And then, a great excitement. The women whispering again—the Nameless was needed. She was called for. She was to be brought.
Scrubbed and dried, her long black hair combed and braided, the women making soft sounds of approval, and then the hall with its mirrors and Her, recumbent on a white-draped bed, the blue of her eyes matching the blue of the Huntsman’s. Of all the men, only his pupils held no pale slivers, and he stood to the side as the long pale loveliness stretched, delicately.
“Here is My Nameless,” the Queen chirped brightly. “Come to Me, child.”
And she did, her heart beating in her throat, her skin alive with joy at the nearness. The incense smoke was thick that day, and the Queen was a haze of beauty, the red-winking gem at Her throat the only color in the world. A white page to be written on, a white bird to nestle in the hand.
The Queen’s broad soft hand touched the Nameless’s slender girl-chest. “Here it is,” She murmured, softly, restfully. “Here is the youth and the living.”
“So it is,” the other Biel’y chorused, and the Nameless was confused. Was this a Ceremony? Were they supposed to speak?
“Do you love Me?” She leaned close, her face filling the Nameless’s world. “Me, and only Me?”
Stunned, the Nameless could only nod.
“Say, yes, Mommy. If you can.”
She struggled to shape the words. “Y-yes, M-Mommy.” Her tongue wouldn’t obey her fully, but She looked pleased.
“Oh, someone has taught you to talk, have they? Well, we will punish for that. But for now . . . ” Her hand tensed, and the Nameless could feel the fingernails, lacquered with white paste and sharpened, through fabric. “Give Me your heart, little Nameless. I want your heart. I will eat it, and grow strong.”
Horror descended. A terrible draining sensation, as the Queen laughed and her fingers flexed. Casually cruel, a cat playing with a mouse before it loses interest. Her jaw snapped, strong white teeth champing just like the dogs’, and the Nameless jerked aside, thrashing and terrified.
Her thin elbow hit something hard and unforgiving, and the gasp of horror passing through the ranks of the Biel’y made the radiance dim. A furious howl arose, for the child, in her struggles, had struck the White Queen in Her lovely, ageless face.
“TAKE IT AWAY!” the Queen screamed. “LOCK IT UP! TAKE IT AWAY!”
And then the pain began.
She shifted, cold stone bruising-hard under her hip, the chill leaching into her bones. The voice was very far away. It didn’t matter. She knew what it was whispering, the same thing it had started whispering after she had done the unforgivable.
“You are nobody,” it breathed, hoarsely. “You are nothing.”
She lay in the stone-closed darkness, the handcuffs biting her wrists, and listened to her heart’s thundering refrain.
I am. I am. I am.
THIRTY-TWO
SHE LAY FOR A LONG TIME IN THE DARK, FLOATING IN and out of her body. The voice kept going, water plinking over stone, wearing away. Her heartbeat was muffled thunder, and the blackness inside her skull was now the softness of a pillow. She could lie still and not think, and everything would be done.
And yet. There was another memory, one that hovered just out of reach. An annoyance, grit in a sandal, the sting of sun on already-burned skin, a poke on an almost-healed bruise.
The Huntsman’s big callused hand trembled on the glass knife’s twisted, ancient handle. His reflections fought too, the mirrors casting back several images of him as he loomed over the little girl on the altar, her eyes rolling with terror, her thin drugged limbs twitching. The smoke was heavy, full of the resinous drug the Queen exuded, mixed with the spices stolen by the close-cropped men and the glowing, harvested fungus. The feral children were all hustled away, and among them was a boy with messy dark hair, the product of an earlier favorite-husband, and so the only one save the Nameless to be unshorn. He was older, and his heart was fine. The Queen said he would make an Okhotnik for Her, one day.
But now, Her husband-Huntsman stood, and the Queen tensed. She was beside him, Her beauty reflecting in each lovingly polished mirror, the great soughing chanting mass of the Biel’y as yet unaware that something was wrong. They bowed and swayed, some of them falling to the floor and gibbering praises of the loveliness overcrowding the mirrors before them, reflected on every wall of this hall, the heart of Underneath where the Queen was the only light.
The crimson jewel at Her throat flashed. Her red, red lips parted.
“Renew Me. Give Me the heart,” she said, and the cry went up.
“The heart! The heart!”
The Huntsman stared at the drugged Nameless. The little girl writhed, twisting on the pale stone of the altar, crusted with the remains of other ceremonies. Unlike the mirrors, the altar was not cleansed until the Great Renewal. The lesser Renewals were left as a reminder, and atop the water-clear mirrors the small skulls grinned down on the ceremony, a few larger ones sprinkled among them. Set in the walls with cement made from the ground-up light-giving fungus, they wept thin trickles of bleaching-clear fluid that must not be allowed to mar the mirrorshine.
The Nameless’s eyes were open a fraction. Blue eyes, so blue. The knife lifted.
“Give Me the heart.” It was unheard-of, for the Queen to have to ask twice, and the first thread of unease went through the ecstatic writhing crowd.
“The heart, the heart!” they cried.
The Huntsman’s lips moved. Why did he hesitate? This one, he seemed to say, but the screams and moans overpowered whatever he would have uttered.
And the drugged girl, sudden desperate strength in her bony bruised and wasted limbs, committed the ultimate sin.
The Nameless rolled free of the altar. She landed on a heap of picked-clean bones, and the gasps and cries of horror began. She scrambled, darting-quick as a cockroach, for a dark gap between two mirrors, and slithered her skinny body through it as the Queen’s fury shook the world.
And later, in the tunnels, as the Nameless wandered sick and shaking, the Huntsman had arrived out of the darkness. “She will have a heart,” he muttered, and pushed her. “That way, go. Run. Run. She will have a heart. RUN!”
And she had run, through a jumble of confusion and terror, the drug working through her and her entire world shattered, to end fallen and limp in the snow while dogs howled elsewhere.
Whose heart had the Queen eaten that night? It was not a Great Renewal, but She had to have eaten something. Dark blood dripping down her white chin, her eyes closed . . . whose heart had She eaten?
And had She thought it was Her daughter’s, until age began to crease Her soft blank skin, and wooden hardness spread over the Huntsman’s skin?
Light, searing her eyes. The murmur went on, a queer atonal chant, and she finally understood it was them, the Biel’y, mouthing their ritual response just like the girls at St. Juno’s murmured Mithrus the Sunlord, watch over us all during chapel every school day.