More alone than I’ve ever been.
Why has my family done this? Is it because I failed them? Is it—?
A girl’s voice startles me awake. “I know you speak our language,” she says. “Answer!”
My eyes creep open. The night sky becomes a stone ceiling streaked with green, but the burning feeling stays. It’s coming from my legs. Pain. Fever. Shredded muscles screaming. Blood sticky on my skin.
Why? What has—?
“Answer!” the girl shouts, making me flinch.
It comes back in a rush: The woman-girl-princess, the soldier. His spear. Failure. The death of the Desert People on my back, to carry for however long I live.
The memories fan the fever flames. I’ve had fevers before, but nothing like this. I grit my teeth and turn my head. The greens and reds pulse and bleed. Black slashes like claw marks slide back and forth before my eyes. It takes a moment for the marks to still, another moment to understand what they are.
Bars. A cage.
“Don’t pretend to be ignorant.” A gray blur behind the black slashes. My throbbing eyes strain, pulling the blur into focus.
It’s the princess in her baggy gray clothes, trembling in front of another set of bars. Behind them, my brother, Gare, stands as still as the stone walls, tall and strong in the face of her interrogation, though his cheek is split open and his eye swollen shut.
“Tell me!” she shouts, stepping closer to him.
“No, my queen.” A man—shorter than the princess, but with broad shoulders and the hard face of a leader—reaches for the girl’s arm and pulls her back. “You’re too close.”
She turns, and I see her face. It is red and puffy; her cheeks and nose are wet. “Junjie. Please. Help me.” On the last word her features crumple, her eyes squeezing shut and water leaking from behind her lids. More magic. I’ve never seen anything like it. I blink, and her face swims like the air above a fire.
Fire. I’m so hot. Burning.
My eyes close, and the cell melts away.
When I wake again, the cage is dark and quiet, and I’m cold. Freezing. My skin crawls. My scales pull so tightly together that it feels they’ll rip away from the flesh. I shiver until my teeth knock with a dull clack, clack.
“Gem? Are you awake?” A whisper I can’t place, but in the language of the Desert People, not the Smooth Skins, so it must be—
“Gem? Can you hear me, boy?”
Father. I try to speak, but my jaw is clenched too tightly; my tongue is fat and slow. I’m dying. I know it. My body feels cut in half—the top made of ice, the bottom still hot, scattered with knots full of poison.
“Gem, if you can hear me …” He draws a ragged breath. “You are our hope. Remember what we came for. Leave a message at the gathering stones if you’re able. We’ll come back for you if we can.”
Come back? Where are they going? Have they found a way to escape?
“If not, you must finish—” A long, hollow scrape interrupts him.
“Silence in the cell,” a voice booms in the Smooth Skin language.
Father ignores the warning. “Bring life to our people. Save them, Gem. You—”
“I said silence.” There’s another scrape, and then footsteps and the clang of metal on metal. “Bring the darts!” Another man answers, and more footsteps fill the room, and my father is still shouting, but somewhere beneath it all, I swear I hear Gare growl that he should be the one to stay behind, that he doesn’t need Smooth Skin words to claim Smooth Skin lives.
I try to tell him he’s right, to confess my weakness, to tell father I’m dying and it’s too late, but I’m already floating away from my body. Up, up, up, until I look down at the slab of meat that housed my spirit, down from the ceiling where the air is silent and peaceful.
I want to keep going. I want to leave my corpse to cool on the stone, but I worry.…
Will I be able to reach the land of my ancestors if I die here? Without a funeral fire or the songs of the Desert People singing me into the night? Or will I stay in this hole, a lost spirit, haunting the Smooth Skins for the rest of time?
They deserve a haunting, but I don’t want to be the spirit to do it.
I am weak. How could I have ever thought myself strong?
My heart thu-dums, and I’m pulled back to the cold and the hot of my body. To the knocking of my teeth, and the sound of my father crying out in pain as he’s shot. When the blackness comes again, I’m grateful.
In and out. In and out.
Days—maybe weeks—pass in a haze. My feverish body is moved from the stone slab to a pallet so soft, I’m sure I’m dreaming it. It cushions me like a cloud. A blanket made of whispers covers my body. Gentle fingers pry open my lips and pour bitter liquid down my throat. I swallow. I don’t care if it’s poison. I sleep. I don’t care if I wake. I’m ready to die. I don’t want to live or think or dream anymore.
The dreams are the worst. Even when the sick heat in my legs fades, I still dream of flame, of a pyre where I burn forever to pay for failing my people.
I am more than shamed. I loathe myself.
“Father …” The sound of my own voice startles me awake. I open my eyes wide, but immediately slide them half-closed again. It’s bright in this room. Sun-filled. I never thought I’d see the sun again. I never thought I’d see her again, either.
The princess sits by my pallet, her oval face calm, emotionless, her blind eyes staring through me. “Are you awake?” Her voice is different than I remember. Emptier. She looks different, too.
Her dark hair is coiled on top of her head like a nest of snakes. Her lips are stained the red of a cactus flower. Her body is covered in a dress the color of her eyes, but not a dress as Desert Women know it. Our women’s dresses tie with straps at the back of the neck. They end at the knee, with slits up the sides to give their legs room to move. This dress has sleeves that clutch at the girl’s arms, holding her shoulders prisoner. It squeezes her chest and waist. I roll my head to see that the squeezing continues all the way to her ankles.
She looks like a worm wrapped up in green silk for a spider’s dinner.
“I asked you a question,” she says, still calm, unmoving except for her red lips. It feels like we’re alone in this room, but she doesn’t seem afraid.
I roll my head, forcing my stiff neck to turn one way and then the other. My eyes roam, taking in the stone walls, the barred windows, the heavy wooden door. Still a cage, but not as miserable a cage. And we are alone. The princess and the monster.
I turn back to her, watch her pale throat work as she swallows. I could kill her now. I’m weaker than I’ve ever been, and my legs ache in a way that assures me that standing isn’t possible, but I could still take her life. My arms aren’t restrained. One swipe of my claws at her neck where the blood flows quickest, and it would be done. She’d bleed to death before the guards could open the door.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Her lips twitch.
My right hand flexes. My claws descend with a sluggish lurp, oozing from above my nail beds.
“It would be a tragedy for the city.” Her words float on their own cloud, hovering above us in the crisp air. “I should be married,” she announces suddenly, proving she’s as rattled in the head as I remember. “Seventeen is young, and I’m in mourning until the spring, but I could do it. I’m sure someone would be willing to risk the bad luck that comes from breaking tradition.”
Seventeen. Two years younger than me. Not young at all.
“But then they’d have no reason to humor me.” She sighs. “Being the keeper of the covenant only goes so far, you know. I’ve learned that in the time you’ve been sleeping. People still feel free to tell a blind girl what to do. My maid had to sneak a sleeping draft into your guards’ tea in order for me to be granted a private visit with my own prisoner. Maybe it would be different if …” Her empty eyes slide toward the door, her ears lift until the tips are hidden in her hair. “They’ll lock me up again if they find
me here,” she whispers. “Junjie will take my father’s place as jailer. I will never be seen again.”
“Then … go,” I rasp.
Her lips curve in a hard smile. “I knew you’d speak to me. Sooner or later.” She leans closer, stretching her long neck. “How did you learn our language out in the desert?”
I think about refusing to answer, but I don’t want the princess to leave, not until I’ve decided whether or not I’ll take my piece of her. “My mother.” I lift my fingers and let them drop, one by one, bringing life back into my hand. “She carried the tradition.”
“What does that mean?”
“She carried Yuan words in her mind. Her mother carried them before her, my great-grandmother before that.” With a steady movement I pull the whisper-soft blanket down my body. It slips off my shoulders, down my chest. I keep pulling, slowly baring my right hand. “Women usually carry language. They take words faster. But I have no sisters. I was the youngest, so my mother taught me.”
“How did your ancestors learn?”
“I don’t know.” My hand is almost free. My focus is on ridding myself of the blanket. “Mother never told me, and she died four winters …” My words trail away as I realize what I’ve said.
The princess is quiet. I lie still, not wanting her to hear me rearranging the covers. “My mama is dead, too. When I was four years old.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t feel sorry. The Smooth Skins deserve to suffer, this girl most of all.
“Well …” She clears her throat. “You speak well.”
“Thank you.”
Her laughter startles me. My arm jerks, baring my claws in one swift pull. But there is still no sound, and the princess doesn’t flinch. Thank the ancestors the girl is blind.
“And good manners,” she says. “Strange …” Her curved lips droop. “The other Monstrous killed my father.”
I pause. Is she telling the truth? Is the king of Yuan dead?
“They cut him open from his throat to his belly. I felt the wounds. Before we put him in the river,” she says, her throat working harder. Her bound shoulders tremble, straining the seams of her dress. It looks as if it were made for someone else, some girl even frailer than this one. “He was taking a walk. He was unarmed. He wouldn’t have hurt them.”
He would have. He did. He hurt them every day that he ruled this city.
But I don’t say the words aloud, no matter how much I want to. Instead I ask, “Where are the others? What did you do to them?”
“If it were up to me, I would have gutted them the way they gutted the king.” I let my arm creep toward her neck, remembering how her flesh parted so easily for my claws the first time. “But I told you, being queen only goes so far. My advisor said we should send the others back to your people with a warning to stay away from the city. Junjie could communicate with your leader. They drew symbols on the dirt floor of the cell. Your leader—your father, if he’s to be believed—offered to leave you here as a gesture of good faith. He knows we’ll kill you if the city is attacked again.”
Her words would wound, but I remember what Father said that night I lay shivering in my cell. I’m not a gesture of good faith; I’m a weed in their garden.
“He seemed confident that you’d recover. I wasn’t sure.” She reaches out. I hold my breath, ready to drop my hand back to the pallet, but her fingers alight on my forehead, not my arm. “But you’re cool now.” The pads of her fingers trace the slope of my nose, over my lips, sending a strange zinging sensation across my skin.
She continues, over my chin, down to my neck, where her hand curls. Her fingers begin to squeeze, and the zing is banished by the thud, thud, thud of blood struggling to flow.
I should do it. Now. Cut off her arm; go for her throat. But I don’t. I’m still weak. Not only in body, but in mind. I don’t want to kill a motherless, fatherless blind girl. Even if she is my greatest enemy.
“Did you know they would kill him?” she asks.
I think about saying yes, just to see if she’ll try to strangle me to death, but instead I say, “We weren’t here to take lives.”
Her grip loosens. “Why were you here?”
I swallow, throat rippling beneath her fingers. “We’re hungry. We hoped to steal food to take back to our people.” I can’t tell her that my chief’s vision revealed that the roses are the secret to the Smooth Skin’s paradise under the dome. And I can’t kill her. If I do, I’ll never leave this room alive.
My arm falls; my claws ease back into their beds. I don’t know why I’m alive, but I am, and I must make the most of it. I have to find a way into the garden.
“My people are starving,” I say.
She makes an angry sound beneath her breath. “If my father weren’t dead, I would feel sorry for you.” Her fingers tighten again, until my eyes ache and green and pink spots dance around her face. “I would have put food outside the gate.”
“Liar,” I grunt, fighting for breath.
“Maybe.” She bends close, and I smell her breath, sweet like sticky fruit and … roses. “Maybe I am lying. The way you lied when you told me I’d die without your help. But you’ll never know for sure, will you? And your people will continue to starve.”
She smiles, and I move, faster than I thought I could after so much time in a cage. I snatch her wrist, pull her fingers from my throat. She comes for me with a balled-up fist that hits my chest and glances off without damage, and I snatch that wrist as well, holding tight as she struggles. I am so weak that my heart slams inside my chest and my head spins from even this small effort, but she’s weaker. Like a child.
“Release me,” she demands.
“You’re the one who wanted to fight.” I pin her wrists together and hold them, like Gare did to me when I was small and wanted to play rough. I am determined to show her that I won’t tolerate her abuse, but she struggles only a moment, before her neck bends and her forehead drops to her hands.
I flinch as her eyes shut and her shoulders begin to shake. Water spills from behind her lids, fat drops that slide down her cheeks to fall onto my bare chest.
It wasn’t a fever dream, then.
“What is that?” I breathe.
She lifts her face. Her eyes aren’t empty now. They’re swimming with misery and pain. This girl wouldn’t run through the garden laughing like a child. The death of her father cut that part of her away and left her bleeding inside where wounds hurt the most.
I tell myself it’s no less than she deserves, but my voice is softer when I repeat, “What is that?”
“What?” Her hands squirm.
“The water.” I loosen my grip on her wrists. “From your eyes.”
She swallows and sniffs as she pulls her fists to her chest. “Tears?”
“Tears.” I remember the word, but only vaguely. It wasn’t one that came up often in my lessons or Mother’s songs. My people don’t tear. Water comes from our skin to cool it, from our body to rid it of toxins, but not from our eyes. We aren’t leaky and fragile like the Smooth Skins.
Yet they hold all the power. They hold me prisoner. Their ruler smiles as she speaks of my people’s hunger; their queen runs her hands over my face and tightens her fingers at my throat, and I must lie here and do nothing.
I smear the tears on my chest away, but some have already soaked into my skin. I can feel them, as if she has marked me, infected me with Smooth Skin weakness.
“Get out,” I growl, hatred burning in my belly.
“Not yet. I have—”
“Now!”
“Quiet, or you’ll wake the guards,” she hisses, her own hatred flashing in her eyes. “You don’t tell me what to do. Junjie and the other advisors tell me, but you do not. Your own father left you here. Forever. For the rest of your life, you are mine. If you’d prefer that life to be a long one, you’ll do what I say, when I say it.”
“I’ll cut you open,” I snarl through gritted teeth.
“You’ll do no such thin
g.” She doesn’t flinch, or move away from the bed. “If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it already.”
“I nearly did.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Do you believe these?” My claws are at her neck a second later, the tips puckering the skin at either side. Her lips part and a strangled sound gurgles in her chest, but she doesn’t move. She has realized that the slightest twitch will open her throat. “You seem curious about what will happen when you die,” I whisper. “Maybe it’s time for your curiosity to be satisfied.”
She sips air, swallowing like a three-hooved gert picking its way down the rocky slope of a canyon. I tighten my grip. The five puckers on her throat deepen. A little more pressure, and her blood will flow. I tell myself it will be justice, but I’m not thinking about justice. I’m thinking about the way she stuck her nose in the air when she told me I’d do as she says. I’m thinking that I prefer fear in her eyes to any other emotion I’ve seen.
I’m thinking I would rather be a monster than her slave.
“Your father told Junjie that you were a healer.” Each word is careful, formed mostly with her lips, using as little breath as possible.
“I am a warrior.” I come from a family of warriors, the greatest family of warriors. At least until I was born into it.
“Then you don’t know plants?” she asks, a new fear creeping into her voice. “You don’t grow and mix herbs for the Monstrous?”
“We are the Desert People.”
And my name is Gem, I silently add. Thank you for asking. Thank you for offering your name before you started giving orders.
But why would she give her name? In her eyes, I’m an animal. My only hope of becoming anything more, of gaining enough freedom to escape the domed city, is to win the Smooth Skins’ trust. So far, none of them have bothered to speak to me. Only this girl. But she is the princess—no, the queen—and has power, even if it isn’t as much as she’d like. And she wants to know about herbs Father said I could mix. I know certain common remedies, but I’ve never mixed a true healing pouch in my life.