Dark Lord's Wedding (25 page)

“What you’re saying is that you’ll never apologize for anything.”

“I make no apology for my perfection.” His coat glowed with a light all its own, and the flytrap plants behind him lit up with crimson mouths gaping around long leaflet fangs. One snapped closed on a firefly.

“At this point, the wedding is a large presumption,” Hiresha said.

“Not at all. I have every confidence in you and our plan.”

“Is this another of your ‘beautiful truths’?”

His smile was a twitch in the spindle corners of his lips.

Leaving his useless self for the moment, Hiresha examined her vat of purple lotuses. Their roots had strangulated twelve leeches, and the extra nutrients had allowed her creations to flourish. As she had anticipated, more leeches had hatched, and those smaller ones were all dead at the bottom. The lotus toxin had killed them. Her plant had successfully inhibited the vermin’s lifecycle at two points.

Amidst all the nonsense, she could continue to do good works. Next she would have to design a better way to distribute the lotus seeds. She also needed to secure her position via the wedding. Otherwise, the hordes of Dominion warriors may not be amenable to her tinkering with horticulture.

Hiresha turned back to Tethiel. “I’ll settle for knowing more of your plan.”

“I’d not tire you with details which already must be obvious.”

Tonight he was being more insufferable than average. That too might be part of his plan. His hesitance to speak of what he expected of her was also telling. Hiresha needed the cooperation of Purest Elbe. The surest way to secure it would be to break off the engagement with Tethiel. At least Hiresha had to appear willing to do so.

She thought Tethiel was making it all too easy with his deliberate inconsideration. Or maybe Hiresha was giving him too much credit. Either way, she had concocted something to put him on the defensive.

Six vials floated from her sleeve. Opalescence filled them, and they trembled with power. The vials circled her wrist with their crystal ends pointing outward.

“Distilled wild magic,” Hiresha said, “enough to break your habit of Feasting.”

“Why ever would I need that?” Tethiel winked. “I have full command of myself, as long as I do exactly as my magic wishes.”

“I look forward to meeting the real you.”

“As do I. It’s been too long.” Tethiel reached out with two fingers as sharp and slender as the bristles of a flytrap. He plucked one vial from the air. Then a second, and a third. “To know which thoughts are my own. To indulge in dreams again. To be free.”

He took all the vials then snapped his hands closed around them.

She distrusted his eagerness. Though he had promised to set aside his magic, she had trouble imagining him without power. No, that wasn’t accurate. He wouldn’t have illusions, yet he would still have his cunning, his persuasiveness. He could still rule.

“You were right about the need for a subordinate Feaster,” she said. “A ruler of the night who wasn’t isn’t ruled by passion. A check to greed, and balanced by one of my enchantments.”

“Celaise will serve,” he said.

“Perhaps.”

If he purged his magic, then Hiresha would outshine him in power. Their standing would mirror their beginning, when he had all the strength of the night behind him and she couldn’t stay awake. Now she felt the universe circling through her with stinging wonder, each moment planned since the birth of time. She and her enchantments had come further than the priests of the Fate Weaver could’ve ever believed.

Her dawn-stone amulet glimmered on Tethiel’s vest. Day by day he was growing into a healthier man. What a strain for her to think of someone handsome to his degree as unwell. Rottenness yet persisted. Her magic would root it out and replace it with youthful strength.

The garden glowed chartreuse beneath the fireflies. Hiresha walked over ponds choked with pitcher plants: some fat-lipped vases, others slender cylinders. One had shut, and it shuddered. The flickering insect trapped inside tinted the water the hue of periodot.

Hiresha’s amethysts lit up the mouths and leaf heads of the pitcher plants purple. “Do you mean to retire from public life?”

“Me, abandon the world? I’m not so cruel a lord of nightmares.” The vials glowed in one hand, and in the other he took Hiresha’s. “Giving up my passions will be a relief. I’ll lose myself in new and deadlier ones.”

He didn’t lean in to kiss her. Rather, it was as if she fell toward him. The ground tipped and unbalanced her. Pitcher plants whirled around, and now their pigments had taken on the fleshy hues of enflamed red. They looked like organs dangling on vines, slick and engorged.

Hiresha could’ve righted herself. She might’ve pushed away before her lips pressed against his, before a molten heat blasted through her, threatening to destroy her and melt her into gem shine.

Afterward they walked through the garden arm and arm. Bats flitted overhead. The fireflies danced among the plants, going out one by one as they were smothered by leaves or drowned in digestive slurry.

Hiresha’s body shivered and throbbed as if she were recrystallizing. The feeling likely came from the potency of Tethiel’s magic. If he purged it then she might never experience something so intense again, except of course for epiphanies.

Tethiel rolled the crystal stopper of one vial against the crimson of his lips. “Would that I could partake now, but it’s too soon to transfer power. I must hold the dragon’s reins a while longer.”

“I do question if Celaise is strong enough to rule.”

“Never doubt her willpower. Look how long she’s left Jerani alive.” He slipped the vials into his coat. “The only snag in the succession is the Bleeding Maiden. She’ll seize the night.”

“You cannot merely quash her?”

“Smothering my strongest child will only unite the rest against me.”

“Or send them cowering.”

Tethiel kissed the gems on the back of Hiresha’s hand. “We must discredit the Bleeding Maiden first. The others believe she has the more delicious vision, that she’ll lay the best table. We must prove ours greater, or at least that the Bleeding Maiden uses the same shameful tactics.”

“Such as?”

“Conspiring with others against the family.” Tethiel pushed back her hair and kissed her ear. The sharpness of his teeth sent her nerves screaming down her neck, jolting around her sides and down past her waist.

Hiresha stopped to touch her ear. No, he hadn’t bitten it off. She had seen a man nibbling a woman’s ear in the pleasure house in city with Miss Barrows. A similar intimacy with Tethiel might be worth the time. She could test it before the wedding, though a garden dripping with dew wouldn’t be the ideal place for the experiment.

The foliage was growing. The sundew plants spread as large as ferns beaded with strawberry-sized globs of sticky death. The flytraps stretched skyward into snaggletoothed monsters. One snapped a bat from the air.

Though she couldn’t be certain, she doubted she would desire to couple with Tethiel every night, even every month. He could well have different designs. Hiresha should talk to him about the glandular expectations of their marriage. He peered at her with his midnight eyes narrowed. He had to have caught a whiff of her concerns. Now was the time to voice them.

She stepped away from him. “There’s something we must discuss.”

“Yes, my heart?”

No, this wasn’t correct. They should be holding hands when she asked. They needed to be close, yet she had stepped away. Hiresha would ask another time. They had more pressing concerns. “Regarding the Bleeding Maiden, I believe she instigated a clan into attacking my banyan fortress.”

“She does pride herself in sloughing all her work onto others.”

“I held one man secure under my dragon’s claw until he described how they had found the village. A woman in a dress of fire had pointed the way and promised they would capture many slaves. He described Celaise, who was comatose at the time. Another Feaster must’ve stolen her appearance.”

“I’ll question the Mimic,” Tethiel said, “but it likely wasn’t him. He’s still alive, and the Bleeding Maiden would never leave a witness behind.”

“You’ll have to prove her guilt to the other Feasters?”

“In an outraged, off-with-her-head sort of way. She might’ve also whispered to the matriarchs, made them doubt my perfect femininity.”

Hiresha slapped her hands together with a clink. “Then she’s responsible for this debacle.”

“Entirely. You and I are above suspicion.” Tethiel scratched the fibrous bristles on the chin of a monstrous plant.

A firefly lighted on his shoulder then flew off, leaving a speck of excrement. Hiresha stepped closer and brushed it off. She gazed into the bottomless depths of his eyes. Her abdomen muscles tightened, and her intestines pinched together. This would be difficult. “There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

“It must be deliciously embarrassing.”

Hiresha frowned and turned her shoulder to him. His teasing was one thing. Reading her mind was another. Together they pushed her too far. She would spite him by asking a different question. “You see gender as merely another coat, do you not?”

“An outfit for every occasion,” he said.

“Then I should like to see your other self. The Lady of the Feast.”

All the lights in the garden had died out except for hers and his. He stared at her. The corner of his lips curled up and looped around in an impossible spiral, too small for anyone but her to see.

“Then you will see her,” he said, “at the wedding banquet. I’ll wear her for a course or so.”

“Then I had best return to making the wedding a possibility.”

He bowed then stepped into the shadows behind a plant’s spiny maw.

“Wait.” Hiresha lifted one hand in a brilliance of amethysts. “If you truly were a woman, would you tell me?”

“Only if it’d please you.”

“
No respectable party begins before dusk.”

“
The wedding festivities may start in the evening. I and the ritual will follow after midnight.”

“
Entertaining such ferocious guests until then will be an ordeal. They’ll wish to see you, my heart, and the impatience of kings is a dangerous thing. Would it be possible to shift your dreaming, so that you may wake earlier to—”

“
Meddling with my dream inversion would work as long as I don’t awaken to find that you were a figment, this wedding a falsehood, and all this planning a waste.”

“
Well then, I hope no one dies from suspense.”

Celaise had no choice. She knew she needed to go out. In the skin-scour of the sun, in the burning, in the unjust brightness, under the dragon’s eye, she had to risk herself. Celaise had to risk everything.

The lord father should die. For making her do this, he should be nailed to a bridge for the gulls to eat out his eyes and piranha to strip the flesh form his legs. First the skin, then the meat, and his evil gristle too.

She stomped, cracked the floorboards. She scoured the walls with her fingernails. She pushed Jerani away then pulled him close.

Celaise was ready.

She went out under the Winged Flame. The sky rippled around the god, recoiling in desperation. The sun seemed so close. If she reached up, her arm would vanish into the furnace of the dragon’s mouth.

Her shawl could only help so much. The sun glared through it. Her poncho smothered her. She squinted out. On their right was a high wall stacked with beehives.

“Wrong way to the forest,” she said.

“Weren’t we going to the docks? For the canvas.” Jerani’s touch was too hot, but she held on to his arm.

“To the forest. To find where she sleeps.” The lord father wouldn’t warn Celaise again. Thinking about him made her hurt everywhere, like her flesh was trying to peel off her bones. His fangs cut to her screaming soul.

Celaise took her first deep breath after leaving the city. She gasped in the misty shade beneath the trees. The jungle air pulsed with insect wings and bird calls. She touched her face. She ran a hand over her legs. Still whole, still straight. The Winged Flamed hadn’t burned his curse into her again. Not yet.