Of Beast and Beauty

by Stacey Jay

  Sick …

  I’m nearly half a day’s walk from my tribe’s winter camp when I smell it. Smoke. Funeral smoke. In the middle of the day. My people burn our dead at night, but there’s no mistaking the smell—charred and oily, bittersweet, musky … terrible. The smell of burned hair and melting flesh and all the dreams the dead will never dream going up in flames.

  I start to run. My leg buckles and bends the wrong way, and my bones knock together with a sick crunch. Pain and heat explode behind my kneecap, but I don’t stop. I run toward the smoke billowing on the horizon, with my leg burning like fire. I run until my ankle turns and my run becomes a hobble. I hobble until my good leg fails me and I fall to the ground and crawl.

  I come into the midst of the fires on my hands and knees, and I’m glad. This isn’t something to see standing up. It isn’t one fire or three or even five. There are a dozen. No, more. Fourteen … fifteen. A city made of funeral pyres, flaming houses eating up their lonely residents with no mourners gathered below to cry their souls into the next world.

  Where are they? Where are the families? The mates? The friends?

  My breath comes faster. Pain and fear and dread swell so big inside me that it feels like my cracked skin will have to tear wide open to let it all out.

  I look up. I force myself to look to the top of each pyre, guessing at the identity of each burning corpse. Any one of the adult-sized bodies could be my father or my brother. My friends. Meer.

  And that one, that tiny one on the right …

  It could be my son. It’s a baby. A tiny spot of dense and dark at the center of a fire too big for a person with so few memories to burn away and no life magic to gift to those left behind.

  My son. That could be my son.

  My eyes squeeze shut. Oh, please. By the ancestors, please, let my son be alive, I beg, though I know my prayer is selfish. If my son is spared, then that means it is some other baby burning on that pyre. Someone’s baby is dead. Fourteen other mothers, sisters, brothers, lovers, fathers, are dead.

  Why is this? And where are the rest of my people while their loved ones burn?

  I emerge from the city of fire, and my question is answered. A line of my people stands before our healer, their heads bowed in defeat. I see the medicine man hand something to a young mother at the far end of the line, and I try to scream—

  “Meer!” But my throat is raw from the smoke, tight from dread, strangled by terror. She doesn’t hear me. Her head stays down as she slips whatever the medicine man gave her between our listless child’s lips and rubs it back and forth across the baby’s tongue.

  Instantly, I know what she’s holding. Poison root. Poison root. Poison root in my baby’s mouth.

  “No! Stop!” The words explode from deep inside me as I scramble across the dirt on my hands and knees, the pressure inside my body threatening to make my heart explode. “Meer! Stop!”

  Meer’s arm jerks, pulling the root from my son’s mouth. From somewhere farther down the line, a cry rises into the air. And then another, and another, but there is no hope in the sounds. No celebration. I’m too late. I know it; everyone knows it. Everyone knows I saw. I saw.

  No. Please, no. I can’t have gotten here just in time to watch my son die for no reason. When there is food here on my back and hope so close.

  “Meer.” I gasp, but she doesn’t respond. Her eyes are wide and empty in her painfully thin face, her jaw slack. Without emotion she watches me crawl toward her for a long moment, before her head snaps down and the arm cradling the baby lifts him closer to her face. She drops the root and pats his cheek. She smoothes his hair away from his face. She places one skeletal hand over his heart and holds it there for what feels like an eternity.

  And then she screams. She screams like her heart is being cut out.

  He’s dead. He’s dead, oh no, please, no.

  A strangled sound bursts from my throat. I push to my feet, only to fall immediately back to the ground. No amount of will can make up for how broken my body has become. Broken. Everything broken. My tribe, my baby, my life, my heart.

  Meer’s wail ends with a sob as she looks up, meeting my eyes with an expression so terrible, I instantly feel what she feels. The pressure building inside my chest and my head, crushing against the backs of my eyes, becomes unbearable. Meer. My friend. If I could spare her this pain, I would.

  I’ll hold her and tell her I forgive her. I’ll tell her it’s my fault. I’ll—

  Suddenly, Meer’s legs bend and her fingers reach for the dirt.

  “No!” I scream, but it’s too late. The root she dropped is already in her mouth, her teeth are already biting down. She’s already falling to the ground, her eyes closing, her mouth falling open as her soul leaves her body.

  I watch her fall. I watch the limp bundle that was my child roll from her dead arm, and then there is nothing but red.

  Red behind my eyes as I scream and scream until my throat is raw and I taste metal on my tongue. Red as I pound my fists into the ground until my knuckles break open and weep blood onto the desert floor.

  I howl until there is nothing left inside me. Until my head buzzes and my muscles lose the last of their strength and I collapse onto the ground with my too-late salvation still strapped to my back and the red world goes black.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ISRA

  I am married. I wear a black dress and a black cap over my hair, breaking mourning tradition and wedding tradition, making it clear I consider the ceremony the blackest of rites. Bo holds my hand during our vows, but he doesn’t stay in the tower that first night, or the next, or any thereafter. I understand that he means to keep his promise not to be cruel, and am grateful for small favors.

  I’m grateful for big ones, too. As the world beneath the dome begins to fade and falter, I know Bo is all that stands between me and death. He begs the advisors to give me more time to come to my senses.

  I beg the desert to send Gem back to me before it’s too late.

  Needle sneaks to the wall every night after returning my dinner tray. She watches for a fire by the gathered stones, while I stand by the door, waiting for news of Gem, hoping so hard, it hurts.

  I am always disappointed.

  Winter ends and the days grow longer and warmer, but the crops refuse to grow. The cows cease giving milk, and—as our stores are used up and milk is replaced with water and wine—I learn what has caused the sad state of my skin. An allergy to the milk I’ve drunk every morning and been bathed in twice a day, every day, since Needle came to care for me. She blames herself for not realizing the milk and honey baths were hurting more than helping, but I assure her I’m not angry. I’m elated. Gem was right about that, too. I add it to my list of things to tell him, but weeks pass and he doesn’t come, and things only get worse.

  The chickens refuse to lay eggs, and half the livestock fall over dead in the fields. The orchard flowers rain to the ground, but no leaves or fruit grow in their place. Beneath Yuan, the underground river becomes a narrow stream. Water is rationed and the city’s worry becomes an ever-present, buzzing fear. I know what game the Dark Heart plays, but I refuse to panic. Gem will come. He will come and we will end this madness. 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 finall
y 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.