Lips Touch: Three Times(30)
Author: Laini Taylor

The kitten was a tabby, long-haired and soft. It had been purring but stopped at the sound of Snaya’s voice. Its tiny claws stabbed Mab’s arms as it tried, suddenly, to scramble away. She held on, wincing at the scratches. She should have let it go.

"Come here, Izha, pretty pet," Snaya coaxed. Her voice was sweet, but her grip on the leather thong was not. She gave it a hard tug that burned the skin of Mab’s wrist and Mab tumbled toward her, slipping over the steep, rock-cut steps and into the handmaiden’s arms.

Snaya scooped her up, kitten and all, and carried her to the foot of the bridge. "Go on, Izha, toss it," she ordered.

"No!" said Mab, holding the kitten close. It hissed and struggled against her chest.

"Now," said Snaya through clenched teeth.

But Mab would not throw the kitten and so Snaya, gripping fistfuls of Mab’s shift, slowly swung her out over the bridge. She heard a gurgle of phlegmy breathing coming from the shadows. Great flat teeth ground together.

And Snaya dropped her.

Or, for a hovering instant, it seemed that she had. Mab seemed to hang there in the air, and she knew that in another second she would land on the bridge and the beast would get her. In a panic she loosed her grip on the kitten and it dropped — but Mab did not. Snaya caught her by the hair and clothes and dragged her back to safety.

The kitten landed on its feet, took a tottering step, then another. Bewildered, it looked back at Mab with its big golden eyes, and then there was a flash of long white arm through the balusters and it was gone.

A pitiable mewl, a crunch, a waft of stench. The beast ate, and while it was thus distracted, Snaya carried Mab across the bridge with light, dancing steps.

The cats were toll for bridge crossings.

"Like you, pretty, the beasts must eat," said Snaya, and even as a tiny thing, Mab had heard the disdain in her voice and understood its meaning. Druj did not eat. They occasionally sipped wine from carved goblets, but eating was for animals.

That night, Mab woke screaming for the first time in her life and the Queen came and picked her up and rocked her. Mab wept, and her Ba’thrishva took the opportunity to taste the tears on her cheeks. Her tongue was as cold as the rest of her flesh, but her rocking was calming, and she hummed in Mab’s ear to quiet her. "Izha, sweetest," she said. "Tell me what happened."

Mab told. She showed the Queen the kitten scratches and the welt around her wrist from the leather thong, and Snaya was punished. The Queen made her shift to cat cithra and she left her like that. She refused to whisper her back and Snaya had to live as a cat for weeks, dodging the groping arms of the beasts. Sometimes the Queen would pick her up and stand stroking her black fur at the threshold of the bridge as if considering tossing her onto it.

No one tormented Mab after that, except for the Queen herself.

At first it was only neglect, and like everything else, it was Mab’s own fault. She grew. She outgrew the little iron cage and wasn’t sorry for that, but she also outgrew her place on her Ba’thrishva’s hip, and day by day the Queen seemed to have less use for her. Mab’s little bed of furs was moved out of the Queen’s chamber and into a desolate stairwell in the back of the spire. No one fed her — as the Druj didn’t eat, such things were easily forgotten. Mab had to sift for herself through the tithes that were gathered twice yearly from the black meadows. She was five years old when she learned about rationing. That first winter of her self-sufficiency, she ran out of food. She grew thin on a diet of moss; she ate fish raw. She ate bark.

The tithe stores were replenished in spring, and after that she was careful. She kept herself alive. Seasons passed. She spent her days in embroidery and practice at her kamanchay. She brushed her own hair now, and she made her own clothes and tried to make gifts for her Ba’thrishva too. One winter when the Queen and the Naxturu were away on their yearly hunt, she spent the months embroidering a robe with intricate birds and butterflies in a hundred colors, but the Queen never wore it, not once.

For some years during that bend in her life Mab thought she had discovered misery, but when she was older, she would look back wistfully on that time, because what came after made it seem almost sweet by comparison.

One night when she was ten, her life cleaved neatly into a time before and a time after, and that subtle starvation, that neglect and loneliness, belonged to before, when she had still been happy.

The night was Vishaptatha. There was always a surge of energy in Tajbel on full-moon nights, and Vishaptatha wasn’t just any full moon. It was also perigee, when the moon comes closest to the earth in its celestial sweep and waxes huge in the heavens. Vishaptatha occurs rarely; many years may pass without a full moon coinciding with perigee. This was the first of Mab’s life and she felt the thrill of it, the thrum. The Druj seemed to be waiting for something to happen, so she waited too.

And something did happen.

The handmaidens came to her as they used to when she was still the Queen’s treasure. They brushed out her long red hair, dressed her in a wondrous sheath of spider silk and seed pearls, and brought her to the small plateau atop the Queen’s tusk. The Queen was there, wearing a shimmering silken sheath of her own, and no sooner had the handmaidens delivered Mab than they shed their own robes and became owls, scattering to the night on silent wings. All throughout Tajbel the Druj were shifting. The Naxturu were howling and foxes were barking; there was a chitter and chirrup of birds, the stamp of deer hooves, and the low, dangerous throat-yowls of snow leopards. Only the Queen did not shift. She never did.

Standing in the streaming light of the huge moon, she beckoned Mab toward her and Mab went, willing. With a pounding heart she yearned toward her Ba’thrishva, hoping for a caress. It had been so long since she’d been touched. The Queen slid one finger under Mab’s chin and tilted her head up. Mab smiled, uncertain.

It was the last time she would look at those pale eyes without the ice of dread crystallizing within her.

"Izha," whispered the Queen, her fangs glittering.

Then the cold rushed in and filled Mab’s being. It was like drowning in snowmelt, blind, dizzy, and breathless. She was shoved deep inside herself, muffled, stifled, and the shock was so great she was scarcely aware her body went on moving through the long moonstruck night. Her arms and legs were no longer her own. Her eyes were not hers either, but she caught glimpses out of them and it was like peering through a kaleidoscope of shadows. She saw the Queen’s body standing vacant, her eyes as dead as glass. She saw wheeling owls, and the silhouettes of wolves howling on the peaks of the far spires. She saw herself in the Queen’s mirror. It was her own small face in the reflection — those were her own brown eyes, but she wasn’t alone in peering out of them.