Lips Touch: Three Times(36)
Author: Laini Taylor

"They won’t. We’re safe here."

"Safe?" Esme repeated with a hysterical laugh. And though she was afraid to know the answer, she cried, "What do you want from me?"

"It’s not from you, Esme," he said. "Not really."

"What — ?" Esme started to ask, but she caught sight of something then that made her freeze. As the last ghostly traces of the desert vision vanished from the mirror, she glimpsed a face in it. It was sunk in shadow, staring out, and it wasn’t a vision. It was a reflection. There was someone right behind her. With a gasp, Esme spun around.

In a darkened niche opposite the mirror sat a woman, still as stone. Dust was thick on her black hair and her shoulders, and it filled the lap of her silken robes. Her face was magnificent, a perfect golden oval, and her eyes were Druj blue. Dust clung to her lashes and one long strand of cobweb anchored there and spun away into the shadows. Her eyes were open but they were dry and dull and no life flickered in them.

"Who is that?" Esme whispered, unable to look away from the woman’s exquisite face.

"She is the Druj Queen."

"Is she … is she dead?" asked Esme, finding herself drawn closer to the shadowed Queen, taking tiny, cautious steps.

"Not dead. She is only empty. She left her body a long time ago." He paused, then added, with a quick glance at Esme, "Fourteen years ago."

"Fourteen?" Esme repeated, turning to look at him as the significance of the number penetrated her awe. "Fourteen?" she said again. Then she faced the Queen and admitted to herself what her first thought had been the instant she’d glimpsed that perfect face. The spark of recognition had been so subtle and yet so profound.

This beautiful creature looked nothing like her, but still, somehow, looking at her was like looking in a mirror.

TEN Yazad

Yazad, Mab," Mihai had said, and so when she was able to pick herself up off the floor, she did.

She stood beneath the elaborate arched gates of the old man’s mansion and remembered the first time she had stood here — or, more accurately, cowered here in Mihai’s arms. He had carried her through a window in the air from Tajbel straight to this spot, and it had seemed to her that the world had cracked open like an egg. The broad black avenue, the streetlamps and distant shimmer of city lights, the passing cars, the fumes — it had been, all of it, beyond her ken. It had been a terror.

She thought now that she must have seemed like some kind of creature to Yazad that evening, a quivering animal-girl at his door. She had held her belly in both arms, so full with Esme she might have given birth at any moment, and he had looked at her with such compassion that her terror had eased a fraction. Never, never had she seen such a look. He’d guided her gently inside to a chair by the fire — another new and terrifying thing, fire! She’d thought it was a thing alive, that leaping flame. Yazad had given her tea, and then spoken long with Mihai in a language she couldn’t understand.

There was so much in those days she couldn’t understand, so much she still did not understand. Why had Mihai stolen her from the Queen? He had been devoted to her, and not in the same servile way as all the other Druj. From the moment Mab first glimpsed his face in the crowd, she had known he was different from the others. In the months he had been in Tajbel — all the months Esme had been growing inside her — she had seen more baffling things than pain on his face. She had seen … love.

Her final night in Tajbel remained as much a mystery to her today as it had been then. It had been a full moon. The Druj were ritualistic in their moon worship and full-moon nights were always a celebration, a madness of fur and feathers and animal voices as they drew down their power from the luminous orb. On that night, as on any full moon, they had stripped off their robes and whispered themselves into animal cithrim one by one. The Naxturu howled. The winged ones whirled in the sky, screeching. The Queen stood atop her tower, changeless as always, watching them.

Mab remembered hoping her baby would come during the festival of the moon so that the Queen would be distracted, and she might keep the moment for herself. It was a small thing to hope for and the last hope she had, and she didn’t have any notion then of it being a stupid wish. She’d seen cats birth their litters and she thought it would be like that for her too, silent and strained and miraculous, like good hard work. She hadn’t understood what the pain would be like, so she had hoped her last hope, stroking her swollen belly and quietly whispering through her skin, "Come out, bakham, my little gift, come out to me now," while out in the night the Druj barked their mad moon songs.

But Esme had not come. She’d kicked and swum within her and then settled down. Sometime in the night Mihai had appeared in Mab’s doorway, making her jump. He only stared at her for a time before disappearing again as silently as he’d come, but Mab was unsettled by the look. She’d wondered why he hadn’t shifted cithra like the rest of the Druj. He wasn’t like the rest; she knew that, but she didn’t know how.

He’d been in Tajbel for some time by then. It had been almost a year since Mab had focused on his face in that crowd of Druj, wondering at his suppressed grimace of pain while the Queen wore her body against Arkady for the first time. They’d taken Arkady away months ago, as soon as she missed her monthly bleeding. She’d cried for him at first, and for herself, to be alone again among the Druj, but then her belly had begun to grow, to move, and she realized she wasn’t alone.

She had something to protect.

She thought of the endlessness of the mountains as she had glimpsed them long ago and escape had seemed as impossible as ever. But now she knew something she hadn’t then: Out there, somewhere, were others. Like Arkady, like her. And so she had tried to escape through the woods for the first time, throwing cats to the beasts of her own free will, so she could flee across the bridge. Erezav and Isvant had found her so easily they’d barely even been angry with her. As they brought her back, handling her as carefully as if she were an egg — an egg containing their Queen’s next pet — Mab realized they’d done this before, perhaps many times. They’d hunted down girl-mothers and brought them back. She wondered if her own mother had tried to flee. Yes, she thought. They all had. Of course they had.

And she tried again. And again. And again. In the end, in a fury, the Queen had stood with her in the vestibule of her spire and whispered in a fierce rasp, "Cinvat ni janat!" and knocked the bridge down, making Mab a prisoner in that lonely tooth of rock. The Druj could glide across the gap to the next spire, but she couldn’t. She remembered the way the misery had welled up in her as she stood there, her arm gripped tight in the Queen’s long fingers, looking out across the blackness of the chasm with no way to escape. The wind had picked up and the little cage had groaned on its iron rings as if to remind her it remained and would be used again after she was gone.