Dark Lord's Wedding (17 page)

“For what reason?”

“She doesn’t think she’s worthy.”

“The Purests are more like monks than priests, is that right?”

“What’s the difference?” Minna asked.

“A monk secludes himself to gain a greater understanding of his gods. Hers, in this case.”

“Definitely that, then. They pretend men don’t exist.”

“I’m certain the Purests would not phrase it in those terms.”

“They own the city, anyway.”

A Purest would have the influence to sanction the wedding. Hiresha might well decide it should take place in the City of Gold.

Hiresha left Minna behind to enter the Sapphire Palace. Sadly, the glass house was not full of jewels but only plants and bees. These were not honeybees. They had no bands. They were dark bees. To be precise: blue bees or sapphire bees. Their exoskeleton glistened in iridescence of purple, azure, and teal. The insects would resemble flies if not for the sleeker abdomen covered on the bottom with pollen.

Hiresha had seen the species only once before. It had been in her other facet. A blue bee had lighted on her jeweled hand during her speech to a crowd of thousands. It had stayed there, fanning its wings, never trying to sting her. Hiresha had been meant to come to the City of Gold. Fate flowed around her in an endless rushing, and a vibration in her chest matched the buzz of the sapphire bees.

They whirled around her as she walked beneath apple trees and between blueberry bushes. The shrubs were not in season for fruit, and their flowers bloomed red.

Footpaths wandered through the glass house. Hiresha went straight to the Purest. A perfume of peppery sweetness led Hiresha on. She met no one else and was alone with the woman.

“Lord Tethiel promised you would come,” the Purest said. She sat on a padded bench, facing the beach windows. Bees walked over the nectar trails embroidered into her robes.

Hiresha thought her intriguing. The Purests were not to acknowledge men, yet this one had spoken with Tethiel. She might have broken her vows. Any pact made with him would be sacrilegious. Beneath her perfume came a whiff of rot.

The woman did have a fine head of feathers. A plumage of pastel blues was braided into her hair. The glistening spikes fluttered in the ventilation breeze as she spoke with a voice of resolution and quiet strength.

“I cannot hide myself from my sisters any longer. I cannot reveal myself. I am losing my hold on Purity.”

Hiresha passed to the other side of the bench. The Purest sat straight and showed no symptoms of pregnancy. She wasn’t with child. That would’ve been the height of awkwardness. Celibate women did tend to have remarkable fertility.

The Purest had a more obvious issue. A sleep mask covered her face. In place of her eyes were painted two blue flowers. From under the mask oozed tears and pus.

“You have eyeblight,” Hiresha said. She had seen blind men carrying water in the city. They had dragged their hands along the walls of the open-air sewers. A girl with the early stages of the same condition had run alongside Hiresha on the street. The child had wiped her tearing eyes with one of Hiresha’s yellow ribbons. Perhaps the girl had hoped the Lightening magic in the cloth would cure her. Eyeblight could make anyone desperate.

“I am infected by Strife.” The Purest removed her mask.

A tattoo of a sapphire bee glittered on the woman’s cheek. Real gemstone had been used in the pigments. Hiresha took it as another sign she had come to the right place. Tethiel had been right. Risking coming here had been correct. Caution would’ve left this woman suffering.

Her eyes had swollen shut. Black strands poked out at odd angles as if her eyelids had been sutured. The majority of her lashes would’ve turned inward, gouging her eyes.

This woman should have been sobbing. She had every right to be curled in a corner, wailing. Instead she rotated her blind gaze toward Hiresha, crying but composed. Her jaw had a forward jut, which gave her face a crescent bend.

When Hiresha touched the woman’s cheek, the Purest didn’t wince. Hiresha clasped her by the temples. The Purest placed her hands over each of Hiresha’s. The woman’s nails were all capped with lapis lazuli, with another gemstone-bee tattoo on her wrist. She had impeccable taste.

Magic seeped from Hiresha’s jewels into the Purest. Paired Attraction spells crushed all the infection units in the woman’s eyes. The inflammation was drained away. Hiresha folded the lashes right-side out. She flicked the globs of pus away into the bushes.

The Purest opened her eyes and focused. She could see; Hiresha had caught the illness early. Her eyes were reddened and scratched, and they shone like amber. Coppery strands wove forward and back within her irises. The citizens might’ve said her eyes were the color of honey.

“Your eyes will regenerate over the coming days.” Hiresha traced a finger over the smoothness of the Purest’s cheek and enchanted the gemstone in her bee tattoo. How convenient. “You’re free of disease and equal to your fellow Purests.”

Unless she had spoken to Tethiel, a male. If Hiresha understood this woman’s beliefs, then she was forsaken.

“I will cure your city of eyeblight.” Hiresha had only tended to the rich in the Empire. Now that she was free, she would do more. She would, and soon, before the Dominion’s warriors could catch up to her. No matter what else happened, her magic would accomplish something worthwhile. A warm brilliance filled Hiresha with tickling sparks of green and red. “A boat will bring amethyst crystals down the Gargantuan River. They will extract the illness from anyone who holds them.”

The enchantments would also cure crotch blight. The infection units were the same. However, the Purest might not care to hear of diseases spread by lust, especially if she had contracted the eyeblight by touching the wrong sort of someone. Of course, a virulent fly could have landed too close to her eye. Plenty of those buzzed among the bees of this city.

The Purest cupped Hiresha’s hand, running her fingers over the jewel piercings. “The only magic we know came from Strife.”

“The hexing.”

“Yours is a magic of beauty and harmony.”

The Empire had wished to believe the same of enchantment, to the exclusion of innovation. “Mine is the magic of dreams.”

“And of what do you dream?”

“The limitless.”

“Could your magic harm another? Could it kill?”

Hiresha had destroyed the infection to save the Purest, yet she was referring to hurting people. “I’d prefer not to.”

“We all carry Strife inside us.” The Purest coaxed Hiresha to sit beside her. Their hips touched. It was too close. The Purest stroked a finger down Hiresha’s hair, a lock of silver. “Does your curse blood yet flow?”

“Are you asking after my age?” Hiresha opened a space between them by sliding back and facing the Purest. “Or my menstrual blood?”

“The blood shed from our wombs by Strife’s curse.” The Purest slid closer, cupping Hiresha’s face with her palm. She was certainly free with her touching. “Have you reached the age of harmony when the curse flow ceases?”

“My magic has stopped the bleeding cycle for years.”

The Purest smiled a gemstone smile. Her false teeth were the dark blue of lapis lazuli. They glittered with white crystals and flecks of pyrite. “You do have power over Strife.”

“Is Strife a god?”

“No, a betrayer. The first hexer.” The Purest leaned close enough that her words puffed against Hiresha’s cheek. “Once there were only women. We lived in harmony, drinking from each other’s breasts and bearing only girls. All was peace.”

The bombardment of doctrine made Hiresha’s intestines quiver, not that she had the right to judge. In her homeland of Morimound, priests read the future in the webs of orb-weaver spiders. The rite tended to horrify other peoples in the Empire.

Hiresha didn’t embarrass herself with a grimace. She exercised her skill in speechcraft by saying nothing.

“Then Man came into the Garden of Purity. His name was Strife.”

“You teach that all evil came into the world through man?” Now that Hiresha had said it aloud, it seemed not entirely devoid of truth.

The woman nodded, and three feathers dipped over her brow like blue bangs. She spoke with a measured grace as if she painted each word with calligraphy. “Now Strife rules the Lands of Loam with blade and threats. I must try to see beyond and remember the better world of our foremothers. I will never be Pure. I am only Purest Elbe.”

“And I am Hiresha.”

The Purest slid her arms around Hiresha. The embrace held them too close to see eye to eye. “Lord Tethiel told me of you and your gems, Hiresha. I had no reason to believe but every reason to hope.”

A Purest couldn’t possibly admit to knowing him to anyone else. “We hope to wed, and this city will be our venue. Your sapphire bees appeared in my prophetic dream.”

Either the other facet was a dream, or this one was. Hiresha didn’t lie. The wedding had to be here. No precedent had been set in this place of kings suppressing free thinking with weapons. These citizens would listen to her.

The Purest said, “I was beginning to think you were not the kind of woman to believe in signs.”

“I trust in my intuition, and she speaks through dreams.”

“Then you must already know about Lord Tethiel,” the Purest said. “She is a Feaster.”

Hiresha leaned away and stood. She had not heard the Purest incorrectly. In one breath the woman had called Tethiel a lord and in the next a “she.”

The Purest rose with Hiresha. They were of the same height, or shortness rather. “She does what she can to fight Strife. Lord Tethiel only permits her Feasters to dazzle the willing.”

“You keep saying ‘lord.’ Perhaps I am misunderstanding your language. Does that word imply feminine?”

“How could a lord be anything but a lady?”

That did explain a great many things, while casting even more in a dubious light. Tethiel was a Feaster but also an illusionist and a deceiver. He must’ve lied to the matriarchs of this city, in the worst way. They thought they were dealing with a woman. In truth, they were breaking their vows.

He always did this. His treacheries might end when he stopped his Feasting, yet Hiresha could hardly trust him to keep that promise. She might have to break off this engagement. He had done enough harm already to this city.

The Purest still clasped Hiresha’s arms. “If you prefer, I will call her Lady Tethiel. You are the Lady of Gems, are you not?”

“Indeed,” Hiresha said. “Would the Purests object to my marrying Tethiel? You would be invited to the ritual, of course.”

“All of the city would celebrate. Too often, women from foreign lands have no understanding of Purity. They bind themselves to the
other
.”

“You mean, they wed the children of Strife?”

“Yes, marriage must only be between a woman and another woman.”

This was too much. Hiresha might explode in laughter or in screams. She would be marrying not only Tethiel but his lies.

“The City of Gold would welcome such a harmonious wedding as yours and Lady Tethiel’s.”

“Wonderful,” Hiresha said. “I cannot anticipate anything going wrong.”

Hiresha had to question if she should’ve agreed to come to this particular street.

“You’ll not regret tonight.” Miss Barrows was bouncing with excitement. She had adopted the local dress and gone bare-chested. “Or even if you do, you shouldn’t. Soon you’ll be a married woman with no chance at all for any wiggle-wiggle.”