Dark Lord's Wedding (23 page)

“Mine is a dragon without hunger. Think of it as a counterbalance to the Winged Flame.”

The Purest lifted the orchids to Hiresha like a blessing. Their perfume wafted over her with scents of citrus and raspberry. The petals neared her skin without touching. The Purest likely wished not to distract overmuch from the crafting. It was well that Hiresha was busy arranging solidifying glass into trigonal structure; otherwise, she never would’ve waited for the Purest’s reply.

“If you use Strife to defeat Strife, then Strife wins.”

That sounded logically dubious, yet it wouldn’t do for Hiresha to argue with the Purest. She had purchased all the vitreous silica. Her caravans had hauled it over the desert. Hiresha would find no better place for her wedding, at the edge of a city, freshened by sea breeze and cooled by jungle mist. She would be patient.

“With harmony we rise above the tide of violence,” the Purest said.

“I do agree that killing is the first and last recourse of the brainless.”

“Harmony makes us most truly women.”

That, Hiresha could not let stand. The Empire had ostracized her for what they believed a lady enchantress should and should not do. She would not accept the same on this side of the sea. Her finger pads squeezed against the amethysts within her palms. If she shouldn’t argue, she could at least discuss.

“I interpret that to mean,” Hiresha said, “that a woman shouldn’t fight to defend herself, that she should only accede and accept with a doily-stitched smile.”

The Purest lofted her hand above her shoulder and posed in an aspect of listening. From her left side dangled a stag-beetle earring. Azure shone off its lustrous wing shell.

“I knew a woman.” Hiresha glanced to the sea and its spray haze. “She was an effervescence of aggression. Shocking and strong, violent and no less feminine because of it.”

“A woman can be resolute in her nonviolence. She can be strong in her calm. She can be powerful in her drive for peace.”

“She can also die to a child with a spear.” Hiresha avoided saying “a boy with a spear” as to not offend the Purest.

Men were working all over the palace foundation, carting in stone and hoisting plates of silica. The Purest looked at none of them. Her amber gaze passed over and never focused. She would not see them. She refused to acknowledge they even lived.

The Purest drifted her hand with its cupped flower toward her guards. The six women were armored in only scarves of red, though for weapons they carried blowpipes as long as staves. The vials on their belts likely were full of poisons for their darts.

“In this world of Purity lost, sometimes we have no choice but Strife.”

Tears glistened in the eyes of one guardswoman. They all looked at the Purest with expressions taut with devotion. One caught a man staring too, and the woman pushed him away by his face.

“But Strife never must be our first choice,” the Purest said.

“We must be capable of violence, or we’ll be ruled by it.” If Hiresha had been merely an enchantress and properly helpless, her conversation with the jaguar knight would probably have begun and ended with abduction. “Ascribing ideal traits to women limits the breadth of their lives. It hurts them. It is comparable to saying our only virtue is beauty.”

“When a woman acts with violence, Strife’s curse has overcome her true nature.”

“That line of reasoning forms a perfect circle.” Hiresha wouldn’t waste more time talking to Elbe if she wouldn’t understand.

Dream power flowed out of Hiresha in waves of ethereal brilliance. The glass in the column flowed then reformed. The silica started even more confused than the Purest, yet Hiresha sculpted it into a pattern in which it could comfortably rest for millennia. As the silica relaxed into place it released heat that softened the nearby rock and aided its transformation. Hiresha levitated along the column, changing it inch by inch and fusing its plates into one perfect whole.

If only opinions were as easy to reshape as stone.

“You are right,” the Purest said. “Faith should not be proven with reasoning, circular or not.”

“That you considered the possibility of being wrong means you’re no fool.” Hiresha lifted her hands from the glass. It cooled as she descended to meet the Purest face to face. “I admit I’m all too accustomed to talking over people’s heads.”

What a relief it would be to have someone else to converse with besides Tethiel. The fennec was eloquent in his way, yet he never took their discussions seriously. Why, the other day she had even resorted to speaking to her dragon construct.

“We have different views. Different ways of speaking,” the Purest said. She brushed an orchid over Hiresha’s fingers and up her arm. It tickled her with softness. The wing beats of bees vibrated across her skin. “We still want something similar.”

“To be left in peace.”

“An end of bloodshed,” Purest Elbe said, “as much as that can be in a cursed world.”

“I won’t achieve anything of lasting significance by dismembering people with my dragon,” Hiresha said. “We agree thus far.”

Elbe passed behind a column. The faceting warped her image into blues and whites.

“Yet I insist my dragon is less inherently violent than a shark,” Hiresha said. “And apex predators are elegant, worthy in their own right, and not to be discriminated against.”

Purest Elbe leaned closer. She had no regard for personal space, yet her slowness gave more than enough time for Hiresha to step away, or push back, should she wish. Nothing about Purest Elbe threatened or imposed. Her orchid fluttered against Hiresha’s cheek.

Elbe asked, “Then may I see your dragon? If you made it, it must be beautiful.”

Hiresha allowed herself a smile. “You may.”

“And may I confide in you, Hiresha?”

“We can correspond, certainly,” Hiresha said. Purest Elbe waited so long between speaking that she might as well send a letter. “Not that I object to you and your bees, yet I predict you have exquisite handwriting, Elbe.”

Their noses touched. Turquoise teeth flickered between Purest Elbe’s lips. She never opened her mouth far while speaking, perhaps to avoid swallowing a bee. “I have heard something about Lady Tethiel that may shock you.”

Purest Elbe knew. Of course she knew he was a man. Elbe was slow but not stupid. She would stop the wedding. She would have the men she refused to acknowledge smash down the crystal column with sledgehammers.

Hiresha’s pulse tripled its rate. Her magic seized her heart, stopped it from thrashing about in her chest. She held in her sweat from beading on her brow. She clamped oily excretions in the pores of her armpits. She stretched her vocal chords to keep them from strumming with guilt.

“I have heard many things of Tethiel,” Hiresha said. “The weight of such a past could sink a ship.”

“My concern is,” Purest Elbe said with a breath of honey and peppers, “Lady Tethiel may not be a woman.”

Hiresha needed to deny it in the most plausible way. She had to convince. She had to lie. If she didn’t then her wedding plans would crumble. Tethiel and she could achieve so much together. It had to be worth deceiving this woman. Hiresha owed her so much for the vitreous silica, yet the truth was too high a price. Hiresha needed to begin her marriage with a falsehood. She should.

She couldn’t. Hiresha slumped. She let go of everything. Her skin leaked. She exposed all her uncomfortable humanness. If her betrothal demanded lies, then marriage with Tethiel might commit her to all manner of atrocities.

“I’m eighty-seven-percent confident,” Hiresha said, “that he’s a man.”

“
The only weddings worth attending are forbidden. Consider, my heart, how the disapproval of the matriarchs would entice the kings.”

“
You presume to tell me that you plan on our marriage being banned?”

“
Success is certain once you’re censured. Our marriage can’t be a quiet affair. It wouldn’t suit our purposes.”

“
I won’t invade a city for the sake of a wedding.”

“
Why, I’d siege a fortress to rescue your bridal veil. But you’re right. We shouldn’t take over the City of Gold.”

“
Yet we can’t do without a city’s infrastructure. Kitchens to prepare a banquet, people to serve it. Flowers. Guest accommodations. A ban would deny us all this and more. How do you propose to overcome the logistics?”

“
By leaving the problem to you.”

The women hurled Jerani into the pit. Flies burst from the darkness, pelting against his skin and into his mouth. Jerani huffed them out. He whirled his arms behind him, angling his body in his fall. Needed to get his feet under him.

The city guards hadn’t thrown him into a well, not some clean pool that he could’ve climbed out of after a cooling dip. By the smell, he could’ve been dropping into a hyena’s butthole. The base of the pit rushed up gloomy and jagged. Were those spikes?

He landed with a squish and a crack. Might’ve broken a leg. No, he was still standing. His right shin hurt. Wood splinters had stabbed him from old furniture. Hard to say what the woody mess had been before someone had thrown it down there, a chair, a toy. It had been carved with a horse head that stared up at Jerani with a pleading eye, half buried in shit.

One woman called down from above. “That’ll teach you to carry a weapon through the streets.”

Something glinted through the flies, and Jerani jumped out of the way of his falling knife. The ground oozed and squirmed under his feet. He dug around and found his knife. Its obsidian blade had broken. He had carried the rock all the way from the Angry Mother Mountain. He was losing all his past. The knife hadn’t even been a real weapon. He had left his club and spear at the safe house.

Jerani had only brought the knife and the crystal flowers. He slapped a hand against his chest, feeling for the pocket in his robes. It was empty. The flowers had tumbled out. The lady had carved them and trusted them to him and he had lost ’em.

One glittered in the muck beside a puddle with a rat floating belly up. Jerani scooped the flower into his palm. He blew its amethyst petals clean. It hadn’t broken. The lady must’ve enchanted it. She was smart. He would have to find the others.

“Never saw one so dark. Think he could be Strife?” The women above were talking.

“No, just a foreign boy full of piss and curse.”

“We should take a few practice shots at him. To be safe.”

The four women had carried long blowpipes. Were they aiming them at him right now? Jerani squinted up but couldn’t see much past the flies and the sun glare. He heard the hollow puff of a dart being fired.

He threw himself against the wall and its crusty foulness. The women were shouting now. One screamed, maybe in happiness. They would line up another shot if they could. There was an opening beside him, like a cave passage of swarming darkness and reek. He scrambled inside.

Once his heart stopped thudding, he listened. No sound from above. Things behind him came closer in the darkness with the sounds of wet thudding. They were likely only men, and that was bad enough.

Jerani crept back into the buzzing pit. No sounds of blowpipes above. He scrounged for the crystal flowers. Things wriggled against his fingers. Would he ever be clean again? Five flowers, six, and seven, those were all she had given him to buy the sailcloth. He could leave.

Part of the wall had been broken off or collapsed, and he climbed up the stair of bricks. He slid his hands over the top of the pit. Jerani lifted one eye to street level. No sign of the guardswomen and their red sashes. The only movement in the alley came from a big beetle dragging away a dead lizard.

Jerani hopped out and dropped straight into a crouch. Something wasn’t right. He should jump back down. His back crawled, and it wasn’t just the flies. He was being watched by a killer.

A giant cat gazed down from the rooftop. Blackness speckled its gold coat. Whiskers splayed from its face like spines. It had to be a jaguar. No wonder the guards had run off.

Jerani slapped at his own arm, found the bracer of the Obsidian Jaguar. Was he seeing a god? The creature had a presence of timelessness and doom. Those weren’t animal eyes looking at him. They were full of orange keenness.