Brood of Bones (2 page)

“Maid Janny, inform Deepmand to—Maid Janny!”

The carriage tipped and bobbed as Spellsword Deepmand descended from the driver’s perch. His turban glinted with gold thread, and his eyes shone black as onyx above a long beard neatly trimmed into a rectangle. He lifted an embossed gauntlet to assist my step down to the road, yet I only sat and wondered what this was all about and who had screamed. The person in question had taken great liberties with my name, and I had no wish to encounter someone so brazen.

I peered out across the Bazaar of Fallen Stars. Within merchant tents, open chests twinkled with diamonds. Rugs spread with vials of perfume; a fire breather performed with an orange flash, and a crowd gathered around a cage for the unjust.

“Hiresha!”
The woman’s cry seemed to originate from the cage. “He’ll kill me tonight!”

“She seems rather excessive,” I said. “Spellsword Deepmand, I am to meet Sri the Flawless at the God’s Eye Court. You may take me there now.”

“May I take leave to suggest,” he said, “that the delay will be worthwhile, Elder Enchantress.”

Hearing him use my title in public reassured me. I was not so very old, yet being called “elder” added another comforting layer of concealment.

Both my driver and my personal guard, Spellsword Deepmand possessed a wealth of alertness. I trusted him with my safety and dignity, and if he thought I should associate myself with this outburst then I would.

Taking his hand, I dragged myself from my seat. Sweeps of cloth flowed after me, my gowns spreading from the confines of the carriage in a sparkling cascade.

The crowd gasped, and my spine tightened, while sickness at my own inadequacy wormed its way up my intestines. I was flawed, and they would see it. They would shout it, like they always had.

“
Look!
The girl who fell asleep in the privy.
”
The taunt boomed in my mind. “
Thought she’d died in there, and when we had the door broken, we all seen her with skirt pulled up. Remember her face? Blinking awake, then gape-eyed like she was choking.
”

Heat billowed from my heart, scalding my chest and rushing to my head. The world blurred and rolled about me. I could not focus on any of the bodies in the crowd, only their staring faces. They were a multi-headed beast, a hydra ready to devour.

“
Her own mother introduced her as an idiot. Said a cobra had spat in her ear.
Rotted her brain.
”

I walked with an ornate cane. To be precise, I stumbled forward, and the cane saved me from falling in a heap of silk before the monstrous throng of eyes.

A brick cracked under Deepmand’s plated boot, and the isolated noise forced me to realize that the Bazaar was hushed. None of the people had spoken. None had jeered. For the first time, I focused on an individual, a woman with a pink cloth wrapped around her belly’s enviable roundness. Her short blue blouse would not by itself have covered her pregnancy, and her healthy skin was the hue of amber and lustrous from budding motherhood.

My gowns had tricked her and the rest into not recognizing me. I reminded myself that these people were the virtuous citizens of Morimound, and years had passed since any had seen the girl who had fallen asleep in the street privy.

The same weight of sleep bowed me over now, and I teetered forward, feeling in my plethora of gowns that I waded through a river of silk. I slipped, the cane catching me at the last moment. No one in the predominately male crowd seemed to notice, although my searching eyes caught on another pregnant woman. This one propped a toddler on top of her enlarged belly, leaning far back to compensate for the weight. She had a wilted look, and when she sneezed I feared she would collapse. Her nose ran
,
eyes a red and blotchy shade of someone who had not slept well for a year.

Meeting expectant women was always bittersweet. Half smiling and half wincing, I approached her, while she held her gaze lowered. I did not imagine this demure person had been the one to call for my help, yet I reached up into the blue and green ribbons of my headdress to remove a jeweled broach, which I handed to her.

“Sell this,” I said, “and buy yourself some help and a few days rest.”

She began to sob, staring down at the cluster of emeralds and gold in her hand, and I shared a moment of surprise: I had meant to give her a topaz broach and instead had presented a treasure worthy of a princess. Yet I would not think of taking back the gift.

At the sight of my charity, the crowd surged closer. Spellsword Deepmand stopped the tide with single upraised gauntlet. He resembled a gold-and-bronze-plated armadillo, except with a scimitar clamped to his back large enough to decapitate an elephant.

I looked toward my destination, the cage, only to be accosted by the appearance in the crowd of a third woman flaunting her fertile belly. The coincidence of seeing three pregnant women in a row shocked me like the sharp pain from a biting fly.

After my next steps swayed toward the cage, a voice of an older woman issued from within the bars. “Bless you, Hiresha. Perhaps only one god has cursed me.”

Blinking away my fatigue, I saw an elderly matron entrapped within the cage, her fat belly pressed against the slats of brass. She must have been the source of the screams. My lethargic thoughts thrashed about, trying to recall where I had seen her wrinkled face before.

“I am Sri,” she said in response to my confusion. “This is who I now am.”

“Sri the Flawless?”

As soon as I said it, I regretted it. The Flawless could not be in shackles. I always had respected Sri as the city’s arbiter and a woman of sober thinking and propriety, and no possibility existed that she could be locked in this cage, a death sentence fit for rapists and cannibals.

The bars would trap her outside at night, exposing her to Feasters.

Those locked in the cage could not run—nor would bars protect them. An indirect method of execution, the open-air prison dragged out death over hours or days, yet all knew it better to satisfy the Feasters with criminals than leave them to bang on the doors of the innocent at midnight.

This woman already looked half dead, perhaps even three-quarters so. Jaundice discolored her eyes and sleeplessness ringed them, while her white hair contrasted with her sickly yellow skin. The more I peered at her, however, the more I thought I recognized her as Sri the Flawless.

An even more unbelievable possibility presented itself. Entertaining this second idea, I concluded, testified to how sleepiness warped my thinking and how my mindset distorted perception.

Sri the Flawless, the chaste arbiter of the city and four decades my senior, appeared to be not merely fat but pregnant.

“I am blemished,” Sri said.

Her hair, renowned for its prestigious length, tangled around her, knotted and greasy. The shortness of her blouse revealed a bulge centered at her waist.

“You turned to gluttony,” I said.

The prominent paunch drew the eye, yet her arms had dwindled to yellow sticks, her cheeks sunken as if all the fat in her body had dribbled into her abdomen. I could not help but think that her belly sat higher and firmer than I would expect for a glutton.

“The priests funneled drafts of wormwood down my throat, yet when this refused to shed itself...”
 
She waved to her belly. “...they decided death the most decent course of action.”

“You should have resigned,” I said, “and secluded yourself before—er—before that grew prominent. How decidedly undignified for a lady of seventy to, ah, pretend to carry child.”

Sri, more venerable than any grandmother, surprised me by sobbing like a girl of sixteen. The Flawless had always held society together with her passionless judgment; her shattered persona felt like a betrayal.

“I am unworthy,” she said. “Yet, last night taught me how much I want to live.”

Her fingers twitched, and she wrapped her arms around herself. She collapsed to sit on her ankles.

“The Feaster, he was kind and inquiring, at first. I hoped he would spare me because of my condition.” She held herself closer, digging her arms into her abdomen. “Now I’m afraid he’ll come back tonight.”

I steadied myself with both hands on my cane while endeavoring to make sense of the scene. My thoughts slithered from my grasp, and I slumped toward sleep.

Sri the Once Flawless said, “I want to taste the wines I’ve never tried, to explore the lands I’ve never seen, and to love. I know it’s not too late to love, and I want a good man to help raise the child in me.”

She caressed her unreasonably round belly.

“You can save me, Hiresha. Your Spellsword can cut through these shackles.”

Her hand wobbled as she reached through the bars, beckoning to Deepmand. The scimitar belted to his back glinted with gilded scrollwork patterned in a tempest of lightning.

The crowd murmured. Deepmand turned to regard me, waiting to hear what I would say. The eyes of the citizens bore into me, demanding an answer.

“I will thank you to refer to me as ‘Elder Enchantress Hiresha,’ young lady.” I had not meant to say that last part to the white-haired woman—the words had slipped out like loose pages in an old tome—and shame silenced me for three long seconds. “They—the priests who sentenced you to this cage may have misinterpreted the wills of their gods. I will inform them of the impossibility of your pregnancy.”

White locks of hair fanned out as she shook her hair. “I am what I am. For months I couldn’t keep more than crumbs down. My hair has thickened, I piss more than a dog, and even my poor old breasts have perked up.”

Her lack of propriety forced me to gasp. “A reasonable explanation exists for all those symptoms.”

“For all?”
She eased her belly against the bars.

My inability to think of an explanation in no way removed the possibility one existed. Even if pregnancy seemed the most visible answer, the idea could not be countenanced. I had never heard of a woman who bore a child at such advanced age. If a white-crowned woman could conceive, then the event would be as rare as a red diamond. She would never survive the birth.

“Even if you were pregnant,” I said, “you presumed too much in recalling me all the way from the Mindvault Academy. I am not one to conceal others’ improprieties. Or mine. Not to suggest I have any.” I could not believe I just said that.

“I admit I committed a selfish act,” Sri said, “and the gods revealed it. Yet, I pled for your return only for the sake of the other women of Morimound.”

“Yes. As the Flawless, you served as the paragon of virtue and restraint for them.”

A thought waddled to the fore of my mind: I had assumed Sri had meant harming its women indirectly by scarring Morimound’s reputation, yet she might have been thinking of another effect. She had said something about a transgression. I wished my thoughts would follow the speed of conversation.

More tears ran down her face’s wrinkles. “You may be right. Perhaps they are all pregnant because of me.”

I started. “What did you say?”

“Have you not seen? All the women of Morimound are with child.”

My thoughts froze in my head and refused to move. I had to speak without thinking.

“I most certainly have seen nothing of the kind. I have seen a trend, yet…no, it’s beyond possibility.
Utterly impossible.
The women of Morimound have upstanding morals, their threads of fate the brightest in the world. Did you say ‘all the women pregnant?
’”

“And all for just as long.”

My heart pounded blood into my head, scattering my thoughts even farther. I could not focus on anything. It all seemed a nonsensical, childhood dream. Yet, I knew I did not dream because if I were sleeping, then I would not feel so exhausted.

“You, Sri the Once Flawless, can only be suffering from dementia.”

“Ask any woman here, any man. They will tell you I speak truth.”

The crowd mumbled assent.

“Hysteria,” I said, “cannot prove true a delusion.”

“Then go to the God’s Eye,” Sri the Once Flawless said. “You must believe the priests.”

“I will go, as sanity is obviously in need of a champion.”