Juliet stared down at the little blue flowers by her knees, and wanted to weep in relief. Not for Viyara. She should have cared for her city first, but in that moment, all she could think was that Runajo’s vigil would not end in death. Romeo’s sacrifice would not be completely in vain.
“And now I am prepared to be kind,” said Death. “So I will grant you this. You may walk out of my land alive, as no one has before. You will never be Juliet again. But you will live in the world you have won.”
You will live.
The words slid off Juliet’s mind like water over glass. Life in a world without the Ruining, where she was not the Juliet any longer. She could hardly comprehend it. If she was not burned up and sacrificed for her people—if the world around her was no doomed—it was more than she had ever hoped for.
And yet.
“What becomes of Romeo?” she asked.
“He is dead,” said Death. “Do you think that you, more than anyone else, deserve to have your true love back?”
Juliet remembered Tybalt and the river of blood, and all who had died by her hands or because of her.
“No,” she said. “But I think that he deserves to live, and more than I do. He righted half the wrongs of my people, didn’t he? And he wasn’t even one of us. He deserves life far more than I do.”
“Oh,” said Death, almost laughing, “don’t tell me you still think deserving has anything to do with who lives and who dies.”
“No,” said Juliet. “But once you start picking people to live, then it does. Why else are you letting me go?”
“Because you, of all the people who ever stole into my kingdom, did not come alone. Whose face do you think I am wearing?”
Juliet stared at her, utterly baffled.
Death rolled her eyes. “Surely somebody told you what happened in the marriage bed.”
“Do you mean—”
“I mean you didn’t come here alone, you simpleton. I wear the face of the child you carry beneath your heart, whom you conceived the night that Romeo married you before both your clans.”
Juliet sat back on her heels. A child, she thought with dazed, terrified awe. I am carrying Romeo’s child.
All her life, she had been a weapon: a thing to be used up and sacrificed for the protection of others. To think that now she was going to be a mother—that there was life within her, that she was person enough to grow another person in her flesh—she could barely comprehend the idea.
“As each soul comes to me, so I deal with it.” Death’s voice was sweet and heartless, like the moonlight. “Those with clever plans, I outwit. Those with noble intentions, I sacrifice. But you came to me with life, so I am prepared to deal it back to you. Just a little.”
Death reached down, and took Juliet’s hands, and raised her to her feet.
“I will grant you this much mercy,” said Death. “If you can find Romeo among the souls in my realm, you may take him back with you, and he will live again. But know this: even if you do find him, and lead him back to the light of day, you will lose him. He will die before you, and no power in all the world can change that fate. Before the hair is white on your head, you will bury him. Is that a bargain you can bear to keep?”
Juliet stared at Death’s serene face—the promise of a future she could barely imagine—and she remembered the drumbeat as she performed the sword dance to celebrate the Night of Ghosts, and the moment when a masked boy caught her sword out of the air.
She said, “I have never loved him except under sentence of death.”
There were many islands. The water around them was black as the sky above, but the flowers that grew on every one were bright, bright blue, shining in the darkness.
Juliet wandered across the water; it cradled her feet and did not let her sink. At first she thought that the islands were empty, that Death had brought her to the only place in her kingdom with no souls. But then she realized that the shadowy lumps on the islands were not stones but sleeping people. Some lay alone, decorously laid out with hands clasped over their chests; others curled into each other, chins resting on shoulders and fingers gripping hair.
They were as still as the souls caught in the terrible grove of the Eyes and the Teeth, but they did not fill her heart with horror.
None were Romeo.
As she went farther, she saw some who were not asleep, who sat up half awake and drowsing, or whispering in quiet tones with each other. Then she saw an island with a looming, twisted shadow, and for a moment her chest clenched in fear—but then it shifted, and she realized it was a reaper, wings curving over a child it held sleeping in its lap.
Its eyes gleamed as she approached.
“What is this place?” she asked. “I thought everyone had to keep walking, or—” She remembered bodies absorbed into trees, half-animal faces, feet turning into stone.
The feathers in the reaper’s wings stirred gently, though Juliet felt no breeze on her face.
“All must complete the journey or turn to rot,” it said. “Some are allowed to rest first. This is their place.”
“I am looking for Romeo,” she said. “Is he here?”
Again its wings rustled. “Human names are not a thing I was made to remember.”
It stroked the hair of the child in its lap, and lowered its head, and began to croon a wordless song.
Dismissed, Juliet wandered onward. Because she did not know what else to do, she began to sing to herself:
“What is love? ’Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty;
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
She sang, and fell silent, and listened to the silence: the vast, sleeping silence that was only made emptier by the soft whisper of water against island, dead soul confiding in dead soul. She wondered if this was how Death would mock her, outmatch her: by saying that she could have Romeo if she found him, and leaving her in a place where she could never find him.
And then—beyond all hope—she heard his voice singing softly across the water:
“O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love’s coming—”
She did not hear the rest, because she was breathlessly running, running across water and rock and infinite dark spaces—she thought she had been running forever—and then she skidded to a stop because there he was before her, there he was.
Romeo.
He sat on a small island, with his back against a white stone column. There was another soul cradled sleeping in his arms. He was waiting for her as he promised, and she had never felt so desperately relieved as when she knelt before him.
“I found you,” she said, and suddenly could not stop smiling.
“Juliet,” he said, staring at her in wonder and fear. “You—did you—”
“I followed you,” she said. “I spoke with Death. The Ruining is ended.”
He smiled, as beautifully as the first time she let him touch her face. “That’s wonderful,” he said, and then the smile dimmed. “But you . . . what did she ask of you?”
“She said that I could go back,” said Juliet. “She said that I could take you with me, if I found you. And I found you.”
But he did not smile again.
“I can’t,” he said.
She stared, her heart turning cold. “Why not?”
“Paris,” he said, and for the first time she realized whom he held sleeping in his arms. “I found him, and I promised I would stay with him. He will wake eventually, and he’ll need to walk farther, and—and even if he slept here forever, I couldn’t leave him. I swore by my name.” Romeo’s eyes were wide with distress. “I’m sorry.”
She thought this was what it meant to feel a heart break: to have it crack in two, between one beloved thing and another. Because Romeo was dearer than the breath in her mouth and the light in her eyes—but Paris was her kin, and he died for her, and she loved honor too well to wish that Romeo would break his oath.
She thought, I cannot accept this.