Dark Lord's Wedding (4 page)

Her vision rippled then flexed back into focus. “Don’t call it a dream. Both facets have equal probability of being real.”

“Some dreams are more real—”

“Tethiel, never try to prove one facet false. The power of my dream inversion depends on my uncertainty.”

He inclined his head. Behind him, the water erupted from the Bright Palm surfacing. Again, she attacked. Hiresha speculated that fearlessness inhibited learning. The bronze blade belonging to the woman stabbed downward in a spray of glinting droplets.

Hiresha flicked her fingers, and the paragon diamond thumped into the Bright Palm. It Burdened her into the pool’s depths.

“My heart,” Tethiel said to Hiresha, “there’s no greater force in this world than ignorance. I promise to respect the strength of yours.”

“I hope you’re being serious in that jest.” Smiling was a strain.

His lips spiked up in the corners with inhuman barbs. “I am always most serious in my contradictions, but you have to understand it ruffles my coat to be called a figment of imagination. Even one as impressive as yours.”

“I didn’t say that you were a dream, only that you might be.”

“It feels much the same. Call me a nightmare if you wish, but never a dream.”

“Very well. I shall treat you as real.”

“And I’ll give you the same courtesy.” He offered his arm. “Though you are incredible.”

They lunged together across the water. An itch in her chest meant she was nearing her lost diamond. The cavern narrowed to a slimy chokepoint. Bristling legs scuttled in and out.

“My heart,” he said, “is there any way you’d forgive me, in your other dimension?”

“No.” Her hand broke from his.

She cast her blue paragon forward, and it propelled a skitterer out of the way. She squeezed through the sphincter of the crawlspace. The stone constricted her. It oozed over her back. The vileness coated her gems. She couldn’t breathe, and when she wriggled into the next cavern, she didn’t want to. There was no air, only poison.

Hiresha’s blue paragon reforged the gases into vital essence, enough for her to gasp and live. Sulfur dusted down from the pyramid diamond.

“Tethiel,” she called behind her, “you may not wish to follow. This passage is a torment.”

Infection units had covered the cavern with sludge. It did not drip so much as stretch. The slime had drained all the air and spewed out toxins that stung Hiresha’s nose and eyes. She Repulsed the foulness from her.

She could die in this isolation. Even if she didn’t breathe in the poisons, they would seep through her skin. Her gemstone light faded. She would be alone and in the dark, a pile of nameless bones.

Her faceting of reality had brought her here. Few people could follow. Even fewer could understand. Tethiel might be the only one, and in her other life she had sworn to never speak to him again.

“Torment, you say?” Tethiel appeared to saunter through the cave wall. “Hardships aren’t half so lethal as comforts. And with you …”

He coughed and gagged. Hiresha floated to him, kept him safe from the worst of the poisons.

“With you,” he said, “every misery becomes a thing of beauty.”

He waved his gloved hand, the one embroidered with dragons. The cavern transformed. The slime brightened into molten gold. The air rippled with heat. The place had lost none of its terror, but he had gilded it with joy. He swam with her through the air, moving around the dripping globs of gold. Tethiel caught one, and it turned into a nugget in his hand. He tossed it at Hiresha.

She veered away. The gold followed her in impossible loops. She laughed. “Master illusionist indeed.”

“They’re not illusions.” He winked at her. “Only different realities.”

When she touched a hanging tendril of orange brightness it cooled into a gold wire. She Attracted more together, forming hexagons, spheres, and ellipsoids that were perfect in form, for a moment. Then they melted.

“I admit,” Tethiel said, “to have hoped the cave would be more bathed in moonlight and less coated in grime.”

“Thus it was in my other face, yet this cave went deeper.” Hiresha turned toward the tug of her lost diamond. She needed it and also an explanation for how her red paragon had come so far up this poison chute.

“This is better.”

“Because of the danger?” Her jewel flickered red ahead of her. “There!”

A cavefish had died. Its catfish tendrils splayed white. Her diamond was inside it. When her hand neared, the fish’s belly flared crimson.

“It must’ve swallowed my gemstone as a digestive aid.”

“And I thought wealthy eating ruined digestion.”

The fish burst, and black eggs tumbled from its abdomen. The sightless creature had come here to spawn and die. It had carried the diamond as it would any other rock in its belly. Yet this stone was the teardrop of a god. A second deity had hardened it in her eight hands. The rarest of diamonds, the most divine of hues, the red paragon shone radiant.

“This is best,” Tethiel said, “to be here together, where no others could survive. To do what none would dare.”

Hiresha was one with the world as she closed her fingers on the diamond. She had never been closer to her gods. They had made this stone. She would perfect it. Her wrist bones stood out as splotches of darkness while the rest of her hand shone magenta.

She carved the diamond with mind and magic. A thousand and twenty-four Attraction spells pried off gem shards to leave a greater whole. Now it would capture the most light. She had refaceted it before, yet never in this reality. At last it was flawless in all her worlds.

Her hand opened, and the diamond floated above her palm. Trigonal in shape, a wine-grape in size, it was wholly hers. A ring of diamond dust orbited it. The glittering swath curved toward her. It slipped through the pores of her dress as she Attracted the shards into her skin. These new piercings would shine forever across her chest, and their enchantment would Repulse any blade that tried to strike her heart.

“Lady of Gems.” Tethiel enclosed her hand with his fingers, and for once they were wholly human: gloved in velvet and embroidered with monsters but still human. The red paragon was squeezed between their palms, shimmering. “My heart. Hiresha.”

At last he would say it. He would propose to her tonight. It had to happen. They would come closer in this facet at the same moment they severed all ties in the other.

He did not kneel. He stood as a lord. His gaze locked with hers, and his eyes could have been polished stones of onyx. Pure black without any whites, they reflected her and her jewels as if she were trapped inside them. His words resounded.

“Will you rule with me as my wife?”

Her lips began to part to answer. Telling him no would be cruel after all they had shared. Promising herself with a yes might spell her doom. If her other facet was a dream, it might be a prophetic one, a vision, a warning to be rid of this man forever.

Certainty was for fools. Hiresha collected gems and doubts, and the first thing she told him would be neither no nor yes.

“I’m flattered and all that is proper, certainly. You offer me your hand, and you assisted in finding this diamond. A jewel, I suspect, you could’ve stolen back from the Bright Palms weeks ago without all this fuss.”

“A man does want everything just so for his proposal.”

“You arranged for me to clash with your enemies.”

“I like to think of them as
our
enemies.”

If he had come to her at midnight with the jewel in hand, she might’ve sent him away. Even so, “You always drag me into your schemes.”

“What is a scheme but a hope with more ambition?”

“Then tell me yours and tell all. What plot would I be marrying into?”

He lifted one hand off hers to wave to the cavern and its dripping gold. “To rule with more temptation than terror.”

“But also with terror.”

“Any half-rate tyrant can take over with an army. The truly talented do so with a party.”

“Our wedding?”

“Yes.” The light of the red diamond played off his lips. When he spoke his mouth opened with inhuman depths to an infinity of stars, or perhaps jewels. “Kings will come, as will our foes. By the end of the marriage ritual, they will all ask us to rule.”

“Ambitious indeed.”

“Now I am but the Lord of the Feast. As king I would command my Feasters to be better than terrors. Our magic can tantalize. We’d offer forbidden delights and frightful wonders. People would beg to be scared.”

“Not everyone’s tastes run so … decadent,” she said.

“I couldn’t rule alone. Your enchantments would inspire.” He cupped her hands, lifting her red paragon between them. Its facets flashed in angular pathways. “Yours would be the light that guides civilizations. Mine would be the darkness that delights them.”

Hiresha had vowed to use her enchantments to better the world. Her talents lay in innovating, not ruling. She had no wish to marry into more obligations. The wedding Tethiel wanted hardly sounded like the one she had hoped for as a young woman, pined for as a not-so-young one, and then tried not to think about as a well-accomplished spinster.

“If everything goes as schemed,” she said, “how will you control your own power? Your magic is desire. You may begin as a benign ruler, yet soon you might see it as your right to harvest fear from all.”

Doing so would grant him power. He and all his protégées consumed human dread to craft waking nightmares. These had proven useful, yet Hiresha believed in moderation in regard to unthinkable horrors. The difficulty being, temperance was the antithesis of Feasters like him.

“You’re right, my heart,” he said. “Only one thing will keep my judgment clear. You suggested it once yourself.”

Her jewels pulsed to greater brilliance. Beams of purple shot from her hands. Motes in the unbreathable air flitted in and out of sight. “You would stop Feasting?”

“Yes, in the way you devised.”

“And you could still control your Feasters?”

“Through a surrogate,” he said.

“With an enchantment,” she said. “The subjugated Feasters would execute our wishes, or I’d implode their hearts.”

“I’ve always lusted after the idea of retiring to a simple stronghold, just one continent to rule,” he said. “This I swear. Our wedding night will be my last Feast, if you will have me.”

His princely features stayed composed. His blood-red lips betrayed nothing, or so he had to think. His heart was pounding, that was plain in the subtle pulse in his fingertips. He was terrified she would say no.

“Yes,” she said.

Hiresha had promised herself, and promises could be broken. Hers would end as soon as she found Tethiel wanting.

Her first kiss with her betrothed more than sufficed. He tasted of dark coffee and brazen dreams. He reached behind her neck to clasp on an engagement necklace. Its gold thrilled the skin around her throat. Her fingers traced over its metal tines that would hold her red paragon, though she would not enclose it there yet. Once Tethiel had given her such a necklace in error. Now he did so with purpose.

Their kiss might’ve led to another, even in that cavern of slime and death, yet she hadn’t the time. She had only a dozen hours in each reflection of reality. In this facet she would fall unconscious at midday and spiral into her other world.