Of Beauty and Beast

side of the street to kneel as I walk by. I just can’t.

I lift my eyes and find a tiny rectangle of blue sky high above the laundry lines zigzagging between the intimidating buildings of the city center. These towers make mine look like a child’s toy. They are breathlessly tall, and each one overflowing with people. The people must live three or four to a room, at least, if the amount of laundry is anything to judge by. Hundreds of pants and shirts and dresses and overalls and underthings hang like uninspired flags, blocking most of the sun’s light, drooping limply toward the street, where their owners were ordered to assemble this morning to meet their queen and let her look upon them with her new eyes.

I demanded that the royal gong be rung and messengers be sent throughout the city. I insisted on walking through the city center, the better to see my people. I would not be swayed.

Now it’s all I can do not to turn and run back to my tower. I long for the comfort of my darkness, my ignorance. I want to go back and undo it all. I want to be the Isra my father worked so hard to create. If only I’d known how easy I had it in my cage, with my velvet blinders always in place …

My scrap of blue sky vanishes, and my gaze drifts down to the street ahead, where a woman without arms or legs sits propped in a chair beside several little boys. A mother who can never hug her sons or hold her babies. How did this happen? How …

A choked sound escapes my lips, bursting free before I can contain it.

“Are you all right?” Bo asks from his place beside me.

“No,” I whisper. “Of course not. Of course, of course not.” I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth, stopping the stream of babble. I can’t lose control in front of my people. I can’t show them how unprepared I am. I can’t be like my mother.

“The tower. My mother.” I pull in a labored breath. “That’s … This is why.”

“Yes,” Bo says. “In her home city, the nobles lived within a second wall at one edge of their dome, kept entirely separate from the common people. She had never seen a human who was not of noble blood before she came to Yuan.” Bo’s hand is firm at the center of my back, guiding me relentlessly onward, through the city center to what lies ahead, to what I’ve demanded to see.

I want to twist away, to order him to keep his hands off me, but I can’t. His touch is the only thing keeping me going. If he withdraws, I’ll stop walking and be stranded in the middle of the nightmare.

Nightmares upon nightmares. I had the fire nightmare again this morning, saw the woman’s mouth opening and closing in the burning wood. But this time I listened harder, the way Gem told me to, and I would have sworn I heard her speak. She was saying something about the truth … about hope … something important.…

When I woke, I couldn’t remember exactly what she’d said, but I was bursting with happiness anyway. I could see the golden miracle of the sunrise shining through my window, the brilliant bleeding red of my quilt, and Needle’s tightly curled smile as she brought my breakfast tray. My life and my dreams were changing, and I was certain my city wasn’t going to be far behind. This morning, Yuan was a riddle I was confident I could solve.

But this is … a disaster. A tragedy. Hopeless.

“Now you see why your father felt he had to take such extreme measures,” Bo continues, increasing his pace until I have trouble keeping up. My dress is wider at the bottom than my other dresses, but it’s tight at the thighs. Still, I don’t complain. I don’t care if I have to wiggle and wobble down the street like a fool. The sooner we leave the city center and all the damage behind, the better. “He was only trying to protect you. He thought if you remained unaware of certain truths that you would be spared your mother’s madness. It was only after she came here that she became … strange. She grew even worse after you were born. At first the healers dismissed it as the sadness that sometimes comes over new mothers, but then she began talking of going into the wilderness to speak to the Monstrous. Father says she set the fire not long after.”

I don’t say a word, though I want to ask Bo if he knows why my mother wanted to speak to the Monstrous. I’ve always known Mother was Father’s second wife and foreign—a noble from far away who married my father to escape a city on the verge of collapse—but I’ve never heard anyone speak of her expressing the desire to make contact with the Monstrous. Why would she want to do that? I want to ask, but I don’t trust myself to speak without breaking down.

When Bo first told me it was my father who had ordered the poisoning of my tea, I nearly slapped him. I was certain he was lying. I refused to believe that my father would steal the sight from his own daughter, even when Junjie showed me the signed order bearing the king’s seal. I just couldn’t believe Baba hated me that much.

Now I understand. My father didn’t hate me. He was trying to spare me from the heartbreaking truth.

“I wanted to protect you, too,” Bo says, louder now that we’ve reached the edge of the city center and only a few citizens kneel at the sides of the street. “I planned for you to remain in the nobles’ village, where the people are whole. There was no reason for you to see this particular truth.” His hand slides around my waist, his familiar touch becoming openly intimate, making my breakfast gurgle angrily in my stomach.

I swallow hard and step away. “Yes, there is. I needed to know.

I … had … to …” My words dribble away as we pass by the final knot of people.

Beyond them, the world opens up, the wide dirt road continuing on through the fields. I want to rush ahead into that open space, but instead I force myself to nod and smile a brittle smile at the subjects kneeling in the grass at the edge of an orchard of bare-limbed pear trees. There are three men and five women, all wearing orchard workers’ overalls, all with missing parts. They are ripped pieces of a dozen different puzzles that will never fit together, and I don’t understand it.

I don’t. I can’t … I thought …

“The Banished camp is … worse?” I whisper when we’ve finally passed the last woman. I find little comfort in the even rows of fruit trees on one side of the road and the perfectly ordered grape trellises on the other. Beyond these tidy fields, at the end of this road, lies the place where the Banished—the people deemed too grotesque to inhabit the city center—live out their abbreviated lives.

“Far worse,” Bo confirms, hesitating at my side. “We can go back to the great hall if you like. I can—”

“No.” I lift my chin, and move past him on stiff legs. “I need to know the truth.”

“I can tell you the truth. Let me do that for you,” he says, hurrying to catch up, what sounds like real compassion in his voice. He’s been unfailingly kind this morning—like the Bo I knew before last night—but I’m not fooled. I will never trust him. Not ever, no matter how helpful he tries to be.

“Thank you, but no.” I pull my shawl tight around my shoulders and aim myself toward the royal carriage waiting for us by the side of the road.

The driver is an elegant old man with silver hair, supposedly a commoner like all noble servants, but without damaged parts—at least, none that I can see. His defects must be hidden inside, like Needle’s. Selfishly, I’m glad of it.

I need a moment. Just a moment.

“Please, Isra.” Bo stops me with a hand on my arm. “Let me spare you any more of this.”

“Why?” I subtly shake off his fingers as I glance back over my shoulder, finally able to pinpoint what’s been plaguing my mind, now that I have some distance from the city. “Why are—”

“I care about you. I told you that last night.”

“No. Not that,” I snap, unable to bear talking feelings at a time like this. “Why are the people damaged? How has this happened? I thought the covenant was strong.”

“The covenant is strong,” Bo says. “It’s been this way since the beginning. You know the legend: those families who refused to sign the covenant did not receive equal protection from its magic.”

“I thought that meant they had fewer goods, smaller houses,” I say, voice louder than I mean it to be. “I didn’t think it meant they—”

“It means they suffered from this planet’s dark magic. They weren’t made Monstrous, but their humanity was not preserved in the same way that those of noble blood are preserved. They suffer from a different sort of mutation.”

My brow wrinkles, and for the first time in more than an hour, my thoughts begin to organize themselves. “But the Monstrous look nothing like that. What’s happened to our people isn’t mutation. It’s … something else.”

“Something like what?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Something …”

Something dark. Something unnatural.