Dark Lord's Wedding (22 page)

The hexer read the jaguar’s words. “The Obsidian Jaguar welcomes all outcasts, all the brave, all the cowardly, all traitors—”

“I am not a traitor,” Hiresha said.

“You are far from your land,” the hexer said.

“My land abandoned me,” she said.

The jaguar’s whiskers lifted, and black lips drew back from a grin. The left lower canine glinted gold.

“Then will you join the Dominion?” The hexer leaned on his crutches toward the jaguar’s writing. “With your magic, the sun will burn for another hundred centuries.”

“With my magic and the blood of thousands. You may well have forgotten to read that part.” Hiresha peered at the scrawl. The etched words were not too complicated. The paw lifted between segments of meaning. “If the jaguar knight sincerely asked for my consent, then my sincere decline will be accepted.”

“The jaguar knight doesn’t kneel to the Winged Flame, but his light casts the greatest shadows. This is his age. This is his land, and he must have his due.”

“And sacrificing his own people isn’t enough for him?”

The fur on the great cat’s nose wrinkled.

The hexer exchanged a look with the jaguar. “He is a greedy god.”

“At least you’re not too blind to see it,” Hiresha said. “I’ll not partake in his wars.”

“Then the sun god will bring the war to you. His warriors are coming.”

“Did they ask you to threaten me first?”

“The jaguar knight heard of you first. News travels fastest through the shadows.”

With them spouting maxims such as that, they must’ve heard of Tethiel. Hiresha wouldn’t mention him just yet. They should respect her first for her own power. “I can enchant, yet I am not an enchantress.”

She deadened the nerves in her hand and then Attracted the tissue apart. A cavity opened between the white-cord tendons and pebbly bones, a passage large enough for one of her amethysts to float through. The gem passed from one side of her hand to the other. The flesh folded back together, and her skin sealed. She didn’t allow a drop of her blood to fall to the soil.

The amethyst she balanced on her fingertip. “I am a woman, yet I’ll not be frightened. I can leap over the sea. I can craft my own dragons.”

The hexer’s hands tightened on his crutches, yet he didn’t startle. The jaguar also looked less than surprised. These two must’ve heard of her dragon. The jaguar knight yawned, tongue spearing out between teeth longer than fingers.

The jaguar wrote, and the hexer spoke. “You will battle the Dominion’s warriors?”

“That’s not what the jaguar knight said.” Hiresha pointed to the scratch marks. She had seen enough to guess the rudiments of the language. “It wasn’t phrased as a question.”

The hexer flinched. His guilt meant she had been right.

“If I’ll not submit, I must fight,” she said. “Perhaps I should expect no better outcome. I did come to your land. I do defy you. I only hoped you would respect my wishes, or if not them, my dragon.”

The jaguar knight sat on her haunches, or his, forelegs straight. The dark markings of the coat spread over the furry chest. The jaguar’s eyes were level with Hiresha’s. She had the great cat’s full attention.

“Four months from now will come a blood moon,” she said. “Have your shadows told what I intend for that night?”

The hexer looked to the jaguar knight. The great cat did not glance back.

“I will marry the Lord of the Feast.”

Not so much as a whisker twitched in surprise. The jaguar knight had heard.

“I request the Dominion hold back its obsidian edges until after the wedding. Then we may decide if we must be allies or enemies.”

“Wait.” The hexer’s eyes glinted up at her. “You’ll wed the Lord of the Feast in the City of Gold?”

“I will.”

“You mustn’t. You can’t, not there.” The hexer hunched over his crutches. His voice was soft but firm. “Lord Tethiel is a man.”

The hexer knew. If he told the matriarchs, it could be disaster. “Tethiel did mention dining with a hexer. You may think you know him. At best, you’re familiar with his illusions. As you cannot be certain of his true gender”—Hiresha glanced to the jaguar knight—“it would be wrong of you to mention anything to the Purests.”

“They would not hear me,” the hexer said. “But this is wrong. You should not marry a man.”

The jaguar snapped jaws over the hexer’s arm. If the great cat tore him apart, Hiresha would have to ward away the blood. No, the jaguar released him with the same suddenness. The fangs hadn’t pierced the skin. The hexer still would’ve felt a toothy pressure of disagreement.

“You don’t speak for the jaguar knight,” Hiresha said.

The great cat scoured new lines of green into the trunk. Hiresha wished she could be certain of their meaning. They were different from the glyph language common to the Dominion. Someone in the city might be able to help her study them. For now, she would have to rely on the hexer’s translation.

“He says—”

That answered the question of the jaguar’s gender. The great cat might be female, yet his was a man’s soul. He had likely been raised outside of the City of Gold.

“He says the Lord of the Feast is another avatar of the Obsidian Jaguar.” The hexer ground his crutches into the clay soil and tried to hide the tremor of scorn in his voice. It might’ve also been sorrow. “You must be a great woman to marry him.”

The firelight revealed flickers of the man’s clean-shaven features. They pinched together in a tightness of pain. He was mournful. The jaguar beside him looked smug with his dark lips angled up behind his whiskers. His ears were less perky than the fennec’s, however. The pitiful things on the great cat looked stunted.

“The jaguar knight will speak for you in the City of Endless Day,” the hexer said. “The warriors will not attack you before your wedding.”

That could mean they would attack on her wedding night. She compared the most recent claw words to the past ones on the trunk that now bled sap. The hexer seemed to have spoken true with as much accuracy as he could.

“And after I am wed, what then?”

The jaguar knight was licking his paws. After he finished, he walked past the marked trunk. His tail swished as he sauntered into shadows. She deduced he would not answer her. He would leave her to wonder.

The hexer lowered himself on his crutches to stamp out the fire. Before its light went out, two eyes flared green in the darkness. The emerald gaze burned into Hiresha then was gone. The jaguar must’ve looked back.

She could kill them both. That was always an option. Then the next time someone found her reliquary, they wouldn’t let her wake. They would kill her. Hiresha’s insides ground against each other like soft fluorite gems amidst hard diamonds.

The jaguar knight would think her beholden to him and his god. Perhaps she should fly past to their capital and face the Winged Flame herself. Or she should stay far away.

The great cat thought himself an ally of Tethiel. Maybe he was. Tethiel might’ve even promised him something. How terrible that she might only be respected through Tethiel. If she broke the engagement then she might have to battle the warriors day and night, and she could only be conscious half that time.

She flew to her dragon to lean against it. Her fingers played over the perfect angles of its scales. If only it were more than a statue when she slept. She should try to enchant more contingencies in its crystalline mind, to allow it to react outside her direct command. Its vision would have to improve beyond recognizing gross differences in light and dark. If her magic scripts were flawed—if she made but one error—the amethyst dragon could lash out and skewer anyone on its crystal claws: Miss Barrows, the young Jerani, or even Tethiel.

“Will you protect me? Or would you devour my friends?” Hiresha asked. Her dragonflies sometimes ate ladybugs. Hiresha would need to devote more time to their jewel minds before she dared trust a larger construct.

The gem scales chilled her skin. A dragon might not be a sufficient protector. These warriors weren’t some backwoods provincials who had run from the first sight of an amethyst claw. The jaguar knight and hexer were two powers of this land. She couldn’t cow them. Neither would they frighten her.

The dragon lumbered after her as she skirted from tree to tree. The jungle floor had more prints than merely the dots of the hexer’s crutches and the jaguar’s paws. A taller man had prowled nearby, and she knew the width of those feet and the spacing of that stride. They were Jerani’s. The lopsided gait would be Celaise’s. She hadn’t relearned to walk evenly yet, and her prints flanked his. They had traversed arm and arm.

They had no good reason to go so far north of the city. Their tracks looped around the trees beneath her reliquary. They may have been searching for it. Celaise might have scented Hiresha’s fears. How strange to think she might detect frights while Hiresha slept and dreamed of another world. Hiresha had to entertain the possibility any Feaster might be able to find her.

The jaguar knight couldn’t have smelled emotions. He might’ve caught human scent on the reliquary and confirmed his suspicions with Celaise’s circling footprints below.

Hiresha touched the roughness of her giant-geode bed. Freeing it from gravity, she lifted it in her palm despite how it was larger than she. Hiresha only fit inside with a quarter-inch to spare. Soon she would outgrow it. The hexagonal crystals came to a point against her scalp and brushed her toes while she floated inside, dead to this world.

She could carry the reliquary to a new hiding place yet nowhere that would be safe. The time had come to leave it behind. Dangers would press her from every side. She would have to surpass them all.

“
My design for the wedding palace requires forty-two tons of refined glass.”

“
I trust it’s not one of those petty wedding palaces, my heart. Those are ever so tedious.”

“
If you insist, I’ll enchant it. First I’ll need to recrystallize the glass into quartz. Only pure silicates will suffice, sold by the master glassmakers of the Oasis Empire.”

“
You doubt they’ll sell to you.”

“
Some might tend to call me a traitor.”

“
The Oasis Empire trades with the City of Gold. Let Purest Elbe order your glass.”

“
The glassmakers will have to suspect the silicates are for an enchantress.”

“
Loyalty and decency rarely outweigh gold.”

“
It would be much to ask of the Purest.”

“
You saved her eyes and her position. It’d be wrong not to ask Purest Elbe for a favor. There’s nothing so selfish as refusing a gift.”

“
Tethiel, why didn’t you tell me the Purests believe you’re a woman?”

“
I thought it too inconsequential to utter.”

“
If they find out you lied they’ll ban the wedding. Is that not of sufficient consequence?”

The vitreous silica reformed under Hiresha’s hands. Its disorder became structured, from common glass to crystal. Its surface rippled then subsided into interlocking hexagon facets.

“Your touch brings harmony,” Purest Elbe said. Her blue headdress of feathers reflected off the column Hiresha was reshaping. A bee hummed in to land on one newly crafted plane. The insect wasn’t harmed; Hiresha had already extracted the crystal’s heat.

Hiresha said, “The six-sided shape is a tribute both to your city and the natural formation of quartz.”

The Purest circled the column step by step. Bees swirled around her, perhaps attracted by her peppery fragrance. She moved with such deliberation that she would never be stung. “May we speak of your sea monster?”

“You must mean my amethyst dragon.” Hiresha had to conclude this was in regards to the incident at the city harbor.

The Purest’s robes flowed. Bees crawled over the dotted trails in the fabric. She neared Hiresha with palms open, holding a blue orchid in each.

“The dragon is a construct,” Hiresha said. “A servant and my guardian.”

“A dragon is a creature of Strife.” The Purest spoke with such gravitas that she could’ve taken a breath between each word.