Of Beast and Beauty (17 page)

Why am I letting this madness distract me? For seventeen years I’ve had close to no interest in the opposite sex. The only men in my life were

Baba and Junjie, and what the roses showed me of boys my age did little to pique my curiosity about the rest of the male population. The soldiers were self-important, and the idle nobles were overly impressed with themselves.

I knew Baba would choose a husband for me from one of the founding noble families, so I took a closer interest when the roses showed me those boys, but just close enough to assure myself the possibilities weren’t too terrible. That was enough to put the business of boys and husbands out of my mind. I knew love wasn’t in my future—not the emotion, and certainly not the … other kind of love. I knew I’d have to welcome my husband to my bed until a child was born, but I didn’t expect to enjoy the process. It seemed best not to think of it.

Now I can’t
stop
thinking about it. Even being frustrated with Gem doesn’t banish the awareness of his smell, his touch. When he stood behind me and cupped my hands in his—teaching me to drink from the cactus he’d sliced open—it felt like my entire being was catching fire. It was terrifying.

Is it the tainted part of me that makes me ache for a Monstrous boy?

Does this mean I’ll never feel this way about Bo? That I’ll never learn to enjoy his attention as much as the other women of court clearly do? The thought of being with a man I didn’t desire was disturbing before I knew what desire felt like, but now the notion sickens me. Soft hands on my skin, instead of Gem’s rough fingertips. Thin lips on mine, instead of Gem’s full mouth. My name whispered silkily in my ear, instead of growled against my throat.

Sick.
Sick, sick, sick
.

I huddle closer to the fire, trying to focus on the pleasant warmth thawing my fingers and nose. I don’t want to think about the future or my duty or the fact that I am hours and
hours
away from my tower, utterly alone for the first time in my entire life and experiencing my lack of sight in a way I haven’t in a long time.

Back home, I know the shape of my world. The tastes and smells and textures of Yuan are familiar, and there’s only so much trouble a blind girl can get into in a domed city. Not so out here. I might as well be on another planet. A dangerous planet where millions of unseen things can kill me before I
don’t
see them coming.

Ha ha
.

I’m able to find the private joke funny until the fire begins to lose its heat and I’m forced to venture away from the rock wall to hunt for more

fuel. I know Gem piled the wood close. I remember his repeated huffing and the hollow sound of dry branches tumbling to the ground. But as to where the pile lies …

I pat the ground on one side of the fire and then the other, moving a little farther out each time, nerves electrified by every pebble and dip in the dirt I come across, certain that at any moment I’m going to happen upon one of the zions Gem warned me about.

I can’t afford a poisonous stinger in the hand or a slow death in the desert. I must return from this adventure with spoils shoved into my deep pockets and ensure the future of my people. I
must
. I can’t allow my decision to lead to the fall of my city. The shame of it would follow me beyond the grave, torment me for eternity, never allowing me to forget my irresponsible, unqueenly failure.

And so, after only a few minutes of searching, I give up trying to find the wood. I scuttle back to the place where Gem left me and press myself against the rocks.

All too soon, the fire snuffs out and the wind picks up. Night falls, and the temperature plummets. Within thirty minutes, my nose is as chilled as it was before. Within an hour, the places where my underclothes were damp feel as if they’ve frozen to my skin. My fingers and toes go numb, then my arms and legs. The chill creeps into my shoulders, licking an icy tongue down to tease at my ribs.

I begin to shake all over in what seems to be my body’s attempt to warm itself, but I only grow colder. And colder. I have never been so miserable in my own skin or so tired. Sleepy. So, so sleepy … My mind drifts until I’m no longer sure if I’m asleep or awake, hallucinating or remembering.…

One moment I’m alone in the desert, the next I’m back in the tower as it burns. I watch the flames leap, and I scream for Mama while the fire rages and my father beats at the door, begging her to let us out.

Mama. Where is she? Why did she lock the door? I can’t see through the smoke, and I’m dizzy and sick and exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I can’t! I have to find Mama. She and Baba and I have to get out. We have to get out!

I look up and see a woman’s face in the burning beam above my bed, watch her eyes go wide and her mouth move urgently, but I can’t hear her.

I can’t hear anything except terrible moans, as if every monster in the world

is crying out for my blood.

I open my mouth to scream again, and suddenly I’m back in the desert, wandering along a rocky path without even my new walking stick to guide me, shaking like a pan of popping corn, not sure which world is the dream. With a strangled sob, I tear my shawl from my head and fling it from me, gasping as the wind whips through my hair.

What are you doing, fool?

I don’t know. I know only that ridding myself of the thing clutching at my head seemed the right thing to do at the time, and now I’m too frightened to go looking for my lost shawl. I don’t know how close I am to the edge of the trail. I don’t remember deciding to leave my safe place.

My thoughts are fuzzy. I can’t remember … I can’t …

My knees buckle. I collapse onto the ground and decide it’s best to stay there. I don’t know how to find my way back to the rock shelter, and if I keep walking, I’m sure to find trouble. But oh, it’s even colder here.

Wherever I am. So cold.

I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around my shins, wishing I hadn’t been such a coward. Now it’s too late. Even if I find my way back to the camp and the pile of wood, I could never start a fire alone.

But Gem will come back soon. He’ll find me. I can’t have gone far.

Surely …

The wind huffs and puffs, its frigid breath making my bare head ache.

I curl into a ball around my legs, tuck my face to my chest, and bite my lip, shivering as images from my brief sighted life bloom in the darkness behind my eyes.

I see the pearl buttons on my mother’s dress, the ones that dug into my cheek when she let me nap with her on the sofa in her chamber. I see the cabbage fields and the orchards blossoming far below the tower balcony, and the scarlet explosion of the sun setting outside the dome. I see my own pudgy hand—not too tainted then, only dry and a bit cracked—snatching a sticky roll from my mother’s tray, and I feel a giddy squeal rising inside me as I sneak with it back to my room. I’d already eaten my morning treat, but my appetite for burned honey icing was insatiable.

Mother always slept late and so soundly that not even little feet scampering into her room would wake her.

I’d forgotten that about my mama. I’d forgotten most of those memories. Their recovery warms me from the inside out, makes me smile

as I give in to the muzzy feeling tugging me closer to sleep.

I curl on my side in the dirt, arm pillowing my cheek—thinking of those pearl buttons, and wishing I could remember my mother’s face—while the cold pulls oblivion over my shoulders, tucks it around my ears, and covers my sightless eyes. Before I consciously decide to go, I am snapped away into something deeper than sleep, but I’m not afraid.

I’m not cold or lost or lonely anymore. I am not a princess or a queen or a sacrifice or an abomination or a disappointment. I am nothing at all, a cup swiftly emptying of all the Isra inside it, leaving nothing behind.

I stand at the base of the mountain for a long, long moment, not sure I’ll be able to climb back up again.

The place where the soldier’s spear pierced my thigh aches so badly, it feels as though the bone there will split in half. A hollow in the ground between two nearby Cross cacti looks more inviting than a Smooth Skin bed of clouds. I think how good it would be to lie down there and stare up at the million stars in the sky and be done with this day. But after a long drink of cactus milk and a too-short rest, I start back up the trail.

As much as I’d like to leave the queen to her lies and trembling up on the mountain, I promised to keep her safe.

Still, I don’t hurry. I
can’t
hurry with my leg throbbing like a second angry heart, but I wouldn’t even if I could. The less time I spend with Isra tonight, the better. I can’t remember being this angry since the day she came to my cell and laughed at my starving people and cried her sticky tears onto my chest. I would just as soon wrap my hand around her throat and squeeze as sit by the fire with the queen of Yuan.

How dare she treat me like a comrade at shovel and hoe every day we worked together, only to cower and quake the moment her guards are gone? I’d believed the way she viewed my people had changed. I thought she was different from the rest of the Smooth Skins. I thought she considered me a … friend. I certainly worked hard enough to convince her I was worth befriending. Even if every shared story and teasing word and

gentle bit of advice was deception on my part,
she
doesn’t know that. I’ve given her no reason to change her good opinion of me.

If
she ever had one.

She must have been lying, too. Lying with every lopsided smile and flash of her clever eyes and softly whispered reassurance about my healing legs. She was only pretending to trust me, to feel affection for the beast she kept in chains. I should have known she was false. In her eyes, I’ll always be a monster. I suspected as much from the beginning.

So why does the proof of what I’ve known all along feel like a betrayal? Why does the sight of her shaking hands make me want to hurl boulders down the mountain? Why do I
hurt
?

I feel as bruised as I did the day Meer told me she was choosing another man as her mate. I should have been happy. I didn’t want to stay with the tribe and watch the baby growing inside Meer be born into a life of famine and pain. I was a warrior. I had a tunnel to finish digging, roses to steal, Smooth Skin cities to worm my way inside.

But I wasn’t happy. There were days when watching Meer love someone else more than she had ever loved me—seeing the casual intimacies between her and Hant at the campfire, catching him with his hand upon her swelling belly and a smile on his face—felt like dying. The same way being captured by Smooth Skins felt like dying, and being ordered about by my enemy felt like dying.

Isra has brought nothing but misery into my life, but when I arrive at the remains of the campfire and see the flames out and Isra no longer sitting where I left her, every hot angry thing inside me runs cold.

“Isra?” I circle the fire, panic sharpening my voice. “Isra!”

The air is too quiet. Even the wind has stopped moaning. It feels like the night is holding its breath, waiting for me to discover the terrible fate that has befallen the queen of Yuan. It has to be terrible. I left a blind girl alone a dozen feet from the edge of a cliff. She could have gone to relieve herself and fallen to her death. She could have decided to follow me and taken a wrong turn on the path and wandered into a zion nest. She could have been discovered by a hunting party and been taken prisoner.

I was certain there would be none of my tribe this close to Yuan, but what of the other tribes? The Desert People from the north have been venturing farther south since they burned the domed city of Vanguard two years ago, only to find that its destruction did nothing to return life to their

own blighted territory.

Naira warned my father that if we failed to return with Yuan’s magic roses, it might come to war between our tribes one day soon. We must show the northerners that we have harnessed the Smooth Skin magic, and share the power of the roses with them, before their chief convinces his people that the only way to heal the land is to destroy every domed city still standing. We cannot allow Yuan to fall, not until we have secured the secret to their abundance.