Of Beauty and Beast

Yearning for Gem grips me so fiercely it feels like my stomach is climbing up my throat. The thought of talking this madness through with him gives me strength and, more important, reminds me—

“I’m not sure.” I turn back to Bo. “But perhaps the covenant will offer some insight. I’d like it brought to my rooms this afternoon.”

He blinks as if I’ve snapped my fingers between his eyes. “The covenant?”

“Yes, the covenant,” I say. “Have it delivered to the tower immediately. I’ll be keeping it overnight.” That should give Needle and me time to sneak over to see Gem.

By the moons, I can’t wait to see him, to feel his arms around me, his chest warm and solid beneath my cheek, making the world feel steady and possible again. Night can’t come quickly enough.

“We should go,” I say. “The driver’s waiting.”

“But …” Bo’s mouth opens and closes as I circle around him and climb into the royal carriage for the first time in my life. I was looking forward to the ride this morning—the wind in my hair, the fields rushing past on both sides—but now I can’t imagine taking pleasure in simple things, not when there is so much suffering under the dome.

“Isra, I can’t have the covenant delivered.” Bo climbs up beside me, clearly deciding he deserves to sit in the carriage rather than ride on the step at the back with the other guards. “It’s impossible.”

“What’s impossible?”

“The covenant was lost,” he says. “Hundreds of years ago. Not long after King Sato died.”

“What?” I want to believe he’s lying, but he seems genuinely confused, completely at a loss.

Lost. The covenant is lost. How could that be? How could something so important be lost?

“King Sato hid the covenant for safekeeping,” Bo says, giving the signal for the driver to start the horses. The silver-haired man flicks his whip, and the buggy lurches forward, throwing me back against the seat.

Bo steadies me with an arm around my shoulders. I’m too horrified to push it away. “He died before he could tell his last wife where it was hidden.”

“But that’s …” King Sato was our third king. That means … “No one’s read the covenant in six hundred years?” I squeak. “Or more?”

“It’s all right.” He has the nerve to smile. “Our history isn’t lost. There are other texts that tell us all we need to know, and the sacred words spoken at each royal wedding are engraved on a gold tablet we’ll hold between us on the day we take our vows.” Bo pulls me closer, until I’m wedged beneath his armpit, my spine crunched and my dress straining across my back. “Don’t worry. The covenant is strong. The damaged people have been that way for generations upon generations. They don’t suffer from it the way we would. They aren’t like us.”

“Then what are they like?” I squirm free, and scoot to the other side of the buggy.

Bo’s expression hardens at the sarcasm in my voice, but to his credit, he maintains his patient tone. “They aren’t Monstrous, but they aren’t human the way we are, either. They don’t know any other kind of life.

They’re happy with what they have, to be a part of our city, to be safe, fed, and protected.”

He sounds like he’s telling the truth, but that doesn’t mean anything.

He could think he’s telling the truth—the way I did every time I assured Gem I was tainted—and still be telling a lie. I know for a fact he’s wrong about my people’s suffering. I could see the pain in their eyes. I could feel the hard facts of their life weighing on me as I walked among them, dragging me down until it felt like my feet were moving beneath the surface of the ground.

“You said there are other texts?” I ask, brushing a lock of hair from my face, finding no joy in the wind that whips it back into my eyes.

“There are,” he says. “Would you like me to have those delivered to your rooms?”

“Yes, right away.” I try to feel optimistic about what I’ll learn in the texts, but I can’t. Something deep inside insists that all I’ll find in those writings are more lies.

I have to find the covenant. I have to discover where it was hidden so long ago, and I can think of only one place to look for help, one thing that’s been around for more than six hundred years and still has eyes to see.

The roses have deceived me as often as anyone else has, but tonight I’ll make it clear that I won’t tolerate lies. They will give me what I want—the truth and nothing but—or I will … I will …

Or I will refuse them their offering.

Even the thought is enough to make my head spin and my heart thrash against my ribs, but I can’t help but think …

What if the stories of Gem’s people are true? If so, wouldn’t my people be better off in the desert? Better off transformed than forced to live with missing pieces? The nobles and soldiers and some of the merchants are still whole, but the overwhelming majority of my people are suffering, not thriving, under the dome.

Maybe if Yuan is abandoned, if the other domed cities are abandoned as well … Maybe if we all go into the desert together …

Maybe I don’t have to die. Maybe Gem was right. Maybe there is another way.

The thought should renew my flagging hope, but it doesn’t. My entire life I have been afraid to die, but at least I thought I had something worth dying for.

Now I have … nothing. A terrible mess I don’t know how to clean up, and the certainty that I will find no help from those in power in this city.

The whole have beauty, pleasure, comfort, and abundance, and they’ve convinced themselves they deserve it. Because they are more human than the people who suffer in the city center, or the Banished in their lonely camp, or the monsters starving in the desert.

I’ll never be able to convince them differently. Yuan will never change, not unless I can find proof that something is wrong with the city.

The nobles are spoiled and soft and inclined to gossip, but they are not evil people. I must convince them that Yuan is rotten at its core. I must find the covenant and discover why it was hidden away.

BO THE morning lasts forever. The afternoon is even longer. By the time I finally sit down on the carved wooden bench outside the court meeting chambers, I’m exhausted.

Isra insisted on seeing every part of the Banished camp—the shelters, the feeding troughs, the burial pit, even the trench filled with their bodily waste. It was … unspeakably repulsive.

The other soldiers stayed at the perimeter with the guards charged with keeping the Banished contained in their corner of Yuan, but I was forced to walk among them. I couldn’t leave Isra’s side for a moment, not if I want to be seen as her equal, and, someday soon, her better.

Today’s insanity shouldn’t make that very hard.

What kind of queen willingly walks among the Banished? What kind of queen tries to talk to people who aren’t much more than monsters, and all of them out of what’s left of their minds?

Even Isra learned that quickly enough. By the time the fourth or fifth Banished ran, screaming nonsense when she tried to approach, she learned to keep her distance. Still, she refused to leave right away. She stayed and asked questions about their treatment, their feeding schedule, their living arrangements, and, finally, why the Banished weren’t allowed into the city center with the rest of the people, since many of them seemed less damaged, physically anyway, than the people she’d seen there.

I was shocked that she needed an explanation.

It’s obvious to anyone with eyes—even new eyes—that the Banished display Monstrous traits. They have patches of scales and huge teeth and hands with pieces of claws exposed outside their skin. They creep and crawl and cower like the beasts they are. They run from any whole citizen in fear, sensing, I suppose, in some part of their wretched brains, that we are their enemies. That they are our enemies, that the Monstrous they resemble want to destroy us, and our way of life, forever.

“They’re lucky we let them live,” I finally said, too astonished by Isra’s complaints about the mistreatment of the creatures to mind my tongue.

“Other cities smother them at birth. Or put them outside the gates to starve. Or worse. We are the gentlest of the domed cities, Isra. We always have been.”

Isra went pale at that, as if she couldn’t imagine anything more terrible. She’s spent too much time with that