Of Beauty and Beast

“You’re one to talk,” he says. “You’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met. Stupidly stubborn.”

“Then put me down and go away,” I say, voice breaking. “If I’m so stupid.”

“I don’t want to go away. I want to help,” he says in a softer voice.

“Please, let me.” His arms gentle around me, no longer holding me prisoner, just holding. Waiting.

“This doesn’t help,” I say, relaxing in spite of myself. “Not like this.”

He presses a kiss to my forehead. “I should have told you before,” he whispers, making my skin tingle.

I wish we’d never stopped kissing. I wish Gem would give up on saving me, and give me something to remember when my life is out of possibilities.

“I would have,” he continues. “If I’d known. I swear I would have.”

“Told me what?” I let my fingers play along the scales at the back of his neck, mesmerized by their smoothness.

He looks down, catching my eyes, the emotion in his making my heart beat faster. “I would have told you that you’re beautiful.”

My stomach flutters and my chest gets warm and tight. I fist my hands and hold his gaze and my breath, determined to bind this moment tight inside me and never let it go. He means it. I’m beautiful to him. To Gem, who is beautiful to me. Does it really matter what anyone else thinks?

“You’re beautiful,” he says again, kissing my eyebrow. It’s a strange place for a kiss, but nice, an offering meant to comfort me, taking nothing for itself. “And you know it. You said so yourself.”

My brow furrows. “I never said that.”

“You did,” he says. “That girl in the painting isn’t a goddess. She’s a queen.”

His meaning hits, and my lungs forget how to draw breath. “That’s cruel,” I choke out, pushing at his chest. This time he lets me go, dropping my feet to the ground and spinning me to the mirror so quickly, I don’t have time to avert my eyes. I catch a glimpse, and a glimpse is enough for the glass to take me prisoner.

My lips part. The girl in the mirror’s lips part, too, and any lingering doubt vanishes in a dizzying wave. That’s me. That is what I look like. The shoulders that burst the seams of every dress are the perfect size in my mother’s shirt. My slender throat flutters delicately as I breathe. My face is not a perfect oval or a moon, but its angles aren’t hideous. There is elegance in my sharp chin and strong jaw, and my nose that isn’t shy about being a nose. It pokes proudly from the center of my face, ending in a tip shaped like a square, as if I ran into a wall with it and the skin never popped back into place.

It’s large, and might be distracting if it weren’t balanced out by my eyes. Enormous, unflinching eyes as green as summer grass, fringed with dark lashes, blinking beneath brows a bit too wild. My hair is even wilder, curling and coiling and running amok above my forehead and down my back, creeping wiry fingers over my shoulders, gluing stray tendrils to my damp cheeks. But it’s lovely, too, in its untamed way.

But there’s still the other … the part I keep hidden … I was careful not to look too closely in the bath, but now …

I lift my hand, and pull up my sleeve, revealing the peeling skin beneath the green fabric. There, where I thought scales lurked below the surface, is simply dry red human skin. Peeling and flaking and messy, but not hideous.

Sickly-looking, but not unnatural. Damaged, but not tainted.

I am …

I am not …

“There may be some way to treat it,” Gem says carefully, as if he senses how fragile I’ve become. “It might be irritated by something you’re eating or … washing with. A certain oil, or …”

He trails away. I don’t say a thing. I don’t know what to say.

This is my body—sickly, not tainted. This is my face. This is my face.

The face of the girl in the painting. I remember sitting for a portrait on my sixteenth birthday, but I was never told what happened to it. Now I know. I am the girl in the painting, that beautiful girl. I don’t look like the other women whose faces I’ve felt—the proportions and structure and shape are completely different—but there is nothing Monstrous or ugly about me. I know it, Bo knows it, Junjie knows it. My father knew it.

My father knew it.

My heartbeat slows; my lips go numb. My throat cramps, and my ribs petrify. I feel the air in the room turn against me, pushing into me from all sides, threatening to turn my bones to dust.

Never, in my wildest dreams, would I have imagined that finding out I’ve been wrong would feel like this. That I would want to pull my beautiful face off the wall and hurl the mirror to the floor, stomp on the pieces until my feet bleed, scream until I lose my voice. That I would wish with every fiber of my being to go back to the way life was before, when I believed myself ugly, when the world and my place in it were perfectly clear.

But I do. I wish. But I can’t go back. Not ever.

I watch the girl’s face— my face—crumple in the reflection, see the way her upper lip pulls up, the way the cords on her slender throat stand out garishly from her skin, and her large nose turns red as she begins to cry, and I am momentarily comforted.

I can be ugly, after all. I can be as wretched-looking as I feel.

Gem turns me gently and pulls me into his arms. I fist my hands against his chest, bury my face between them, and sob as if the world has come to an end. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles into my hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

I shake my head, my forehead rubbing against the stiff cotton of his shirt, but I can’t talk. I don’t blame Gem. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d told me. I wouldn’t have believed him. I was certain I knew the truth, that I knew it all. At least when it came to the who and why and what of Isra.

But I knew nothing. Nothing. I am worse than the emperor without clothes. I am the biggest fool in the world.

“You were right,” I say, forcing out the words. “I am stupid.”

“You’re not. You were ignorant, and you didn’t stay that way on your own.”

He’s right. I didn’t become this fool alone. Baba made me this way.

My father hid me away in this tower, and provided me with a mute maid incapable of telling me about myself. By the time Needle and I learned to communicate, I was older and unwavering in my beliefs, the reality of my world set so firmly in my mind that Needle’s compliments trickled in through my fingers and out through both ears. She was a servant, she was obligated to flatter me. I never imagined …

I couldn’t have imagined. If I had, if I for one second had thought I was nearly as whole as any other citizen of Yuan, then I would have known there was no excuse for any of it. No excuse for keeping me prisoner. Or for not, at the very least, allowing me visitors aside from the rare music tutor, sworn to silence about her time in the tower. If my father had been worried only about my safety, he still could have brought friends. Girls my age to play with when I was younger, to gossip and make music with when I was older. I didn’t have to be alone. I didn’t have to grow up feeling like a disgraceful secret.

But I did. No matter how much time Father spent with me, no matter how many times we laughed together or sang together or how many times he said he loved me, I always believed he was ashamed of the tainted girl who was all that remained of his family.

But I’m not tainted. I’m not. And as Gem said, there might be some way to treat my skin if I ask the healers for help. But Father never called the healers, even when it became obvious that Needle’s honey baths and creams weren’t making me better. I didn’t imagine it was possible to get better, not until Gem came to the city.

“I don’t understand,” I say, fists tightening until my nails sting my palms. “Why did my father do this? Why did he keep me here? Away from almost everyone? Why did he let me think …”

“I don’t know.”

I shake my head again, struggling to breathe past the rage burning white-hot inside me. I’m devastated and hurt and betrayed, but most of all, I’m furious. I want to hit something. Someone. I want to bloody them. Him.

A sense memory rises from somewhere deep inside me. My hands clawed, my nails torn, and blood—some mine, some not—hot and sticky on my stinging fingertips. The memory has the cold, silent terror of all my earliest memories, of those days when I was newly blind, but somehow I know it’s older. It’s something I’ve forgotten.