Of Beast and Beauty

by Stacey Jay

  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 hove
ring 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.

  I watch him, feeling his agony as my own, and then suddenly I am somewhere else, in a time before the fires, standing beside the old man as he places a shriveled black root into the hands of devastatingly thin Monstrous people. Old men, young children with distended bellies, boys Gem’s age with their wide shoulders concave with starvation, girls my age with glassy-eyed babies clinging to their necks. One of the girls is even thinner than the rest. Her baby still has the strength to wail, to squeeze his eyes closed and scream as his mother slips the root between his lips.

  He’s dead almost instantly.

  “No!” Heat floods my face; tears spill from my eyes.

  The scene changes again, going back even further, showing Monstrous men and women gathered around a fire. Their faces flicker with orange and red from the flames, but their backs are kissed by pale blue winter moonlight. It’s a night like tonight—it could even be tonight—and the people are thin, but not dying.

  It’s not too late. It’s not too late to help them, to save them. Gem and I can go into the desert. We can bring food and—

  A growl—loud and deep and fierce enough to make the hair on my arms stand on end—shatters the scene playing behind my eyes. I land back in my body with a jolt and wrench my neck toward the sound, a relieved breath already bursting from my lips.

  Gem! He’s here. He’ll free me, and together we’ll—

  “Ah!” I cry out as the roses jerk me closer to the flower bed, hauling me over the retaining wall and into their midst, surrounding me with thorns, crowding my eyes with blossoms fattened on centuries of blood.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ISRA

  RED floods my vision. The smell of rot and metal and bitter herbs sweeps into my nose. My skin crawls as sharps mean as needles press at me through my clothes. I squeeze my eyes shut and scream as I cower closer to the ground.

  “Let her go!” Gem shouts. I hear a whistling sound and a muffled thud as something soft, but heavy, falls to the ground. Before I can turn and see what’s happened, the roses are moving, their thorns piercing through my clothes, making me howl like a trapped animal.

  “No!” I beg. “They’ll kill me! Don’t touch them!”

  “I have to get you out,” Gem says, sounding so fearful and desperate that I know he cares for me. Now I have to prove I care for him as much.

  “You have to go,” I say, panting against the urge to be sick. The pain is too much, coming from everywhere all at once. “Your tribe. They’re in trouble.”

  “How do you—”

  “I saw it. In a vision.”

  “A vision.” He lets out a shaking breath. “From the roses? Were there—”

  “Please, Gem. Half your tribe will die if you don’t go.” I grit my teeth, refusing to whimper, to do anything to make Gem feel compelled to stay with me. “Needle prepared a pack for you this afternoon. It’s waiting by the King’s Gate. Take it and go. Now.”

  “I won’t leave you,” Gem says, voice breaking. “I can’t.”

  “You have to,” I say, and then add silently, But you can come back. Oh, please come back. Oh please, oh please.

  If he comes back … If he cares enough to come back … maybe we can find a way to end this, to escape from the Dark Heart and make a better life for both our peoples.

  The thorns press deeper, and I can’t keep a soft cry of pain from escaping my lips.

  “Isra … they’re killing you.” His hand finds mine. I can’t turn my head to see him, but I know he has risked his life to reach out for me. I cling to him, selfishly needing to touch him one last time.

  “They’re not killing me. They’re keeping me here. They know my thoughts. They know I wanted to go with you.” I close my eyes, memorizing the feel of his fingers threaded through mine. “They’ll release me when you’re gone.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do,” I lie, knowing that Gem will refuse to leave unless I properly convince him. “They need a willing sacrifice, a suicide. They can’t murder me,” I say, hoping it will be enough to make Gem go before he’s caught. “How did you get out of your cell?”

  “I broke the lock on the door. After I …” His breath shudders out, and his grip on my fingers gets tighter. “I saw you coming into the garden and I tried to call your name, but—I felt something, a terrible magic.”

  He has no idea how terrible, and I can’t tell him. Not now.

  “There’s no time.” I release his hand, pushing him away. “Go. Run. Hurry.”

  I hear a rustle in the leaves, and when he speaks again, he sounds farther away. “I’ll come back as soon as I can,” he says. “If you’re not alive, I’ll burn this city to the ground. Starting with this garden.” The blossoms closest to my face rotate on their stalks, moving out of my line of sight as they turn to Gem.

  I lift my head, meeting Gem’s worried eyes through a jumble of leaves and thorns. I want to tell him how beautiful he is to me; I want to tell him everything I’ve held back. I want to share everything that’s happened since he left the tower last night, because only after sharing it with Gem will it seem real.

  I want to tell him that, too, but instead I say, “Please go.” He has to go. There’s no time. “I’ll watch for you on the wall walk. Every night. Set a fire by the gathering of stones. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  “You’re bleeding,” he says, throat working. I can see it, even in the moody blue light of my least favorite moon.

  “Don’t forget me,” I whisper. “Please. Don’t forget.”

  “I’ll come back,” he says. “If I have to drag my body across the desert. I swear it. On my life.”

  I nod, squeezing my eyes closed to keep the tears at bay. By the time I open them, he’s gone.

  “Let me go,” I whisper to the roses after several long moments have passed. They’ve gone as still as any plant now, but I know they’re listening. “You’ve gotten what you wanted.” The Dark Heart clearly wanted Gem to leave the city. There’s no other explanation for why it showed me the suffering of the Monstrous out in the desert. It wanted Gem—and the risk he poses to the continuation of the covenant—removed from Yuan.

  But he’ll come back to me. I know it. I haven’t lost yet, not if I gain my freedom tonight.

  “Let me go.” I try to straighten my legs, but the ancient vines lie heavy and motionless across my thighs. “Let me go! I won’t be held like—”

  “What have you done to yourself?” The voice is soft, shocked, and so unlike Bo’s that I don’t guess who it belongs to until I look up to see him standing where Gem stood a few moments ago.

  “Who were you talking to?” Bo asks again, in that same numb way that makes me more nervous than his angry voice ever has.

  “No one. Myself.” I lick my lips, taste my tears, and shiver despite the fact that the night is the warmest we’ve had since autumn. Why is Bo here? How much has he seen?

  “The Monstrous is out of his cell, Isra,” Bo says. “Do you know anything about that?”

  “Y-yes,” I stutter, my heart beating faster. “I needed him to take care of a few things in our garden. He’s going there now,” I say, hoping to buy Gem more time to reach the King’s Gate by sending Bo in the opposite direction. “He’s trustworthy. He’ll be back in his rooms within the hour. There’s no need to—”

  “There’s every need,” Bo snaps, anger creeping into his tone. “There’s every need to do … so
mething.” He shakes his head, his expression bleeding from anger to confusion to utter bafflement. “What are you doing here? Why have you hurt yourself?”

  “I didn’t do it deliberately. I tripped and fell,” I say, lifting my chin. “And it seems to me you should be more interested in helping your queen than interrogating her.” I can’t tell Bo that the roses attacked me, or he’ll think I’m more rattled than he does already, but I don’t have to endure being treated like a fool. “Now. Help me out. Use your sword. Cut the vines if you have to.”

  Bo’s lips part, and a horrified look creeps into his eyes. “You want me to desecrate the royal garden? Are you mad?” He laughs, a single baw so loud that it makes me wince. “Of course you’re mad. Of course you are. And to think I … I felt for you,” he says, gravel in his voice. “Even today. I thought my father and the other advisors were being unfair, but he’s right. You’ve lost your mind.”

  “No, I haven’t.” My forehead wrinkles, but it doesn’t hurt. At least the roses didn’t attack my face. “Your father supported every measure we discussed today. He sent the amendment concerning the Banished to my rooms a few hours ago. It was exactly—”

  “He’s lying to you, humoring you until tomorrow morning,” Bo spits. “He and the other advisors are going to force you to marry me and give Yuan a ruler who’s not out of his head. They say the law allows them to compel your marriage, whether you consent to the union or not.”

  My stomach clenches. “But I … I’m still in mourning. It’s against our—”

  “Sometimes big changes are necessary to protect the city,” he says, mocking his father’s kind words from this afternoon perfectly, setting fire to the last tattered shreds of my hope. “I tried to convince him to wait,” Bo continues, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “I wanted you to choose to marry me, but clearly you aren’t capable of making wise choices.”