Of Beast and Beauty (39 page)

Forever. We can do it. I’ve read the queen’s diary. I know the secret now.

For a month I believe.

And then the month becomes two months. More. I stop waiting by the door, no longer certain the black night outside the dome will ever be broken by the light of Gem’s fire. I retreat to my bedroom to sleep the rest of my life away, to dream and keep on dreaming.

I dream all the time.

There is nothing to do in my prison but sleep and dream, wake and dream, sit staring at the scrap of sky visible through the mostly walled-up window in my room, and ache for my freedom like a missing limb, and dream and dream.…

I learn to speak the language of midnight, to communicate with phantoms. I have long conversations with the burning face in the beam, my ancestor, Ana, King Sato’s third wife. Reading her diary has opened a door between us, and now we speak freely, without needing sleep as a meeting place.

She tells me of Yuan at the end of its first hundred years, before the Dark Heart was forgotten, when every soul in the city knew the roses were the teeth of the monster they had created. She tells me of growing up yearning for the world outside, watching from the wall walks the giant cats roaming the grasslands, and longing to run free the way they did. She tells me of her fourteenth birthday and the meager meal she shared with her family at the end of a summer when the crops had refused to grow, the day it was decided that the queen must die and Ana’s father promised her to the king.

King Sato was tired then, already finished with two wives, and decades older than his new bride. The king promised Ana’s father that he, the king, would take his turn under the blade when it became necessary, and he and Ana were married. Years passed and three children were born.

Then, just before Ana’s thirty-sixth birthday, the crops once again began to

fail. King Sato was nearing his ninetieth year, but when the advisors agreed the time had come for a sacrifice, he refused to go to the roses.

Ana was told to kiss her children good-bye and prepare herself for the ceremony the next morning.

Terrified, Ana ran from the tower, through failing fields begging for blood, to the King’s Gate and out into the desert. She hid in the tall grass that surrounded the city in those days, praying she wouldn’t be found by wild animals, hoping the king would take his own life within a day or two and she would be able to return home.

It was there, sleeping in the grass with her cheek pressed to the earth, that she spoke to the Pure Heart of the planet for the first time.

She’d been raised to fear the Dark Heart’s other half, the magical force that had caused the deformity of most of Yuan’s citizens, but she found the Pure Heart anything but cruel. It spoke kindly to her; it offered her life instead of death. It told her how to break the curse and restore the health of the planet and all the creatures living upon it.

Ana was transformed, frightened, but also filled with the certainty that her people must change their ways and end the division of the world.

She returned to the city and to her tower, where she wrote her last diary entry, the one explaining how to break the curse, and why the people of Yuan must reach out to the monsters in the desert.

The diary ends there, but Ana’s spirit shows me the morning the guards came to escort her to the royal garden.

King Sato and the heads of the noble families were gathered around the roses. The royal executioner was already wearing his hood. Ana begged the king to listen to what she’d learned outside the dome, but he wouldn’t.

No one would. Just as no one would remind the king that—according to the covenant—his life would serve as well as hers. The king threatened to kill Ana and marry another if she refused to offer herself to the roses, while, beneath the soil, the Dark Heart called to her, promising her peace and rest, assuring her there was no choice but death.

Finally, Ana gave up. She knelt down. She took the knife in her hand and opened her own throat. The executioner ensured that her death was swift.

After the ceremony, King Sato buried the covenant beneath a paving stone in the royal garden and ordered all copies of the text burned, hoping to ensure the ignorance of his fourth wife. Unfortunately, the king didn’t

live to enjoy his new wife for long. Only two days after giving Ana’s bloodless body to the river, the king suffered a heart attack in his bed and died. His new wife—barely twenty and unprepared to rule—married Ana’s eldest son the next afternoon and went on to give the city many sons and daughters.

Ana had died for nothing. Her soul lingered to see that painful fact, to see her diary hidden away by her maid, and to see the truth of the covenant and the dark magic it nurtures lost to the people living beneath the dome. Her spirit lingered for centuries, reaching out to Yuan’s rulers in their dreams, hoping one would discover her diary. She was a part of the city, but a piece that didn’t fit, the keeper of a secret even more important than the location of the covenant, the keeper of the truth about the Dark Heart and the only way to end the nightmare of life under the domes.

Love. The secret is love.

A citizen of the domed cities and a man or woman of the Monstrous tribes must love each other more than they love anything else. When they do, the cities will fall, life will return to the desert, and every creature dwelling on the planet will be made whole and strong. All it takes is love.

My mother must have also somehow discovered the truth. That
had
to be why she took me into the desert, and why she attempted to destroy our family when she was locked in the tower and denied a way out of Yuan.

She wasn’t crazy. If she’d succeeded in burning the three of us to ash that night, there would have been no blood for the Dark Heart. Murder would have succeeded in destroying Yuan, but only love will heal our world.

I love Gem. I grow more certain of that every day. I also grow more certain that Gem is dead.

He would have returned by now if he weren’t, I know he would. He must have died out there in the desert, and now I will never be able to tell him how much he means to me. At least, not in this life.

I ask Ana’s spirit if I will see Gem in the afterlife, but that is one question she refuses to answer. She doesn’t want to believe I will share her fate; she wants to believe Gem and I will end the curse, but I know better.

Yuan is failing. I awake each morning certain I’ll find Junjie and the guards waiting outside my bedroom, prepared to kill me if I continue to refuse to give my life for my city. Bo can hold them off for only so long. They will come. Soon.

My time grows shorter than the thorns on the royal roses.

I tell Needle about the secret location of the covenant, but warn her to stay away from the garden. Still, I’m not surprised when she returns one evening with a scroll wrapped in cloth so ancient that it falls apart in my hands.

I unroll the paper carefully. Needle reads and signs each word. I follow along, flinching when she reaches the final line and I learn that Ana was telling the truth. Our city’s bargain with the Dark Heart calls only for the death of “one bound by oath of marriage to the first sacrifice.”

One bound by oath. Not a
woman
bound by oath. Not a queen. A king would serve just as well.

It’s a little betrayal in a world ravaged by centuries of hatred and suffering, but it doesn’t feel little. It feels like proof that there is nothing good within the human heart. How could there be? If an entire generation could condemn Yuan’s daughters to death because they found that preferable to the death of Yuan’s sons?

What is there worth fighting for? Worth dying for? What have any of my dreams ever been worth?

That night, I tuck the covenant beneath my mattress, lay my head on my pillow, and dream of the day my mother took me walking outside the dome. I smell the wild scent of the desert; I feel the sun hot on my cheeks. I hear a whisper on the wind, a voice begging me to stand up
to
my people and
for
my people, to force the darkness to end with me, to save my daughters, to save myself.

To be brave.

I wasn’t brave. I was as afraid of that voice as I was of death itself. So afraid I buried every memory of my life before I heard it, in an attempt to keep myself from remembering what I had been asked to do. But I’m not afraid anymore.

I am finished with my fearful heart. I am ready. I am brave.

Are you certain?
Needle mouths.

“Yes. But I want you to go first,” I say, refusing to meet her sad eyes.

I look at the pile of bricks in the corner instead. Needle has been gathering them—one by one, two by two—for the past month. As soon as Bo left this afternoon—lips pressed into a thin line after all his pleading won him nothing but a pat on the shoulder and a walk to the door—she began pulling the bricks from their hiding places.

Tonight is the night. Tonight I will build my own walls.

First, a barrier to cover up the entrance to the tower, then a wall in front of my bedroom door, and finally another behind. It should be enough to hold the soldiers until tomorrow morning. And maybe even a bit longer.

It will be enough.

The city is on the brink.

Suddenly, this very morning, Yuan went from ailing to falling to pieces. The walls began to crumble. Above our heads, the dome groans like a field animal that’s swallowed something foul. Needle says only the nobles still believe the city can be saved. The people from the Banished camp, the farmers and their remaining livestock, and all but a few of the commoners from the city center are fleeing into the desert, bound for Port South.

I hope they make it there safely. I don’t wish them any pain, but the cost of saving Yuan is too great. The Dark Heart will not feed from this city again.

I’ve failed to end the curse and heal our planet—either Gem is dead or he never loved me the way I love him; I suppose I’ll never know which—but I won’t fail in this. I’ll take one city away from the darkness.

Yuan will fall, and there will be only two cities left. And maybe someday, in one of those cities, a girl or a boy will look out into the desert and see someone who makes him or her want to change the world.

I close my eyes and see Gem’s face as clearly as ever. Nearly three months, and I can still remember the way his eyes reflected the candlelight, the warmth of his skin, the feel of his lips.

Bo didn’t mar that memory. He has been a better unwanted king than I could have imagined—he has never stolen so much as a kiss. He has refused to take what wasn’t freely offered.

Not a kiss, and certainly not my life.

I knew he’d been sent to kill me today. I knew it before he said a word, before he fell to his knees, begging me to save the city and spare at least one woman’s life. He warned me that his father would come tonight with his own knife. Bo can’t protect me any longer. This evening, Junjie will arrive at the tower to slit my throat, and Bo will marry another. The woman has already been chosen, a woman older than Bo with two children she’ll leave motherless, the oldest a five-year-old girl who will become next in line for sacrifice if Bo never marries again. The woman’s wedding dress is sewn and her mind made up. She will say her vows with a blade in her hand, and willingly give her blood to the roses as soon as she is made the

queen.

Bo was so genuinely troubled by it all. It made me glad the covenant is hidden in my room and will remain there until the city falls.

When I first learned the truth, I wanted nothing more than to throw it in Bo’s face, to make it clear his blood would serve the roses as well as mine. But in the end, I had to keep the ancient king’s secret. If Bo knew he could feed the roses, he might pick up the knife and do so, and I can’t have that. I need the Dark Heart to starve. I need the city to fall. Soon. Tonight, if I’m lucky.

“You have to go.” I turn back to Needle, who has yet to budge. “You have to tell the people of Port South how to end the curse.”

Her bird hands flit from my shoulder to my cheeks, but her kindness offers no comfort.

There was a fire in the desert again last night
, Needle mouths.

My stomach flutters. “It’s probably some of our people,” I say.

“Camping by the dome, waiting to see if the city will be restored.”

It could be him
, she mouths.
Let me go and see
.

Him.
Gem
. Even thinking his name makes my heart do strange things in my chest.

“It’s too late,” I whisper. “If he loved me, he would have come sooner.”

Needle’s fingers move beneath my hand.
Maybe he was prevented
from returning
.

“How?” I ask.

Maybe he was hurt or grew ill. Maybe his people did the same thing
to him that yours have done to you
.

“I don’t think the Monstrous have towers or walls made of stone.”