Lips Touch: Three Times(29)
Author: Laini Taylor

She wasn’t Mab then. She was called Izha and she grew up thinking that was her name. It wasn’t until later, after Mihai had helped her to escape, that she found out what it meant. Mihai brought her to an old man in London — Yazad — to await Esme’s birth and learn how to be human, and Yazad had refused to call her Izha. He told her gently that it wasn’t a name, but a title. It meant "milk sacrifice" and it was what the Queen called all her girl pets, one after the next. Yazad called her simply "dear girl" and waited for her to name herself, and once she learned to read, she did. She found a line in a poem in Yazad’s marvelous library. It went, "I am the Fairy Mab: to me ’tis given the wonders of the human world to keep," and at that moment she became Mab.

But first she was Izha, and she belonged to the Queen.

Since leaving Tajbel, Mab had never seen a mortal woman whose beauty could touch that of the Druj Queen. She was goddesslike in her perfection, the golden glow of her skin, the facets of her sculpted lips, her face the flawless oval of a cabochon, its delicate bones a perfect counterpoint to the vivid ferocity of her gaze. Her black hair was as soft as the furs she slept on, and her flesh was as cold as river stones. Even when she held Mab in her arms, the child’s human heat didn’t transfer to the ice of her own skin.

She seemed to have no name. The other Druj called her Sraeshta, "most beautiful," and Rathaeshtar, "warrior," and Mazishta, "greatest." Mab was taught to call her Ba’thrishva.

Mother.

It was hard later to admit it, but she had adored her then, the tall, beautiful creature who held her on her hip, so easy in the crook of one long arm. She had even loved her eyes and thought they were like the blue jewels in the frame of the great milky mirror in her Tabernacle of Spies. Mab’s own eyes reflected in that same mirror could only seem wrong, since no one else had brown eyes, not even the lowest Druj handmaidens. Brown eyes seemed animal, as un-precious as bone buttons or an owl’s talon on a leather cord.

From her earliest awareness, Mab understood that she was not Druj. She didn’t have blue eyes and cold skin. She couldn’t shift shape, or fly, or slip suddenly invisible. She didn’t know what she was, but she guessed she must be animal, like one of the cats that were everywhere in Tajbel, or like the forest creatures — though perhaps a rare and special one, as there were no others like her, and the Queen seemed to treasure her above all else. For a time, anyway.

She sang, "Hair like fire and skin like snow and eyes as brown as a forest doe," and she kissed Mab’s small nose and breathed the scent of her hair. She taught her to dance, embroider, play the kamanchay, and mix herbs into a tea that would keep her always healthy. She dressed her in strange and beautiful clothes, and she wove intricate crowns of flowers for her hair. One summer she showed her how to fish for butterflies off the cliff’s edge. Together they would bait their lines with blossoms and wait quietly for butterflies to alight on them and then slowly, slowly, they would reel them in, and the Queen would reach out, take them onto her finger, and transfer them to Mab’s hair, where they would perch, fanning their wings in the sun like a crown of living flowers. Once, she

fashioned a harness out of deer hide and commanded her handmaidens to shift to owl cithrim and carry Mab up into the sky, a little girl borne aloft by a dozen soundless wings.

It was from there, on high, that Mab had her only glimpse of the greater world. Tajbel was a place lost in mountains, as hidden as a vein of gold. It was a citadel of spires, each carved from immense, tapering tusks of rock that rose from a chasm so deep that echoes lost their way in it and drowned in its silence. The tusks were connected by dozens of bridges, and more bridges arced gracefully toward the canyon walls, where cliff-cut stairs rose to the forest above. There — the dappled edge of the trees — was the boundary of Mab’s known world.

When the handmaidens flew her into the sky, she witnessed the immeasurable sweep of the forest-flocked mountains rising and falling as far as she could see, and the immensity was beyond anything she could have dreamed. That, then, was the world: mountain and forest, forever. She never imagined another landscape. She never fathomed a beyond. Even later, when life devolved into misery, she didn’t dream of escape — she knew there was nowhere to go. It would take more than misery before she would finally attempt it.

But that was later. When she was small, Mab was happy, much of the time.

She slept in the Queen’s chamber with her, on her own little bed of furs at the foot of the Queen’s own. In the summer she was given nectar in a little dish to lap at with her tongue, in winter icicles rolled in sugar to suck. The Queen stroked her hair when it was warmed by the sun, and swaddled her in wool and furs against the cold.

If she sometimes grew bored, if that flat, reptilian look of utter disinterest came into her eyes and she shooed Mab away, surely it was Mab’s own fault for being dull, lesser, animal. And the cage, surely that was her own fault too.

It was an iron cage and it hung off the side of the Queen’s bridge in view of her windows, and sometimes she would put Mab in it and leave her there. Its iron suspension rings ground together and shrieked if she moved, which is how Mab learned to hold so very, very still. She also learned to hate the breeze that set the cage swaying in spite of her stillness, because the screech of the iron drew the notice of the beasts, and she could see their phosphorescent eyes watching her from beneath the bridges, coolly considering her in her swinging cage.

She would never forget those eyes, or the rank smell the wind teased up from under the bridges, and she would never forget the silhouettes of the beasts’ long, white arms reaching up to grope for any live thing they might pull down into their gaping mouths — cats, a fawn … her. The Queen had forbidden them to touch her, but they were beasts after all, and they had disobeyed her before.

The Queen liked to watch the beasts watch Mab. It amused her, the risk of it.

Mab never knew just what the beasts were, or how many there were — one to each bridge, or a mere handful creeping in the darkness from one bridge to the next, or perhaps an ever-shifting multitude of them that scaled up from the depths of the chasm below when they were hungry. And they were always hungry.

That’s what the cats were for.

"Look, Izha has a kitty," observed a handmaiden one day on the steps of the Queen’s spire. Her name was Snaya and she was often in charge of Mab, leading her hither and thither by a little leather thong tied around her wrist. She gave the thong a yank and Mab tried to pull away. She clutched the kitten in her arms and instinctively curled around it to protect it. She must have been about three years old then, but she knew the fate of cats in Tajbel. "No," she whispered.