Lips Touch: Three Times(40)
Author: Laini Taylor

Mihai began to understand that he was changed.

"Is that all souls are for?" Esme had asked him earlier. "For when we die?" Mihai could have laughed or cried when she’d asked him that. In all its simplicity her question was like cupped hands holding the meaning of his life.

"No," he’d said. "They’re for living too."

And because of Yazad, he had one. If not an entire soul, a shred of one. And Yazad had gotten something from him too. He had been born in 1564, after all, the year Michelangelo died and Shakespeare and Galileo were born, when people still believed the earth was the center of the universe. More than four hundred years had passed since then, and Yazad was still alive.

Such longevity was a mixed blessing, they would discover together.

Wearing his own body again, Mihai had traveled back to Kashmir and found the boy whose soul he had lived inside of. Seeing him again had been like getting back a piece of himself, and for Yazad it was the same. They were kin now, more than kin; they had been one creature, and together they felt something like wholeness.

Hathra.

They had traveled together after that, in and out of the centuries. Yazad had prospered. With the help of Mihai’s magic he had become not only rich, but learned. He had collected artifacts and lore, learned the herbal cures the Druj used on human pets and beasts, even learned some animal language, and he had amassed a fortune in gold. At one hundred and fifty years old and still a young man, he had married a Mughal princess. Her father had objected and imprisoned her in the palace, but Mihai had sent a pair of giant ghorpad lizards up the sheer wall to carry her down and the three of them had escaped together across the desert. Tranquil Sahar had borne Yazad sons and daughters and they had all of them faded and died before even a hair of Yazad’s own mustache went gray. Thus had he tasted the bitter residue of long life — to outlive all love.

When Mihai began to think of finding a new unborn soul to twin with, Yazad would only agree to help him on one condition: that any new host would never know his own loss and loneliness. If there was a solution, it was only to be found in magic, and so the two of them had bent themselves to it. They gathered books from forgotten places, but there was nothing written anywhere to help them. They experimented on their own with the language of the Druj. They had time, and in time, they wove the spell they wanted.

Over the next centuries, Mihai repeated his incubation a dozen times. He slipped into a dozen more human hosts, entering through a mother’s eyes and slipping down into the kernel of incipient life within her, only to hatch years later with another shred of humanity to add to the patchwork soul he was making himself. Each time, his humanity deepened and something else happened. The mists began to clear. The almost-memories danced near like butterflies and he learned to cultivate stillness so they would alight upon him. And he began to remember.

And what he remembered pulled his world apart and rewove it in a new shape.

"We were human," he repeated, still holding Esme’s hands, looking into her eyes and seeing only the Queen’s eyes. Esme was there too, a part of this now forever, but it was the Queen to whom he spoke. "We had souls. We gave them up, Sraeshta. We were given a choice and we chose immortality."

Esme stared at him. She, or the Queen — for the moment there was no distinction — said faintly, skeptically, "No."

"Yes. We didn’t know what we would lose. We were so filled with our own power we didn’t think that even the archangels could humble us! The things we had discovered had lifted us above the rest of humanity. We could change our shapes, become invisible, become weightless. We had mastered the elements. We rendered iron into gold, and rock into iron, and earth into water. We could send sickness on the air, and we sent the ill wind that slew the accursed Alexander who destroyed Persepolis and burnt Zarathustra’s scriptures. We are great, Mazishta, and we are ancient, but back in the mists there is a time that we were children, you and I."

And, he thought but did not say, a time that we bore children.

Esme was trembling now, and despite the chill in the dank tabernacle, moisture had sprung up on her brow. Mihai reached out carefully to touch her and felt the heat radiating from her even before his fingers reached her skin. He knew what was happening. He’d been inside of it a dozen times but had never watched it from without. He thought watching would be harder to endure than the pain.

Esme’s soul and the Queen’s animus had twinned and intertwined for fourteen years, and now they would be ripped apart. Like birth, this hatching came in its due course and nothing would stop it. He had hoped to tell his Queen more of their story first. Afterward, things would be … difficult. She would be herself again, more powerful than he by far, and she would see what he had done. How he had tricked her and stolen fourteen years, held her whole tribe prisoner in animal cithra while her spies’ eyeballs rotted in their silver lids and her citadel fell to the beasts.

A beast roared and slammed at the door as if to punctuate Mihai’s thought. The whole spire trembled and Mihai trembled too. He was afraid. His patchwork soul made fear a real and vivid thing and he loved even the fear, for he still remembered the numb absence of it. If he had the choice to make again, his soul for immortality, he knew what he would choose. But he wouldn’t have that choice to make again. There was only one way that his benighted race might blend itself back into humanity — this secret way that he had discovered.

There was more he had hoped to tell the Queen before her animus hatched from Esme’s soul — so much more — but now was not the time. Esme’s blue eyes were glazing over. The pain was already taking her away. Yet there was one thing Mihai thought he could tell her now that might help. Taking Esme’s chin in his hand, he said, "Mazishta, listen to me. Your true name, when you were human, it was Mahzarin. Golden moon. My beautiful Mahzarin."

Esme’s eyes flared open and fluttered as memories unfurled within her. A sob broke from her lips. The beasts wailed outside the door. And pain descended like nightfall.

THIRTEEN Almost Memory

She had forgotten her name a long time ago. The mists had taken it.

(But her name was Esme. She was a girl with long, long, red, red hair. Her mother braided it. The flower shop boy stood behind her and held it in his hand. Her mother cut it off and hung it from a chandelier.

She was Queen. Mazishta. Her hair was black and her handmaidens dressed it with pearls and silver pins. Her flesh was golden like the desert. Her flesh was pale like cream. Her eyes were blue. Brown.

She knew what it was like to hold eyeballs between her fingertips. To toss cats to the beasts. To wrest babies from their mothers’ arms. To kiss a fanged hunter in the snow. There was a crypt of memories at her feet, going deep into the earth. Things were starting to rise from it, on wings and tatters of mist. Things that horrified her.