"And?"
"And she did," whispered Mihai. For a moment his careful mask slipped and he knew by her widening eyes that she had seen his real face, haunted and hungry and stricken by the sudden memory of something she couldn't fathom. Love. He expected her to draw away from him in disdain, but she didn't.
She kissed him.
She leaned into him, sinuous as a predator, and touched her lips to his and held them there in mimicry of kisses she had witnessed. There was nothing sensual in it, not at first, just the chaste press of skin. But then her lips parted ever so slightly and Mihai felt her tremble as, just for an instant, there passed a ghost of the way they had kissed in a long-ago life when they had loved each other, soul and skin, and slept entwined, sharing dreams through their flesh and waking in the dark to the slow pull of pleasure.
Before she had been the Queen of the Druj, she had been Mahzarin, and she had been his. Once upon a time, she had hooked her small foot around his leg and drawn him up against her. He had taken her earlobe between his teeth, tasted the hollow at the base of her throat, and sung through the skin of her taut belly while she grew his daughters within her. Her black hair had fallen across his pillow like a shadow every night and he had slept and woken upon it. He remembered how her flesh had felt when it was human and warm, and not immortal and icy.
But she would not remember it. And she would not believe it.
Her breath quavered, then her eyes flew open wide and she reeled away from the kiss. There was fascination and a hint of disbelief in her look. She stared at Mihai's lips. She lifted her fingers to them and hesitated, then touched them quickly as if they might burn her. "Your ... your lips are warm? she stammered. "How?"
But Mihai didn't have a chance to answer her. He caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye and looked just in time to see Isvant's body come hurtling at him, human as he left the ground, his flesh morphing to fur as he flew through the air. When he hit Mihai, he was wolf, claws slashing and fangs bared. The two toppled backward into the river and were lost under the black water.
Mihai's blood surfaced before he did.
FIFTEEN Full Moon
He lived. Druj are not so easy to kill. Only fire can accomplish it, or the severing of the head from the neck. Isvant did neither of these things; he only raked Mihai's chest from collarbone to navel and sank his fangs into the muscle of his shoulder. It was not pleasant, but it was no risk to Mihai's life. After he dragged himself out of the river, he whispered the wounds closed, left his blood on the snow, and got up to struggle back into his clothes.
The Queen came and stood before him for a brief moment and looked into his eyes. She was tall; they met eye to eye, and Mihai saw her hesitate before reaching out quickly to touch his lips once more. When she did, the troubled look went out of her eyes. His lips were as cold as the river, just as Druj flesh should be, and she turned on her heel and went to her sledge, pausing briefly to run her fingers through her human boy's red hair.
She didn't mention the kiss again or the memories it had unlocked -- if, indeed, it had unlocked any. For Mihai it had. Watching her across the snow, he could picture her so clearly from many centuries past, balancing a black-haired baby girl on each hip. Arzu and Lilya, their twin daughters had been called. Wish and Lily. Mihai wanted to tell her that her body remembered the weight of her own flesh-and-blood children, but he wouldn't. She wasn't Mahzarin now. She was Queen of the Druj, only a soulless echo of the woman she had once been. In any case, he had no chance to tell her. She didn't come near him again.
They continued on to Tajbel and her sledge traveled fast through the snow, the wolves flanking her. Isvant doubled back and watched Mihai constantly, and Mihai watched him back. He knew the body could remember hate as it could remember the weight of a child or the pressure of a kiss, and Isvant had always hated him, even if the hunter didn't remember why. Mihai remembered why -- Isvant had loved Mahzarin too, in the time before -- and he didn't grudge him the hate.
But he did grudge him his brutal charade of intimacy with the Queen once they arrived in Tajbel.
He had to stand in the throng of Druj and watch as the red-haired boy and the Queen's izha were thrust toward each other, painted in their bizarre spirals of blue. Their terror was thick as musk, and Mihai thought that was part of what excited the Druj. But only part of it. Druj sense-memories were a kind of ineluctable torment, like an itch they could never scratch. It was an awful irony that the last vestiges of their humanity, the phantom memories contained in their skin, were what drove them to this grim violation.
But he understood. Wasn't that same torment what had driven him to wear human after human himself and, ultimately, to break the taboos?
At first, no coherent thought could break through his anguish and he spent all his energy concealing it as the humans were mated with each other like animals. He did a poor job, he thought, but fortunately no one was watching him, held in thrall as they were by their sick excitement. Only the girl herself seemed to fix on his face in the instant before the Queen tilted up her chin and took her over.
And Isvant took over the boy and grabbed the girl by the wrist.
Through all that followed, the Queen's body -- Mahzarin's body -- stood by empty as a statue, a vivid reminder to Mihai that although he had struggled his way back from his own execration, pieced together a makeshift soul from shreds, and found with a weary kind of amazement that he could love, it little mattered. The woman he loved was a monster. And she could never love him back.
"Naecish," she said to him later. "You'll stay in the Naxturu spire with the hunters where you belong."
She meant it as an honor, he thought. He wouldn't be held prisoner here but would keep his caste status. It was unexpected, and the Naxturu wouldn't like it, and he didn't either. Mihai knew where he belonged, and it was not with the Naxturu. It was not with the Druj at all. "Queen," he said softly. "I told you, I am a different kind of hunter now."
"Ah, yes," she said with a hint of disdain. "A hunter of mists. Well, we have no caste of mist-hunters, have we? Perhaps the astronomers' tower would be more suitable."
He was supposed to decline. The castes were fixed: Naxturu were Naxturu as wolves were wolves. Would a wolf suddenly take up residence with a nest of serpents or hawks? No; it was against nature. Nevertheless, Mihai said, "It would be, Mazishta, I thank you."
She showed no surprise, only stared at him a beat too long. "Very well," she said. "Vanghav," she called, summoning a Druj to her side. "The naecish is to be your guest."