She caught his flailing hand and pulled him up.
Her grip was warm and strong as he remembered, and when his feet were back under him, she didn’t let go. She stared at him, her eyebrows drawn together, her lips half parted, and he knew she almost recognized him.
The world halted.
Nothing moved, nothing mattered, nothing except that she was looking at him and wanting to know him, and Juliet, Juliet, Juliet—
He thought, I cannot stay silent, and he opened his mouth.
Then she let go. All the life and wonder drained from her face, leaving it like a mask.
“I am summoned,” she said.
For a moment Romeo didn’t understand, because there was nobody there, they were still alone beneath the stars—
“I will have orders to kill you soon,” she said, and turned away from him, and that was when he remembered that Juliet had a Guardian now, who could call her mind to mind.
Romeo had heard the stories from Justiran: that Lord Ineo had leashed the Juliet to a Mahyanai girl who was not only an orphan, but a disgraced former Sister. People called it a clever move on Lord Ineo’s part, to choose a Guardian who owed him everything.
Romeo knew that Guardian had to be Runajo. Before Makari came to tutor him, she was the closest thing Romeo had to a friend. For years after, he had thought he was in love with her.
He’d been wrong about that. But one thing Romeo didn’t doubt even now: Runajo was the last person in the world to obey Lord Ineo without question, no matter how much she owed him.
And Juliet had chosen to stay with her, when she could have asked Romeo for help.
So he watched Juliet go. He watched, and did not follow, because he no longer had any right to do more.
Juliet raced across the rooftops. Runajo’s call still echoed in her head: Get here at once, surrounded by a flicker of images—a hallway, a door.
That was all. But there had been fear in Runajo’s voice—Runajo, who hadn’t spoken into Juliet’s mind since she betrayed her. It was the only mercy she had shown her. If Runajo was desperate enough now—
She felt a sudden burst of pain in her arm, and she stumbled for a moment. The pain wasn’t hers.
Juliet remembered the old serving woman, dead in the hallway. She’d been an idiot to assume that there had been only one group of Catresou causing a distraction. She’d been so desperate for a chance to help her people, she had just stopped thinking.
Runajo had made Juliet a slave and a murderer. If Runajo died on a Catresou blade tonight, it would only be just.
And yet.
And yet Juliet was fleeing desperately across the rooftops, not looking for a single way to subvert this order. She had sworn by her soul that she would never forgive Runajo, and she didn’t. She couldn’t. But the thought of Runajo’s blood spilling across the ground, like the blood of a hundred others who had deserved to live more—
Losing Romeo had robbed the sun from her sky. The thought of losing Runajo felt like it would scrape the last stars out of the night.
She was close. She dropped from the roof and a moment later was running through hallways.
There was the door. She slowed, drawing her sword and trying to catch her breath as she listened—
Paris Catresou stepped out of the room.
Sheer surprise caught her by the throat and held her still.
She’d met Paris only once, the day that Tybalt was buried. She had still been reeling from her cousin’s death, from knowing that Romeo had killed him and soon she would have to kill Romeo in return. When her father had told her that Paris would be her Guardian in Tybalt’s place, she was already planning her escape.
But the awkward, desperately polite boy in her father’s study had been nothing like the jailer she expected. At Tybalt’s funeral, when grief overwhelmed her, he had been kind to her. Afterward, he had helped her slip away from the funeral feast, back to the sepulcher, where the sacred fire burned with the word zoura inlaid in gold on the wall above it. When she had told him how she had always only wanted to be correct, how she was afraid her father did not care about zoura at all, he had listened. And he had promised to serve her.
She had thought that, in another world, she could have been happy to serve her people with him.
The next day she had run away to make Romeo her Guardian, and destroyed him instead. She’d never seen Paris again; he hadn’t been at the compound when she was sent there for the purge, and she’d heard nothing of him since. She had hoped that he escaped, and resigned herself to not knowing.
She hadn’t expected to see him again.
To have him see her, holding a sword still smeared with Catresou blood.
Surprise held her. But only for a moment. The order Runajo had given her, Get here at once, still pulsed in her mind, and it dragged her a step forward—
As Paris attacked.
There was no warning: no shout, no spark of anger in his blank face, no tensing of his shoulders. His sword just lashed out, fast and fluid as a whip, and Juliet barely saved herself from that first stroke, it was so unexpected.
But she should have expected it, she realized as she dodged back, parrying. Paris had wanted to serve his people. She was now their enemy. Of course he would try to kill her.
What had he done to Runajo?
That thought sent her attacking forward in a flurry of speed. She’d had the impression that Paris was not particularly good, and his technique was definitely not impressive, but he was moving with a speed and strength that matched hers.
And that terrible, empty calm on his face. She remembered when he’d looked at her with such hope.
“Paris!” she shouted. “I don’t want to kill you!”
As she spoke, he tried to parry her stroke and failed. Her blade slid, and before she could stop it, sliced across his cheek. She pulled it away instantly, stumbling back a step, but blood was already welling up in a line across his face.
It wasn’t red. It was black.
The living bled crimson. When their dead bodies rose again as revenants, their blood oozed in brownish clots, if it hadn’t yet dried away entirely. But the living dead—whose souls were trapped by necromancers, so they could never find rest—they bled as black as night.
It was the very worst fate that could befall any Catresou.
Paris said, “My master ordered me not to kill you. But I have to complete my mission.”
His voice was completely emotionless. Lifeless. It made Juliet’s skin crawl.
“What’s your mission?” she asked.
“Rescue,” he said, and Juliet was about to reply, But the Catresou aren’t being kept here, when she saw someone else stepping out of the room.
It was the living dead girl who had been pulled out of her father’s secret laboratory. Juliet had only seen her once, when Lord Ineo was lecturing her on the depravity of the Catresou clan, and how grateful she should be that she’d been rescued from it. But she would know those golden curls and those dead eyes anywhere.
Runajo’s order still burned in her mind: Get here at once. Get here at once. Get here at once.
“Get out,” she said. “Now. I won’t stop you.”
Paris stared at her a moment longer. She thought of the dying man she’d tried to comfort, and she wished she could say the same words for Paris, but it would be no use. He couldn’t walk the Paths of Light, because his soul was trapped here. He couldn’t even understand the words, because the necromancer’s power had shredded his mind.
In another world, he could have been dear to her. In this one, he was already destroyed.
Paris turned and strode away; he caught the dead girl’s hand as he passed her, and dragged her with him.
Juliet ran into the room. Runajo was at the far end, huddled against the wall, terribly pale.
But alive.
Her eyes were squeezed shut, but she opened them as Juliet approached. “Did you stop him?” she asked.
“No,” said Juliet, kneeling beside her. Runajo was cradling her right arm to her side.
“You should have stopped him,” said Runajo.