Character Analysis
Esmé
In many ways, Esmé is just a normal fourteen-year-old girl who's trying to live out a normal life… even though her circumstances are unique. See, she's lived a solitary life alone with her mom all these years, and Esmé is starting to feel the need to explore the outside world. She doesn't want to be cooped up all the time anymore:
"What's wrong with us?" she demanded now. "Why are we such freaks? Why don't we have any friends? Why don't we have any family?" (3.1.39)
Pretty normal adolescent desires, right? Solitary life or not, most teens wonder what the heck is wrong with their family at some point.
Esmé's growing pains have to be put on hold, though, because something weird is happening to her. She wakes up one day to find that one of her eyes has turned blue and that she has all sorts of odd memories lingering in her subconscious—memories of events that didn't happen to her. Creepy.
Through time and adventure, Esmé realizes that throughout her life, she's been incubating the Druj Queen inside her soul. Mihai reveals that when he helped her mother escape from Tajbel, he also allowed the Queen to incubate inside of Esmé's soul. Um… thanks?
The realization that there's been someone else living inside of her—and experiencing everything that she goes through—is shocking. And yet, when Esmé sees the Druj Queen's lifeless body for the first time, there's something familiar in the mix, too:
Then she faced the Queen and admitted to herself what her first thought had been the instant she'd glimpsed that perfect face. The spark of recognition had been so subtle and yet so profound.
This beautiful creature looked nothing like her, but still, somehow, looking at her was like looking in a mirror. (3.9.64-65)
In other words, though she's only newly conscious of the Queen, Esmé recognizes her nonetheless; she is familiar.
That said, Esmé isn't defined by the demon that she's unknowingly incubated inside her soul. She goes ahead with the process of separating her soul from the Druj Queen without putting up much of a fight—despite how painful it is—because she wants to be her own self without any incubating demons. And once the Druj Queen separates from her soul, Esmé is determined to go back and live a normal life in the human world. She starts going to school and dating a nice boy because that's what fourteen-year-olds do—and Esmé is finally simply a fourteen-year-old girl.
Mab
Poor Mab has been through a lot in her life so far. Because she grew up as a pet to the Druj Queen, Mab is extremely paranoid and afraid of everything. She has some serious unresolved trauma that shows up when Mihai takes Esmé to Tajbel with him:
So when he stole Esmé away and Mab glimpsed the rough spires of Tajbel through his window of air, all the old agonies overwhelmed her and she screamed until she could scream no more, and then she collapsed onto the rug, rigid. (3.8.28)
Mab's life has been focused on evading the Druj and staying safe. Because of this, she doesn't have any of the fun experiences of growing up that Esmé does. But through her daughter, Mab is able to witness those experiences:
They were only children, as Mab had never been allowed to be, and it was sweet. Esmé was happy… (3.17.49)
Mab is also able to rest assured knowing that escaping was worth it. She's given Esmé a real life instead of one where she's kept inside a cage.
Mihai
Mihai represents a truly rare thing in this story—a Druj with something like a soul. Because Mihai has spent so many years incubating in human souls and learning about emotion, he's in touch with his human side and can even feel love, which is something the Druj have lost. Because of this, he's determined to show the Druj Queen (who used to be his wife when they were human) what she's missing. He really hopes that she'll understand:
She had created the new magic that had angered the old god. And, Mihai thought, she would eventually remember it. He feared she would have just enough humanity now to grieve for what she'd done—but not enough to love him. (3.16.15)
Mihai recognizes that the deal the Druj have made in order to have immortality isn't a good one. He knows that there are more important things—like feeling emotion and having loved ones—than living forever. What good is an endless life if it's also loveless, after all? No thank you.
The Druj Queen
When the Druj Queen is first introduced, she is basically a cold dictator and Mab's tormenter. She keeps humans as pets and tries on their bodies without empathy, and has a collection of "beasts" that tear living creatures apart. In short, she is basically a textbook villainess, even dangling a little girl in front of her terrifying violent beasts:
The Queen liked to watch the beasts watch Mab. It amused her, the risk of it. (3.6.21)
But through Mihai's memories, it becomes clear that the Druj Queen wasn't always this way. At one point, she was human, just like all the other Druj. She challenged the gods, though, and gave up her soul in exchange for immortality—and that's what stripped her of her humanity, compassion, and memory of her former loved ones:
She chose immortality and the others followed her. And so the god scorched their souls to ash and scattered them in the wind. He dubbed them Druj. Demons. He breathed a mist into their memories and he plucked their children from their arms to grow old and die as humans… (3.16.4)
Even though the Druj Queen is pretty scary now, Mihai's not going to give up on her, especially since he remembers that she used to be his wife. He convinces her to incubate inside of Mab's unborn child, and through the sharing of a human soul, she regains some of her memories of the time before—and eventually comes back to Mihai. Yay.