Magic Banquet (14 page)

A bronze sickle flashed. Janny hacked the
knife downward. Her face opened in toothy hunger much like the
visage of the Taotie demon.

Solin’s crutch smacked the knife away before
it could strike. It skidded off along the tiles, blade
spinning.

Janny dropped the bottle to clutch her hand.
“Ack! Why’d you do that to a poor, old young woman? Have to keep
eating. It hurts so much, and she wouldn’t have felt anything, the
blade was so sharp.”

Solin spider-walked on his crutches to Aja.
“I’ll help you.”

He didn’t carry a jade bottle. He had spoken
with a rope of saliva dangling from his teeth.

Aja stumbled behind the screen of koi fish.
“Everyone, stay away!”

Her foot sweated a smell better than bacon
fried in coconut oil, and Aja bowed over, her mouth yawning open as
it neared her toes.

No! She pinched herself.

“
Whap!”
A dark palm smacked against
the other side of the rice paper. The partition tipped over, and
Janny bounded around in pursuit, chasing Aja back onto the
carpet.

“Janny, stop,” the swordsman said. He stood
with his blade out, over the empress. She hadn’t been covered with
unguent, but she didn’t smell like anything. The empress hadn’t
eaten the dumplings.

Aja scuttled around the empty tray and
reached for a jade bottle.

“Don’t worry, she’s old.” Janny pushed Aja
off balance. “Won’t need that foot much longer anyway.”

Aja fell, flipping over a platter of red
cakes and a cup of cashew milk. Both floated over her without
spilling. Hot fingers clamped onto her foot. No, this couldn’t be
happening. Aja and Janny could’ve almost been friends.

“Shame for it to go to waste.” Janny angled
the foot toward her mouth.

“Stop!” Aja jerked her leg, trying to pull
it from the younger woman’s grasp.

Beneath her plumpness, Janny had the
strength of a farm girl. She wrenched the leg into position. “Toes
fresh off the foot? Don’t mind if I—Oof!”

A hand with a six-sided tattoo gripped Janny
below her breasts. Solin yanked her overhead, flipping her onto the
carpet and into a chokehold with his crutch.

Janny started shivering and wailing. “Help!
He’s hexing me. Oh, god farts! Even my earlobes hurt.”

Aja scooted backward into the table. She
scrounged for a knife, found it, and shook it at the first guest to
approach her.

It was the lord. He didn’t cringe at the
blade or even seem to notice. His gloved hand with the sea-monster
embroidery held out a bottle of jade. “My tenacious taffy, it would
be a shame if you died so early in the evening. Of all of us, you
have the least, but you fear losing it the most.”

Aja looked at the unguent in his grasp. She
looked at him. Back at the bottle. She extended her hand, fingers
shaking. Taking something from him was like reaching between the
spring-loaded blades of a dog trap.

She swiped away the bottle. The lord lounged
on the tabletop beside her. The other guests stayed away.

“Guess it’s my own fault,” she said. “For
not covering this foot.”

“Not in the least, my dumpling. It’s the
fault of Janny’s appetites and the Chef’s recipe. Never accept
responsibility. To do so is to lose the boundlessness of
youth.”

Aja pulled her leg onto the table’s
interweaving pattern of flowers and moths. Over her foot she lifted
the jade bottle—no, that was the bronze knife.
What if I eat
just one toe?

Gritting her teeth, she set down the blade.
She shoved it out of reach.

Aja wouldn’t blame Janny and the others for
trying to eat her. Not much anyway. The Chef was the one who had
cooked such terrifyingly delicious dumplings. He served dishes
without preparing his guests for the full dangers. The Chef must
want someone to die.

The lord brushed off his pant leg as though
there was a crumb on it. “We want people to crave us but not to
carve us. Usually, the distinction is clearer.”

“Yes, I don’t want to be adopted into a
stomach.”

The jade lid was fashioned to look as if a
salamander’s tale plugged the bottle. She pulled and watched the
greasy globs ooze out. That ick would ruin her foot’s scent. How
wrong, like pouring mud over a wedding cake.

“Yuck!”

“If not as a meal,” the lord asked, “how
would you prefer people see you?”

“Not old.” Aja spread the unguent between
her toes. She had to hold in a whimper. “I’m hoping the phoenix
will give me my body back. I want to be known as the woman who ate
a phoenix.”

“It’s a sorry thing to be known by what you
eat,” the lord said.

“Everyone knows the empress dines on three
banquets a day.” Aja nodded to the prone girl.

“But that’s not what Ryn is renowned
for.”

“That’s right, she has her jewelry.” Aja
gazed at the turquoise sweep of bird amulet that lay unclasped
beside the empress.

“I overindulge in dining and dress everyday,
so you can believe me when I say it’s no way to live.”

He had to be teasing her. Aja worked the
unguent over her heel.

“The empress isn’t in her best form,” the
lord said. He watched the swordsman pushing on her chest, to help
her breathe. “But she doesn’t inspire that sort of slavishness
through what she eats or wears. It’s her flare.”

Aja greased her last toe, then unfolded a
napkin, wiping her hands. Would the lord ever tell her something of
use? “What does the empress do?”

“When her favorite bird died, she sang to it
for three days. Not in mourning, but to resurrect with sound, to
siren the soul back from the afterlife. Her voice made the court
weep. And at the sunset of the third day, the bird came back to
life.”

“Really?”

“Well,” the lord said, “a heartbroken
servant may have snuck the dead bird from its cage and replaced it
with a live one. It’s no less a triumph.”

“She had a servant to help her.”

“Servant, friend, stranger, they all
would’ve done it after she astounded them with days of
soliloquies.”

“But I don’t sing,” Aja said.

“Of course you will, except perhaps not with
sound.”

The redness of the lord’s coat left with
him. She sat alone on the black-and-white table.

Aja returned to her pillow seat to munch on
a half-dozen bean cakes. They seemed plain and safe, anything to
dull her hunger until the next course. Crumbs rained down. They
floated over the carpet, and magic returned them to a corner of her
plate. Aja emptied the crumbs onto her palm, then ate them, too.
That fox-spit essence must’ve done something to her. Her stomach
was a quivering emptiness as if she hadn’t eaten in a week.

She had time to think, and, yes, she had no
urge to sing her way to greatness. Spending three days to bring a
bird back to life was just silly.

Aja would be accepted for something that
mattered. Whatever that was, she first had to live long enough for
people to hear of it. She needed to survive the Banquet.

That’s it!
Aja would live through the
night, and she would make certain every other guest did, too. This
would be the first Banquet where no one died. Not herself, not
Solin, not even Janny—as tempting as that was after being chased by
her knife. Aja would protect them, just like she would if they were
related. Maybe by the last course they would see her in the same
way.

Aja didn’t need to be adopted. She would
make her own family of survivors.

A Midnight Banquet where everyone
lives.
Now that would be amazing, with courses like these.

The Chef had outsmarted her so far. He had
overpowered her with rich flavors. His meals were dangerous, but
they could be resisted. The lord had proven that with his self
control. And they could be eaten safely. Solin had finished most of
his chimera stew while staying human.

Aja thought back to when Old Janny had eaten
the Apple of Youth. The Chef had not warned her against the seeds,
but he had told her to eat its flesh with care. He had hinted at
how dining on kraken would enliven them without saying that they
would lose control, that the meat would make them drunk.

“The Chef’s not lying to us,” she said.
“He’s just trying to trick us.”

No one paid attention. She was but a crone
who no longer reeked of dumpling. But she could hope they would
mind her. They would have to and soon. Two golems marched from the
kitchen carrying a regal bird on a platter. Its every feather was a
different color.

The Chef strode after the dish to introduce
it, and Aja met his eye. He seemed to nod to her with his oily dome
of a head as if in challenge.

I accept,
she said to herself,
our
lives against your food.

Eighth Course:

PHOENIX ON ICE

SERVED WITH STARLIGHT YOGURT

“A breach in dining etiquette will kill
you,” the Chef said. Peering downward as he always did from his
height, his eyes appeared to shut. He turned his nearly closed eyes
on Janny. “Some of you have approached the prior courses with
irreverence.”

The Chef gestured to Aja, then the empress.
Ryn lay so still that she looked less alive than the bird
entrée.

“Others have eaten heedlessly. I must warn
you to dine on these later courses more seriously. As meals,
they’re more astounding. As dangers, less forgiving.”

The swordsman asked, “The kraken was
forgiving?”

“The magic in the phoenix is far more
potent.” The Chef swept a hand before a rainbow bird resting on a
mound of ice.

Feathers of mauve and cerulean fanned out in
its tail. The ruffles of its breast were indigo and raspberry. Its
head was tucked beneath wings the hues of burgundy and lime.

The bird looked whole, but Aja thought it
had to be dead. That poor, beautiful animal. It shouldn’t have had
to die. A barb of feeling stuck in Aja’s throat even as her gut and
every other part of her tingled. Eating the bird would restore her
to youth. Aja would regain her life, her future.

She would, if she was cautious. Aja leaned
forward to listen to every word the Chef spoke.

“The phoenix must first be chilled with a
banshee’s scream. Then I stew it for seven days. The cooking must
be done at low temperature. Otherwise the phoenix will burst back
to life and fly from the oven.”

The feathers glossed with lamp flames, but
the bird also shimmered from within. Its hues rippled in patterns
of dancing fire. Flickers ran along its swan neck and
peacock-length tail. Great heat and life throbbed in that bird,
caged by a thin layer of ice and death.

“I balance the phoenix’s immortal fire with
century-old ice from a peak so high and cold its snow never melts.”
The Chef cut into the phoenix with a crescent-shaped knife. “Salt
from crocodile tears removes the taste of guilt. After stewing, the
plucked bird has its feathers replaced.”

The blade severed the bird in half without
so much as a sound. From the hollow of the phoenix’s breast, flames
fluttered out. Flashes of orange and red beat over Solin and the
other guests. One landed on Aja’s arm. She pulled back, then saw it
was only a butterfly, trapped inside the bird and now free. Its
wings swayed in an out with the gleam of silk. The butterfly
tickled her. What a bright delight.

“From death comes life.” The Chef served the
phoenix. On Aja’s plate he placed the bird’s curving neck, each
feather a different grain of color. The Chef’s closed eyes held
hers locked. “And from life comes death.”

He left for the kitchen. The swordsman
called after him, “Hold on, what about phoenix etiquette? Do we eat
the feathers?”

The Chef disappeared down the stair without
answering. In the silence, the lord spoke.

“You never eat the feathers. He would’ve
told us if we should.”

The lord pulled out a sheath of feathers,
and in his hand they all turned black. Janny scrabbled the feathers
from her dish, tossing them overhead like a festival of color.

Aja tugged out the fuzz of neck feathers.
Could it be this simple? The Chef had warned that a mistake from
now on would end in death. He must’ve told how to avoid the peril
while misleading them straight into the quicksand. Aja had to
figure out the trick before anyone ate.

“Wait,” she said.

The swordsman lifted a phoenix drumstick to
his face. “I’ll try it first. If it sits in me smooth, the empress
will get her taste of life.”

“Would you stop already?” Aja dropped her
gaze to the platter of ice, a pile of snow on a plate of metal. The
dish was made of chrome serpents joined together. The ornamental
snakes tangled about each other, belly up in poses of death.

The swordsman plucked out one last feather
and bit into the drumstick. The red juice that trickled down his
chin shone like sparks.

“No!” Aja leaned up to her feat. They had to
stop ignoring her. She had to be more than a nameless street person
to them. Braver, smarter. She reached into the platter and threw
snow at his face.

He wiped slush from his chin and spoke from
one side of his mouth. “I’m all for snowball fights, but I need to
taste test this.”

“We have to figure out the trick first,” Aja
said.

“Took off the feathers, didn’t I? And look.”
He pointed to the plate beside him covered in orange peel, seeds,
and no fruit. “Not much time left for the empress.”

“I don’t think the feathers matter.” Aja
tossed some ice at Janny.

The woman in paisley had opened her mouth to
take a bite, and now she spluttered ice chips.

Aja continued, “The Chef must’ve
said—No!”

The swordsman swallowed.

Defeat slimed its way down Aja’s throat. She
would see him die, perhaps burst into flames, and she’d fail at
another promise to herself.

Flames.
She glanced at the snow she
gripped, stinging her fingers.
And ice. That’s it!