Buy Bright Smoke, Cold Fire by ROSAMUND HODGE

 

Buy Bright Smoke, Cold Fire
by ROSAMUND HODGE

Ready for our next read? When the mysterious fog of the Ruining crept over the world, the living died and the dead rose. Only the city of Viyara was left untouched. As the heirs of Viyara’s most powerful—and warring—families, Mahyanai Romeo and Juliet Catresou share a love deeper than duty, honor, even life. But the magic laid on Juliet at birth compels her to punish her clan’s enemies, and Romeo has just killed her cousin. Which means he must die. Romeo and Juliet dropped into The Walking Dead? COUNT US IN! It's Bright Smoke, Cold Fire, the latest from Rosamund Hodge, and it’s this week’s FIRST5 read! Missed a chapter? No problem! Read Chapter 1 now.   LEARN MORE

2

  IT SEEMED LIKE HALF THE city had turned out to watch a single man die.
Runajo, standing in her place with five other novices, thought all the fuss was a bit silly. People died every day. And the Great Offering was no less regular or essential than carting the dead away to be burned, or tending the sewage pipes that pulled waste out of the city. But because it was done only twice a year, surrounded by the songs and dances of the Sisters of Thorn, it was a great festival, and nobody wanted to miss it.
When they had to kill somebody every week to sustain the city walls, maybe then the thrill would fade.
Maybe Runajo would be able to keep it from coming to that.
“You’re looking awfully solemn,” said Sunjai, and Runajo startled.
Sunjai just dimpled. She was a plump, pretty girl whose dark braids were always sleek and flawless, coiled around her head. Her gray novice’s robe was immaculate as always, her clasped hands primly tucked into her wide sleeves.
“Worried that Romeo has forgotten you?” she asked.
“No,” said Runajo, glancing to see if Miryo, the novice mistress, was listening.
It was not Runajo’s fault that the idiot son of her mother’s childhood friend had spent years fancying himself in love with her, and had kept sending her poems even after she’d entered the Sisterhood. But Miryo was always looking for an excuse to punish Runajo; she’d jump on even a hint of scandal.
“Then you’ll be glad to hear that everyone says he’s still refusing to look at another girl,” Sunjai went on cheerfully. “Perhaps he’s just spent all this time working on a really special poem.”
Probably that was true. Sunjai was the only other novice from Runajo’s clan, and she seemed to know just as much of the gossip from their kin as she did of the goings-on among the Sisterhood.
“I don’t care what you heard,” said Runajo. “And I don’t care if Romeo lives or dies, let alone loves me. Why don’t you go bother Inyaan? I don’t think anyone’s told her she’s glorious in the last five minutes.”
Sunjai patted her shoulder in fake fondness and then went to whisper in the ear of Inyaan, the novice who was the younger sister of the Exalted himself. Unlike the rest of the novices, who were thrilled at the great occasion, she was staring at the crowd with the same blank disdain she directed at everyone in the Cloister.
It wasn’t true that Runajo didn’t care if Romeo lived or died. He’d been the closest thing she ever had to a friend, and he had tried a lot harder to be kind to her than anyone else ever had. But his delusion that she had thrown herself into the Cloister out of grief for her parents and needed to be rescued? Insufferable.
If he wasn’t sending her letters anymore, he had probably found another girl to imagine himself in love with, and that was all for the best. He could write more bad poetry, and Runajo could get on with saving Viyara.
It felt like the whole city was gathered now. The Great Offering was held in the grand court at the center of Viyara. It was, perhaps, the most magnificent place in the Upper City. A broad avenue cut straight into the rising stone slope of the city spire. At the end was a round marble dais—wide enough to hold a hundred men—in which the glowing patterns of the city’s magic shifted and whirled. Above the dais, the gargantuan obsidian face of the god Ihom looked out from the white stone wall, as if the rest of his body was sealed into the city itself. Of the nine gods, he had been the first to die, and so it was before his image that human lives were offered now.
The summer sun was blazing and the air was a sodden weight. Even so, people from the Upper and Lower City thronged the court, chattering, laughing, singing, selling sweetmeats and trinkets. Only the three high houses were allowed to stand before the dais. At the center, of course, was the Exalted—a bored-looking young man who ruled the city on the strength of his supposedly divine blood. All around him stood the rest of the Old Viyaran nobility. They were a tall people, dark skinned wth white-gold hair, all of them resplendent in translucent white silks and gold chains.
To the right was Runajo’s own clan, the Mahyanai. They looked like a reverse of the Old Viyarans: fair skin, black hair, their silk robes a swirl of colors, their wide sashes heavily embroidered. Most of the men wore at their hips curving swords in lacquered black scabbards, while the women’s hair was piled atop their heads, wound about gold or silver headdresses.
At their center stood Lord Ineo, his harsh face solemn. Supposedly he ruled the city in all but name, since the Exalted was too lost in his own pleasures to care. For this, the Mahyanai adored him.
Runajo could never decide if she hated Lord Ineo or not. He was Romeo’s father—and no matter how insufferable Romeo could be sometimes, when she thought of how Lord Ineo ignored him, she could happily spit on her clan's beloved leader. But when her family petitioned Lord Ineo to drag her out of the Sisterhood, he had declared she had the right to sacrifice herself. He’d set her free.
To the left stood the Catresou in sullen ranks: still, dressed in black, and dead silent. Every one of them was masked, because they did not believe outsiders worthy to see their faces; at the center of the crowd stood Lord Catresou, robed and hooded in black velvet, his face completely covered in a mask of gold and rubies. Beside him—dressed in a simple red gown, her face half covered by an ivory filigree mask—stood the Juliet, the nameless girl who had been ensorcelled into being their mindless attack dog.
The Juliet was the pride of the Catresou. They didn’t realize what hypocrites they were, calling the Great Offering a cruel abomination when they were happy to enslave their own children.
Drums had started beating. At the center of the dais, a young Sister prostrated herself before the face of Ihom. The High Priestess knelt behind her with a silver knife; gently, reverently, she kissed each of the girl’s feet and then sliced a shallow line down the sole, from heel to toe.
The girl rose and began to dance, her body twirling and undulating in time to the drums, her bloody footprints spreading across the marble dais. Where her feet touched the marble, light blossomed in the stone, and the glowing patterns bent and shifted toward her. The city was eating up her bloody sacrifice.
The world was made from the blood of gods. The blood of men sustains it now.So said the Sisters of Thorn. Runajo did not believe in the gods, but she didn’t doubt the power of spilled blood.
Nobody in Viyara did.
A low note sounded from a horn. The girl paused, swaying on her feet. Runajo couldn’t help wincing at the trembling line of the girl’s mouth: the volunteers for sacrifice were drugged, but on such a solemn occasion, Sisters were expected to bear all their pain themselves.
The horn sounded again, and then all the people—Sisters, nobles, commoners, even the Catresou—prostrated themselves on the ground. Because this moment was in memory of all they had lost.
The horn sounded again, and they rose. Runajo blinked at the sudden dazzle of light—she had squeezed her eyes shut during the prostration—and when she could see properly again, the young man was being led out to the sacrifice. He was an Old Viyaran this time, which meant he was a volunteer, not one of the condemned criminals that the Catresou dragged out when it was their turn to provide the sacrifice. Golden chains dangled across his bare chest; he swayed slightly under all the drugs.
Runajo thought, If they don’t like my plan, then very soon that could be me.
They’d make me wear more clothes, though.
She wasn’t afraid. Not exactly. But her body felt terribly light and fragile. She was aware of her tiny, rapid heartbeat: the little flutter that kept her among the living and not the dead.
First the young man was brought to the Exalted, who laid hands on him and blessed him; then to Lord Ineo, who bowed gracefully to him; and last of all to Lord Catresou, who remained stiff and expressionless as a marionette as he placed a velvet wrapped hand on the young man’s shoulder.
Then the Sister escorting the young man turned him around, toward the bloodstained center of the dais where the High Priestess waited. He wobbled on his feet, but gave her a huge, dreamy smile. Not every sacrifice died by the hand of the High Priestess herself.
Runajo’s stomach turned uneasily. This wasn’t the first sacrifice she had seen. Before the illness, her parents had taken her every year, starting when she was a little girl who barely understood the pageant unfolding before her.
But six months ago, she’d missed the Great Offering because she was ill and vomiting. This would be the first sacrifice she saw since she’d truly understood what death meant.
The cold emptiness was back in her chest, and her hands clenched into fists, because she couldn’t panic now. She couldn’t.
But as the young man knelt in front of the High Priestess, the feeling rolled over her in waves: a cold, absolute emptiness that left her drifting and hollow, watching the world from what felt like an immeasurable distance. She saw—in flashes— the High Priestess carve the sacred signs into the man’s skin and whisper the sacred words into his ears. But the splendor in front of her didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. She was going to die, and this bright bubble of a world would wink out, and there would be nothing left of her.
Trying to imagine it felt like choking. Her heart pounded— desperately, fleetingly alive.
Nothing. Not even silence. Nothing.
The High Priestess cradled the man’s head. The whole grand court was silent, still and breathless. Her knife flashed.
The man’s lifeblood poured out, the dais flashed with dazzling light, and a great shout went up from the crowd. Horns and flutes and drums and tambourines rang out, proclaiming that they would all live for another six months.
Runajo realized she was trembling. Her nails bit into her palms.
She was alive. Right now—just for now—she was alive. And she had a plan to carry out.
On the dais, several Sisters of Thorn danced around the body in languid movements of stylized grief and reverence. It was their teaching that those who died in sacrifice—or in dueling, or in childbirth—would go to feast with the dead gods, while those who died of sickness or age would serve them, forever less but not cast out into darkness like thieves and murderers and oath-breakers.
Runajo didn’t believe it. Not because of the ancient Mahyanai sages, who said that the gods were a delusion, and that the soul of man was like a candle that guttered in the wind and was gone forever. But because she had seen her mother and father lying dead. She had seen the terrible emptiness in their waxlike faces, and she knew that nothing was left of them in any world.
The High Priestess turned to the waiting ranks of the Sisters and beckoned.
It was time.
Seven of them walked forward: the newest of the novices, who had been with the Sisters only a year and never taken part in any solemn sacrifice before.
The ceremony was simple. They would kneel before the High Priestess, take the knife from her hands, and slice a single cut into their forearms. Their blood would mix with the blood of the sacrifice, signifying their willingness to pour out their lives serving the gods and protecting Viyara through magic that could only be bought in blood.
Inyaan went first, her face a haughty mask. But when she fell to her knees before the High Priestess and took the knife, her hands were shaking. Perhaps she was realizing that even the sister of the Exalted would someday die.
Sunjai went second, and kept her dimples all the way through, but that was hardly surprising. If she had any understanding of her own mortality, Runajo had never seen it.
Then it was Runajo’s turn.
She walked forward, but it almost felt like floating. Her arms and legs were cold and numb.
This was the moment. This was the choice. If she carried out the ceremony correctly, it would be her first initiation. There would be seven more years before she became a full Sister.
She couldn’t bear waiting that long. To be silently obedient one day longer.
Her fingers wrapped around the handle of the knife. She looked at the blood, at the dead man’s gaping wound, at the crowd and the city, the far-off mountains already ruled by death and the blue sky above them.
She raised her left hand. She didn’t make the simple slice she was supposed to; she carved the circle of binding as she spoke the oath she was not meant to swear for another seven years: “By Ihom’s breath and Amat’s silence, I bind myself to the fate of thorns.”
It was a sacred and irrevocable vow. It was blasphemy to speak it before the High Priestess had declared her worthy. And Runajo had just done so in front of all of Viyara.
In the silence that followed, she thought, I hope they at least wait for my trial before they sacrifice me.