Lips Touch: Three Times(37)
Author: Laini Taylor

Hope had dwindled until all that remained was the wish to hold her child in her arms before they did to her whatever it was they did to spent pets.

But miraculously, it hadn’t come to that.

Mihai came to her a second time that full-moon night, and this time he brought the Queen with him. There was feverish high color in both their faces and Mab had skittered into a nook in the rock wall of her room. She wept. She pleaded with them to leave her alone. But they had taken hold of her arms and eased her out of the nook in the wall. And as she had done so many times before, the Queen had slid her fingers under Mab’s chin and tilted up her face. Mab saw her cast one questioning glance at Mihai, who nodded. "You’ll understand everything," he said, and the Queen turned back to Mab. Through tears Mab looked into those hated blue eyes. The cold filled her.

And this time, oblivion came with it. She didn’t remember anything after that until Mihai gathered her into his arms and carried her through a window of air, to London. To Yazad.

Now, Mab lifted Yazad’s heavy door knocker and let it fall. The sound was like the crack of a gunshot. She lifted and dropped it again, and after a moment Yazad himself came to the door, not the butler Mab had been expecting. "My dear," he said, a warm smile lighting up his face. "It’s been too long." He took her hand and pressed it between his. He knew it was the only touch she allowed. "Come in," he said, drawing aside to let her pass.

Mab stepped into the magnificent marble hall with its dripping shimmer of chandeliers and filigree of polished gold, remembering her first sight of it all and caring for none of it now. She looked at Yazad.

He was an old man, white-haired and brown-skinned, with wrinkles like the creases that deepen in fine leather over ages. His eyes were bright as a bird’s, and they were brown, like her own. Yazad was human.

"Why did he take her?" she demanded.

"Come to the library, my dear," he said. "We’ll talk there."

She followed him. They walked over lush carpets in all the jewel colors of the Orient, past many-armed statues, bronze helmets, crossed scimitars, and almond-eyed madonnas glimmering with gold leaf. Yazad’s home was a treasury of ancient beauties and the library was the most marvelous room of all. Mab stood in the doorway, remembering the way she had learned to read here with tiny Esme cradled in one arm. Standing here in the house where Esme had been born, Mab could almost feel her tiny daughter in her arms. Her arms and br**sts would never lose their mute memories of holding that small body; they ached now with miserable yearning, and Mab let out a moan. "Yazad," she pleaded. "What’s happening to her? Do you know?"

"I do know, and I promise you Mihai will take care of her. He’ll bring her back. Tea, my dear?"

"What? No! When will he bring her back? What’s he doing?"

Yazad poured two cups of tea from a samovar anyway and set them out on a marble-topped table. "He isn’t doing anything," he said with a sympathetic smile. "He’s only waiting now. What was done was done long ago, and it will be over soon. You can trust me when I tell you I know what Esme is going through, Mab. I went through it myself when I was her age."

"Went through what!"

"It was a different time, of course, a different land. A sudden blue eye did not go over well in the Srinagar of my youth!" He chuckled. "The priests guessed I was possessed by a demon, but there were so many demons to choose from! They nearly killed me trying to cast it out. What terrible days those were!"

Mab stared at him. He was smiling and chuckling as he recounted his memories, and only the slightest flicker of uneasiness in his eyes hinted at their true unpleasantness.

"It was worse for me than for Esme," he went on. "Much worse. You see, I was the first."

"First what?"

"There was no word for it then," he said. "It was an accident, an act of despair that brought… unexpected results. Later, much later, Mihai started calling it hathra. Wholeness. I think it’s a fine word."

"Yazad!" Mab cried in exasperation. "What’s he done to her? You said your priests guessed you were possessed by a demon. But you weren’t," she said fervently, as if by declaring it she could make it so. "You weren’t!"

"No, my dear. I would say I was not possessed by a demon." He paused, looking at her queerly, and Mab did not like the pause. He continued, "Rather, I was … incubating one."

"Incubating?" she. repeated faintly.

"There’s something unsavory about the word, I know, but I really think that’s the best way to describe hathra. I was incubating a demon, but it hatched and no harm came to me, as you see. And no harm will come to Esme, my dear. Mihai knows what he’s doing far better now than he did in my time."

"He … he …" Mab stammered, feeling herself once again on the edge of hysteria. "He grew a demon in you?" she asked, her voice thick with outrage and disgust.

Yazad tilted his head to one side and lifted his heavy white brows. "What? My dear, no. You don’t understand. Mihai was the demon. He grew himself me."

"What?" Mab looked at him, bewildered. She shook her head. "No, Yazad. That’s not what this is. I’ve had Druj in me." She shuddered. "Hundreds of times! My eyes never turned blue. Neither did Arkady’s when they went into him. This is something else."

Yazad nodded patiently. "Yes, it is. It’s something else. Something marvelous. It’s hathra."

ELEVEN Hathra

In Tajbel’s Tabernacle of Spies, Mihai tenderly brushed the dust I of fourteen years from the Queen’s hair and from her smooth -JL cheeks. He blew lightly on her eyelashes to dislodge the cobwebs that clung there. Her dry, vacant eyes didn’t even blink.

He turned back to Esme, who was still staring at the Queen. "I feel like Eve seen her before," she whispered. She shifted her eyes to Mihai and added, "And you too. But I haven’t. I remember things, but they’re not my own memories. I know they’re not."

"What do you remember, Esme?" asked Mihai.

"What? I don’t know–" She glanced quickly at Mihai’s lips and blushed and looked away.

He saw, and smiled. "You remember kissing me," he said softly.

"Eve never kissed anyone!" Esme protested.

"But you remember it, don’t you?" He took a step toward her. The years of waiting had coiled him tight as a spring. He wanted badly to whisper himself into a wolf and run fast and far and let all the tension flood out of his underused muscles. He wanted to howl. But more than anything just now he wanted to hear this memory from Esme’s lips. "Tell me," he urged her.