Lips Touch: Three Times(44)
Author: Laini Taylor

Vanghav didn’t question the decision, but Isvant did. "Sraeshta," he growled, coming up behind her. "The exile should be in a cage."

"Tajbel is a cage," she said lightly, and Mihai had to agree. Though not as desolate as Herezayen, there was something awful about the Queen’s citadel with its tusks of rock, its black chasm, and the beasts that lurked there. He’d glimpsed only their arms flashing up from beneath the bridges, but their stench was everywhere, and it was alien. He didn’t know what the creatures were, but he was certain they existed nowhere else. Knowing the Queen’s awful power, he thought she must have made them. But out of what? What had she transformed into these foul guardians of Tajbel? Some unfortunate humans, long ago? Druj who had displeased her? He shuddered at the thought.

"He could escape –" said Isvant, but the Queen cut him off.

"Don’t worry. He’ll be watched. Come with me," she commanded, and they followed her down a curving stair to a doorway low on her spire. They stood at the threshold as she unlocked the door, and waited there when she entered. The room within was dark, but Mihai could make out the glint of silver and hear the quiet swivel of small hinges. Peering in, he saw eyes, dozens and hundreds, watching him from the shadows. At a glance they seemed to be a horde of creatures hunched in darkness, still as cats on the prowl. But he quickly saw there were no creatures — only disembodied eyes. It was his first sight of the Tabernacle of Spies.

The Queen brought a lizard out of the darkness. It was collared and chained to a manacle, and this manacle she put around Mihai’s upper arm. It clicked shut and she set the lizard on his shoulder, from which perch it peered at him with a single golden eye. Its other was somewhere in the tabernacle behind one of the silver eyelids. "For you," said the Queen. "A pet." "A spy," he said.

"Yes, of course. But treat him as a pet. Feed him, name him if you like, and take care nothing happens to him. I’ll be watching, naecish."

He didn’t name the lizard, not at first, but through the months of tolerating its golden-eyed scrutiny he grew rather fond of it and dubbed it Zaranya. Golden. Its weight on his shoulder, even its flicking tongue, made him feel less alone in the bleak austerity of Tajbel.

And he was alone. Even with a crush of Druj around him he felt that he and Zaranya were the sole living creatures in a city of the undead. Well, not the sole living creatures. There were the beasts, in their awful hunger more alive than the Druj, and there were the cats, and of course, there were the two young humans. Seeing them together only deepened Mihai’s despair.

In the weeks that followed their first mating he watched them from the corner of his eye and, attuned to their humanity as the rest of the Druj were not, he saw what began to grow between them. Though the blue spirals were painted again and again and the Queen and Isvant repeated their charade almost daily, there were many more hours in which the young girl and boy were left alone. And how, in this place, could they fail to turn to each other for comfort?

One day several months in, Mihai saw them sitting side by side in the sun in the highest window of the Queen’s spire, their thin legs hanging over the edge. He watched the way their shoulders touched, the shy way their eyes met, peering up through their lashes. How they hooked pinkies when they rose to their feet to go back inside, as if they were just children walking to a bus bench and not captives in a wilderness of demons.

Those hooked pinkies almost made him weep. He thought of Mahzarin as she once had been and, with a violence that made his soul shudder, he wished for an innocent touch like that. He even wished for a glance. Since their arrival in Tajbel she had scarcely looked at him. She had the business of ruling her citadel to see to, and she was much occupied with her two young humans, but whenever Mihai was near her, she seemed always to be looking elsewhere. He thought there was something a little too careful in her coldness, as if by avoiding him she was trying not to betray something inside herself, and he knew well what that was.

It was hunger. Once it had driven him too. The Queen tried to hide it, but she had a hunger for humanity, for warm flesh and quick blood and memories. She played it out in her izha’s body, and she locked herself for hours in her tabernacle, watching lives unfold in distant lands through the eyes of her hundreds of spies. And through Zaranya’s eyes, she watched Mihai. He might never have known how often she watched him, or how false her feigned indifference was, if not for Isvant.

"I’m going to kill him," he heard the hunter say to Erezav. The two were three spires away in the Naxturu tower and Mihai shouldn’t have been able to hear them so clearly, but he whispered to the breeze and it carried their words to his ears.

"She watches him," Erezav replied. "She’ll know."

"She can’t watch him forever," spat Isvant. Then in a sudden fury he snarled, "What does she see, anyway? She watches the naecish as much as she watches the humans. Locked away with her mirror! What is there to see but an exile who should be fed to the beasts?"

"Or become a beast," said Erezav.

Isvant gave a terrible kind of laugh. Druj did not often laugh; they did not know humor. This wasn’t humor, but a curdled snarl of vengeance that came out as an awful chuckle. "Yes," he said. "But only Mazishta has that power, and while he’s her fascination she won’t do it."

"Her fascinations don’t last," said Erezav.

"No, they don’t. But I don’t want to wait until she’s through with him. I’ll kill him when she’s not watching him –" "She’s always watching him." "Not always. Not on the full moon."

The Queen presided over full moons on the platform atop her spire. She stood with her head thrown back and let the white light flood into her and charge her with its power. Mihai could remember now the first time she had drunk the moonlight, long, long ago. He’d been at her side and had seen her lit from within. It had been the beginning of everything. If only they had known then the price of their power.

Erezav said to Isvant, "She’ll notice if you don’t shift."

"She won’t," he said bitterly. "She doesn’t notice me at all."

And so Mihai took care to guard his life, making certain Isvant could never surprise him, and a new layer of desperation was added to his existence in Tajbel. "Her fascinations don’t last," Erezav had said. Mihai could well imagine they did not. He knew he couldn’t stay here; if he did, things would not end well for him. Nor could he escape; there was nowhere in the world he could hide if the Queen chose to pursue him, and … he didn’t wish to escape. Even in her soullessness, the sight of her face was like a conduit to his oldest memories: her skin, warm beneath his own. Her belly, magnificent with child. Their daughters, soft as velvet and dark-eyed as they too once had been.