Bright Smoke, Cold Fire by Rosamund Hodge

Author:Rosamund Hodge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

By Any Other Name

THIS TIME SHE GOES TO meet him.

This time she puts on her simplest clothes, her plainest mask, and slips into the streets. Nobody stops her, because nobody expects the Juliet to flee her duty.

She does not expect it, though she has planned it; when she meets him on a quiet street corner, when she takes the mask from her face, she feels as if she is dreaming.

He kisses her bare cheeks before he kisses her mouth. To walk outside unmasked, where the whole world can see, is to become nobody and nothing. Every Catresou child knows this. But with him holding her hands, her face exposed to his—she almost feels as if she finally has a name.

(She will never have a name. She will never get to keep him. There is only this moment, this sun-drenched afternoon. This kiss, and the next, but not too many after.)

He leads her down to the Lower City. She has been there before, but only as the Juliet, needed and despised. Now she is just another girl, hand in hand with just another boy; the sellers in the market cry out to her, and the scrawny cats sniff her and rub their cheeks against her hand.

It is as if she had been a ghost, and now is alive.

Her eyes sting. He must see it, for he presses a hand to her shoulder and says, “Race me?”

“Where?” she asks, and he grins at her. A moment later he is clambering up the side of the nearest building, and she follows him. Side by side, they race across the rooftops, leaping between the houses, careening off ledges. They do not laugh only because they are running too hard. The air and the wind and the sunlight are their laughter.

At last they stop on a roof overlooking one of the many little squares of the Lower City. This one has a public fountain, and beside it sits a musician, singing and playing his lute for the coins that the passers-by throw at him. She can catch scattered bits of the tune, but she cannot make out the words.

“What is he singing?” she asks.

He listens for a moment longer, head tilted; then he begins to sing along with the musician:

“O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O, stay and hear, your true-love’s coming,

That can sing both high and low:

Trip no further, pretty sweeting;

Journeys end in lovers meeting,

Every wise man’s son doth know.”

Below, the song ends abruptly as a pair of children start to argue with the musician. She wonders if they are pickpockets working with him; she has heard of that trick, when her family was telling her that the Lower City was a terrible and unclean place where she must never go.

She is not blind now to the dirt and the poverty, the anger and the tricks. She loves this place anyway.

“How do you know that song?” she asks.

“They sing it all over the Lower City,” he says. “I’ve heard it often.” Then he starts

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