by Stacey Jay
He looks down, catching my eyes, the emotion in his making my heart beat faster. “I would have told you that you’re beautiful.”
My stomach flutters and my chest gets warm and tight. I fist my hands and hold his gaze and my breath, determined to bind this moment tight inside me and never let it go. He means it. I’m beautiful to him. To Gem, who is beautiful to me. Does it really matter what anyone else thinks?
“You’re beautiful,” he says again, kissing my eyebrow. It’s a strange place for a kiss, but nice, an offering meant to comfort me, taking nothing for itself. “And you know it. You said so yourself.”
My brow furrows. “I never said that.”
“You did,” he says. “That girl in the painting isn’t a goddess. She’s a queen.”
His meaning hits, and my lungs forget how to draw breath. “That’s cruel,” I choke out, pushing at his chest. This time he lets me go, dropping my feet to the ground and spinning me to the mirror so quickly, I don’t have time to avert my eyes. I catch a glimpse, and a glimpse is enough for the glass to take me prisoner.
My lips part. The girl in the mirror’s lips part, too, and any lingering doubt vanishes in a dizzying wave. That’s me. That is what I look like. The shoulders that burst the seams of every dress are the perfect size in my mother’s shirt. My slender throat flutters delicately as I breathe. My face is not a perfect oval or a moon, but its angles aren’t hideous. There is elegance in my sharp chin and strong jaw, and my nose that isn’t shy about being a nose. It pokes proudly from the center of my face, ending in a tip shaped like a square, as if I ran into a wall with it and the skin never popped back into place.
It’s large, and might be distracting if it weren’t balanced out by my eyes. Enormous, unflinching eyes as green as summer grass, fringed with dark lashes, blinking beneath brows a bit too wild. My hair is even wilder, curling and coiling and running amok above my forehead and down my back, creeping wiry fingers over my shoulders, gluing stray tendrils to my damp cheeks. But it’s lovely, too, in its untamed way.
But there’s still the other … the part I keep hidden … I was careful not to look too closely in the bath, but now …
I lift my hand, and pull up my sleeve, revealing the peeling skin beneath the green fabric. There, where I thought scales lurked below the surface, is simply dry red human skin. Peeling and flaking and messy, but not hideous.
Sickly-looking, but not unnatural. Damaged, but not tainted.
I am …
I am not …
“There may be some way to treat it,” Gem says carefully, as if he senses how fragile I’ve become. “It might be irritated by something you’re eating or … washing with. A certain oil, or …”
He trails away. I don’t say a thing. I don’t know what to say.
This is my body—sickly, not tainted. This is my face. This is my face. The face of the girl in the painting. I remember sitting for a portrait on my sixteenth birthday, but I was never told what happened to it. Now I know. I am the girl in the painting, that beautiful girl. I don’t look like the other women whose faces I’ve felt—the proportions and structure and shape are completely different—but there is nothing Monstrous or ugly about me. I know it, Bo knows it, Junjie knows it. My father knew it.
My father knew it.
My heartbeat slows; my lips go numb. My throat cramps, and my ribs petrify. I feel the air in the room turn against me, pushing into me from all sides, threatening to turn my bones to dust.
Never, in my wildest dreams, would I have imagined that finding out I’ve been wrong would feel like this. That I would want to pull my beautiful face off the wall and hurl the mirror to the floor, stomp on the pieces until my feet bleed, scream until I lose my voice. That I would wish with every fiber of my being to go back to the way life was before, when I believed myself ugly, when the world and my place in it were perfectly clear.
But I do. I wish. But I can’t go back. Not ever.
I watch the girl’s face—my face—crumple in the reflection, see the way her upper lip pulls up, the way the cords on her slender throat stand out garishly from her skin, and her large nose turns red as she begins to cry, and I am momentarily comforted.
I can be ugly, after all. I can be as wretched-looking as I feel.
Gem turns me gently and pulls me into his arms. I fist my hands against his chest, bury my face between them, and sob as if the world has come to an end. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles into my hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
I shake my head, my forehead rubbing against the stiff cotton of his shirt, but I can’t talk. I don’t blame Gem. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d told me. I wouldn’t have believed him. I was certain I knew the truth, that I knew it all. At least when it came to the who and why and what of Isra.
But I knew nothing. Nothing. I am worse than the emperor without clothes. I am the biggest fool in the world.
“You were right,” I say, forcing out the words. “I am stupid.”
“You’re not. You were ignorant, and you didn’t stay that way on your own.”
He’s right. I didn’t become this fool alone. Baba made me this way. My father hid me away in this tower, and provided me with a mute maid incapable of telling me about myself. By the time Needle and I learned to communicate, I was older and unwavering in my beliefs, the reality of my world set so firmly in my mind that Needle’s compliments trickled in through my fingers and out through both ears. She was a servant, she was obligated to flatter me. I never imagined …
I couldn’t have imagined. If I had, if I for one second had thought I was nearly as whole as any other citizen of Yuan, then I would have known there was no excuse for any of it. No excuse for keeping me prisoner. Or for not, at the very least, allowing me visitors aside from the rare music tutor, sworn to silence about her time in the tower. If my father had been worried only about my safety, he still could have brought friends. Girls my age to play with when I was younger, to gossip and make music with when I was older. I didn’t have to be alone. I didn’t have to grow up feeling like a disgraceful secret.
But I did. No matter how much time Father spent with me, no matter how many times we laughed together or sang together or how many times he said he loved me, I always believed he was ashamed of the tainted girl who was all that remained of his family.
But I’m not tainted. I’m not. And as Gem said, there might be some way to treat my skin if I ask the healers for help. But Father never called the healers, even when it became obvious that Needle’s honey baths and creams weren’t making me better. I didn’t imagine it was possible to get better, not until Gem came to the city.
“I don’t understand,” I say, fists tightening until my nails sting my palms. “Why did my father do this? Why did he keep me here? Away from almost everyone? Why did he let me think …”
“I don’t know.”
I shake my head again, struggling to breathe past the rage burning white-hot inside me. I’m devastated and hurt and betrayed, but most of all, I’m furious. I want to hit something. Someone. I want to bloody them. Him.
A sense memory rises from somewhere deep inside me. My hands clawed, my nails torn, and blood—some mine, some not—hot and sticky on my stinging fingertips. The memory has the cold, silent terror of all my earliest memories, of those days when I was newly blind, but somehow I know it’s older. It’s something I’ve forgotten. Until now. Until suddenly it’s all right to remember flying at my father in a rage and raking my fingers down his face.
But why was I so angry? Did I know that what he was doing—holding my mother and me captive—was wrong? Did I try to fight back, only to give up and give in and forget? To trick myself into believing a story that made it okay to love the only person I had left?
“If he’d remarried, then that woman would have been the offering?” Gem asks.
I sniff, and lift my head, slowly. It feels heavier than ever. It weighs more than all the rocks in the desert. “And if they’d had children, one
of them would have been the next king or queen. I would have been safe. The crown would have reverted back to me only if they’d had no heirs. I would have had, at the very least, more time. More … life.”
Gem curses beneath his breath as he tucks the hairs stuck to my cheeks back into the mess from which they came. The lovely mess. I am a lovely mess now. That should matter, I think, but it doesn’t.
“I know I shouldn’t wish for someone else’s death,” I say, sounding broken. “And I don’t. Not really. I just wish …”
“That your father had wished for it,” Gem finishes, proving once again that he is clever and human and privy to at least some of the secrets of my heart.
I smooth the wrinkles from his shirt, trace the damp circles with my fingers where my tears wet the fabric. “I wish he’d told me it wasn’t easy to decide I would die for my city.”
“He never said anything?”
I shake my head. “And he knew what I assumed. About myself. I told him. He’s the only one I talked to … until you.” I look up, wishing Gem were the only one I had ever told.
Gem’s eyes narrow, and for a moment I see the terrifying creature I encountered that first night in the garden. I know he would rip my father open right now if the other Monstrous hadn’t done the job for him already. “He’s the monster you should have been protected from,” Gem says.
Tears fill my eyes again, but I refuse to let them fall. “He was my father,” I say, voice lurching as I try to regain control. “He was all I had. He taught me everything I know. I don’t …” I take a deep breath that comes out a terrifying little laugh. I don’t know that laugh. I don’t know myself.
“Who am I now?” I ask. “I don’t know that girl in the mirror. I don’t know how to be her. I don’t know how to think her thoughts or—”
Gem lays his hand on my cheek, so gently, I can barely feel his touch. “You are Isra. And now you’ll be the person you would have been without the lies. His lies, or mine.” His eyes swim with regret. If Gem hadn’t told me it was impossible for Desert People to produce tears, I’d think he was about to cry.
“I don’t blame you.” I put my hand over his, pressing his warm palm closer to my cheek. “I think only good things about you. Except when you’re making me angry. Or being bossy. You’re very bossy.”
“You have to stop this,” he says, his expression grimmer than ever, refusing to let me tease us out of this terrible moment. “You shouldn’t have to give your life. No one should.”
My hand falls to my side. “This is the way things are, the way they’ve always been,” I say, acutely aware of how exhausted I am. I’m a rag that’s been wrung out, leaving only a few drops of me left behind.
“This is dark magic,” Gem says. “Blood is bad enough, but death …”
“One death, to preserve thousands of lives. Without that one death, the crops would fail, the dome would fall, and the city would crumble,” I say, crossing to the bench at the foot of my bed and collapsing gratefully onto its cushioned seat. “Every man, woman, and child living here would die.” I run my fingers over the needlepoint flowers embroidered on the fabric beneath me. Roses. Fitting.
“I can’t let that happen,” I whisper. “I will remain queen, and when the time comes, I will do what queens have always done.”
“Your mother didn’t,” Gem says, the heat in his tone making me look up to find him pacing the thick carpet in front of Needle’s bed.
“Yes, she did.”
“If she burned in this tower, then how did—”
“She didn’t burn,” I say, stomach lurching. I’ve known the truth for a long time, but it sits differently now that I know it wasn’t only my mother who wished me dead but my father, too.
Gem stops pacing, and turns to me. “But you said—”
“She set the fire, but she didn’t burn.”
NINETEEN
ISRA
“SHE …” Gem shakes his head, and keeps shaking it, as if doing so will cause what I’ve said to make sense sooner or later.
“She set the fire.” I lift my hand to my throat and feel it ripple as I swallow, finding myself comforted by the rush of my blood beneath my skin. “One night, when Father was reading to me before bed, Mother came in to light the little lamp I liked to leave burning while I slept.
“Baba had mentioned something about a strange smell in my bedroom earlier, but neither of us knew what it was until my mother threw the lamp at the curtains. Apparently she’d soaked them with oil earlier in the day. They went up with a rush that sucked all the air from the room. I can’t remember what my mother looked like, but I remember seeing her silhouetted against the flames, how white her nightgown looked next to all that red and orange.”
“Why?” Gem asks, his voice breaking.
“She had decided the royal family had to die. Together,” I say, piecing together what little I remember with what Baba told me of that night. “As soon as she lit the curtains, she ran from the bedroom. She locked me and Father inside, and went to set another fire in the sitting room. Father slammed his fists against the door and begged her to let us out, but she wouldn’t. She … She said she loved us, but that fire was the only way.”
My brow wrinkles as the unfamiliar piece of the puzzle fits into place. I don’t know if it’s seeing my bedroom that’s helping my memory, or the fact that I’m telling the story aloud for the first time, but I can suddenly hear my mother speak, as plainly as if she were in the room right now. I can hear the tears in her voice, the genuine grief over what she felt, for some mad reason, she had to do.
“I didn’t remember that last part before,” I continue, “but I’m sure I heard her. It was right before my nightgown caught fire.”
I press my fingers to my lips, concentrating until I swear I catch a whiff of smoke. “I screamed for Baba, and he ran back to the bed and threw me to the ground before the fire could touch my skin.” I point to the spot on the floor, only a few feet from where I now sit.
“My head hit the stones beneath the carpet and … everything went blurry. I don’t remember much after that, but I know soldiers arrived and broke down the bedroom door. Father gave me to one of them and went to find my mother. She was in the music room, but she ran out onto the balcony when she saw Father and the guards. Baba said she refused to come back inside. When she realized her plan had failed, she leapt over the parapet, down onto the top of the first roof, and threw herself from the edge. I heard her scream as she fell.
“My father and Junjie took her body to the rose garden the next morning.” I glance at Gem, who stands frozen on the other side of the room, as horrified by the story as the people were in the days after my mother’s suicide. Suicide was always expected of her, but not like that, not anywhere but in the garden.
“They slit her throat and spilled her blood on the soil.” I drop my hand to my lap. “According to the terms of the covenant, the queen should do that herself—make the first, fatal cut before the royal executioner finishes the job—so it wasn’t the way things were traditionally done, but it was a suicide, and the covenant was satisfied. The city had been running low on water for months, but that very day, the water came surging back into the underground river at full force. For the next three years, the harvests were so abundant, Father had to have additional granaries built to contain the bounty. He named one of them after my mother. Not the greatest honor for a queen, but it was all he felt proper for a woman who’d tried to burn her family alive.”
Gem curses. It’s a Desert People word, but there’s no doubt that it’s a curse.
“She was mad,” I say, defending Mama out of habit. “My father and mother were married for almost twenty years before she became pregnant. I was a complete surprise. Mama was forty years old when I was born. Needle tells me the gossips say she was strange before my birth, but afterward …”
I sigh. “She started to talk about leaving the city. She even took me outside the gates once when I was four. It’s one of my earliest me
mories. We were spotted by the guards and brought back inside almost immediately, but … My father couldn’t trust her after that. He moved us both to the tower. Father said Mother didn’t mind. Court life had always been a misery for her, and going out into the city center gave her fits. She’d get so upset, she’d forget to breathe, and faint dead away on the street.”
“Was she sick?” Gem asks.
“Not in body,” I say. “Father said the illness was in her mind but that she seemed happy in the tower. He never thought she’d … do what she did. I didn’t, either.” I lean back, resting against the mattress. “I don’t remember much about her, almost nothing, really, but I remember feeling loved. I’m sure, in some part of her mind, she did what she did out of love.”
Gem crosses the room, his steps soundless on the thick carpet. He’s learned to be as silent in his boots as he is in bare feet. He has adapted well to my world. If only I could have the chance to see if I would adapt as well to his. I already miss the desert, the wind, the moaning of the dead trees. I’d never be alone in my sorrow out there. There would always be the wind to commiserate with.
“I’m sure she did,” he says as he stops in front of me. “It’s not hard to believe.”
I look up, up, up at him in surprise. “It’s hard for most people. It was hard for me when I was little.”
“She was trying to spare you a life spent preparing to die.”
“We’re all preparing to die.”
“Not like this.” He squats down, resting his hands on my knees. “You know it’s not the same.”
“I know,” I whisper, running my fingers over the ridges on the backs of his hands, down the top of each finger, tracing the places where his claws go to hide. They’re solid, sturdy chambers, like a second set of bones on top of the first, barely contained by his thick skin. I’ve felt them before, but I never expected them to look like this, so … natural. Not scary at all, really.
I lift his hand, studying the tiny puckers above his fingernails that must open in order to let his claws out. “I would like to see your claws.”