The Book of V.: A Novel(39)

Esther blinked, trying to bring something into focus. Even the king, seated at the table, appeared blurred at his edges. Without looking her in the eyes, he pointed at a long, low cushion.

She sat.

When he didn’t speak, she began, “I’m here—”

“You’re bold.”

“I—”

He lifted a hand. “I understand.”

Esther waited. Her head hurt. It took all her strength to hold it upright—her crown felt heavier than water. The king picked up a tool. It was made for him, clearly—small, for his hands. He looked at the tool, then he picked up one of the stones in his other hand and began to scrape the stone with the tool. Then he stopped.

“You want something.”

Esther nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her. She was struck by how tenderly he handled the tool and the stone. This moved her to speak more freely than she might have, to use the voice she had not dared use since she had told him she wanted to go home. “What have you done to my people?” she asked.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” the king said. He brought the stone to eye level, lowered it, and began scraping again.

“The edict. Why?”

The king bent lower over his table. “There are differences,” he said, in a strange, singsong way, as if repeating something someone else had told him. “There are differences, and there are times when people must be reminded of these differences.”

“I’m one of them. You know this.”

He looked up and gave her a woeful smile. “I don’t know what you are.”

“I’m a Hebrew.”

“You were.”

“I still am.”

“You’re queen.”

A fresh sharpness joined the pain encircling Esther’s head. “You’re punishing them because you despise me,” she said.

The king set down his tool and stone and stood up from the table. Then he crossed the room to Esther and knelt in front of her. The torches sputtered behind him, throwing his beard and nose into shadow and making his eyes appear abnormally bright. He was quiet, examining her face. His eyes trying to get inside her eyes. This felt more threatening somehow than what he’d done with his sex the times he’d climbed atop her. Esther remembered his calm before he smashed the goblet. She worked not to flinch.

“I don’t despise you,” he said finally. “I mistrust you. I always will.”

Esther felt tears coming, but she did not cry. If she had not asked to go home, she thought, if she had not become the beast?…?the camp would likely have been forgotten, left alone. Right after you were chosen, Lara had said, and now Esther knew with certainty: what she had done was worse than merely failing to save them. She was driving them more quickly to destruction. She began again to shake.

“Esther. Beautiful Esther.” The king ran a finger down her left cheek, then another down her right. He touched her with the same tenderness and deliberation with which he handled his tools. Esther could see that he wanted to love her. She had sensed this before, in the dark, as he found his position above her, as he moved, and then stopped moving. But now she knew. He ran his fingers across her brow, pushing hair out of her eyes, and she could see that he was desperate to go back to before the beast yet couldn’t, not fully, not just because of her changed toes and ears but because the beast had left an after shape, like the way the sun left imprints on your vision even after you’d closed your eyes. He could not unbeast her. He could not unshame himself. Knowing this made her feel weaker—a softness for him knotted in her breastbone—and also more powerful, because she understood that he was weak, too.

She did not love him. But she touched his hand that was in her hair. “I want you to undo what you’ve done,” she said. “And I want to know things before the girls in the night station know them.”

The king said nothing. He took off her crown—sweet relief—and laid her down. The cushion was long enough to be a bed. It was a bed, she realized. He took her breasts out of her robes and sucked them, and Esther, despite herself, or to save herself, allowed herself to feel a jolt of pleasure. But mostly she made herself like the ground. She closed her eyes. She endured.



* * *



Robes are timeless, convenient, easily opened, easily closed. When the king was done Esther closed hers and, without asking, went closer to his table. The objects weren’t stones, she saw, but bones. Tiny bones.

“Birds,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

Behind her, on the cushion, the king lay atop his own robes, unclothed. She did not look at him.

“I know a woman—” Esther stopped. It struck her that these bones were those bones, that the reason the palace kept commissioning more necklaces from Nadav’s mother was not to adorn the wives’ necks—Esther had never seen any of them wearing one, now that she thought of it—but to supply the king.

“She’s very gifted,” the king said.

“Why have her go to the trouble of separating all the pieces and making necklaces, only for you to take them apart again?”

“It’s a puzzle. I like the puzzle.”

On the shelves, Esther saw, the bones had been put back together again to form birds, or skeletons of birds. Some were complete, others partial. Some bones that could not take a wire through them, foot bones for instance, the king had fashioned out of silver. Esther lifted one skeleton to see how it could stand and was impressed by the intricate joints and loops, the melding of wire and bone. The thing weighed so close to nothing she had an urge to crush it in her palm. She picked up another, larger one—not a bird.