Page 28 of Lucy Undying

She laughed. “Neither does our Queen. She calls me Knife, for obvious reasons. Most of us you train with are named Knife, actually. The girls who are no good for sending out she calls Pearl. Unless she really likes you, and then your name is Jade.”

A small woman who was missing her right arm nodded, taking a deep drink. “Pearl,” she repeated. Several others raised their hands.

That didn’t seem right. The Queen loved her girls. Why wouldn’t she know their names? “Where is she?” I hadn’t seen her leave since I arrived.

“Out getting supplies,” Pearl answered.

“Food?” I asked.

Pearl laughed. “We can get food on our own. She’s bringing in a new load of us.” She gestured around the courtyard.

Knife nodded. “She goes out once or twice a year to rescue new girls. Whenever she hears of any who need saving, or whenever she needs to replace the ones she loses.”

“You mean if any of you decide to leave?”

Pearl gave me a look as cutting as Knife’s name. “Leaving is not an option.”

“Just ask Jade,” a young woman whose hair flowed down her back like a jet waterfall muttered.

Knife hissed.

“Who’s Jade?” I looked around.

Knife stood, authority and warning in her voice. “Jade’s dead, along with the lover she was stupid enough to take. Everything we have we owe to our Queen, and Jade forgot that. The new girls our Queen brings will love her as we do. And we’ll teach them the rules of that love.”

“But—” Pearl started. Knife cut her off.

“Remember where you came from. Remember what she’s given us.”

Pearl closed her eyes and nodded with a sigh. “I remember.”

“Good. Now pass the wine. We need to drink as much as we can right now so it’s out of our systems before she gets back.” Knife lifted the bottle with a laugh, trying to tease the tone back to rebelliously playful, but the atmosphere had shifted. No one seemed light or playful anymore. They drank as though it were a chore.

Once most of them had fallen asleep in the heavy late afternoon heat, I cornered Knife.

“You’re prisoners here,” I said. I should have seen it from the start. They were safe, yes, but it was the safety of a cage, not a refuge. Trickles of memory from my life were pooling in my mind. I knew what it was to have comfort and protection but no say in your future.

“It’s better than where I came from,” Knife said. She was lying on her stomach, trailing her fingers through a pond, letting them linger where curious fish came to nibble. “But you should leave now, while you still can.”

Her words stuck between my ribs, much like her blade often did, and they found just as quick a path to my heart.

I went to the gate without thinking. Would I have left then? I’m still not sure. It wasn’t an option. The Queen had gone, but her loyal servants were lounging on either side of the pathway out, watching me with their enormous golden eyes. Without the cover of night, I couldn’t change form, and I knew enough from trailing them during their hunts that I couldn’t beat two leopards in my exhausted state.

Besides which, I love cats. Of all sizes. I didn’t have it in me to hurt them.

I turned around. But instead of creeping back to the dim closet I’d been given, I ventured somewhere forbidden: the Queen’s own bedroom. Maybe that’s where my affinity with cats comes from—my curiosity, which has nearly gotten me killed on many occasions.

I’d expected opulence. Instead, behind her throne chamber, I found a room not much larger than my own. There was a simple mat on the floor, a few rolls of tattered gray silk that looked more like strips for binding wounds than finery, and a chest.

I opened the chest. It held oddly shaped shoes that couldn’t possibly fit anyone’s feet, a simple jade hairpin, and a few brittle sheets of paper.

I pulled them out. Painted in grossly exaggerated simplicity, the Queen stared back at me. It was a flyer, advertising a show in which the Queen herself was the attraction. The words blurred in front of my eyes, violence and cruelty evident in the spectacle they presented her as. More than a hundred years earlier, she’d been toured around Europe as an oddity—as a display.

A bell rang. Clutching one of the papers in my hand, I walked numbly back to the courtyard. The girls had done their best to recover, standing in neat lines as the Queen entered, pulling a cart behind herself. Only she could have looked regal and aloof doing that. The cart was filled with half a dozen girls, as young as toddlers and as old as teens. They were in rough shape. Not from anything the Queen had done—this was clearly the result of lifetimes of abuse.

The Queen’s knives and pearls hurried forward and took the girls into the room they all shared. I knew they’d get the care they deserved. They’d be healed, as much as possible. And they’d accept this life and stay, indebted to the only being who ever tried to help them.

I finally understood the Queen.

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