Of Beast and Beauty - Jay Stacey - Страница 45
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the roses. None of them have. Only her female ancestors have died. Only
Isra will die.
Only Isra.
EIGHTEEN
ISRA
“MY mother died when I was four. Thirteen years ago.” The words
float easily from my mouth. This night feels like a dream—too much has
happened for it to be anything else—and the consequences of this
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. Stupidly 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. That is what I look like. The
shoulders that burst the seams of every dress are the perfect size in my
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 not …
“There may be some way to treat it,” Gem says carefully, as if he
senses how fragile I’ve become. “It might be irritated by something you’re
eating or … washing with. A certain oil, or …”
He trails away. I don’t say a thing. I don’t know what to say.
This is my body—sickly, not tainted. This is my face. This is my face.
The face of the girl in the painting. I remember sitting for a portrait on my
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 knew it.
My heartbeat slows; my lips go numb. My throat cramps, and my ribs
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.
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