“I tell you,” said the girl, braver than any warrior, “I will suffer any torment, I will serve you any length of time, I will become any terrible thing, if you will only let me see him again.”
Oh, she was noble and terrible as the clash of arms. And Death loved her, as she loves all the dead. So this is the noble and terrible fate that she gave her: as the girl spoke, feathers grew from her face, and her fingers twisted into claws. Her sweet, soft lips turned into a razor-sharp beak, and she became a reaper. Death sent her up into the world, and tirelessly she still walks through plagues and battlefields, guiding lingering souls to the world below.
Once every hundred years, she approaches the river of blood. She wades into it, up to the knee and up to the neck and farther in: and there, beneath the boiling blood, she finds her lover. She draws him out to the shore, and for one hour she is human, and they may comfort each other. Then she changes back to a reaper in his arms; and she herself must lead him back to the blood and torment for another hundred years.
When the tale released her, Juliet was shaking. She thought she could hear the roar of the river again, and the muttering of the Catresou dead. She could not imagine another fate than being rent apart for her sins.
But Romeo and Runajo had trusted her. Viyara needed her. She could not let the sacrifices continue; she could not let the city fall.
“Still,” she said. “Still I must try.” She lifted her chin, and tried to steady her voice. “Did my dance please you? Then grant me a wish. Take me across the river. Or show me another way to Death.”
“Your dance was lovely as spilled blood,” said the reaper. “But if you wish to speak with Death, you must ford the river. There is no other way.”
The next moment, the darkness and the silence were gone. Juliet staggered, overwhelmed by a pandemonium of light and sound. She was back at the festival, back in the center of the crowd.
It was different now. The crowd still surged, but they were not dancing, they were running. The voices were not laughing, they were shouting and screaming. The music still played, but fiddles wailed high and desperate.
The light was from the tents burning.
She whirled, trying to find the source of the chaos. And then she saw them, among the crowd: people who did not have the faces of people anymore.
For one instant, she thought of the fanciful animal masks that the Catresou would sometimes wear at parties. But these people were not masked: the fangs and tusks, the scales and dripping fluid, the elongated mouths and extra eyes—they were real, and they made every face a different nightmare.
Juliet had fought armies of revenants, and yet this sight closed her throat in horror.
She ran.
Everyone was running, all around her. Some ran back up the slope, into the darkness. Some ran down, toward the river.
Juliet was running that way too, before she realized it. Her feet hungered for that direction; she only paused when the heat and the smell struck her across the face.
Then she saw the people plunging into the river. They screamed as they broke the surface; then they sank back down. Those on the bank wailed as well, but they were too close. They could not seem to stop themselves as they rushed forward into the boiling blood.
Above the chaos, pipes and fiddles were shrieking still.
Something shrieked behind her. She whirled—
It was not Tybalt anymore. And yet it was still Tybalt, this hissing creature with claws and a forked tongue. She saw the ruins of his face among the scales and the bony knobs.
She saw, but not in time. Her sword was already moving, and it slashed across his throat, cutting deep and releasing a rush of blood.
Tybalt staggered, and she cried out because she never wanted to kill him, never, not even when he hated her—
Then he raised his head.
Of course, she thought with numb horror. He is already dead.
We are all of us already dead.
Tybalt lunged forward and slammed her to the ground. Juliet was only barely able to hold him off as they wrestled, his jaws snapping at the air an inch from her throat.
She flung him to the side for a moment, found her dropped sword. When he sprang again, she slashed it across his eyes; as he howled, she kicked him to the ground, then plunged her sword down through ribs and spine and earth, pinning him in place.
He writhed, and whimpered, but the steel seemed to sap his strength. He did not rise.
The screams were silent. All the other people had disappeared, into the darkness or into the river. The fires had died among the tents.
The music was very soft now, a slow dirge for the end of all things.
“It’s brave and beautiful,” said the reaper, “the festival that they built here.”
Juliet looked up, and saw the reaper standing beside her, wings gently flexing, feet not quite touching the ground.
“It was not wrong of them to build it. But those who linger here too long begin to rot. Eventually they overwhelm the festival, and force the rest into the river, however much they fear it.”
Her throat felt dry and raw. It took her a few moments to speak.
“But Tybalt—he’s only been dead two months. He was speaking to me just now.”
The reaper looked at her and Tybalt with infinite, heartless pity. “The dead keep their own calendar.”
Juliet remembered how his face twisted when he ripped the covers from the bed, when he tried to shame her in the festival. He had been rotting, perhaps, for a very long time.
“What is the river?” she asked.
“All the blood that’s shed on earth,” said the reaper. “All must wade through it, to remember what part of it they shed.”
“Or sink beneath it forever,” said Juliet, remembering the story of the warlord.
The reaper shrugged. “For some, it’s a very wide river.”
And she had to cross it, if she was to find Death and save her people.
“The people who have already changed into monsters,” asked Juliet, “if they go into the river, will it help them?”
The reaper considered this awhile before it said, “Yes.”
Juliet looked down at Tybalt. The music was silent. The air at her back was still, no longer stirred by wings, and she knew without looking that the reaper was gone.
She remembered his cruelty as she knelt beside him. He was still now, his eyes wide and dazed. She looked into those eyes, remembered when they were dearer to her than all the world.
“You wronged me,” she said. “You and all our clan. You wronged me when you made me Juliet, and every day thereafter. I do not know if I can ever forgive you.”
She swallowed, feeling dizzy and lost. “But half the blood in that river was shed by me. So I do not know if I have the right to forgive you.”
She drew the sword from his body.
He didn’t spring at her. He didn’t make a sound. But he let her take his hand, and pull him to his feet.
And she drew him, step by step, into the river of boiling blood.
32
THE NIGHT WAS DARK, AND silent, and very long.
Runajo did not move from her place, kneeling before the dry remains of the Mouth of Death. Her back ached and her eyes felt gritty with exhaustion, but she did not lie down. She did not close her eyes. She watched the spot where Juliet had disappeared, and she waited. Because there was nothing left in the world that she could possibly do, except keep her promise, and wait.
Alone.
She had thought she knew loneliness before. But ever since Juliet had vanished into darkness, and the bond had broken—
It felt like the close walls of her own mind were going to smother her. Even when they had both been doing their best to close off the bond, Runajo had still felt Juliet’s presence in every moment, endless and unquestioned as the sky overhead.
Now that sky was gone. Was forever gone, even if by some miracle Juliet returned. Runajo was locked up forever in her own mind, with no company but her own thoughts endlessly circling.
Juliet is dead. You should have died in her place.
That was true.
You destroyed her clan and became a murderer to save her, and she’s still dead.
That was also true. The thought burned, but it was a familiar pain now.