Dark Lord's Wedding (14 page)

Hiresha met the collision and lofted her friend in an air-born hug. “You old indulgence, I haven’t missed you at all.”

“Liar.”

“Why, I saw you only hours ago,” Hiresha said.

“It’s been near half a year. That’s about a thousand beers.”

Over Janny Barrow’s shoulder, Tethiel ghosted his way out of the workshop. He had given them time alone. Hiresha had another chance of explaining herself to her friend. “You’ll note I’ve changed.”

“Never seen you all yellow before.”

“This is a dress of citrines. And?”

“You don’t look so droopy. Ah!” Janny Barrow’s cheeks jiggled when she saw they were levitating ten feet above the pond. “We’re flying.”

“Suspended in the air.”

“Did you sprout wings out your ass?”

“I am awake, and asleep.”

“You’re making no sense.”

“My strength comes from paradox,” Hiresha said. “My jewels shine with the power of dreams. My eyes are yet open.”

Janny Barrows folded her hands around one of Hiresha’s. The calluses of the former maid rubbed over the jewel piercings of the once enchantress. “You’ve stuck yourself more than a seamstress.”

“I am two selves, two places at once.”

“So you’re cracked?”

“Faceted,” Hiresha said. She had to make Janny Barrows understand. She was Hiresha’s friend. She should know. “Enchantresses can only cast spells when dreaming. Since I don’t know if I sleep or wake, I have my powers in both worlds.”

Janny Barrows had sucked her lips into her mouth, making a moue of puzzlement.

“Both facets feel like a lucid dream. For the first time, you’ve seen me wholly alert.”

“You’re awake as a nude sitting on ice, that’s plain. The rest isn’t.”

“I know you in two worlds. In the other, I call you Janny. Here, I’ll call you Missus Barrows.”

“But I’m Janny.”

“Don’t you understand? I see two of you, and if I called you the same thing in both facets I’d only confuse myself.” The Janny in the sunset facet appeared both young from Hiresha’s regenerative magic and haggard from worrying about the plagues, while this one had a disposition of sunburnt happiness.

“When I see two of a person,” Missus Barrows said, “I call the night a success. Maybe you’ll make more sense after a few drinks.”

Hiresha sagged to the ground with her friend. Missus Barrows didn’t understand. They never did, no matter how Hiresha tried to explain her dream inversion. No one understood her except Tethiel. Only with him could she speak her whole mind. She would have to close part of herself off to the rest, even to her oldest friend.

Missus Barrows patted Hiresha’s cheek. “Wring the glum out, you old rag. Tell me if it’s true you’re getting married.”

“I am betrothed.” Hopefully they could speak of this. “To Lord Tethiel.”

Missus Barrows sighed. Thankfully, she didn’t scream. “Feasties are a bad lot, but they know how to throw a party.”

“You sound as if you’ve mollified your opinion of him.”

“If that has anything to do with mulled wine, then yes. He and I vanquished a thirteen-course banquet together. We’re comrades in cups.”

“Awe inspiring.”

Missus Barrows scratched at her turban. “And, you know.”

“Most things, but which one in particular?”

“My own daughter is a Feaster. Can’t help but love her a bit. Even if she is a no-good brat.” The corners of Missus Barrows’ lips puckered with guilt. She blamed herself for what the girl had become.

Missus Barrows hadn’t been able to spend much time at home, with all the assistance Hiresha required while stricken with her sleeping disease. Hiresha owed her a great debt. “You’re a good woman, Missus Barrows.”

“Don’t call me that. The young bucks will think I’m married.”

“‘Will Miss Barrows do?”

“Suppose anything is better than ‘Maid Janny.’”

“Then, Miss Barrows, might you be bold enough to attend my wedding?”

“Don’t you doubt it, Miss Jewel Toes, but only if I can be the maid of honor.”

Hiresha had not been brought up with that marriage tradition, yet the Lady of Gems had little need for convention. Tethiel had to be right. She was one of a kind. Well, one of two, to be precise.

Her jeweled hands clasped Miss Barrows’ rough ones. “Will you be my maid of honor?”

“You can have honor, and I’ll be your maid.” She winked.

“Why, did you not just claim you disliked being called maid?”

“This kind is more fun. Not that you’d know anything ’bout that.”

They talked until dawn. Miss Barrows bathed her feet in the pond. “Free of leeches, you will observe,” Hiresha said while carving her amethyst scales. The fennec napped alongside Celaise and Jerani. They had come in to sleep under Hiresha’s watch.

“Don’t let yourselves become too settled,” Hiresha said. “Spellsword Sagai and Naroh Sen are likely to arrive this morning. I will endeavor to send the assassins away with minimal fuss. Is that them coming now? Very punctual.”

Hiresha turned to face the path at the sound of someone else, a pair of unexpected feet. Merely two, not four. Plodding, not deft.

“That isn’t them.” Hiresha concealed herself in her rags and uncomfortable shoes. The robes were all so much dead weight, yet she would need them if that tread belonged to whom she thought. The steps were familiar in their heel-slapping, in their favoring one side, though heavier today, weighed down and stumbling.

A woman from the village came into the grove. Yes, it was the mother of Nahui. Grief had turned her face into a rocky tightness.

Hiresha lifted the geode in her gloved hands. Nahui had left it for her yesterday, to open, to marvel at the garden of crystals within. She had been well enough to walk here. The enchantment had cured her, yet something had gone terribly wrong.

A sense of despair rang through Hiresha. The foreboding felt as real as prophecy. Nahui would never see the inside of this geode.

“What happened to your daughter?” Hiresha asked the woman.

“You killed her,” she said.

Hiresha rested the geode in the dead girl’s hands. She had died yesterday, when Hiresha had been asleep in her reliquary. Hiresha had been dead to this world. She had been powerless to help. Rigor mortis had set in, yet the girl had so little muscle that Hiresha could shift her arms to a more peaceful pose.

A small dose of magic eased the stiffness in the girl’s hands in order for her to grip the geode. The ancient water had flowed out of stone and left it hollow. Exposed now, its interior glittered with three hundred seventy-three crystals. They were quartz and clear except for ghosts of amethyst purple at their cores.

The girl had cuts around her ankles from rope burns. Hanging her upside down had drained her blood faster from the severed artery in her neck. She had been sacrificed.

Hiresha could be angry. She could be disgusted. Five years ago she had balked and blanched when a priest from her homeland had suggested sacrificing citizens. He had claimed their ancestors had given up their kin for the favor of the gods. He must have been right. Go back far enough in any nation’s history and one would find human sacrifice. They usually called it “war.”

Hiresha gripped the sides of the girl’s face. Mud spattered her open eyes. Hiresha could try to bring her back. The girl had been dead for twenty-one hours, and decay came fast in the jungle. Hiresha could still quash the infection units, Attract the girl’s blood from the soil back into her veins, force her heart to pump, and attempt to regenerate her rotting mind.

What an exercise in futility. Even if it worked, the uproar would shake the continent. Hiresha was helpless. With all her power and knowledge, she could do no more for the girl or her grieving mother.

The woman stood hunched over; her hands bent into claw fists; and her face trembled from the effort of not crying. “She was so close. Next full moon and she would’ve had a new name. She would’ve been a real person.”

The priest stood over the woman. Thorns pierced his blood-crusted ears. The jade sacrificial knife hung from his belt. “Remember your daughter with pride. She’s brought the rain’s gladness. Her blood is the richness that blooms from the ground and from wombs.”

The mother did not reply.

He turned his staff over. Within was a void full of seeds, which plinked downward in a sound like rain as he walked away.

The mother leaned toward Hiresha and spat. Hiresha let the glob hit her robe. “The King’s Spear chose her because of you,” the mother said. “He told the priest to kill her.”

“Did he say why?” Hiresha tucked the girl’s hair behind her ear. The curative amethyst Hiresha had placed against her scalp was gone. It had been cut off.

“Nahui died because of you. You did something to her. What?”

“Not enough,” Hiresha said.

The King’s Spear was watching Hiresha, not trying to hide his grin. His foul little mind must have its speculations. After she left the crying mother to approach, he handed Hiresha the curative amethyst.

She flicked off the dead skin from the gemstone. “The girl reported that this came from me.”

“Her strength came back, but not from no god. She only had your stone.”

Hiresha couldn’t blame a six-year-old for breaking her promise. However, Hiresha had thought only her own future was at risk.

“Should’ve told Macco you had some magic,” the King’s Spear said. “Shouldn’t have wasted it on a girl too young to be people. Not when Macco’s stuck out in the wilderness.”

What Hiresha had to determine was if he had told anyone else about the enchanted crystal. If her secret could die with him, then it would. “Maybe I will share my magic, if no one—”

“‘Maybe’ nothing. You will.” He waved his poisoned spear with its green band in front of her face. “You think you can choose? ‘No, the gods can’t kill this girl.’ ‘No, I need the crystals sooner.’ ‘No, I won’t help Macco become the king’s greatest warrior.’”

“You think I can make you mighty?” Hiresha asked. “And that having this power, I still must do as you say?”

“Yes,” the King’s Spear said. “And admit it, you hexed the maize yourself. You tricked the king into thinking you saved his city. You can’t trick Macco.”

The pus brain, he didn’t seem to understand what an enchantress was. He knew she had magic. He knew she worked with gemstone. He couldn’t connect those two points with a line. If he did, he would try to kidnap her. With an enchantress hostage, the King’s Spear could position himself to become king.

She would let him live, for now. Her secret was safe with his stupidity.

Hiresha held up the amethyst crystal. It glowed in her palm as she unraveled its enchantment. “I can see there’s no fooling someone of your intellect. Take this. Push it up your ass so no one can steal its magic from you.”

He blinked at the amethyst. “Won’t it come out? With the shit.”

“You merely have to pick it out of your feces and slide it back in.”

The muscles of his abdomen twitched and contracted to the point that he no longer appeared to boast a potbelly. “And the magic will keep Macco safe in battle.”

No, the crystal would do nothing. She would not prolong his worthless life. Hiresha was not inclined toward murder, yet she was tempted to think the world would be improved with Macco removed from the equation. “I can promise you this: In your next battle, you’ll be above all other men, and none shall kill you.”

“Wait.” He frowned. “What about the battle after that?”

“Then you’ll need another crystal from me, of course.” How tempting to give him a bigger gemstone, but then she shouldn’t focus on such pettiness. She had more productive things to do and only twelve hours in her day.

On her way back to her banyan fortress, she stopped in front of an elephantine tree. Two assassins were hiding behind it.

She paused to analyze how she knew. She had no right to be able to hear their breathing. Yet she could. No person should’ve been able to pick out the motes of light reflecting off their blades onto the nearby ground. Hiresha could count them, five to seven depending on the shifting canopy. She might even be able to feel body heat diffusing through the misty coolness. Her gem-studded palms itched from the enchantments in nearby blades and armor.