the roses. None of
confession seem distant, unreal. “I could have another seventeen years. I
could have ten. The advisors could come for me tomorrow if they believe
the city to be in danger.”
“How long have you known?” Gem asks, a stricken expression on his
face.
“Forever.” I brush my hair wearily from my forehead. “I can’t
remember a time when I didn’t. It was never a secret. I always knew that if
my father didn’t remarry and give the city another queen—”
“Why didn’t he remarry?” Gem demands, his anger hot and
immediate.
“He was doing what he thought was best for me,” I say, more
exhausted with every word. “As future queen I was protected. I don’t think
my mutation is severe enough to send me to the Banished camp, but—” My
words end in a yip of surprise as Gem snatches my hand and half drags me
across the room toward the mirror on the wall.
Instinctively I dig my heels into the carpet. I’m not ready. Not like
this. “No,” I say, squirming my fingers, panic making my voice high and
tight. “I’m not ready.”
“You need to see yourself,” he says. “You need to see the truth.”
I shake my head and throw my weight backward, fighting harder to
free myself from his grip. “In a minute. Wait! I—” He drops my hand, only
to scoop me up in his arms. “Stop! Please,” I beg, shoving at his chest.
When he stops in front of the mirror, I squeeze my eyes shut and turn
away.
“Look at yourself,” he demands. “Look!”
I press my face against his shoulder, inhaling the smell of the desert
and Gem on his shirt, hating that he can still smell good to me even when
he’s dirty and bullying me like everyone else in my life. “You’re no better
than Bo,” I say through gritted teeth.
“I’m only trying to help!”
“Sh!” I stab his chest with the tip of one finger. “You’ll scare Needle.
She’s mute, not deaf. If she comes in here and finds us like this, she’ll bring
the bed pot down on your head. It’s copper. It will hurt.” I peek at him
through slitted eyes. “Even someone with a skull as thick as yours.”
“You’re one to talk,” he says. “You’re the most stubborn person I’ve
ever met.
stubborn.”
“Then put me down and go away,” I say, voice breaking. “If I’m so
stupid.”
“I don’t want to go away. I want to help,” he says in a softer voice.
“Please, let me.” His arms gentle around me, no longer holding me
prisoner, just holding. Waiting.
“This doesn’t help,” I say, relaxing in spite of myself. “Not like this.”
He presses a kiss to my forehead. “I should have told you before,” he
whispers, making my skin tingle.
I wish we’d never stopped kissing. I wish Gem would give up on
saving me, and give me something to remember when my life is out of
possibilities.
“I would have,” he continues. “If I’d known. I swear I would have.”
“Told me what?” I let my fingers play along the scales at the back of
his neck, mesmerized by their smoothness.
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.
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
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
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—
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
clothes. I am the biggest fool in the world.
“You were right,” I say, forcing out the words. “I
“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
not,
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.
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
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.
“
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