Dark Lord's Wedding (49 page)

He wasn’t the only thing burning. A purple sun scorched closer.

“
Love was understood in Morimound to be a lie. Evil men from other lands used it to ruin daughters.”

“
That is most unfair, my heart. Love also ruins sons.”

“
We did believe in soul matches. When a diamond is cut, its octahedron is split into one large jewel and one smaller. These soul stones are traditionally displayed together, and we’d call a particularly suitable couple a soul match.”

“
That sounds too true to be poetic. One greater jewel and one lesser, and being dominant is so degrading. Which of us must be the larger?”

“
Neither.”

While Hiresha’s dress burned with illusion, Tethiel’s coat blazed with a fire all too real. As far as she could derive, he had been set alight and hurled from the ceiling. He fell toward his death. Someone wanted to kill Hiresha’s betrothed. They thought they could control her. The murderers believed they could decide whom she would marry.

Hiresha leapt, jewels gusting ahead of her. In a priceless constellation, she caught him. With precise spellcraft, she would save him.

He burned. She had dressed herself in amethyst flames. The synchronicity of the moment resonated into timelessness. The random movements of the universe had brought them together, fire and inferno. Pattern had resolved from entropy. Hiresha and Tethiel were a glimpse of unity. The coincidence chimed. Dream shine vibrated through her, across her back and rippling between the blue diamonds there, around to her flickering fingers, and then rebounding into her skull with a spiraling flash.

She had to tear off his coat, except his sleeve had melted into his right arm. An ooze of wildfire was eating its way up his wrist to the elbow. Whatever this magical slime was, she could find no hold on it with her power. The blinding sludge seethed past his elbow. She had to act or he would lose more than his arm.

Inaction was a choice. She could allow Tethiel to perish.

Fangs unfolded from him in all directions like a shattering obsidian orb. They would skewer outward in his death throws. In the other facet, a crater had opened beneath him in a pit that had engulfed a city. Here, his spreading teeth would lance through all the guests and everyone within a radius of some miles.

One spine bored through Hiresha’s waist with cold finality. It pierced through time and space, a tearing, rending nothing and everything. Hiresha pressed onward. She reached through the flames to touch Tethiel’s face.

“You’ll not die.” She rested her blue paragon on his brow, her pyramid diamond over his triangle stigmata. “Only sleep.”

She planned to remove him from pain then sever off his arm. He had to trust her to save him, not to deceive and destroy him like she had done to the dagger Feaster seventeen minutes before. Tethiel needed to withdraw his magic before he slayed everyone. He too must value his and her burning synchronicity.

Though his eyes were awash in darkness, he was gazing at her. She could sense it. A freezing brilliance crashed over her even as his lashes drooped.

He could die with power. Or he could trust her. This would decide everything.

Tethiel smiled. His fangs faded into a mist of possibility. The spines narrowed into dark threads then frayed into nothing. The one that had speared Hiresha now had never been. The whites returned to his eyes the moment before they closed.

She had him in deep sleep. The fate of the Lord of the Feast rested in her hands.

The liquid fire crawled to his shoulder while her thoughts raced. She could give him a peaceful end. Hiresha could expunge all worlds of the Lord of the Feast.

What a dreadful monotony that would be. Trying to align her facets would create a sickening infinity of mirror images. He had trusted her. She wouldn’t betray him.

Hiresha whisked him away from the gawkers in the reception hall. Down a crystal passage, they left the shredded remains of his coat in a smoldering trail. Gold thread curled in on itself. Cloth smoldered to ash.

Her jewels clamped his blood vessels at the shoulder. She pulled away his burning arm two seconds before the ooze would’ve melted its way into his chest.

The exposed arm socket was not overly becoming. She folded loose skin over it then bound the wound closed. On his remaining hand he had lost a finger, which seemed careless. The stump bled on his hand, and she tended it as well. She deadened various nerve fibers then released him from his dreamless prison.

He did not wake at once. They floated over the maze of thorns. The crystals had pierced enough guests that veins of blood branched throughout the room. Judging by a filigree of green amidst the red, the Green Blood must have misstepped.

Tethiel’s charred limb smelled of burnt meat and tarnished copper. Even the bones had split under the heat. As she couldn’t salvage it, she hurled it to the farthest corner. Making Tethiel see that as the first thing upon waking would be a cruelty. Fortunately, as a Feaster he wouldn’t smell his own charred flesh, only her fears for him.

His eyes snapped open. He peered at his right truncated shoulder and the space where his arm would be. He gazed back to her with grave seriousness. “Then there was no saving the coat?”

“Tell Celaise to bring the one in my dressing room. I designed it for you and hadn’t yet decided if you deserved it.”

“And now you are certain?”

“Certain that you’re in need of a coat.” A smile edged its way onto her face.

“I fear I won’t fit it.” He nodded down to the missing arm.

“How irresponsible of a groom.” Hiresha pointed to his missing finger. “And how did you lose that?”

“I believe Guile stole it.” He peered through the space between his smallest finger and pointer. “Her idea of a jest. Lucky we will exchange necklaces, not rings.”

“You’d dare put on an enchanted necklace? It could make you forever young.”

He met her gaze. Though they levitated above the blood thorns without moving, everything seemed to spin in a scintillation of half-seen facets. He wore only a charred vest. Spectral vestments flowed around him in robes of magnificent shadow.

“Yes.” His four-fingered hand reached to hers. “I will wear it.”

“For how long?” She pulled back and folded her arms into the sleekness of her flames. The fire gown fluttered against her skin, cool as a breeze, hot as expectation.

“My heart, tonight I’ve kissed death, and after that flirtation I’m more than satisfied committing to you.”

“Forever?”

“That does sound like a long time, but I can be happy knowing murder can snatch away our bliss at any moment. That will make it ever precious.”

Hiresha’s heart pressed against her lungs and diaphragm as if it could fill her entire chest with warmth. Yes, she might marry him. His absent arm was a small matter; she could regenerate it in mere weeks. He and she could follow through with their plan to the end.

“I didn’t want to live forever until I met you,” he said.

No one had ever told her something so lovely. She thought she might reach out and take his one remaining hand. He lifted it to her with the mar of the missing finger. She might fold his between both of hers and kiss him.

Instead she stepped back. “First, I must confess. I killed you in another world.”

He did not blink. “I am certain I deserved it.”

“If I’ve seemed distant tonight, that’s the reason.”

“You were right to tell me, my heart. Marriages would be happier on the whole if every husband believed his wife capable of killing him.”

Hiresha raised a palm to keep him a step distant. Heat shimmered over her hand in the mirage of a glove. “In my other facet you were terrorizing the night with the Bleeding Maiden. You must promise you’ll not do the same here.”

“I’d never stoop—”

“If I don’t marry you. You must swear you’ll still oppose her.”

He traced his hand over his shoulder stump. “I would succumb, I fear, willing or not.”

“You could purge yourself with the wild magic. Then I’d arrange your stay among the Bright Palms until you could be certain of your safety.”

“Nothing is more grim than a certain future.”

“You have to promise nonetheless,” she said, “or the latent threat forcing me to accept you will compel me to refuse.”

“Ha-ha!” He gazed around him to the thicket’s eighteen-thousand points of crystal. Each thorn contained its own bramble with just as many branching veins: patterns within patterns, facets within facets. He straightened the blackened hem of frayed fabric over his stump. Bits of his coat crumbled off.

He must answer her soon. Each second of delay forced her to envision a new lifetime apart.

Tethiel yet said nothing.

“Speak now if you’ll not promise.” Her jewels tore through the air around her in jagged orbits.

“I swear,” he said, “and you already know I would keep my word. Allowing you to put me to sleep meant surrendering myself to the deadliness of your decisions.”

Yes, Hiresha could believe him. This wedding had included a few mishaps, yet it could still be one-hundred-karat perfect.

He raised his hand, now with five fingers. She suspected he had covered the blemish with illusion for her sake. She took it. They embraced, and he wrapped two arms around her. Her gown didn’t burn him. His touch brought the ache of a forgotten dream that would one day be remembered, the shrill contentment of a fleeting delight that would come again.

She could trust him, unless he had spoken and done what he had only to trick her. Wearing her last dress, she hadn’t been at all certain she had wished to marry him. One change later, and everything was different. Perhaps she only believed he had lost an arm to fire. He might have deceived her into thinking she’d had him asleep and helpless, when he had been in command the entire time.

The illusion would have needed to have been an intricate perfection, a work of peerless complexity baffling in its scope, and as subtle as a falsehood learned too early and taken for granted for too long. In short, it would’ve required a true master, which he was.

Or she was. Tethiel could be a woman. She or he was, above all else, a mystery.

Hiresha pushed back to arms’ length.

“You’re right to fear, my heart. All I’ve done these last years has lured you into flying me above this thicket of glass. Do you believe you could drop me to a pointy death? You are wrong. You have no choice. Now you must marry me.”

Hiresha had to laugh. The alternative was too terrifying. “Then I must consign my ensorcelled heart to an eternity by your side.”

“Woefully so.” He extended his right arm for her to take, the one she had seen melt away to ashes and warped bones.

Hiresha took it. She grasped her destiny. The sapphire passageways of her future aligned into a streaming endlessness, down which she plunged. She was breathless and beyond breathing. She hadn’t any words planned but knew exactly what to say.

“Tethiel, I never wanted to rule the world, until I met you.”

“May we despair of ever being apart.”

Hiresha assumed she was grinning like an idiot. She had no right to be this happy. They had a staggering amount left to achieve before the end of the wedding. Then again, maybe a certain amount of lunacy could be allowed for the sake of joy.

“Before we return to the festivities, I too must make a confession,” Tethiel said, “one darker than yours.”

PART

III