Dark Lord's Wedding (16 page)

Everything could go wrong. His children could undermine him. The kings of the land might refuse to attend the wedding. Hiresha could abandon it.

This alliance had to work. No, he needed to do better than that. The marriage had to astound. As a couple, they must steal the world’s devotion. They needed to be everyone’s guilty pleasure. Or the world would take pleasure in watching them burn.

He reined in his basilisk in front of a gateway. This dream belonged to another of his children. He could walk in. Maybe he would.

Inside was an abandoned manse. Wind rolled over hills of dead grass and blew through the house’s broken windows in a whistling chorus. Rain fell through holes in the roof musically. Sunset painted its walls. The house was in delicious isolation. Too high for the sweet stench of the cities to reach, the manse was lost in emptiness.

“Is it real?” Tethiel had dismounted and walked into the dream. “All realities are false, and falsehoods are truth. But does this place exist upon waking?”

“Yes,” his child answered. It was a small thing of modest appetites, a ghost holding a lantern. The spirit cowered, and as it spoke, its mouth did not move. Only its flame flickered. “I stayed here for a time, lord father.”

Tethiel walked through rooms of beautiful incompletion. Half the floor tiles were missing, half the doors were locked with keys lost, half the rooms empty, half the closets cluttered with worthless treasures, half the attic collapsed, and half the cellar flooded.

In such a place Tethiel could escape. He could bid his obligations farewell. He could live with Hiresha and her crystal tinkering. They would bother no one. No one would bother them. Their wedding could be a quiet affair. A few candles, a blood sacrifice, and cake.

“Why did you ever leave?” Tethiel asked.

“I grew hungry,” the child answered.

“No company?” For their escape to work, Tethiel would have to stop Feasting. Hiresha would need to content herself with the jewels she already had. The Bleeding Maiden would have to never ride into his dreams, once she was queen of nightmares. Their enemies would have to leave them in peace.

Graver still, Tethiel would have to content himself with never knowing how far he and Hiresha could have risen. What marvels they could’ve created together. What minds they could’ve sculpted, and what nations built. They could rule, or they could spend their lives running from their own power.

No, he could never live simply. It would be too complicated.

Hiresha leaped off the river’s surface and flew over boats, docks, and then streets. The City of Gold was bright, though not with metallic luster. Flowers covered each flat-topped roof in uniform purples, yellows, blues, spotted whites, a chaos of colored dots. The city was fragrant. Updrafts of nectar scents alternated with sewer reek. The city was filthy. Trenches of mud and feces served as lower streets for laborers. Predominately men, they wallowed forward while balancing water jugs on their heads. One vessel tipped and broke when a man spotted Hiresha.

Most people did not look up. Children in an alley threw rocks at a dead snake. A babe sat on her mother’s shins to excrete on the street. Flies converged on the mess.

The city was a jungle of clay brick. Whitewash failed to cover all the cracks in the homes, and a few buildings had crumbled. The rest had rooftop gardens, tended by humming women. They stopped as Hiresha passed. They stared. Some pointed and cried out. A few dropped to their knees among the flowers and bowed.

They had seen her. Now this world would know of Hiresha’s power. The day could not be undone. If Hiresha had made a miscalculation, this would be the moment she regretted forever.

She would also have to withstand the smug disappointment of Miss Barrows. She had told Hiresha not to go. “Elope if you have to,” Miss Barrows had said, “but don’t go parading yourself in front of a bunch of bloodletters. They’ll cut out your heart and toss it to their scaly gods.”

“You’re over generalizing. The Dominion of the Sun is not inhabited entirely by priests and their sacrificial knives. That’d be equivalent of saying we were raised in an empire of headhunters.”

“That’s a flaming barrel of pig shit and you know it. Headhunting is mostly illegal. Sacrifice is their national sport.”

“I believe their warriors play some manner of game with hornet nests, yet that’s beside the point. Were I to fly over the City of Endless Day, now that would be inexcusable. I understand the City of Flowing Gold has a more peaceable outlook.”

“They’ll hear. Bet your butt they will.”

“Soon, I’ll have enough amethyst to feel safe.”

“They have jaguars. They have armies to send after you.”

“By then I’ll be ready.”

Hiresha hoped it would be so. Prickling sensations crisscrossed over her skin, and it wasn’t only because of the multitudes of bees.

The city resonated. The air throbbed with insect wings. The haze buzzed. The pollen-coated legs and banded abdomens thronged in shifting clouds from rooftop to rooftop. The bees parted around Hiresha. The current from her momentum pushed most aside. The rest she Repulsed so as to not collide and harm any of the industrious creatures. Her magic nudged them and their stingers away.

The city had modeled itself after the honeybees that had brought it wealth. The buildings were hexagonal and fit together to resemble hive combs. Six-sided towers were painted like flowers, with dots leading gusts of bees to open windows with flower planters.

What a joy for Hiresha to fly over such geometry. Tethiel had been right to recommend this place. The civic planning, the grid of streets, the adherence to a theme, it suggested a people that valued forethought and unity.

The stratified street and growth-stunted men suggested something else: rampant and senseless discrimination. In that regard, the city was not so different from home.

As a child, she had only tasted this city’s honey a scant three times, on festival days. How she had treasured its golden sweetness. Now its ultimate creators buzzed around her. The bees flitted between the streamers of her ribbon cape. The yellow fabric rippled behind her for forty-three feet.

The cloak did make her resemble a bird. Some children had named her so, hopping up and down on the street and chasing after her ribbons. Yet Hiresha may have been right to accept the wardrobe suggestion from Tethiel. She would have been too small to notice without it, quite lost in the bees. The cape matched her citrine-spiral dress while also covering her back. No one would see diamonds implanted there in the design of a kraken. She did have to think of how she presented herself. The first foot she put forward shouldn’t be a monstrous tentacle.

She flew onward. Warm air flowed into her dress and down her legs and toes. Her yellow train rippled behind her and looped around towers. She sprang off their flat sides: six faces, five towers. Hiresha would’ve preferred a grouping of six, and indeed, construction had begun on another foundation already.

Hiresha found the nearby market then skipped two blocks to the east. There waited a fountain exactly as Tethiel had described. A statue of a pregnant woman was smiling as water spurted from her belly button. Tethiel did have a penchant for oddity.

A familiar Feaster sprang from the fountain’s edge and prostrated herself before Hiresha. “Lady of Gems, welcome to the City of Gold.”

“It is hardly your right to welcome me, Minna. We are both of us guests.”

The Feaster was the daughter of Miss Barrows, and of all the women on the street, only she wore a veil. Now the citizens were looking from her to Hiresha.

Minna’s eyes blinked at a rate of three times a second in her panic. Her words rushed out with the halting rapidity of being rehearsed. “Lady of Gems, you have been invited to stay with priestess … with Purest Elbe. May I lead you to her home now?”

“You may.” Hiresha lifted her naked hand. Nothing covered it except her jewels. The amethysts gleamed with more than sunlight. Hiresha didn’t hide their dreamshine. Everyone was looking. People were seeing the real her for the first time.

Excitement crackled over Hiresha. Everything fluttered. Even her bones hummed.

One woman stepped over Hiresha’s ribbon train to approach. She had notable piercings of her own. Piranha dangled from her ears. Their teeth appeared to be biting her lobes, yet the fish were dead and preserved. Their eyes had been replaced with painted wood. Though Hiresha wouldn’t call the piranha “jewelry,” they were ornamentation of a kind.

The woman asked, “You flew with the bees?”

“Approximately, yes,” Hiresha said.

“Were you stung?” The woman reached out in a most forward manner to touch Hiresha’s wrist, above her jewel clusters, and then again on her cheek.

Hiresha stopped herself from Repulsing the hand away. “I am not stung.”

People started to murmur. One young woman with a fan of blue feathers protruding from her hair said, “Is she one of the Pure?”

“Couldn’t be,” another woman said. Hexagonal tattoos surrounded her drooping breasts.

“W-what are you?” The woman with the piranha was trembling now.

The poor Feaster, Minna, jerked her head up. She licked her lips, no doubt preparing to recite Hiresha’s title a third time. Hiresha spared her by answering.

“I am the dawn of a new age. I am Hiresha.”

Saying it would’ve made her blush, yet her magic clamped the minor blood vessels in her face. Maybe she was being inexcusably presumptive, or merely accurate. They might remember her as coming that morning with the dawn. They wouldn’t know that this was her dawn facet. Every sunrise she witnessed in this world, never a sunset. She could’ve said something else but nothing as true.

At least the women did not laugh. They refrained from telling Hiresha that her jewel piercings were an abomination. They didn’t mention that women of refinement only practiced magic behind closed doors. They made way for her. They accepted her, for the moment.

The Empire had seen her as a sleepy enchantress. Her colleagues in the Academy had known her as an eccentric savant. They would cast her out for breaking tradition and been right to do so. Hiresha hadn’t been one of them. She was far greater.

Hiresha was free at last. She was herself.

She couldn’t walk at a time like this. Hiresha’s toes only skimmed the street. The ribbons of her cape floated weightless behind her. They drifted through the air as if underwater. A woman snipped off one strand with her gardening shears, yet that was of little consequence. The woman clutched the yellow fabric against her chest.

Trees shaded the boulevard, and flowers grew on the branches. Orchids draped their petals. Flowers of different varieties demarcated other streets, hanging from signposts in planters. Hiresha could anticipate where she needed to go by Minna’s darting eyes.

The girl walked to the side and just behind. Her veil hid the wine-stain birthmark on her face. She concealed her paleness under a shawl patterned with intertwining snakes. A taxidermy viper circled her arm. Its yellow complemented her dress, in a scaly fashion.

“Minna, I know why you became as you are.”

“You do?” A mirror was tucked into the Feaster’s belt. She made a fist around its handle as if she gripped a weapon.

At night, she would unveil herself as Minara, an unblemished woman with a face free of any wine-stain birthmark. “We are taught to accept ourselves and our position in life. There is value in that,” Hiresha said, “yet I admit there’s nothing as liberating as appearing in the manner of your own choosing.”

Minna’s veil masked her face. Her grin still shone through her eyes.

People followed Hiresha down the boulevard. Some ran ahead. Children caught hold of her ribbons. Hiresha willed the fabric to split, leaving presents for the girls and boys. Hiresha came into a district of manor houses. The sea breeze suppressed some of the city stink. A salt wind blew past flowers. Terraces of limestone overflowed with blooming vines. Ponds lined the street, and they were rich with imported lotuses.

Gates of ebonwood opened for Hiresha. Women shut them behind her, closing out the other citizens and leaving her alone with Minna.

“Purest Elbe is waiting for you in the Sapphire Palace,” Minna said. They neared a glass house. The panes of its walls and ceiling were tinted dark. “She’s afraid. She thinks she’ll lose her position.”