Dark Lord's Wedding (46 page)

“If we wed, I’d rid myself of this extraneous height.” Otherwise Hiresha would have to bend down to kiss anything lower than the top of Elbe’s head. The feathers bound to her hair would brush and tickle against the lips and cheeks.

Hiresha and she might kiss now, except Elbe didn’t possess the diamond from the Mother-In-Law’s Eye. Favors couldn’t be given away. The jewel moved upward in relation to them with an itching across Hiresha’s skin. The Green Blood had the gem now, of all people.

Tension whirled in Hiresha’s chest, and excitement pulsed. The Green Blood might try to envenom her, or poison her. The abomination had both powers. She could turn the deadly strength against its master. First she would need an enchantment. She had practiced warding herself against various noxious substances, yet Green Bloods were renown for concocting new blends of death.

She left Elbe and met Celaise in a changing room. While Celaise dressed her, Hiresha prepared an enchantment. On a shelf beside the pink hippo statuette waited a malachite. Hiresha summoned the green gem to her.

A scream pierced through the opaque crystal wall. Celaise didn’t stop her work. She might not be able to tell this wail from those of the throat singer. The sound, though, it was barbed with surprise and lacked even clarity to its pitch. Hiresha believed the Feaster girl detected the fear. She started weaving faster amidst the anguish.

Likely Tethiel had resorted to harsh discipline. Hiresha shouldn’t assume the worst. No reason to leap to a conclusion that the Green Blood had stricken Elbe. Why, Hiresha could hardly imagine someone of the Purest’s repose screaming at all.

Come, now.
Tethiel’s deep voice invaded Hiresha.
Or your guest will die.

Confound this world! Hiresha hurled the wall open. Purple thread tangled after her.

“Wait,” Celaise said.

Fos bellowed from above. “Get your daggers out of her!”

“
He who rules must be the source of all violence.”

“
Then she who reigns must be the center of all good sense.”

Tethiel decided to embrace the spirit of the festivities and allow a child to cut off a finger. One would be a small enough price for indulgence. Ah, he was too generous. A parent’s self sacrifices were altogether too selfish.

The jaguar knight prowled closer. He would have been waiting for the bride to leave. No sooner did she slip into her secret changing room when he came with that deliciously spotted fur coat of his, with its shadow rosettes and treasure hues.

“After you, my milk pumpkin,” Tethiel said. They strolled out to the two posts displaying the betrothal necklaces. “Here we may have a whiff of privacy. And this is the jewel the Lady of Gems stole from a god.”

The jaguar growled with the sound of a distant avalanche crushing a village.

“Yes, I was wrong to serve those butterflies,” Tethiel said. “Souls are ever so fattening.”

A server placed between them a board of the finest purple-blood wood. The jaguar set to scratching it.

“All lands,” the hatch marks read. Xochi then aimed his gold-curse eyes at the Bright Palm sitting at a high table. The jaguar knight clicked his teeth together.

“You’re willing to eat a Bright Palm? Most brave. Their meat is too lean and rotten with dourness.”

A paw tapped against the scratched board.

“You’d eat all the Bright Palms in the lands?”

The jaguar knight turned his ears forward in agreement.

“A mouthwatering ambition.”

How blissful night would be without those Bright Bores. Tethiel believed Xochi might even be able to make good on his offer. He commanded other jaguar knights and could influence the Dominion’s armies. An alliance with this spotted divinity could make Tethiel supreme from sea to sea, from dusk to dawn.

Xochi would demand something of equal value. Tethiel could guess who she was.

“While you undertake this luscious quest,” Tethiel said, “what marvel should the Lady of Gems make?”

The jaguar knight scratched out the glyph for ships. He wanted the enchanted vessels to sail across sand dunes. His armies would dominate the Oasis Empire then take their blood-decorated claws and blades up to the Alliance of Masks. Every new conquest would exterminate the Bright Bastards.

They could all be gone. The night could reach perfect dark. Then Tethiel would be the first lord of nightmare to rule all the Lands of Loam. For longer than an evening.

Tethiel saw but one problem. “The Lady of Gems would never agree.”

The jaguar knight nodded toward the betrothal necklaces. His whisker wreath dipped and rose again.

“She’d be no more willing to listen to me after the wedding. Marriage changes everything, except for the bride and groom.”

Xochi hissed with the sound of boiling snakes.

“The key to getting anything done is to lower expectations,” Tethiel said. “Ally with us, and we can counterpoint the Winged Flame to bring the gods back into balance.”

The jaguar knight lowered his tail, sweeping it back and forth over the glass ceiling in a pose of contemplation. He sat upon his haunches and leveled his gaze of golden mystery with Tethiel. He reached out with one paw. His finger pads were broad and pale amid the dark fur.

Tethiel knew better than to clasp hands with the jaguar knight. This was a different sort of gesture, and it was the same.

Xochi’s claws were hidden for the instant, but he wouldn’t need them to kill. The jaguar knight could snap a neck with a shove. A push would shatter a ribcage.

The paw pressed against Tethiel’s chest. Heat sank into his heart, and with every beat it scorched through his arms to his fingertips, fighting against the exhilarating backflow of black wine. The jaguar’s furry bludgeon spanned the breadth from Tethiel’s shoulder to mid vest. His buttonhole would be crushed.

A less distinguished jaguar knight might test a man by wrapping jaws around his head. Xochi didn’t open his mouth for that indignity. Tethiel met him eye for eye. Both kept their fangs in. Tethiel could tell Xochi feared the strength of the Winged Flame. His smell of fried pancake proved it. They might have an agreement.

Or they might not. The jaguar knight shifted down to all fours. He marched away showing his asshole.

Then a lower guest screamed. A rain of bright blood had fallen over her entrée of air-dried chinchilla. What a waste, but victim though she was, this woman didn’t have the room’s greatest fright.

Tethiel followed Lyss’s scent of lotus wine to the high tables. She was being naughty. Her daggers were sawing through the neck of a Bright Palm. The glowing blood that sprayed furthest rained all the way to the glass floor. The clear ceiling diverted the rest, pulling it back toward the stars. It was a sight of beauty, one that Hiresha wouldn’t appreciate.

He would have to tell her with a sending.
Come, now.
Or your guest will die.

With efficiency that spoke of much practice, the Feaster wedged her serpentine dagger between Alyla’s neck and pried the vertebrae apart. Hiresha Attracted the Feaster away by her gold necklace, yet the Bright Palm’s head came off with her.

Hiresha couldn’t very well have the wedding devolve into a mêlée. She had to correct this situation without outraging anyone to the point they wouldn’t partake in the next course.

Fos’s sword ripped through the space where the Feaster had been. He leaped after her, perhaps forgetting that he didn’t wear any enchanted boots. The spellsword landed short. The Feaster was held out of his reach, floating at the center of the reception room, still clutching Alyla’s cranium by her hair.

“What?” Fos’s eyes met Hiresha’s. “Bring that head back.”

Hiresha fully intended to, though she wouldn’t go alone. This dagger Feaster likely hadn’t defied her lord on her own initiative; she would have allies. Hiresha Attracted the two other Bright Palms present by their invitation necklaces. One had already begun an attempt to scale a column to assist Alyla. The other had a nail raised over another Feaster guest. Neither cried out in surprise as Hiresha dragged them flying after her.

“This,” Hiresha said while taking Alyla’s head from the dagger Feaster, “does not belong to you.”

The eyes of the decapitated Alyla focused on Hiresha. The irises glared white with magic. The Bright Palm hadn’t lost consciousness. The pain would’ve been meaningless to her. She even had the presence of mind to mouth the word, “Help.”

Fos had bravely and ridiculously tried to staunch the bursting blood from the body by holding a platter on top of her neck. Hiresha Attracted the head back onto the stump. The two Bright Palms she had towed with her lay their hands on Alyla. Hiresha stayed close to observe the healing.

The ghostly brilliance of their magic flowed into Alyla. Severed skin fused together. Torn muscles connected with scar tissue. Blood vessels stretched to find each other and bond, sometimes with the wrong one. Hiresha broke them apart to seal the original pairings back together. The spinal chord was a tangled puzzle that even she couldn’t solve. The nerve strands wriggled to reconnect; no telling if they were the most suitable of pairings.

Alyla did not get up. She mouthed something that was easy to deduce as, “I cannot breathe.”

“Would you be good enough to push air into her lungs?” Hiresha said to the Bright Palm who resembled Jerani. They were likely familial.

“It should be me,” Fos said. “She’s my sister.”

“She’s no one’s sister,” the dagger Feaster said. She contorted herself in her prison of air to face Hiresha. “Your guest had no soul. Was trying to give her an honest death.”

Hiresha had expected conflicts at her wedding. Even so, the defiance stimulated her heart to palpitations, frightening in their force and quickness. All her jewels aligned their pavilion points toward the Feaster.

Hiresha swept a hand to the prone Bright Palm. “Merely because she doesn’t experience the world as you do doesn’t mean she’s unworthy to live.”

Tethiel appeared beside Hiresha to face the Feaster. “Better soulless than traitorous. My child, you’ve disappointed me.”

The woman with a stabbing habit glanced to a table with high guests. She had to hope for aid from the Bleeding Maiden. She may have even been promised it. Now they would observe if the murderous would-be waif would abandon another follower to death.

She did not. The Bleeding Maiden wrung her hands as she approached. She pawed at Tethiel’s shoulder. “Please, you mustn’t kill her. You, avenging a Bright Palm against your daughter? She’s your best shadow knight.”

“She was yours tonight,” Tethiel said, “and you cannot save her.”

This, Hiresha deduced, was the Bleeding Maiden’s ploy. She had placed Tethiel in a situation where he would either look weak to his followers, by sparing the rebellious Feaster or from coddling Bright Palms. Many of his stooges looked up from the common tables. Physis was so rapt she hadn’t even changed to copy Hiresha’s next dress.

“I will not punish her for attacking a nailer,” Tethiel said. “Her crime was against the Lady of Gems. No one may murder at a wedding except the bride.”

The Feaster spread her hands, and her daggers multiplied. They swarmed around her, morphing into bronze vipers. Through the razors and fangs, she glared at Hiresha. “Are you a friend to the family? Or a slave to the Bright Asses?”