Dark Lord's Wedding (56 page)

“My rule will begin without bloodshed.” Hiresha glanced at the red stains on the floor below. “To as great a degree as possible.”

“War only leads to war,” Tethiel said.

“And for peace you must make peace,” Elbe said.

Hiresha allowed herself to hope they had swayed the Purest.

Elbe reached to the chalice. She took it, and she drank. Hiresha knew then they had her. The corners of Elbe’s eyes pinched with distaste. She set the chocolate drink down.

“Too spicy,” Tethiel asked, “or too sweet?”

“You poison me with sugar.” Elbe slid the pinkness of her tongue over her upper teeth. “It has none of honey’s melody of flavors, only the bitterness of slaves harvesting the sugarcane.”

“How deliciously awkward.” Tethiel touched a fingernail against the bloody redness of her lips. Her head twitched around at an owlish angle as she looked behind at the jaguar knight. “When it was our dear orange who smuggled in the sugar.”

The golden fur of the great cat’s broad nose rumpled. An immense tongue spread out to his platter to flick another locust into his mouth.

“Sugar tastes of Strife,” Elbe said, “and it ruins the palate.”

The honey baroness would have a keen interest in suppressing the sugar trade. Hiresha pushed the chalice between Elbe and the jaguar knight. “Perhaps you both could reach an arrangement.”

“Xochi could remove his blessing from sugar smuggling,” Tethiel said.

The jaguar knight snorted.

“And in return,” Hiresha said, “Purest Elbe would ban sea fishing.”

The jaguar’s ears perked up. Their fuzzy white interiors angled toward Hiresha.

“With seafood illegal, the black market would surge with demand. Fishermen would then have to pray to the Obsidian Jaguar for favors,” Hiresha said. She estimated the total catch would also go down. More sea creatures would be safe, and fewer fishermen would risk their lives in the Sea of Fangs. Hiresha’s promise to a lost friend would be kept.

“The City of Flowing Gold is not the only port,” Elbe said.

“Only the largest,” Hiresha said. “Assuming I could secure cooperation throughout the Dominion, would you both agree to the pact?”

Elbe regarded the jaguar knight with a beat of butterfly lashes. The jaguar knight stared back with gold-foil eyes.

Above them both, Tethiel motioned to Hiresha with a gesture like a bursting kiss. Tethiel’s sharp fingernails flicked outward in front of her lips.

Elbe held out her hand to the jaguar knight. He opened his mouth, each fang longer than her fingers, yet she didn’t jerk away. He licked her palm.

“Then we are agreed,” Hiresha said.

Tethiel clapped her hands together. The lacy darkness of her stigmata tattoo surged across her brow in doily tentacles. When she spoke to all the guests, none reacted to her new appearance. Hiresha deduced only she could see the change. Most everyone would still see Tethiel as a man and hear his voice as masculine.

“The ritual nears, and soon you’ll taste the final morsels of the evening. The last course will naturally be your firstborns.”

A cup dropped in the shocked silence and bounced off the table with brittle pings.

Fos coughed out a locust wing. “Are—are you serious?”

“How could I be, my overstuffed dainty? You don’t even have a child,” Tethiel said. He did enjoy his hoaxes. “The last course will only be a bouquet of ice treats.”

Servers carried the ices in on platters. The desserts sweated a mist of coldness.

“Remember to eat too much,” Tethiel said. “The pain in your belly will distract you from the greater ache of a meaningless existence followed soon after by an empty eternity.”

Hiresha recognized the flavors of ice she had selected: melon, peach, and lemon, among many. The treats had been sculpted into the shape of infants, each plump and grinning. She hadn’t agreed to that. Tethiel must’ve had reasons, likely bad ones.

The chubby arms of the ice sculptures were cut off and served on platters. “Does look like my firstborn,” the king brute said. He started wolfing down his dessert.

Fos snuck a finger from his own plate.

“How awful,” said one woman below on the common tables. She dipped a spoon into a head of a blueberry ice. The infant’s expression stayed serene, almost beatific. The woman swallowed part of its face. “How delicious! The flavor is rippling over my skin.”

“Tasting with your skin?” Miss Barrows asked. She had descended from the ceiling. “You must’ve had too much blue honey. Or just enough.”

Hiresha had a few moments to herself, between pacts, and she would spend the time with Miss Barrows. Hiresha dropped from the ceiling, flipping around a swinging chandelier. Ropes of silk trailed after her.

Miss Barrows dipped her finger into the blueberry ice head and sucked. Her jowls bounced as she giggled. “Come down to join me for treats, you old cobweb? Suppose it’s too bad for you there’s no flavor of fly blood.”

Hiresha had asked much of Miss Barrows to stand amidst the golden orb weavers. “You’ve grown as courageous as Fos, Miss Barrows. Have you considered training in weaponry?”

“Cutlery, maybe.” She swiped a spoon and ate a nobleman’s lime ice with it. He opened his mouth to protest, yet she stopped him with a kiss. Afterward, she chortled and licked her green lips. She scooped out another spoonful from the infant’s soft belly and lifted it to Hiresha. “Try it. You’ll never meet so sweet a babe.”

“No, thank you.”

“Get every satisfaction you can now. The joys of marriage end at the wedding.”

“Though I’ve memorized all the knowledge bequeathed by the Opal Mind, I may never understand why people waste their lives pursuing pleasure.”

“Don’t know why you’d waste your time on anything else.”

“You shouldn’t expect too much of yourself in the capacity of philosophy, Miss Barrows. Your skull is likely now entirely full of fluids.”

“My aptitudes are more fun.” Miss Barrows winked and elbowed Hiresha, redundantly. “You’re going to be a married woman soon. Let Ol’ Janny know if you need any advice on blowing off the dust. You know, playing nug-a-nug. The horizontal constitutional. Bed galloping.”

“I understood the first reference, yet I refused to consider.”

“You would, you dry mummy.”

“Semi-sentient simian.”

“Gem grubber.”

Memories aligned in Hiresha of all the arguments she had enjoyed in the past with Miss Barrows, of all those they might have in the future. It was like a corridor of framed mirrors, each pleasing in its familiarity.

“Miss Barrows, I would grieve to lose you.”

“Ho-ho! Would you?”

“Yes.” It had happened yesterday in the other facet. Many had fallen into the sinkhole of shadows. The city of Morimound had collapsed, and Hiresha had been pulled to this world before she could preserve any of her friends in metabolic stasis. By the time she returned, Miss Barrows’ mind would’ve decayed beyond saving, as little as she protested needing it. The pain of remembering warped everything, stretching the figures around Hiresha into stick insects with human faces.

Hiresha focused on her blue paragon, into its flashing celebration of facets. She was in her dawn world. Here, her friends lived. She wouldn’t let them die. Now there was but one Miss Barrows between the two facets, and Hiresha could soon recommence calling her by her first name.

Miss Barrows upended another spoonful of ice at the same moment a smoke ring passed close by. Both dessert and soot entered her mouth. She spluttered.

Hiresha turned on the smoker. The woman stank of rotten tea leaves. “You may now put out your pipe,” Hiresha said.

“What?” The clouds the woman puffed out were discoloring the yellow orchid petals of her dress. “Always smoke after a meal. Or while beekeeping.”

“That may be, yet you never smoke after my wedding banquet.” Hiresha Attracted all the vital essence from air near the burning leaf, asphyxiating the flame. She then levitated the pipe out of reach above the woman’s head and her flower hat.

Three Feasters prowled past the woman’s dispersing haze. They stalked between the tables, converging on a Bright Palm sitting by himself. A Feaster made of obsidian shards asked him, “Don’t want any ice treat?”

“His heart’s already frozen.” The disembodied voice came from a Feaster with a flickering lantern for a head.

“Ice babies, like eating little Bright Palms.” The third Feaster appeared to be a charred skeleton, a female one by the dimensions of her hips. She slathered prickly-pear ice into her clattering teeth. The pink slush splattered down her neck bones and ribs.

The Bright Palm said nothing.

The lantern-headed Feaster turned to look at Hiresha. Light glared through a dragon design cut into the red paper on top of his shoulders. Even as empty-skulled as he appeared, the Feaster couldn’t dare consider attacking the guest in front of Hiresha.

The Feaster threw a handful of orange ice. “That’s for nailing the Fire Eater.”

The glob slapped against the Bright Palm’s face. He blinked one eye but otherwise stayed still.

“And that’s for Ant Breath.” The charred skeleton tossed more ice. The obsidian lady did the same, and then more Feasters of all manners of frightful forms were throwing sweet slush at the glowing man.

The Bright Palm couldn’t take offense. The food attack was more childish than harmful, and Hiresha considered if it would be right to let it proceed. The Bleeding Maiden might’ve instigated it only to ridicule Hiresha for stamping it out. Other guests grabbed handfuls of dessert. A man plastered a noblewoman’s dress of white-moth wings. She screamed, if not for shock then for the expense of her clothes.

Hiresha gazed up to Tethiel. The Feasters were her responsibility.

She was still wearing the fractal jacket Hiresha had given, only illusions must’ve tailored it to fit Tethiel’s new frame. “Let us have a game,” she said. “Whoever colors the lady’s silk-white dress will gain the prize of her kiss.”

All the low guests turned on Hiresha. Their hands dripped with pinks and blues.

“I think not,” Hiresha said. “Lord Tethiel is too free with my favors.”

“You are right,” Tethiel said, “the reward is too great. The winner, then, may ascend to the ceiling and attend the marriage ritual. Begin!”

In none of her planning had Hiresha predicted her guests would tear apart childlike dessert effigies and hurl their dripping limbs in streaks of reds and greens. She could hardly call it decorous. The hexer lifted an arm from his crutch to throw a papaya ice. The noblewoman risked her gown to toss yellow powder flavored with pineapple. An old woman in coarse yucca cloth cackled as she lobbed an infant’s head of watermelon. Even the Bright Palm set down his spear and took aim with his food.

Hiresha leaped away. She sprang off the crystal wall and twirled between the pillars. A pity this dress covered the kraken-eye jewels on her back, though the onyx orbs about her person did give her a sense of movement and shifting light. Few guests anticipated her flight, and even the decadent projectiles that should have hit her did not. She Repulsed them away. As inefficient as that power was, she could turn aside a bit of sweetened slush.

The misses fell back down on the low guests, splattering them. The men and women cried in outrage and delight. They began aiming for each other. The wedding had turned into a multicolored mêlée. Hiresha expected Tethiel was satisfied with herself. Though her contained expression could scarcely qualify as a smirk, there was a sense of the monstrous glee lurking behind her, each terror half seen and smiling with a crescent of fangs.

The guests wouldn’t ever hit Hiresha. The spidersilk dress would stay pristine and—

A metallic crawling traced around Hiresha’s neck and down her back in skin-crinkling undulations. She was sensing someone steal her engagement amulet. Its warning enchantment had activated. Yes, the stalactite podium that had once held her red paragon was bare.

A needling on her brow guided her gaze across the ceiling. A Feaster moved there, obscured by a meager cloak of shadows, carrying her jewel. Someone dared touch it. He or she presumed to soil the faces of divinity.

Three specks of guava ice landed on Hiresha’s skirt. They stuck to the silk.

She sprang off a column, bolting toward the gem thief. The concealing magic burned away as the Feaster stumbled into Bright Palm Alyla. It was Lantern Head, and he flailed the necklace at the Bright Palm, trying to slip it on her, attempting to let go of the chain. The enchantment wouldn’t release him. The gold links imbedded into his skin, and his nearness to the Bright Palm burned away his paper face. Strips of red peeled off to reveal a toothless man with rolling eyes.

Hiresha Attracted the paragon diamond from him. She seized him, as he had seized her jewel, her wonder. She Lightened him to toss him to pieces against the wall. He would be the one to shatter. “You’ve made a horrible mistake.”

“No.” Tethiel pattered her fingernails on Hiresha’s shoulder, each as light and quick as a spider leg. “Not him. The Bleeding Maiden has.”

The Feaster in question sat across the table, her knees pressed against her chest. Her breath caught, and her lips parted in a perfectly angled pout. “What have I done?”