Dark Lord's Wedding (29 page)

“Much depends on Celaise.” The lady gazed from the sun back down at him. “My dresses must be perfect.”

Could dresses make so great a difference? Yes, Celaise’s might.

The lady pulled herself to a rooftop then leaped away. Jerani was left to pad onward to find shade. Not even bees darkened the city’s sky at noon.

Celaise supposed the goldsmith had long gone to sleep. The kiln still blazed. It was well her viper dress wouldn’t catch fire. She entered the workshop with her blue and red gloves crossed over her chest.

“Now, Miss Barrows,” the lady said.

The maid checked the fit of her hair turban then picked up tongs. She lifted a crucible from the fire. “Hotter than peppers on your woman bits.”

Celaise wouldn’t go near her. If Miss Barrows tripped, the gold would splash out and burn to the bone.

“You sure this is where you want me to pour it?” Miss Barrows asked.

The lady stood over a tub of water and spread her hands.

Miss Barrows tipped molten metal between them. A tongue of blinding heat dipped downward. It caught midair. The lady flourished her jeweled fingers, and the gold stretched and spun. It lengthened and sharpened. The lady was really forging it with her mind. Celaise’s eyes stung and teared from the brightness, but she couldn’t look away.

The lady dropped her hands, and the gold plunged into the water with a screaming hiss. She had made something jagged. Celaise would have to wait for a better look. Too much steam rose from the tub.

A tingling pressure on her brow warned Celaise that the lady was looking. Her eyes seemed to glitter.

“How is Jerani?” the lady asked.

“His fever’s broken.” Celaise had to go back to him before he woke. They should share dreams.

The lady nodded. “Have you finished my spider-silk dress?”

“It’ll be ready.”

“Oi!” Miss Barrows slid the crucible back into the furnace. “You haven’t talked with Lord Satin-Pants about any of your dresses, have you?”

“Why would I? I know which designs are best.”

“He trusts you,” Celaise said.

“You as well,” the lady said.

Did he? He shouldn’t. Celaise would pour a bellyful of molten gold in his mouth if she could. The lord father had dragged Jerani to a city that hated men. No, Celaise had lured him here. She was the lord’s hold on Jerani.

Her body didn’t fit her dress. She was bloated and empty on the inside.

The lady flicked her fingers at the tub, and up splashed a key. The gold was pockmarked, with parts of the handle and shaft missing. So the lady could make mistakes.

The lady grinned. She gestured to a chest, and out flew a parade of red stones. They looked like jasper, but brighter. Like blood. They fit into the gaps in the gold. It was forming into a whole key.

“You may take Miss Barrow’s measurements now,” the lady said.

Celaise tore her eyes from the key. She wrapped her measuring string around Miss Barrow’s chest.

“They’re sixty-two-oo.” Miss Barrows winked. “With an extra wahoo at the end.”

“The measurement is sixty,” the lady said.

Celaise held out the length of string. It was sixty.

“Don’t bother taking the rest,” the lady said. “I’ll tell you.”

“The dress will be too tight on the wicked sisters.” Miss Barrows adjusted her leather apron over her bosom. “Should fit right if I’m paying so much for it.”

The lady glanced from the key to Celaise. “For each bridesmaid’s dress you require a pound of flesh?”

Celaise clamped her hands over her wrists. She nodded. Making such a dress would take more than a pound of flesh, but it would help.

“Where’s the pound coming from? You ought to tell us.” Miss Barrows gripped her chest and backside.

“If the pound came from your brain, it’d scarcely be missed,” the lady said. “A small sacrifice for a magnificent dress.”

“A bride would say that.” Miss Barrows waved the tongs under the lady’s nose but didn’t smell too frightened. “Give a woman a fancy enough dress and she turns into a monster. No offense meant, young miss.”

Celaise couldn’t be offended. She was a monster.

But maybe she didn’t always have to be. She could forget for a moment or two, watching the lady craft masterpieces out of the air. Each key had a triangle handle, like the sign of mastery on the lord father’s brow. The gold and red teeth were crooked in the most beautiful way. The gemstone set into the key had a pattern, glyphs that could almost be read, shapes that could almost be known.

Celaise’s palms tingled to touch a key. “What do they open?”

“The upper circle of the wedding palace.” The lady pointed, and a key slid from a tabletop to Celaise. “This one is yours.”

Celaise folded her scaled gloves around the key. Its gold handle was divided into small triangles, and smaller red ones within those. The longer Celaise looked, the more there were.

“You will of course be one of my bridesmaids.”

“Me?” Celaise twitched away. The key hung in the air a moment before she snatched it again.

“I think it proper.”

“Ha!” Miss Barrows poured more searing metal. “Now how do you like the cost of the dress?”

Not very. Celaise had paid it far too often.

The workshop door creaked open, and in came three moths with eye-wings along with a woman. She smelled of minty anxiety. A gold chain crossed from her nose-ring to her earrings. She had several in each ear, all loops of gold.

“You can’t be here,” the woman said. “Not until I’ve been paid.”

“Payment was promised.” The lady swept the moths back outside with a flick of her hand. “And I will pay.”

The woman seemed to shrink in on herself before the lady’s stare. “I’m grateful my shop was pure enough for you, I’m sure, but I need stock now or I won’t have anything to work. And my daughter’s flight is coming soon, you see. I promised her the Sunburst.”

Celaise could only wonder if the lady understood all that. Her face stayed sharp and edgy, but she sweated the scent of mangoes in honey. Was she afraid she wouldn’t be able to pay the woman? Not very. The fear smell faded after the goldsmith retreated from her workshop.

The lady forged another key. “Miss Barrows, you may recall the pleasure house with the presumptive name of the Dragon’s Fire.”

“Remember some parts more than the others. Ho ho!”

“You’ll no doubt be surprised that the matron lied.”

“And she didn’t even charge us extra?” Miss Barrows winked and poured another stream of metal.

“I performed some research. The dragon in question is not a god of intimate lust. His principle duality is battle frenzy and tender commitment.”

“Love, you mean?”

“I most decidedly do not.” The lady gestured another finished key to lay itself on a stone bench.

Celaise clutched hers against her chest on the long walk back to the safe house. The gold in her hand still held the fury of the furnace. The heat was hidden deep in the metal, covered by a thin layer of solidness. It could burst apart in her hand with searing force.

She had to believe she should throw away the key. Celaise should run away with Jerani. Maybe the lord father wouldn’t hunt them down and eat them to the last suck of bone marrow.

She shivered. The only warmth in her was the key in her hand. Even if she could leave, she wouldn’t. She needed to see what the key opened. She had to go to this wedding, to be there, to see the guests, what they wore, who they were, for them to see her with Jerani, her and her gowns.

Celaise would be at the wedding. Even if it killed her.

“
People disdain gifts and insist on what they cannot have. The kings would never come if we thrust invitations upon them.”

“
That has the stink of overstatement, yet I can see we’d devalue the keys by throwing them at the feet of kings. We must first deny them, while giving recourse to acquire the invitations.”

“
The hardest word to pronounce correctly to a king is ‘no.’ We’ll need an emissary of highborn talent, rich persuasion, irrefutable beauty, and generously good taste in coats.”

“
Why, Tethiel, what a pity that on every qualification you fall short.”

“
Nothing gives me greater confidence than your discouragement. I’ll be gone with the dawn to capture kings.”

Tethiel rode toward Gangral. A fence of puny tree trunks surrounded the city. Walls built against fear were never high enough.

“They keep out jungle monsters,” he said, “but they throw open the gates to us? How disrespectful.”

Eyebiter snorted and whisked his mane at the city’s flies.

The dandies trotted after on their mounts. Pall spoke with his melodious hoarseness. “Maybe the wall’s to keep the jungle safe from men.”

People stooped in the market to sniff vanilla reeds for signs of mold. Slaves bent low in the weight of their spiked collars. Brass points curved from their necks toward their faces, and the poor delicacies had to stare down their doom. The entire city was rotting, crumbling, and smelling sweetly of the despair of crowded isolation.

Tethiel rode Eyebiter up the palace stairs. The courtyard tiles were in good taste. They showed the wailing faces of the king’s fallen adversaries. Tethiel dismounted, and his right knee exploded with a balefire of pain.

Knees were such a nuisance. It was a wonder people got anywhere with them. He would spend the next month riding from kingdom to kingdom, and after that he might not be able to walk. For now, the agony contracted to a humming point, thanks to the black wine beating from his heart.

He wore his fifth-best face into the palace, along with a crimson loincloth and a cape of jaguar black. He was announced as a messenger from the Lady of Gems.

The throne was broad and sculpted like the rippling wall of a cave. Stalagmites jutted behind the king, who sat with his oiled belly and the usual assortment of pale jade and terror-bird feathers.

On the king’s right side lounged a Green Blood. Here was beauty that transcended gender. They wore no trinkets, no clothes, only their glistening skin of blue, deathly blue, exquisite blue, speckled with a madness of black spots. Tethiel cherished the idea that Hiresha had also glimpsed the Green Blood’s vibrant danger. She had been here. If she had not seen, she had been impoverished.

A slave dropped a hot stone in a cauldron. Out hissed a mist of steam that a second servant fanned onto the Green Blood. They sported a fanged yawn. They didn’t bother to swat at a fly that landed on their neck. The fly fell off, dead after the first sip of the Green Blood’s sweat.

Tethiel addressed not them but only the meager man on the throne. “I bring the formal announcement of the Lord of the Feast’s betrothal to the Lady of Gems. He, you know. She, you’ve met by a different name. She saved your maize crops to the north. You rewarded her with an amethyst mine. She crafted a gemstone dragon.”

“Then it’s true.” The King of Gangral set aside his pet sloth and sat up in his throne. The Green Blood beside him didn’t stir. “She is an enchantress from the unbalanced lands.”

“They were afraid of her power.”

“The Empire is full of scribblers and she-men,” the King of Gangral said. “But this Lady of Gems, she hid herself from my eye. Is she beautiful?”