Of Beast and Beauty (6 page)

The dreams are the worst. Even when the sick heat in my legs fades, I still dream of flame, of a pyre where I burn forever to pay for failing my people.

I am more than shamed. I loathe myself.

“Father …” The sound of my own voice startles me awake. I open my eyes wide, but immediately slide them half-closed again. It’s bright in this room. Sun-filled. I never thought I’d see the sun again. I never thought I’d see
her
again, either.

The princess sits by my pallet, her oval face calm, emotionless, her blind eyes staring through me. “Are you awake?” Her voice is different than I remember. Emptier. She looks different, too.

Her dark hair is coiled on top of her head like a nest of snakes. Her lips are stained the red of a cactus flower. Her body is covered in a dress the color of her eyes, but not a dress as Desert Women know it. Our women’s dresses tie with straps at the back of the neck. They end at the knee, with slits up the sides to give their legs room to move. This dress has sleeves that clutch at the girl’s arms, holding her shoulders prisoner. It squeezes her chest and waist. I roll my head to see that the squeezing continues all the way to her ankles.

She looks like a worm wrapped up in green silk for a spider’s dinner.

“I asked you a question,” she says, still calm, unmoving except for her red lips. It feels like we’re alone in this room, but she doesn’t seem afraid.

I roll my head, forcing my stiff neck to turn one way and then the other. My eyes roam, taking in the stone walls, the barred windows, the heavy wooden door. Still a cage, but not as miserable a cage. And we
are
alone. The princess and the monster.

I turn back to her, watch her pale throat work as she swallows. I could kill her now. I’m weaker than I’ve ever been, and my legs ache in a way that assures me that standing isn’t possible, but I could still take her life. My arms aren’t restrained. One swipe of my claws at her neck where the blood flows quickest, and it would be done. She’d bleed to death before the guards could open the door.

“I know what you’re thinking.” Her lips twitch.

My right hand flexes. My claws descend with a sluggish
lurp
, oozing from above my nail beds.

“It would be a tragedy for the city.” Her words float on their own cloud, hovering above us in the crisp air. “I should be married,” she announces suddenly, proving she’s as rattled in the head as I remember.

“Seventeen is young, and I’m in mourning until the spring, but I could do it.

I’m sure someone would be willing to risk the bad luck that comes from breaking tradition.”

Seventeen. Two years younger than me. Not young at all.

“But then they’d have no reason to humor me.” She sighs. “Being the keeper of the covenant only goes so far, you know. I’ve learned that in the time you’ve been sleeping. People still feel free to tell a blind girl what to do. My maid had to sneak a sleeping draft into your guards’ tea in order for me to be granted a private visit with my own prisoner. Maybe it would be different if …” Her empty eyes slide toward the door, her ears lift until the

tips are hidden in her hair. “They’ll lock me up again if they find me here,”

she whispers. “Junjie will take my father’s place as jailer. I will never be seen again.”

“Then … go,” I rasp.

Her lips curve in a hard smile. “I knew you’d speak to me. Sooner or later.” She leans closer, stretching her long neck. “How did you learn our language out in the desert?”

I think about refusing to answer, but I don’t want the princess to leave, not until I’ve decided whether or not I’ll take my piece of her. “My mother.” I lift my fingers and let them drop, one by one, bringing life back into my hand. “She carried the tradition.”

“What does that mean?”

“She carried Yuan words in her mind. Her mother carried them before her, my great-grandmother before that.” With a steady movement I pull the whisper-soft blanket down my body. It slips off my shoulders, down my chest. I keep pulling, slowly baring my right hand. “Women usually carry language. They take words faster. But I have no sisters. I was the youngest, so my mother taught me.”

“How did your ancestors learn?”

“I don’t know.” My hand is almost free. My focus is on ridding myself of the blanket. “Mother never told me, and she died four winters …” My words trail away as I realize what I’ve said.

The princess is quiet. I lie still, not wanting her to hear me rearranging the covers. “My mama is dead, too. When I was four years old.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t feel sorry. The Smooth Skins deserve to suffer, this girl most of all.

“Well …” She clears her throat. “You speak well.”

“Thank you.”

Her laughter startles me. My arm jerks, baring my claws in one swift pull. But there is still no sound, and the princess doesn’t flinch. Thank the ancestors the girl is blind.

“And good manners,” she says. “Strange …” Her curved lips droop.

“The other Monstrous killed my father.”

I pause. Is she telling the truth? Is the king of Yuan dead?

“They cut him open from his throat to his belly. I felt the wounds.

Before we put him in the river,” she says, her throat working harder. Her bound shoulders tremble, straining the seams of her dress. It looks as if it

were made for someone else, some girl even frailer than this one. “He was taking a walk. He was unarmed. He wouldn’t have hurt them.”

He would have. He did. He hurt them every day that he ruled this city
.

But I don’t say the words aloud, no matter how much I want to.

Instead I ask, “Where are the others? What did you do to them?”

“If it were up to me, I would have gutted them the way they gutted the king.” I let my arm creep toward her neck, remembering how her flesh parted so easily for my claws the first time. “But I told you, being queen only goes so far. My advisor said we should send the others back to your people with a warning to stay away from the city. Junjie could communicate with your leader. They drew symbols on the dirt floor of the cell. Your leader—your father, if he’s to be believed—offered to leave you here as a gesture of good faith. He knows we’ll kill you if the city is attacked again.”

Her words would wound, but I remember what Father said that night I lay shivering in my cell. I’m not a gesture of good faith; I’m a weed in their garden.

“He seemed confident that you’d recover. I wasn’t sure.” She reaches out. I hold my breath, ready to drop my hand back to the pallet, but her fingers alight on my forehead, not my arm. “But you’re cool now.” The pads of her fingers trace the slope of my nose, over my lips, sending a strange zinging sensation across my skin.

She continues, over my chin, down to my neck, where her hand curls.

Her fingers begin to squeeze, and the zing is banished by the
thud, thud,
thud
of blood struggling to flow.

I should do it. Now. Cut off her arm; go for her throat. But I don’t. I’m still weak. Not only in body, but in mind. I don’t want to kill a motherless, fatherless blind girl. Even if she is my greatest enemy.

“Did you know they would kill him?” she asks.

I think about saying yes, just to see if she’ll try to strangle me to death, but instead I say, “We weren’t here to take lives.”

Her grip loosens. “Why were you here?”

I swallow, throat rippling beneath her fingers. “We’re hungry. We hoped to steal food to take back to our people.” I can’t tell her that my chief’s vision revealed that the roses are the secret to the Smooth Skin’s paradise under the dome. And I can’t kill her. If I do, I’ll never leave this room alive.

My arm falls; my claws ease back into their beds. I don’t know why I’m alive, but I am, and I must make the most of it. I have to find a way into the garden.

“My people are starving,” I say.

She makes an angry sound beneath her breath. “If my father weren’t dead, I would feel sorry for you.” Her fingers tighten again, until my eyes ache and green and pink spots dance around her face. “I would have put food outside the gate.”

“Liar,” I grunt, fighting for breath.

“Maybe.” She bends close, and I smell her breath, sweet like sticky fruit and … roses. “Maybe I
am
lying. The way
you
lied when you told me I’d die without your help. But you’ll never know for sure, will you? And your people will continue to
starve
.”

She smiles, and I move, faster than I thought I could after so much time in a cage. I snatch her wrist, pull her fingers from my throat. She comes for me with a balled-up fist that hits my chest and glances off without damage, and I snatch that wrist as well, holding tight as she struggles. I am so weak that my heart slams inside my chest and my head spins from even this small effort, but she’s weaker. Like a child.

“Release me,” she demands.

“You’re the one who wanted to fight.” I pin her wrists together and hold them, like Gare did to me when I was small and wanted to play rough.

I am determined to show her that I won’t tolerate her abuse, but she struggles only a moment, before her neck bends and her forehead drops to her hands.

I flinch as her eyes shut and her shoulders begin to shake. Water spills from behind her lids, fat drops that slide down her cheeks to fall onto my bare chest.

It wasn’t a fever dream, then.

“What is that?” I breathe.

She lifts her face. Her eyes aren’t empty now. They’re swimming with misery and pain. This girl wouldn’t run through the garden laughing like a child. The death of her father cut that part of her away and left her bleeding inside where wounds hurt the most.

I tell myself it’s no less than she deserves, but my voice is softer when I repeat, “What
is
that?”

“What?” Her hands squirm.

“The water.” I loosen my grip on her wrists. “From your eyes.”

She swallows and sniffs as she pulls her fists to her chest. “Tears?”

“Tears.” I remember the word, but only vaguely. It wasn’t one that came up often in my lessons or Mother’s songs. My people don’t tear.

Water comes from our skin to cool it, from our body to rid it of toxins, but not from our eyes. We aren’t leaky and fragile like the Smooth Skins.

Yet
they
hold all the power. They hold me prisoner. Their ruler smiles as she speaks of my people’s hunger; their queen runs her hands over my face and tightens her fingers at my throat, and I must lie here and do nothing.

I smear the tears on my chest away, but some have already soaked into my skin. I can feel them, as if she has marked me, infected me with Smooth Skin weakness.

“Get out,” I growl, hatred burning in my belly.

“Not yet. I have—”

“Now!”

“Quiet, or you’ll wake the guards,” she hisses, her own hatred flashing in her eyes. “
You
don’t tell me what to do. Junjie and the other advisors tell me, but
you
do not. Your own father left you here. Forever. For the rest of your life, you are
mine
. If you’d prefer that life to be a long one, you’ll do what I say, when I say it.”

“I’ll cut you open,” I snarl through gritted teeth.

“You’ll do no such thing.” She doesn’t flinch, or move away from the bed. “If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it already.”

“I nearly did.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Do you believe these?” My claws are at her neck a second later, the tips puckering the skin at either side. Her lips part and a strangled sound gurgles in her chest, but she doesn’t move. She has realized that the slightest twitch will open her throat. “You seem curious about what will happen when you die,” I whisper. “Maybe it’s time for your curiosity to be satisfied.”

She sips air, swallowing like a three-hooved gert picking its way down the rocky slope of a canyon. I tighten my grip. The five puckers on her throat deepen. A little more pressure, and her blood will flow. I tell myself it will be justice, but I’m not thinking about justice. I’m thinking about the way she stuck her nose in the air when she told me I’d do as she says. I’m

thinking that I prefer fear in her eyes to any other emotion I’ve seen.

I’m thinking I would rather be a monster than her slave.

“Your father told Junjie that you were a healer.” Each word is careful, formed mostly with her lips, using as little breath as possible.

“I am a warrior.” I come from a family of warriors, the greatest family of warriors. At least until
I
was born into it.

“Then you don’t know plants?” she asks, a new fear creeping into her voice. “You don’t grow and mix herbs for the Monstrous?”