Brood of Bones (21 page)

The carriage stopped at the inn, and I let myself out to find a group of five Bright Palms waiting beside a cart.

“We understand you wished to unburden your soul.”

“Yes, a smidgen of unburdening is just what I needed today. Mister Obenji will be leading a procession of men here carrying expensive furniture. They may not come all at once, so I will thank you to be patient.”

“You should have told us to bring the cart to your manor.”

“I do believe you are right. Thoughtlessness is no doubt a side effect of an over-burdened soul. Now, if you will excuse me.”

I strode toward the inn door; Maid Janny hustled beside me, carrying my ottoman. She glanced back at Deepmand.

“Why is Gautam staying at the carriage?”

“He will assist the Bright Palms.”

“He’s looking after us like a hound with a bur in his backside.”

“This is no time for your vulgarity.” I stopped before the inn door, waiting for someone to open it for me.

With a gleam and a thump, Deepmand landed next to the door. “My place in life is by your side, Elder Enchantress, until life does end.”

His words produced a tremor through my chest, and I hoped he would come to no harm.

The door opened from the inside, and a man in an orange suit beckoned. His face appeared splattered with a fleshy paste, his nose swollen and purplish, and the missing two fingers on his upraised hand confirmed him as a leper. More surprising still, above his shoulder protruded the jeweled hilt of a sword, which appeared disconcertingly familiar.

Deepmand preceded me inside the inn, where two other lepers with swords and bright clothes led us with uncertain gaits into a parlor. One had silver triangles tied to his face, where he should have had a nose, and the arms of the last man ended in moveable stumps, all his fingers gone. I did not know whether to laugh at the fingerless swordsman or be horrified.

“What’s going on?” Janny craned her neck to see around the ottoman.

The Lord of the Feast sat on a couch, his suit and
vest
the red of aerated blood, lace spilling from his jeweled cuffs and surging from his collar in a silk spume.

As I entered the room, he rose, only returning to his seat when I had positioned myself on my ottoman. His expression was neutral, his voice controlled.

“Enchantress Hiresha, you’ve come at the perfect moment.”

He slouched, arms limp at his sides. Beside him, a woman wore a low cut dress that revealed no bosom but ridges of ribs under sallow skin, gaunt as if she had nearly died of a wasting sickness. She lifted a cup to his lips, and he drank a steaming black liquid with an affected sigh.

“Once brewed,” he said, “the bitter bean is an antidote to drowsiness. It may be the greatest necessity you’ve never tried.”

The emaciated woman sipped from a second cup then lifted it in offering to me. I would not have expected the Lord of the Feast to invite me for a cup of bitter bean, and I might have doubted my assessment of him if not for the curious leper guards and the bony faces and twig arms of the women in the room; the four starving figures reminded me of the physique of the Feaster boy I had interrogated.

“I will not partake,” I said.

“It’s not poisoned.” He glanced at the painfully undernourished woman who had tasted the drink. “She’s a dear heart but couldn’t survive a drop of nightshade.”

The woman looked like a skeleton wearing a skin suit. She revolted me, as did all the presumed Feasters, with their dull, sunken gazes of fright. Among them, the Lord of the Feast appeared healthy, even with his snowy face and seemingly paralyzed arms.

Waving away the cup, I said, “Bitter bean only puts me to sleep.”

“You don’t say?” He swallowed from his cup, which the woman then lowered in order to dab his mouth with a napkin. “Then you’re better off without. I’m convinced it’s no good for me, it’s too delightful.”

The lepers with swords disturbed me, yet I worried more that the Lord of the Feast plotted to delay until the Bright Palms outside departed. My heart fluttered, beating two hundred and three times a minute, and I noticed I could count the silver links on his pocket-watch chain: thirty-seven. I also identified the twelve varieties of flower embroidered on his vest, from camassia to wisteria, a feat I should not have been able to achieve while awake.

“I did not come to dither,” I said. “I know who you are.”

“You do? Then please remind me, it’s been days since I introduced myself.”

“You are the Lord of the Feast.”

Maid Janny
gasped,
and a rustle of my gowns told me she hid in my silken train.

His brows rose in surprise at my denouncement, yet as they stayed lofted for more than a second, I could tell it was feigned. “Do I have a surplus of heads? Do I stand thirteen feet tall? No, I am merely ‘Tethiel.’ That is, until I lift my hands.”

One of his gloved fingers twitched, and the woman beside him winced. She was afraid, and I believed I should be as well, yet I still felt as if the thread of my fate thrummed under a goddess’ touch.

Deepmand drew his scimitar over his shoulder, although his blanched face and bloodshot eyes suggested that only the stiffness of his armor kept his hands from shaking. The leper dandies reached for their blades, the fingerless one locking his wrist into a gauntlet attached to his hilt.

“Don’t bother, my hearts,” the Lord of the Feast said. “The Spellsword could cut through you like wicker. But he won’t. He’s too wise, which is more than I can say for the Bright Palms outside. My dear Enchantress Hiresha, discovering me has only confirmed my good opinion of you. But one could interpret the presence of the Bright Palms as a discourtesy.”

“They will only accost you,” I said, “if you fail to tell me what you know of the mass pregnancies.”

“By threatening me, you’re doing just what I would do. You’ve disappointed me tremendously.”

“Father.”
A leper limped into the room, toward the couch and the Lord of the Feast. “They are loading furniture.”

“Your furniture?”
The Lord of the Feast gazed at me with blue eyes, which burned like icicles across my skin. “You haven’t told the Bright Palms about me.”

“I will, unless you speak substance.”

“And what will you tell them? That I’m serving cups of bitters?”

“I will tell them of whom they must dispose.”

“And ‘
whom
’ is that?”

I had to stand up to him and stop his circuitous speech. After the Bright Palms ran out of furniture to load, they would leave.
“You.
They will kill you.”

“Did you hear that, my hearts? Was it not a well-spoken threat?”

The Feasters grinned, and one leper spoke in a hoarse voice. “Not veiled in the least, Father.”

“How charming,” he said. “A man can never tell how much a woman cares about him until she threatens his life.”

“You are mocking me,” I said.

“I mock your faux pas,” he said, his tone still impossibly even and collected. “Only threaten those you know, or you may not hit upon what they most fear. You see, those five automatons outside could not catch me, should I ride away on Eyebiter, and even if they could, they still would not kill me.”

I peered at his face for signs of trepidation or dishonesty, but only his left cheek quirked, hinting at amusement. He had to be a master at self-suppression.

“The Bright Palms would never let you live,” I said.

“They may be heartless, misinformed fools, but they mean well,” he said, “and it’ll not be a better man who kills me, but a worse one. My living harms fewer than my death.”

“The argument of a carrion bird.”

“Enchantress Hiresha, have you ever considered why Feasters—why my children—never break into homes? Never cast through windows?”

“The implication is that you forbid them?” I considered it remarkable how fast I had thought of that reply.

“I care for my children too much to give them what they want. But on the night of my death, my sons and daughters will celebrate by breathing terror through keyholes and killing thousands in their beds.”

I was sure of it now: He was delaying, while my heart hammered my ribs at an unsustainable pace, and heat built inside my gowns to the point where I clung to consciousness.

“Maid Janny, pick up the ottoman.
Unless this fop speaks of the pregnancies, we are leaving.”

Before my gowns could finish sliding off my seat, Janny hefted it and ran out of the inn.

The Lord of the Feast stood. “Before going, you should know that though I am safe from the Bright Palms, these, my seven dearest children, would be strangled. If they come to harm, then tomorrow, on the capital building in every nation, words painted in blood will tell how enchantresses cannot cast spells when awake. That they sleep naked with every sword they enchant.”

My heart stopped mid beat, and for two-thirds of a second, I feared it would never start again. Then it bludgeoned my insides while my mind reeled, scrambling for a clue as to how he could have learned of our shame. I felt as if he had robbed my thoughts.

He continued. “Each department chair in the Mindvault Academy will receive a letter detailing how you broke the Propriety Pledge, resulting in the death of one Faliti Chandur.”

I faced him with open mouth and tearing eyes, wishing he could have done something more civil, such as threatened my life.

“Don’t look so surprised. I have many children, who smell fear in many fascinating flavors.” His tongue peeked out to touch his upper lip, which was painted a deep red. “I feel I’ve forgotten something. What was it? Ah yes. Without my intervention, the women of Morimound will birth fiends that will enslave this city for twenty generations.”

A jolt ran down my spine while tears mixed with sweat in my eyes. “What will they birth? How must I stop it?”

The Lord of the Feast nodded to the woman beside him, and her rat-bone hands drew a folded handkerchief from his coat pocket then lifted it toward my damp face. Spellsword Deepmand held up a gauntlet to block her from touching me.

The crimson-suited lord closed his eyes, for a moment. “The Bright Palms are moving away from the inn. You should go.”

I wiped my face with my gloves. “I cannot depart until I know how to save my people.”

“Elder Enchantress, we should leave.”

“Listen to your Spellsword. He is wise with fear.”

I needed the Lord of the Feast’s information concerning the mass pregnancies. I wanted it more than fistfuls of rubies. However, I had a hard time focusing on him, as my heart had beat so much adrenaline into my blood that my vision blurred, and I could not risk crossing him further, not when he knew so much about enchantresses.

On the way out of the parlor, I stumbled over my gowns and would have fallen on my head if not for the cane. When I reached the carriage and found myself still alive, I did not faint. I merely fell asleep extremely fast.

In my laboratory, I realized that my heart had almost exploded, and I had nothing to show for it. I wanted to believe the Lord of the Feast had bluffed his way out of my threat by denying that the Bright Palms could kill him, yet I had not spotted evidence of the lie and still could not in the mirror.

He might have spoken true, and if so, my errors in judgment had offended the one person who seemed to know anything about these pregnancies.

“You faced the Lord of the Feast and didn’t scream or nothing.” Maid Janny padded my brow with a damp cloth. “Are you made of marble?”

“I believe I did sweat,” I said.

“No more than normal.”

My less-than-erudite statement left no doubt that fatigue once again clogged my mind. I staggered into my manor to see a servant woman stooping over her belly to sweep crystal from the broken windows.

“My girl, did I not tell you to leave those shards alone?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you wanted me to.”

Now that I squinted at the woman, I noticed her sickly complexion and spindly limbs, which seemed inadequate to support
herself
without the help of the broom. She was Alyla Chandur, whose mother I had killed.