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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 pla
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