And she understood why the Queen had taken her braid on the Winter Hunt. The boy's hair was the exact same shade as her own, red as persimmons, and like hers his skin was the color of cream, unsprinkled by the spice of freckles. To look at them, they might have been brother and sister.
Isvant pushed the boy up the rock steps and into the chamber to where Mab stood beside the Queen. All the Druj followed. They crowded in and nudged him toward her, that queer, predatory glitter in their eyes. The boy was shaking and Mab began to shake too. She didn't understand what they wanted her to do. For a terrible moment she was afraid they'd make her kill him like a cat and shove his body to the beasts. Panic rose in her. Her eyes darted between the Queen's icy gaze and Isvant's leer and found no answer and no comfort. All the others stood watching, and for an instant Mab's eyes fell on a stranger's face among all the familiar ones. As alike as Druj were, she knew them all, and this one was not from Tajbel.
It wasn't just that he was a stranger that made her gaze falter on his face; it was the look that flickered through his eyes, a kind of look Mab had never seen on a Druj before. She only knew it from seeing it in her own reflection. It was pain.
Then the Queen set her finger beneath Mab's chin and raised up her face. That blaze of blue, the feeling of falling into a freezing river, and everything became muted and distant. The Queen was inside of her and Mab was as powerless over her own body as if she were merely its shadow. Dimly she saw her own painted arms reaching for the boy, but she could barely feel his skin beneath her fingertips. It was the Queen who felt what her fingers felt as she traced them over his sharp young clavicles, his heartbeat in his thin chest as clear and fast as a bird's.
Then his trembling ceased at once and his face went blank, and Mab knew that brutal Isvant had gone inside of him. The boy's hand reached out to grip Mab's wrist in just the way that Isvant did when he pulled her across a bridge, as if she were only a corpse he had to haul from one place to another.
He -- the boy, but not the boy -- pulled her down on the furs. Captured inside herself as she had been so many times, Mab turned aside and waited. She was only an unformed thing within a chrysalis, and she no more felt the flesh on her flesh than a butterfly pupa feels rain on its cocoon. She waited for it to be over, and in time it was. But before it was, she noticed the new Druj again in the throng of watchers and she fixed on his face. It shone out from the others, rigid as it was, as if this stranger held a struggling thing between his teeth and had to champ down until it died. The struggling thing, Mab was certain, was indeed pain, though she knew Druj felt it not. It was a mystery. He was a mystery, and he gave her something to wonder about until the Queen and Isvant finished their charade and returned to their own bodies.
The Queen's body stirred. She lifted her chin and turned coolly away from Mab, leaving her lying on the furs, her blue paint smeared and mixed with the boy's blue paint. He was weeping quietly beside her and Mab slowly came back to herself to turn to him and stroke his hair and murmur to him, and the Queen stopped and looked back over her shoulder to watch. A flicker of annoyance passed over her face.
Mab met her eyes boldly and went on stroking the boy's hair, amazed by the heat of his brow. She understood several new things at once. One was that she wasn't alone in the world, but one of a mysterious species that existed elsewhere. The other was that whatever she was, in some way, the Queen coveted it. Druj could wear borrowed bodies against each other, but they would feel only the friction of it. They would never feel what it was that made two strangers cling to each other, more intimate in fear and sorrow than a Druj could ever be, even aping the act of love.
Mab understood then that the Druj were missing something. It was Yazad, later, who would explain about souls. She couldn't have put any of it into words then, lying on those furs with the boy, but even without the words, she began to understand.
Many months later, when she felt the first flutter of life within her and her hands flew to her belly, that understanding focused into a hard, bright point within her, like a pearl. Here was something else the Druj couldn't do, she thought fiercely. And though the Queen could flow inside of her and steal the feeling of that flutter for herself, Mab knew that the pearl inside her was her own, and nothing the Queen ever did could change that.
And she knew that she could never walk out across the black meadows with empty arms, buying her freedom with the tiny life inside her. She thought of the lineage of girl-mothers who had come before her and she tried to imagine them leaving Tajbel and going away, emptied of their babies, empty as eggshells, and she just couldn't believe it.
What had happened to her own mother, and all those before her?
Because of Mihai, Mab never knew, and because of him, her daughter never had to endure starvation, or the cage, or the sinister thrust of a Druj animus. For some reason, he had saved them. So when he stole Esme away and Mab glimpsed the rough spires of Tajbel through his window of air, all the old agonies overwhelmed her and she screamed until she could scream no more, and then she collapsed onto the rug, rigid. She was seeing young limbs encircled by blue paint and hearing in her mind a song about ripening fruit. She clutched at her flat stomach, long empty of its precious pearl, and she imagined gentle Esme being led to a stolen boy of her own, to breed the Queen a red-haired pet that human arms would never hold.
"It isn't what you think," Mihai had said, but Mab was trapped in nightmares and could dream no other fate.
NINE City of Beasts
M ihai's whispered window spilled Esme onto a narrow stone bridge. She landed on her knees and spun swiftly around. Mihai was right behind her, and she glimpsed her mother's desperate hands and heard her screams until the air sealed itself shut once more and choked off her voice. The profound silence that followed was akin to deafness.
Esme crawled backward. She pressed herself against the carved balusters of the bridge and watched Mihai. He was standing with his hands on his hips, slowly looking around. A cold wind whipped his hair into his eyes and impatiently he pushed it back. There was a look of ill-concealed horror on his face and Esme looked to see what he was seeing. The bridge they had landed on spanned the space between two tall crags of rock. Worn stone steps spiraled up and around the towers and disappeared into passages, and glassless windows revealed barren rooms inside. There were many such crags rising like stalagmites from the shadow-shrouded depths of a long ravine. They tapered up to conical spires, ridged like animal horns, and they tapered downward too as if they had grown up from the blackness below on long stone stalks, dangerously delicate.