Lips Touch: Three Times(41)
Author: Laini Taylor

Mahzarin.

She had forgotten her name.

She tried to hold her mind like a corridor of open doors, clear and ready for footfall, for whatever might dance past. Wolves, beasts, girl-mothers, stolen boys.

Rooftop dancing, a string purse filled with cherries and lace, fairy tale books embossed with gold.

And her body remembered things her mind did not. Whenever she had held the babies in the crook of her arm, she had been besieged with almost-memories, like fireflies never close enough to catch.

Mahzarin. She snatched the name from the air and held on to it as pain came down like drums and thunder and she felt herself begin to pull apart. She was a girl and she was a queen and back in the mists she was a woman who had seized the moon from the sky and drunk its light so that she would never die. And she never had.

The pain blinded her. It shattered the world into a maelstrom of jagged wings, beating and tearing at her. Falling to her knees, she imagined she was in a long corridor, and though she couldn’t see or feel the doors, she tried to keep them open so the pain would find some egress after it had torn her in two.

FOURTEEN The Kiss

Mihai held Esme’s head in his hands as she writhed on I the floor of the tabernacle. Her screams had even shocked the beasts into silence, but after a moment they resumed their piteous moaning outside the door. Esme’s eyes were open, but Mihai knew she couldn’t see anything but darkness and tangled memories. He cradled her head in his hands and her body between his knees to keep her from harming herself as she thrashed.

Seated in its niche, the Queen’s body still did not stir, but soon it would. Mihai wished he could believe that his waiting was drawing to an end, but he was no fool. She might kill him for what he’d done, and he wouldn’t even blame her for it. It would be a poetic end to his long, mad life, and sometimes death didn’t sound bad at all, but simple and even a little sweet. Of course, he hoped for something else.

He had hoped for it since the day fifteen years ago when he had kissed his queen and everything had at last come clear.

It was luck or destiny that their paths had converged at all. Of all the places two bodies can be on a world, all the avenues and mine shafts and battlefields, they had found each other on the same desolate sweep of snow in mountains at the ragged fringe of Russia.

Mihai sometimes went away to bleak places when he needed an escape from the life he had chosen, with its welter of feelings and its dance of almost-memories opening themselves to him one by one. He had lived in thirteen human hosts and he knew hathra with them all, each one a part of him like blood in his veins. He laughed and wept with them and helped name their children, knew what they dreamed and helped them get it. And because of the magic he and Yazad had wrought, their long lives weren’t spent alone. Their longevity, rather, proportioned itself amongst the ones they truly loved — soul mate, children — a measure of their years gifted to each, so that a beloved spouse might live long beside them, the span of years perhaps not as long as Yazad’s, but richer.

Mihai had pieced together a soul of sorts, but he still didn’t know what he was. The mists of memory were thin now, barely a veil, and there was something behind them always shifting, beckoning, receding. It exhausted him, straining to see through it.

He had been drawn to the Caucasus Mountains by some glimmer of instinct or impulse, and it had seemed an unreal coincidence when, after several days of quiet, he had heard wolfsong and known it was Druj. They were coming his way. He could have hidden himself, but he didn’t. He waited, and soon the lunging black shapes shimmered out of the forest, and behind them glided the Queen’s sledge, drawn by her enormous goats with their horns like swords.

In a matter of moments they were upon him, the wolves snarling, snapping. The Queen looked at him and his soul quailed. He had not seen her in hundreds of years, not since before he left Herezayen. Her beauty was seared into his memory; it was an unforgettable thing. But as he looked at her now, deeper, older visions stirred, remembrances that had been well lost in the mists when they had met in Herezayen.

She met his gaze, her pale eyes half-lidded with disinterest. To the wolves she said, "Hunters, do you not know kin?" and they drew back, their snouts still furled with silent snarls. Her eyes did not flicker from Mihai’s face. "Is this not our naecish cousin from high Herezayen? The one who vanished?"

Mihai stiffened. Naecish. It meant no one. Nothing. It was what Druj called exiles. They had been known to kill exiles. The two largest wolves — Erezav and Isvant — were growling low in their throats and slavering, and Mihai thought they would be glad for the feel of his throat between their teeth. He looked back to the Queen and there was no sanctuary in her cold eyes. He could whisper himself into a falcon and try to escape, but if it came to that, he would likely wear those feathers forever; he had no one to whisper him back again. He could open a window in the air and flee through it, but they would follow. The Queen’s power dwarfed his own; she could even whisper him dead if she chose.

He dropped to one knee and bowed his head. "Mazishta," he said. "I didn’t vanish. I went hunting a new quarry. I am no exile, but a wanderer in the mists."

"The mists?" she said, not understanding.

"Those that veil our memories, Queen. It turns out that they are not… impenetrable."

There was a flicker of interest and her eyes bored into him for a long moment. Mihai thought that she was mastering her desire to ask him what he meant, as if to show her curiosity would be to show weakness. She said only, "Indeed," in her purr of a voice.

He inclined his head slightly, never taking his eyes off hers.

There was movement from her sledge, and a whimper. The Queen’s cold gaze flicked impatiently toward it and Mihai looked too. He saw a red-haired boy wrapped in furs, wrists and ankles bound, eyes immense with terror. The Queen’s expression remained hard and cold and it sickened Mihai, all of it — the boy’s terror and the Queen’s calm — but he was careful not to show it.

"A boy, Mazishta?" he asked her, keeping his voice carefully careless.

"Yes." She turned her attention back to Mihai and laid her fingers on a twist of red hair tied to the moonstone amulet around her neck. "He wasn’t easy to find. This red is a rare shade. Does it not look like blood in the moonlight?"

Mihai looked at the hair, not understanding. In the moonlight it did have the sheen and shade of blood. He nodded.

"My izha has grown up," said the Queen with a hint of regret. "They grow up so fast, humans."

Izha. Milk sacrifice. Across the centuries Mihai recalled that the Queen had bred human pets in Tajbel. He kept his face still as stone and swallowed his disgust. "More slowly than most creatures," he said.