She told Philip about the woman’s promise. She reminded him that she has no family for people to badger, no aunts or uncles, no parents, no siblings, and that the only people who know where she is are Alex and Hump, who have no interest in sharing that information. She explained that no one recognizes her, that even on her trip northward, the driver, an Albanian man who was silent for 99 percent of the ten-hour drive, did not insist on any kind of costume when she got out at rest stops.
But Philip is not assuaged by any of this. He insists she wear a hat on her walks. When she tells him now, “No calls,” he stays in the doorway, silent, until she twists around to face him. Philip is shorter than Alex but broader in the shoulders and meatier in the arms, like he might have been a wrestler once upon a time and has the potential to grow a little fat as he ages. He stands tilted against the jamb, arms folded, frowning, and for the first time it strikes Vee that he may be afraid not only of attention but of her.
“I’ll leave as soon as I can,” she says.
“Good,” says Philip.
Vee nods.
“This is a quiet house,” he adds. “Rosemary and I would like to keep it that way.”
A flush of anger moves through her and as she turns away, and sinks her hands into the cool, wet clothes, she begins to hum, pretending great concern about locating care labels, until, finally, she hears Philip’s footsteps in retreat.
SUSA
ESTHER
The Queen, Nine Months Pregnant
You had to understand it couldn’t be prevented. She is eighteen, ripe as a rabbit. Her stomach sits in her lap. Her feet are being rubbed. The midwife doing the rubbing discreetly avoids the bulging knuckles on Esther’s big toes, remnants of her beastly transformation, but that does not mean she—or any of the midwives—trusts her. They have been too close to her for too long. They know the other changes, as well: the slight deformation of her ears, pointed where they used to be round; the permanent rash that runs along the tops of her thighs; the way her nipples have turned from pink to purple. Granted, this last problem could also be linked to her condition. Either way, they will never go back to pink, just as her ears and skin and toes will never return to their original forms.
You had to know she didn’t escape. Smart girl, very brave, became a beast. But this is not fantasy.
Esther’s face is altered, too, though this has nothing to do with accidents of amateur magic or ravage by hormones. The minister’s scratching did it, striped her cheeks with vertical paths slightly lighter in color than her skin.
She lives well, Esther. Like a queen! She is a queen. There are jewels and silks and velvet pheasant dinners and rare wines. Yet none of this has dulcified her. Last week, when she was invited to dine with the king, the king’s minister—the one who scratched her and held the knife to her throat and who has turned out to be the only minister who matters—informed her that the wine in her glass cost more than the diadem on her head, but to Esther it tasted like overdried fig. She knows her chambers are basically another harem, if the upstairs version. There are plenty of windows, and she is allowed outside, but only in the courtyards, and only within the boundaries of the palace walls. The king and his minister mistrust her, for obvious reasons.
The walls of her chambers are so soft you could sleep on them if the world fell over, which it might have as far as Esther is concerned.
Another girl would have relented by now. But Esther, possessed of an extraordinary self-regard that pitches her alternately toward survival or doom, is still at war. If she cannot save herself, she has determined, she will make good on Marduk’s ludicrous boast and save her people. They are still out there, she has learned, still being attacked, still leaving themselves attackable. It doesn’t matter what makes them stay, she has decided, whether it’s inertia, or stupidity, or some delusion Marduk managed to make them believe about Esther’s powers of persuasion. All that matters is that they go. All Esther does now is to make sure that happens.
She tried Lara first, some weeks after the choosing, found her lying on her bed, as hairy as she was born to be, eyes closed. Esther’s old bed was empty, and in the light then streaming down from the slit of a window Esther could suddenly see the ghosts of the tally marks she’d once made. How long ago was that now? Something about the way Lara had arranged herself, her legs spread comfortably like a man’s, her palms resting on her breasts, gave Esther an understanding. “You were the one who erased them,” she said.
Lara startled like a deer hit with a bow, opening her eyes and leaping up in one swift movement. She had grown fat, Esther saw. It suited her. Her sickly, stubbled skin was gone. Her eyebrows had grown together into one line that dipped slightly in the middle, like a great, gliding bird. Quickly, she took an inventory of Esther’s queenness, from her jewel-heavy diadem past her layers of silk to the gold fringe that swept the floor wherever she went. Then Lara smiled, her thin but glittering smile, full of mischief and warmth, and Esther’s throat went hot. She waited for Lara to embrace her. They were alone—the other girls had bowed absurdly low and fled when they’d seen Esther enter. She was not pregnant yet that day. She had known the king twice only, both times in blackness, encounters so brief and seemingly independent somehow of Esther herself that they made less of an impression on her than her first kiss with Nadav. She still felt at that time that she belonged more to the night station than she did to the royal chambers.
But Lara stayed where she was. “It was so hopeless making,” she said. “One day, fifty days. What difference would it have made?”
Esther fought off tears. Why had she started with an accusation? She did not want Lara to hate her. She didn’t want to go back to her chambers, alone, to sit upright through dinner, playing queen. What she wanted, she realized, what she wanted almost as much as she wanted Lara to help her bring a message to the camp, was for Lara to lie down with her like they used to, when they were still waiting. Lara’s smell was as it had been, eucalyptus and salt. Esther would lie behind Lara and scratch her back, and then Lara would lie behind Esther and do the same, and all the while they would trade stories, until one of them fell asleep or got called off to some useless task. Esther’s longing for this closeness was almost embarrassing in its intensity, as bodily as thirst or hunger. But what could she do? It was Lara who had spurned her, not the other way around. It would have to be Lara who came forward. In the absence of that, Esther would have to act as if she didn’t care.
“So you tricked me twice,” she said.
“Tricked you?”
“My tally marks. Our plan, to go as ourselves.”
“I meant to do it.”
“Really.”
“I did. I meant everything.”
“So?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t what? What we were doing wasn’t hard. It was the opposite of hard.”
Lara looked away. She shrugged. “I must not be as brave as your majesty.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“But you are. That.”
Esther emitted an involuntary groan. Apart from her robes, there was nothing queenly about her. There had been no training. There had been a ritual with the crown, but the priest spoke in an ancient language no one but he seemed to understand; nothing about it resembled any marriage Esther had ever seen, and afterward the king’s minister breathed in her ear: Try a fleck of sorcery and I’ll have you impaled. Right here. He’d shoved her with genius stealth into a pillar, then called the king off to some business of some sort. Since then, Esther had been attended constantly. She had been fed like a queen, and bathed like a queen, which was to say she had been fed and bathed like a night station girl was fed and bathed, yet more indulgently and with more ceremony, no longer part of a herd but elevated, alone. She had been praised. But she did not feel like a queen. It was all a costume. Couldn’t Lara see that? She was squinting at Esther. She drew closer, examining, until her breath landed on Esther’s skin. “What happened to your face?”