Of Beast and Beauty (35 page)

“If you don’t need me, I’ll go back to the barracks,” I say, with a deep breath. “I could use some time to myself.”

“Go. I’ll have dinner sent to your room.” He drains the last of the liquid. “After dinner, we’ll discuss how you’d like to take care of the other matter.”

“The other matter?”

“The Monstrous.” He holds out his goblet. The servant and tray magically appear to claim it and whisk it away. “You should kill it tonight.

Now that Isra’s been deemed incompetent, there’s no reason to wait. The marriage will go forward with or without her consent.”

I swallow. I didn’t think Father would expect me to kill the Monstrous myself, but I should have. “You’re right,” I say, refusing to show how unnerved I am by the prospect of slaughtering the beast, the night before my wedding no less. “I’ll choose my best men. We’ll go to the creature’s rooms tonight and … kill it in its sleep. If possible.”

Father smiles, that same smile from last night, the one that assures me he’s proud of who I’m becoming. “A wise plan. And a merciful one.” His voice is as silky as it was when he praised Isra for her keen perception, and for a moment I wonder …

I stop the thought before it can find its other half. I don’t wonder

anything. I know what must be done and I will do it, and come tomorrow night, all the terrible things will be over.

TWENTY-TWO

I wait for her all day and long into the night, staring out the window at the royal garden, watching for a shadow slipping from the orchard, but she doesn’t come.

My prison gets smaller by the hour. The bars more hateful. I prowl the confined space a hundred times. I do every one of my exercises a thousand. By the time the three moons rise high in the sky, I should be too exhausted to stay awake, but I’m not.

I can’t sleep. I can’t rest until I know what’s happened. If someone’s hurt her … If they’ve locked her away …

I’ll break through these bars with my bare hands. I’ll kill every soldier who stands in my way. I’m not sure if this is love or madness, but it doesn’t matter. It’s real. True. And as inescapable as this wretched cage.

I growl and slam my balled fists into the door of my cell. It rattles on its hinges, but doesn’t break or bend. Outside, there isn’t a sound. The guard from my early days is asleep in his own bed. The Smooth Skins are so sure of their doors and locks. But Isra found a way out of her prison. If she can do it, I can do it. I
will
do it.

I spin and stalk back to the window, claws slicking out as I move. I haven’t tried my claws on their bars. I wasn’t ready to escape before, but I am now. I have to make sure she’s all right.

She’s not all right. She’s marked for death, and refuses to fight for her
life. If she had someone else read the covenant and it offered no hope …

I clench my jaw, grinding the thought to dust between my teeth. It doesn’t matter. Isra would come if she could. Even if it was only to say good-bye.

I won’t let her say good-bye.

My claws strike the bars hard enough to send pain shooting up the backs of my hands into my forearms. I curse and shake my fingers at my side, moaning as my claws draw painfully back into their chambers. Every nerve in my arm is on fire, and the skin above my nail beds is ripped and bleeding, but the bars don’t have a nick on them.

I curse in my language, adding in a few foul Smooth Skin words I’ve picked up from listening to the soldiers. I kick the wall beneath the window hard enough to bruise my toes through my thin boots, and curse again, but manage to keep myself from further self-destruction by wrapping my fingers around the bars and shaking them with all the strength in my body. I shake and shake, tensing until the muscles in my neck threaten to snap. By the time I’m finished, I’m even more exhausted than I was before.

Maybe enough to sleep. Or at least to rest …

I’m turning to my bed when I see it. The shadow near the garden.

A woman’s shadow, winding her way through the orchard. She seems familiar, but I can’t place her until she steps onto the paving stones and the moonlight catches her curls. It’s Isra, but she doesn’t walk the way she did before. She doesn’t reach with her toes before she steps; she doesn’t hesitate before allowing the rest of her body to catch up with her feet. Her eyes have changed her. It will take time for me to recognize her in the dark, time I don’t know if we’ll have.

I want to call out, but I don’t dare. The guards will be through the garden soon. I have to wait.

I stand at the window, wondering how she plans to reach my cell—through the main entrance or by climbing through the window down the hall the way I did when Needle returned me to my cage. I expect her to hurry down the path toward the barracks, but instead she stops on the far side of the roses, near where the vines have crept from their bed. She goes utterly still for a moment before her hand darts out, reaching for one of the low-hanging vines.

Above her bowed head, the roses rustle awake, rotating their obscene blooms to peer down at the queen.

I open my mouth to howl her name, but something stops me—a

sudden throbbing in the places where my skin tore above my claws, a pain that shoots up my arm and into my chest, squeezing my heart, heating my blood, making the room spin and the blue night pulse before my eyes.

I try to step away from the window, but I can’t move. I can’t breathe.

I can’t scream, even when the night air comes alive, whipping in to beat at my face, stinging at my skin like sparks from a funeral fire, hot and full of magic.

I fall to the floor, gasping for breath, and begin to crawl toward the door.

Something is happening in the garden. I have to get to Isra, before it’s—

ISRA

—TOO late. It’s too late to pull away, even if I wanted to.

“What happened to the covenant?” I demand, fighting to keep fear from my voice. I’ve never felt such a powerful presence in the garden before. It feels bigger than the roses, older and darker and deeper, a cold, unblinking eye staring straight through my skin. “Where is it? Show it to—”

My words end in a pained cry as fire courses through my fingertips, shoots through my arm, trapping the breath in my lungs, making my ears ring with the sound of a thousand voices screaming at once. Agony explodes on either side of my head, and my eyes roll back.

The thorn in my finger digs deeper, while another darts out to stab my arm, jabbing deep. Something primitive inside me snatches control of my muscles. My legs push away from the flower bed, but when I move, the thorns move with me, digging into my skin. The roses are hungry, starving, they—

No
, it’s not the roses who hunger. It’s the other
thing
—the ancient presence coiled like a snake beneath the flowers—that is hungry. Gem was right. There is something else. The roses are only the teeth that creature uses to chew its food, a mouth that will pull me into the belly of the beast.

Come to the Dark Heart, girl
. The voice in my head is a tongue made of ice licking at the frantic pulse at my throat.
Come to the Dark Heart and
join your mothers and grandmothers. There is peace in sacrifice
.

The Dark Heart. That is its name.

I go utterly still, overwhelmed by the vastness of the being speaking in my mind. It is bigger than I first assumed. As tall as the mountains beyond the dome, as deep as the violent ocean the roses showed me on my thirteenth birthday, as big as the planet itself.

It is a god, and I am only one small person, so briefly alive that my death is practically not a death at all. I should be content to lie down in the fertile soil, to join myself with the Dark Heart, to give my blood to the one who sustains my city.

The roses’ gnarled stalks and their thorns—as big as my hand, bigger, how could I not have noticed how deadly they could be—reach for me, ready to pull me into their embrace, to the center of their bed.

To my death.

The haze clouding my thoughts departs in a frantic rush of blood.

“No!” I pull away, but the roses loop a toothy arm around my wrist and squeeze tight. Smaller thorns slice through my skin, creating a bracelet made of blood, igniting my body with lightning flashes of pain.

“Help me!” I scream, hoping the guards will hear. I bat at the flowers with my fists, kick the vines that snake close enough to snatch at the legs of my overalls. “Help me! I’m in the royal garden!” I scream, but no one comes. The one time in my life I’d be breathlessly grateful to see a soldier, and none can be found.

And the thing controlling the roses, the Dark Heart, knows it. Of course it does. The Dark Heart knows everything that happens under the dome, and it knows that I’ve learned too much, that it must take me before I ruin it all, before I steal the lifeblood from the splintered, wicked thing my ancestors have fed for generations.

But my ancestors weren’t murdered; they were
willing
sacrifices.

Even my mother took her own life when she jumped from the tower. But I’m not going to lie down and die. I won’t!

“I don’t give myself to you. I don’t!” I shout as I knock a vine away with the back of my hand, earning myself another deep scratch. I pause to survey the damage for less than a second, but a second is all it takes for a vine to snap around my other wrist, as quick as a whip. I scream and tug on both arms, but the vines only squeeze more tightly.

“I’m not a willing sacrifice,” I sob, heart racing as the thorns get closer and closer to my face. “I’m not married. I have no children or brothers or sisters or anyone.” I feel the vines’ death grip loosen the slightest bit, and I know I’ve hit upon the only thing that might save my life.

The Dark Heart is starving, but it doesn’t want me to be its last meal. “If you kill me, you will never feed from this city again. The covenant will be broken forever. Forever!”

When the vines stop moving, there’s a thorn longer than my finger a whisper from my eye.

I force myself to face it, ignoring the sweat rolling down the sides of my face, the frantic racing of my pulse, the pitching of my stomach. “Let me go,” I say. “Let me go! You have no choice.”

But they do,
it
does, the Dark Heart. It could decide that one last meal from our city is better than none at all. It could take comfort in the fact that there are still two domed cities alive and well and filled with

women willing to die.

Everything in my being screams for me to fight, to get away before it’s too late, but I can’t. The force controlling the roses will have to choose to let me go. There’s no way I can free myself without cutting my arms from my body. I’m already hurt badly. The muscles and nerves in my wrist are shredded, and my blood spills with a steady
smack, smick, smack
onto the dirt. I can feel how much the Dark Heart craves more of it. Its need echoes inside me.

If only I’d gone to Gem before coming to the garden. He could slice through the vines with his claws in an instant. But I was afraid he’d try to stop me, that he’d say it was too dangerous, now that he knows the truth about the roses.

Now I may never see him again. I may not live to tell him how much I care, how much I—

I gasp as the vines suddenly clutch more tightly, as if the Dark Heart can read my thoughts and disapproves of the way I feel for Gem, as much as any citizen of Yuan would.

Death
, the Dark Heart whispers inside me, making me shiver and my arms go numb. My eyes roll toward the sky, but instead of the dome and the moons hovering above it, I find myself seeing through the roses’ eyes.

But this time they show me something new. They show me … fires.

Fires in the desert, scaffolds made of long-dead tree limbs holding the corpses of Monstrous men and women and children. There are a dozen of them, more than a dozen. Twenty. Thirty. Fires all around, and at the center of them, an ancient-looking Monstrous man shaking with grief. His shoulders convulse, his chest heaves, but no tears spill from his eyes. The Monstrous can’t cry, but they can obviously feel tremendous pain, pain that takes over and has its way with a body.