Dark Lord's Wedding (38 page)

At least nothing was going to plan. Perfect weddings bored Tethiel.

The guests had defied the seating. The men who ruled the Dominion had allied to take over a table. They had built a barricade with their backs. Their axes of office they had arranged around them in a moat. Assailing such a fortress of like minds would take peerless statecraft, or better yet, alcohol. And the matriarchs had forbidden even that.

Tethiel divided himself, one persona in a corset colored by midnight, for Purest Elbe’s eyes, and another wearing a coat embroidered with scenes of battlefield slaughter. Both were ravishing, if he did say so himself.

He grazed the thrones but did not sit. Too early to test the kings. They thought themselves his equal. He never dashed hopes this early in the evening. It would be a kindness, and nothing was so hard to forgive as mercy.

“High guests, we didn’t bid you welcome.” Tethiel lifted a crystal chalice of blue honey to the guests. “Still you came. You came for power. You came for splendor. You came for pleasure, and all of them you will have.”

They had all arrived. Fos the Empire’s Slave grimaced at Tethiel. Purest Elbe pressed a finger to her lips and frowned. The Bleeding Maiden dropped her knife in a most purposeful accident, and the blade clattered then cut her. Ix the Green Blood trailed greasy fluid across the tabletop with a finger. The jaguar knight yawned his fangs. The Talon gazed with bloodshot intensity as if imagining ripping Tethiel’s heart out. Bright Palm Alyla was even more likely to butcher a Feaster at his own wedding, but her slack face showed not the least sign of it.

By the end of the night, all the guests would heed him, all would swear to him and Hiresha. All those still alive.

“Tonight,” Tethiel said, “we celebrate the marriage of the greatest mortal woman in the Lands of Loam.”

Tethiel motioned forward a server. The man was bent double from a tray carried on his back stacked with red fruit.

“The Lady of Gems will bestow a kiss on the guest who chooses best.” He spoke so that all in the dining room, high and low, could hear. They had no choice. “In one persimmon waits a diamond of favor. Go on, there’s a chance for everyone.”

Some kings took two fruits, or three, or five. As many lower guests would go without their share. Thus life rewarded those with greater appetites.

“We’ll begin the feast with sweet fruit, for some of us may die before tasting dessert.” Tethiel lifted his chalice in a toast. The honey inside turned black. His glass filled with the darkness of unexplored caverns and unspeakable desires. “The gods are cruel. Existence is worse. None of us have souls, so try to fill the emptiness inside you with food. Thankfully, you’ll never succeed.”

The clashing contrast of the red fruit in Ix’s blue hand strummed Tethiel’s heart. Ix picked apart the persimmon with hook-fang fingernails. The fruit was overripe, bleeding juices. Ix ate none of it.

A Green Blood had no magic of their own, but their ability to control their venoms flirted with the preternatural. Tethiel couldn’t believe they shed death from every inch of their body at all times. They seemed to be able to control the potency and the orifice, from sweat pore, to spit, to claw, to fang. The flesh of their fruit had blackened.

“We eviscerated the persimmons and filled them with pomegranate jelly,” Tethiel said. “They’re called Mother-in-Law’s Eye.”

The guests munched and slurped. Their scents told Tethiel they feared him, but not enough. Ix couldn’t be much bothered to care if they fell from the ceiling, was sliced through by a chandelier, and splattered in pieces among the lower guests. Ix might even hope for it. The Dominion men and jaguar at the same table tried to outdo each other with foolish courage. They would have to be separated.

A guest shrieked at a lower table. He spat in his palm and held up the twinkle of a diamond along with a bit of broken tooth. The man was beaming.

Congratulations drizzled in. A waft of raspberry tart came from Purest Elbe. She lifted her chin to catch the eye of one of the lower guests, a woman in a moth-wing dress, who advanced with three others on the hapless man. Soon his prize would be acquired. That was plain to Tethiel. No man could withstand wealth.

Appetites had been wetted for food and for Hiresha’s favor. Everywhere, fingers dripped red.

“Where are our flowers?” The king brute from the Sky Islands slammed his hands against the table. It might’ve broken if not for enchantment.

Tethiel wished men in all lands understood the vital importance of flowers. Servers advanced with the emergency jasmines. The king rubbed his hands on them, crushed them, then inhaled so greedily that a petal flitted against his nose. The safe house roof hadn’t enough jasmine for the lower guests, but again, such was life.

Tethiel stroked the edge of a throne. “The greatest chef in the lands has prepared you his ultimate banquet.”

Servers wafted in with the second course. Their trays were filled with rabbits, neatly arranged with noses touching.

“Their blood was siphoned away drop by drop and replaced with clover honey.”

The Talon flipped over his rabbit and sliced it open from chin to tail. His feather headdress bobbed as he nodded. “Their hearts must’ve still been beating.”

“Until they filled with sweetness,” Tethiel said. “Then the rabbits were flayed, roasted, and served refitted in their fur coats.”

The men looked to Ix. When he showed no interest in the rabbits only then did their fear of poison diminish enough to eat. They trusted Ix to warn them. If a Green Blood had a nose for the noisome, they may smell city sewage as fragrant. Tethiel could ask, were he willing to approach tables full of fighters and boors, a dangerous proposition.

Tethiel sent a premonition to the servers.
Lure the Green Blood to his proper seat or you’ll not outlive the dawn.

“Master Ix,” a veiled man said, “the Chef has prepared special courses for you. Hemlock salad with amanita mushrooms, garnished with mandrake.”

The server waved to the right. A place had been set with a bowl heaped with speckled toadstools a brilliant hue of poisonous red. Next to the spot waited a jungle pastiche reserved for a fellow Green Blood. Too little would be gained from introducing Ix to their long-lost friend unless both could sit together.

Ix’s eyes lingered on the fare of leafy poisons, but the Green Blood did not stir. Beside them, the jaguar knight snorted and patted the table with a paw big as a dinner plate.

“I cannot bring Master Ix’s food here,” the server said, sweat darkening his veil. “You are in the wrong seats, and—
Auck
!”

The Talon sprang at the server with a snap of feathers. The veiled man was forced into a chokehold, with a knife pressed against his chest. The weapon’s handle was a gemstone mosaic of a man, holding the blade as he might an engorged phallus.

“You don’t insult the gods,” the Talon said behind the server’s ear. The sacrificial knife was angled to dive between ribs to the heart. “You don’t insult us.”

The Bright Palm steepled her fingers on a table to shove herself to her feet. “He’s Innocent,” she said. Her brother Fos stood beside her, bearing his long sword and short intelligence.

They might fight to protect the server. Tethiel had to stop that. His had to be the hand of life and death. He stepped forward.

All eyes swung to him. Apprehension changed to flavors to undercooked dread. Their fear wouldn’t paralyze but instead give them the resolve to fight. They were different peoples from different lands, united in their wish for his death. All of them had to like their chances with Hiresha better with him gone.

Only one guest wouldn’t join in the uprising against him. She would be content to watch him topple. He couldn’t see the god of cunning, only smell her slight odor of crisp eggshell. Not that he would need her help.

His blood seared through his veins. Dark blood from bitter coffee and black wine. Roiling and heaving through his heart, fuming, boiling, seething. They dared to think they could oppose the Lord of the Feast? Why, he could devour them all as a first course. There were not so many Bright Palms. Tethiel had his dandies and Jerani behind him. Fierce as these guests were, they might yet fear him.

Or they and the Bleeding Maiden might defeat him.

And if Tethiel won, he might vanquish himself. For anything of his to endure, he would need these lords of men.

With Hiresha at his side, he could abash the guests. Until she returned, Tethiel’s jaws were bound.

He waved a hand toward the server. “Bring the Green Blood their lethal delicacy.”

The Talon patted the man on the head before letting go. The tinkle of dining sounds resumed with the murmur of chatter and the slurp and suck of mouths savoring choice flesh. The Green Blood only nibbled at a corner of a mushroom cap.

The king brute lifted a chalice full of blue honey. “What’s this trinket?”

“Honey heightened with mindbloom mushroom,” a server said.

Tethiel blotted out the other sounds in the ballroom for them to hear him. “The blue honey will make you feel emotions you never knew existed. Such as remorse.”

“How do you hold this cup without breaking it?” The king fisted the chalice then waved it under Ix’s nose. “Enough poison in there for you?”

“Pitiful,” Ix said.

“Can’t be worse than your Sky-Islander beer,” the potato king said. He at least knew how to hold a chalice. His was full of green honey, and he saluted the other king with it. They both tipped back and slurped.

To the table left of the kings, the Bleeding Maiden was whispering poison of another sort into the matriarch’s ear. Tethiel knew that pair also needed to be split.

“Lord Father,” Wane said from behind. The Feaster knight tapped his sword hilt and nodded toward the nearest Bright Palm and those on the tables below. “Why invite the party killers?’

“Because, my dandy, to exclude breeds conflict. Fighting enemies multiplies them, and the only way to eradicate opposition is to make them love you.”

The other Feaster knight guffawed with a clatter of metal mandibles while Wane blinked his gold-eclipse eyes in confusion. “Bright Palms can’t love.”

Jerani beside them nodded and stole a glance down at the Bright Palm tribesman.

“They haven’t nailed anyone yet tonight,” Tethiel said. “There’s a start.”

“Won’t the Lady of Gems crush them?” Pall clenched a bronze-plated claw.

“She will,” the Bleeding Maiden said. She had shadow-stepped into the conversation and twined her arms around Tethiel. “If the Bright Palms kill her groom.”

Tethiel withstood her touch even though the heat of her blood scorched against the small of his back. His coat soaked up her red acid.

“You won’t be safe until she’s here.” The Bleeding Maiden’s faltering breaths scratched at his ear. “When will the bride come? The Purest wants to know.”

The matriarch would not even gaze at Tethiel’s other self, his feminine side. The Purest had abstained from the honeyed rabbit and instead dined on a salad of flytrap plants. One closed its spiky jaws on her fingernail before her lips engulfed it.

“You may tell the Purest that the bride will arrive when her pleasure aligns with her convenience.”

The scent of rotten rose from the Bleeding Maiden intensified, as if Tethiel stood in a burning garden. Then the aroma of decay lessened to its typical nausea of potpourri. The Bleeding Maiden could hide much from him, but she had been afraid of something. She could be leery of Hiresha’s power.

No, he didn’t believe so, not with that duration and curvature of aroma. This was a different vintage of foreboding. He had caught a whiff of plot. The Bleeding Maiden didn’t fear the time of Hiresha’s arrival. The Feaster worried that the enchantress would survive an assassination.

Tethiel cast a portent into Jerani’s mind.
Leave the wedding. Run to Celaise and help her guard the lady. If she dies before waking, you’ll both join her in a wreckage of dreams.

“
Should I die, my heart, beware of my children. They will hunt you.”

“
And should I, my enchantments will fail you.”

“
We must rule together or not at all. When an empire is built on the strength of the great, with their deaths will it fall. Thus it’ll be with ours.”

“
Which is why you shouldn’t have taken off my amulet. It would allow you to live long yet. Perhaps forever.”

“
Then our empire will never be appreciated. Greatness can only be valued once it’s gone.”

“
Whoever I marry will desire to achieve something more substantial than nostalgia.”