Of Beast and Beauty

by Stacey Jay

  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.”

  Needle scowls. Don’t make jokes. Junjie will kill you.

  “Only if he can get through my walls before the city crumbles.”

  Then the city will kill you.

  “The city was always going to kill me,” I say. “At least this way I will take Yuan with me.”

  But what if Gem—

  “Leave,” I snap, unable to bear thinking of Gem right now. “I have to get started. Even the fast-setting mortar will need an hour to gain strength. I must have the first wall built before sunset. You’re wasting my time.”

  Needle’s lip trembles and her eyes shine with unshed tears, and I immediately feel terrible. Poor, tired Needle, my dear friend.

  “Please, love,” I say, taking her sweet face in my hands. “You have been my mother and my sister and my slave and my keeper for too long. Take your bag and go. Go to Port South and live. Find people you can trust and tell them the truth. There can still be a future for this planet. All hope is not lost.”

  Except for me.

  It doesn’t matter if it’s Gem who’s been lighting those fires by the stones these past two nights. It’s too late. Even if I let myself believe in Needle’s excuses for his long absence, there’s no way I can join him in the desert. If I set foot outside the tower, I’m a dead woman. The soldiers have been ordered to kill me on sight. Bo warned me of as much this afternoon. Junjie is determined that I will die before sunset and has enlisted every remaining citizen of Yuan to his cause.

  Save one.

  “You’ve been so good to me,” I say. “I want you to live and be happy.”

  I would rather stay, Needle signs, but I’ll do as you ask. She picks up the pack we’ve filled with food and clothes and all of my jewels. No need for them to be buried along with me, not when they could help Needle get settled in her new home. I’m not sure how the people of Port South treat their damaged people, but I know a rich mute woman has a better chance than a penniless one.

  I will miss you, my friend, she mouths, refuting my claim that she’s been a slave or a keeper, with the same firm grace with which she’s always handled me.

  What would I have done without her?

  “Good-bye,” I whisper, eyes filling as I stand and hug her tightly. After a moment, she moves out of my arms and down the stairs without a pause in her step, without looking back.

  I tell myself I’m glad. And then I cry the tears I’ve refused to cry all day, but only for a minute. There isn’t time to waste. When my brief cry is over, I wipe my nose on my less-than-fresh overalls and get to work. It doesn’t take long to lay the first row of stones. The quick-drying mortar is already mixed and ready. By the time my tears have dried on my cheeks, I have the beginnings of my wall.

  Unfortunately, beginnings are not the same as endings.

  I’m not even close to an ending when I hear footsteps on the stairs. Heavy steps, two pairs of boots, two men’s voices arguing in harsh whispers as they circle around to the top of the tower. When they reach the last stair, Junjie pauses, clearly surprised to see me and my half wall.

  “What is this, Isra?” Junjie’s eyes are sad, but not nearly as sad as his son’s.

  “I tried to stop him,” Bo says from his place behind his father. “I wanted you to have a few more hours.”

  A few more hours. Then he means to do it, to help his father kill me.

  “No,” I whisper, shaking my head. I can’t have failed, not when I’m so close.

  “This doesn’t have to be painful,” Junjie says, holding out his hand. “You can still change your mind and make your death a meaningful gift to your city.”

  “It’s no gift. Not for you or Bo or anyone else.” I back away, my trowel falling to the floor with a dull thud, smattering mortar across my bare feet. “This city is built on evil. It has to end with me,” I say, voice rising until it rings with desperation.

  “You will give your blood, or we will take it,” Junjie says, as stern as he’s been with me since I was a little girl. “This city will stand and prosper and flourish for another seven hundred years. You know this is the way things are done in Yuan.”

  And the way they will always be done. Nothing I say now will change that. Nothing I do will accomplish anything but putting off the inevitable. Escape is impossible, but still, I turn and run. I skid into my room and slam the door behind me, throwing the lock seconds before Junjie throws his weight against the door.

  I back away from the trembling wood, hands shaking at my sides.

  I won’t let him take my death. It’s the only thing I have left, the only thing that matters. My death will be mine. I will have my revenge against this city and the monster beneath the ground so eager for my blood, and I will finally, finally, finally be free of it all. Of life and fear and love and loss. Free of my responsibilities. Free of my failures. Free of this love that’s been nothing but another curse, another stone around my neck pulling me to the depths of an ocean of pain so deep that I will never hit bottom.

  I want to be free. Free.

  “Isra! Open the door!” Junjie shouts.

  “Free,” I say aloud.

  I’ve always craved freedom more than anything else. Anything.

  If even one citizen of the dome and one Monstrous can love the other more than they love anything else …

  If I’m brutally honest with myself, do I really love Gem more than freedom? Have I ever loved anything more than that elusive, seductive unknown? If I had the choice—Gem or freedom, even the freedom that will come with death, when all my obligations have been honored and I’m free to exit on my own terms—what would I choose?

  Gem is strong and brave and clever and good, and he makes me feel things I never dreamed I could feel, but he is also difficult and frustrating and impatient and … overwhelming. His arms feel like home, but he represents everything strange and uncertain and unknown. Loving him means gathering up all of those things, and carrying them with me. Forever. Love means being vulnerable and beholden. Love means embracing the pain I’ve been holding apart from myself for all the months that I’ve waited for him. It means taking that pain and claiming it and knowing it might not be the last of the pain he’ll bring into my life.

  Love is pain, and pain is the opposite of freedom, and freedom is all I’ve ever wanted, but I’ve never really stopped to wonder why. Why do I want my freedom so desperately? Why do I dream of the wind instead of something solid or permanent that I can hold in my hands, my arms?

  Maybe I … Maybe … />
  “Isra! Isra!” Junjie is still shouting loud enough to rattle the door, but his cries seem muted, drowned out by the roar of the revelation taking place inside me.

  “I had nothing better,” I whisper. Back in the time before Gem, back in the darkness, in my cage, in my narrow world with Death waiting with His arms outstretched and only my father to help me prepare for the long walk to greet Him, there was nothing better than the dream of having no ties to bind me.

  But Gem, with all his flaws and complications and high expectations, is better. His love, his faith in me, his belief that I can be as strong and brave as he is … The way he makes me feel and think and try harder than I’ve ever tried …

  All of it, all of him, is better than anything else. Anything at all.

  I take a breath and let the pain and love and admiration and everything I feel when I think of Gem fill me up, soak into my soul, break my heart wide open. It hurts—so, so much—but it’s also a relief. It’s also warm and peaceful and safe. Beautiful. This kind of love is weightless, limitless.…

  And almost exactly what I imagined freedom would feel like.

  If only I’d known sooner. If only I could thank Gem for helping me find the only thing I’ve ever wanted as much as I want him.

  TWENTY-SIX

  GEM

  I’M too late. Yuan is falling before my eyes.

  Cracks as wide across as my body snake up the surface of the dome. Stones tumble from the wall walks, making skittering sounds beneath the moaning of the buckling metal that once fused the glass to the rock.

  Bizarrely shaped Smooth Skins unlike any I encountered during my captivity, partial mutants that I assume are the Banished that Isra spoke of, and a few starving animals stream away from the once-healthy city in a seemingly endless ribbon across the desert. The last of them emerged from the Desert Gate less than an hour ago.

  Isra was not among them. But I didn’t expect her to be. There’s a reason the city is crumbling to pieces. Isra is gone.

  Not gone. Murdered, and the city along with her, while you walked away. And stayed away, wallowing in your weakness. You might as well have slit her throat that first night. You’re the reason she’s dead.

  Add another name to—

  I begin to hum beneath my breath one of the songs Isra taught me, a complicated tune with as many ups and downs as the path over the mountains that brought me back to Yuan from the wilds where I had lost myself for months.

  Singing drowns out the terrible thoughts. Sometimes I imagine I’m singing to Herem, the son I held for the first time the day I lifted him onto his funeral pyre. Sometimes I imagine Father singing along in the deep, steady voice of my childhood, banishing from my memory the confused whimpers of his last days.

  By the time I returned, Father no longer knew me. He called me by his brother’s name. He asked where our sisters were. He smiled and told stories about his new mate, as if he were a young man and he and Mother just married. He cried like a child, begging me to bring a light into the hut because he was afraid of the dark.

  He died in his sleep a week after I returned. I never got to say good-bye to the man I remembered.

  Gare blamed me for that, too. He blamed me for Father’s broken mind. He blamed me for the twenty dead before I brought the food. He blamed me for the hopeless future when the carefully rationed provisions inevitably ran out. He said I should have taken the roses and Isra and made Yuan’s dark curse our own. He called for a war party to be formed to return to Yuan and capture the roses and the queen at any cost, to kill every Smooth Skin we could kill and avenge our tribe. Our usually peace-minded chief agreed, but the final decision for war is always taken to our people.

  It failed by one vote. Meer’s mother said no. She said Meer wouldn’t have wanted to live if it meant binding our tribe to dark magic. She said Meer wouldn’t have wanted her son to be raised under the shadow of evil or for me to lose the woman I love.

  I told my people what I felt for Isra. Most of them assumed my head had been damaged by my time spent under the dome.

  I close my eyes now, and let my head fall back against the warm rock behind me. Isra. Thinking her name is enough to rip me apart. I was sure I was done with these feelings. I thought I’d known the worst pain any man could imagine, but I was wrong. There is still more pain. New pain. The worst pain. I am a broken man. Without Isra, I will never be whole again. There is nothing left to hope for, no reason to keep living.

  I imagined that the worst thing awaiting me in Yuan would be explaining to Isra why it took me so long to return, asking her forgiveness, hoping she could understand how lost I was. But this …

  By the ancestors …

  I should have known it was possible. I should have prepared myself.

  You knew. You refused to prepare. Coward.

  “I’m not a coward,” I whisper. I never betrayed her. I never lied, I never took the easy way, even when Gare, the last living member of my family, disowned me before the tribe, when he said a lover of Smooth Skins would receive no death wails from his throat, and vowed to let my body rot on the ground if I were foolish enough to die before he does.

  He won’t give me the release of a funeral fire. He hates me that much.

  I don’t hate him, but I would have fought him if he’d tried to hurt Isra. I would have killed him if I’d had to. My own brother. I’m no better than he is, but I’m—

  “Not a coward,” I choke out.

  “No, you’re not.” A soft voice. A girl’s voice.

  My eyes fly open—some desperate part of me hoping I’ll see Isra, though I know her voice is deeper and richer than the one I heard. Instead I find Needle standing at the base of the rocks I climbed last night and haven’t bothered to leave all day. She looks up at me, her golden skin rosy in the fading light, her black eyes glittering with wonder. She looks … complete.

  “I can speak.” She blinks, sending twin streams of water racing down her cheeks. “For the first time in my life. I was born without the parts I needed to make words, but a few minutes ago I felt …” Her fingers touch her throat, her awe clear in their trembling. “It’s magic. Isra was right. Everything in the queen’s diary is true. The curse is breaking.”

  Isra.

  “Is she …” I falter and start again. “Is she—”

  “She’s in the tower.”

  My chest explodes with a relief brighter and purer than anything I thought I’d feel again. “She’s alive,” I say, just to hear the words out loud. Then again, “She’s alive!”

  “We must return to the city. Quickly.” Needle drops the pack slung over her shoulder onto the ground and backs away toward the dome. “She thinks you’re dead and she’s determined to die, too,” she says, sending my heart plummeting into my stomach. “She wanted to stay with the city until it falls, to put an end to the covenant, but now that you’re here—”

  As if in response to her words, a terrible sound—like thunder, but a hundred times sharper and closer—erupts from the direction of Yuan. Needle wheels to look. I lift my eyes in time to see a chunk of the dome as big as the stones I’m standing on break away from the rest and fall … farther … farther … until it finally collides with one of the buildings at the center of the city, sending the structure tumbling to the ground. A little farther to the left, and the thick shattered glass would have destroyed Isra’s tower.

  I jump from the rock, and hit the ground running.

  “Wait!” Needle calls as I race by her.

  I glance over my shoulder to find her already running after me.

  “There are soldiers still in the city,” she says. “They have orders to kill Isra if she leaves her rooms.”

  “Why?” I ask, slowing just enough for Needle to keep up.

  “Junjie forced her to marry his son,” she says, making my stomach knot. But there’s no time to think about what Isra’s marriage means for us. I have to save her life. That’s all that matters. I can’t be too late again; I won’t survive it.


  “Once she’s dead, Bo can marry again,” Needle continues, moving quickly for someone so small. Though … she seems larger than I remember her. Larger and stronger, with muscled calves peeking out from beneath her simple gray dress. “Isra was walling herself inside her room to try to protect herself, but if you hurry, you can reach her before she finishes. Go,” she pants. “You can run faster. I’ll wait for you both by the stones.”

  I’ve just started to push harder, when Needle cries out—

  “Get her out, Gem. Kill the others if you have no choice.”

  I stop for one precious moment, and turn back with a nod.

  Needle sighs with a mixture of relief and fear I completely understand. “Isra has to live. She has to see this,” she says, arms sweeping out as if she’ll embrace the entire desert. It’s only then that I notice the color. Color in the desert.

  Patches of green and gold and black and blue prick at my eyes. Golden grass pushes up from the crumbling earth; green teases the branches of trees that have been dead for decades. Bruised blue and black storm clouds sweep over the mountains, smelling of sweating metal and new grass and the sweetness that comes just before a rain.

  I can’t remember the last time it rained. I can’t remember the last time I saw a storm cloud. It’s been years.

  Something’s happening, something miraculous, and Isra has to see it. She has to know the world can change, no matter how hard the road has been to get to this place or how viciously the old world will fight to keep us from walking out of that dying city.

  There is hope. For her, for me, for all of our people.

  With one last glance at the clouds rolling across the sky, blanketing the sizzling desert with cool promise, I run for the dome. I run faster than I have ever run. I run to her, for her, my Isra.