She had a trespasser. She was crushed down inside herself, tamped down, creased, torn, bruised. That first time the Queen entered her, Mab knew little else but her shock, little but the cold and the ache, but she would soon grow accustomed to it. It was the new shape of her life.
In the weeks, months, and years that followed, Mab learned that she was even less than she had always thought. She wasn't animal. She was cithra. She was just something for the Queen to wear, like a robe, like a fur. She would watch the Queen's empty body from within her own violated one, would see the stillness of that empty vessel and wish her own self might be a sacred place, a clean and empty cloister unscuffed by trespassers.
The next years went slowly by, and then Mab's bleeding came, and again everything changed.
SEVEN Stained
One dawn in her fourteenth year, Mab woke stained on her bed of white fox pelts, and she didn't understand. She knew blood -- she had seen the Naxturu slit deer bellies and spill them out, and she'd seen cats' whiskers tinged red after a meal of voles or songbirds. Blood meant death, and somehow it had gotten into bed with her. She touched between her legs and her fingers came away red. It was her own blood!
In her terror she searched for a wound and found none, only the folds of herself as they had always been, and then she thought she must have done some new nasty thing that the Druj didn't do, something animal and foul. She shuddered. Never did she feel lower than when she had to creep out to the trees and squat like an animal to make waste.
She rose, furtive, hoping to slip out of the tower and across the bridge, to make her way unseen into the forest to cleanse herself of the bewildering shame of her blood. It had flowed onto the fox pelts too, and she gathered up the top few and took them with her down the long, curved stairs to the Queen's bridge.
She hesitated there and looked from side to side along the chasm of Tajbel. Mist hung heavy in the air and the spires were dusky purple through the haze. Some curved like the horns of sheep, others stood straight as knives. There were windows in them, glassless, and Mab knew the Druj slept dreamlessly just out of view. She was desperate not to wake them. She regarded the bridge before her.
She knew better than to traipse across without an offering for the beasts. She could smell them, the thick rot of them, and in the fogged silence of the dawn she could even hear the wheezing breath of one as it waited in the shadows. She looked around. There were no cats near, and she was glad of it. In her urgency she might have scooped one up and tossed it out onto the bridge. Disgusted by the thought, she clutched the fox pelts and tried not to cry.
The fox pelts. She looked down at them, considering. Surely the beast would smell her blood on them; it would smell blood and feel fur and for a moment it might be fooled. Not once the dead fur was in its mouth, crunchless and spurtless, but for a moment -- enough time for Mab to race across the bridge. So she hurled the two pelts, and as soon as the beast's long arm groped through the balusters of the bridge to seize them and drag them down, she took to her toes and ran.
Her feet scarcely touched stone as she raced across, fearing at any second to feel a big rotten hand wrap round her leg. But she made it and shot up the steps on the far side, up the last lip of cliff and into the forest, and when she felt pine needles under her feet, she slowed. Behind her the beast bellowed, displeased with its dead mouthful, and she trembled and went to the stream. Deer were there drinking; they didn't mind her soft steps, but just looked at her and kept on as she knelt on the bank and plunged her stained fingers into the cold water.
The cold felt pure. Mab stripped off her thin shift and slipped into the stream, wading out to the middle where the water came to her waist. She scrubbed herself and dunked her head under too, so her hair was a red cloud around her, then she climbed out and sat shivering on a flat rock as the sun finished rising. The deer moved off. Mab slipped her shift back on and returned to Tajbel, waiting at the foot of the bridge until Snaya found her and paid the toll with a ginger cat.
The rest of the morning went like any other. She ate some wild apples and worked the knots out of her hair with her ivory comb. She tried to do some embroidery, but the piece she was working on was red thread on white muslin and reminded her of her blood. She put it away, shoving the mystery of her bleeding to the back of her mind and hoping to leave it there. It was over, she thought. Over.
But it came again, and this time there was no hiding it. She was playing her kamanchay when the Queen, passing her doorway, suddenly stopped and spun toward her. The sudden movement made Mab flinch and she sawed her bow across the strings, producing a sound like a moan. The Queen was staring at her, her icy eyes aglitter and unnaturally bright. She said, "Izha, you're bleeding?
"No --" protested Mab.
"I can smell it."
Mab's breath caught in her throat. She dropped the kamanchay with a clatter and tried backing away on her knees, but the Queen said, "Stop," and she did.
"I'm sorry ..." she whispered. "I didn't mean to --" The Queen came to her and Mab flinched again and squeezed her eyes shut. But the touch that she felt on her hair was very, very soft, just fingertips trailing over the curve of her skull, and when the
Queen spoke again, her voice was like a purr. "Child, child, stand up. It's all right. I've been waiting a long time for this. Look at me."
Look at me. It was a command that sent a chill down Mab's spine; whenever she heard it, she knew what would come next -- the Queen's animus flooding into her like black water. Trembling, she looked up into those pale eyes. She waited for the cold but it didn't come. The Queen didn't slide inside her, but only stared at her, that queer glitter still bright in her eyes, her lips curved into a kind of amazed smile. Again she stroked Mab's hair, and it felt nice, like it had in that before time when Mab had been a little creature in her lap, pretty and petted.
"It's the vohunish, child, the life-making blood," she said. "Don't be afraid. Smile for me. There."
Mab's smile was a grimace, but the Queen cared little for the distinction between real emotions and feigned ones. She clapped for her handmaidens and when they came, she announced, "Our Izha has grown up!"
Grown up. How little those words had meant to Mab then! Surrounded by changeless Druj, what did she have to go on? Kittens growing long and lean? Deer sprouting antlers to clash in the rut? Later, she would look back and wonder how she hadn't guessed what was coming. It would seem to her that the gathering doom should have blotted out all else, like thunderheads roiling before the sun, but there had been nothing like that, only a small, pathetic hope that the Queen might love her again. Love! As if the Druj were capable of it! She herself didn't even know the word then, scarcely knew the feeling. But she would learn it.