Of Beast and Beauty - Jay Stacey (читать хорошую книгу txt) 📗

garden soon. I have to wait.

I stand at the window, wondering how she plans to reach my

cell—through the main entrance or by climbing through the window down

the hall the way I did when Needle returned me to my cage. I expect her to

hurry down the path toward the barracks, but instead she stops on the far

side of the roses, near where the vines have crept from their bed. She goes

utterly still for a moment before her hand darts out, reaching for one of the

low-hanging vines.

Above her bowed head, the roses rustle awake, rotating their

obscene blooms to peer down at the queen.

I open my mouth to howl her name, but something stops me—a

sudden throbbing in the places where my skin tore above my claws, a pain

that shoots up my arm and into my chest, squeezing my heart, heating my

blood, making the room spin and the blue night pulse before my eyes.

I try to step away from the window, but I can’t move. I can’t breathe.

I can’t scream, even when the night air comes alive, whipping in to beat at

my face, stinging at my skin like sparks from a funeral fire, hot and full of

magic.

I fall to the floor, gasping for breath, and begin to crawl toward the

door.

Something is happening in the garden. I have to get to Isra, before

it’s—

ISRA

—TOO late. It’s too late to pull away, even if I wanted to.

“What happened to the covenant?” I demand, fighting to keep fear

from my voice. I’ve never felt such a powerful presence in the garden

before. It feels bigger than the roses, older and darker and deeper, a cold,

unblinking eye staring straight through my skin. “Where is it? Show it to—”

My words end in a pained cry as fire courses through my fingertips,

shoots through my arm, trapping the breath in my lungs, making my ears

ring with the sound of a thousand voices screaming at once. Agony

explodes on either side of my head, and my eyes roll back.

The thorn in my finger digs deeper, while another darts out to stab

my arm, jabbing deep. Something primitive inside me snatches control of

my muscles. My legs push away from the flower bed, but when I move, the

thorns move with me, digging into my skin. The roses are hungry, starving,

they—

No, it’s not the roses who hunger. It’s the other thing—the ancient

presence coiled like a snake beneath the flowers—that is hungry. Gem was

right. There is something else. The roses are only the teeth that creature

uses to chew its food, a mouth that will pull me into the belly of the beast.

Come to the Dark Heart, girl. The voice in my head is a tongue made

of ice licking at the frantic pulse at my throat. Come to the Dark Heart and

join your mothers and grandmothers. There is peace in sacrifice.

The Dark Heart. That is its name.

I go utterly still, overwhelmed by the vastness of the being speaking

in my mind. It is bigger than I first assumed. As tall as the mountains

beyond the dome, as deep as the violent ocean the roses showed me on

my thirteenth birthday, as big as the planet itself.

It is a god, and I am only one small person, so briefly alive that my

death is practically not a death at all. I should be content to lie down in the

fertile soil, to join myself with the Dark Heart, to give my blood to the one

who sustains my city.

The roses’ gnarled stalks and their thorns—as big as my hand, bigger,

how could I not have noticed how deadly they could be—reach for me,

ready to pull me into their embrace, to the center of their bed.

To my death.

The haze clouding my thoughts departs in a frantic rush of blood.

“No!” I pull away, but the roses loop a toothy arm around my wrist

and squeeze tight. Smaller thorns slice through my skin, creating a bracelet

made of blood, igniting my body with lightning flashes of pain.

“Help me!” I scream, hoping the guards will hear. I bat at the flowers

with my fists, kick the vines that snake close enough to snatch at the legs of

my overalls. “Help me! I’m in the royal garden!” I scream, but no one

comes. The one time in my life I’d be breathlessly grateful to see a soldier,

and none can be found.

And the thing controlling the roses, the Dark Heart, knows it. Of

course it does. The Dark Heart knows everything that happens under the

dome, and it knows that I’ve learned too much, that it must take me before

I ruin it all, before I steal the lifeblood from the splintered, wicked thing my

ancestors have fed for generations.

But my ancestors weren’t murdered; they were willing sacrifices.

Even my mother took her own life when she jumped from the tower. But

I’m not going to lie down and die. I won’t!

“I don’t give myself to you. I don’t!” I shout as I knock a vine away

with the back of my hand, earning myself another deep scratch. I pause to

survey the damage for less than a second, but a second is all it takes for a

vine to snap around my other wrist, as quick as a whip. I scream and tug on

both arms, but the vines only squeeze more tightly.

“I’m not a willing sacrifice,” I sob, heart racing as the thorns get

closer and closer to my face. “I’m not married. I have no children or

brothers or sisters or anyone.” I feel the vines’ death grip loosen the

slightest bit, and I know I’ve hit upon the only thing that might save my life.

The Dark Heart is starving, but it doesn’t want me to be its last meal. “If you

kill me, you will never feed from this city again. The covenant will be broken

forever. Forever!”

When the vines stop moving, there’s a thorn longer than my finger a

whisper from my eye.

I force myself to face it, ignoring the sweat rolling down the sides of

my face, the frantic racing of my pulse, the pitching of my stomach. “Let me

go,” I say. “Let me go! You have no choice.”

But they do, it does, the Dark Heart. It could decide that one last

meal from our city is better than none at all. It could take comfort in the

fact that there are still two domed cities alive and well and filled with

women willing to die.

Everything in my being screams for me to fight, to get away before

it’s too late, but I can’t. The force controlling the roses will have to choose

to let me go. There’s no way I can free myself without cutting my arms from

my body. I’m already hurt badly. The muscles and nerves in my wrist are

shredded, and my blood spills with a steady smack, smick, smack onto the

dirt. I can feel how much the Dark Heart craves more of it. Its need echoes

inside me.

If only I’d gone to Gem before coming to the garden. He could slice

through the vines with his claws in an instant. But I was afraid he’d try to

stop me, that he’d say it was too dangerous, now that he knows the truth

about the roses.

Now I may never see him again. I may not live to tell him how much I

care, how much I—

I gasp as the vines suddenly clutch more tightly, as if the Dark Heart

can read my thoughts and disapproves of the way I feel for Gem, as much

as any citizen of Yuan would.

Death, the Dark Heart whispers inside me, making me shiver and my

arms go numb. My eyes roll toward the sky, but instead of the dome and

the moons hovering above it, I find myself seeing through the roses’ eyes.

But this time they show me something new. They show me … fires.

Fires in the desert, scaffolds made of long-dead tree limbs holding

the corpses of Monstrous men and women and children. There are a dozen