Dark Lord's Wedding (55 page)

The weavers dropped down around the lady. They spun curtains between Celaise, Miss Barrows, and her daughter. The staves touched overhead. Spiders scaled to the point then sprang. They trailed silk.

Celaise made a wish to the spiders.
Weave.
They listened. They zigzagged over the lady, spinning a web of lace. She withstood them. Celaise could’ve made the spiders bite the lady, but their fangs would’ve broken off on her skin. She had to be harder than gemstones. Not even the Green Blood had hurt her. She didn’t flinch as spider legs spanned her face. Her hair was wrapped in a net.

Celaise breathed out despair and hardened it in her hands into black gems. Eight cold stones, eight eyes. Their darkness gleamed with secrets. They shone with merciless hunger. Celaise set four across the lady’s collar in a necklace of eyes. The rest encircled her hips in a belt of bottomless gazes.

The spiders sewed the eye gems into place. The legs of the weavers were yellow, fat and furred at the joints, and ended in spindles. They tiptoed down the new skirt. The spiders plopped to the ceiling floor, leaving the lady standing in her dress of silver.

Celaise and the maids stepped away. The guests saw the lady, and they would never forget. She gleamed as a web in starlight, and you couldn’t look away from those, not until you spotted the spider. Her dress stared back with its eight gems.

Limbs of silk reached from her back. They bristled with woven strands like a living spider’s. With every breath she took, the boning in her bodice contracted, and the cloth limbs behind her reached and grasped.

The lady moved to the guest tables. The men were kings, but they could not meet her eyes. She had too many. The guests couldn’t be angry. They were too frightened. Celaise could tell they feared to be close, dreaded to be sent away. They crouched and stooped before the lady and her dress. They bowed to Celaise’s masterwork. Her craft of murder.

Jerani wrapped an arm around Celaise’s waist. “Should I still not look?”

His touch made all her muscles tense, flame, shiver. She should kill him too, string out his guts to make a new dress, an even better one. The thought was terrible, but it crawled through her faster than she could stamp it out.

She had to tear herself away from him. Celaise didn’t want to. She had to, and now hurt warped the scar lines on his face. Celaise’s insides were shriveling into stinking green sludge. It would feel no worse if every spider had bitten her.

This couldn’t go on. She knew something would have to change, and it would be for the worse. “Every dress I spin gives me more fear. More power. More, more, more.”

“Too much?”

“I’m floating away from you.” And closer to the lord father. Celaise had to fight the tide of black wine. That sounded impossible. She might have to do something terrible. “Jerani, what if I never wove another dress?”

“What?”

“Would you still love me? If I stopped Feasting. If I could.”

“You can,” Jerani said, “I know you could.”

“How could you? No one can leave the family.” There was no escape, just the weight of chains no one could see. “It’s a stupid idea.”

“No, there’s a way.” Jerani patted his robes. “The lord talked about it.”

“To you?”

Jerani pulled out something shiny. Not a fang, it was a little glass bottle. The stuff inside it churned and shimmered.

Celaise grasped his arm. “What is that?”

Jerani huddled over the bottle. His fear wafted cinnamon. “It belongs to the lord.”

Hiresha cast a shadow with eight legs.

“You are looking fateful tonight,” Fos said. He propped himself on one foot, ready to rise from his pillow. His gaze darted past Hiresha, toward the pillars with the engagement necklaces. He looked back to her dress, closing one eye at a time as if to compare how the different ones saw her spidersilk. “Did the priests read marriage in your future?”

Prophecy was for small minds and orphans. Hiresha wouldn’t say so, however, since Fos had in fact lost both parents.

“Only asked because they did for me.” The protrusion in Fos’s throat bobbed down then up again. He glanced past her then to the kings at his table.

They leaned in to hear. Fos likely wished to speak with her in private. She would have to disappoint him more than once tonight.

Fos cringed at the onyx orbs of her dress then lifted his chin farther. He was gazing into her eyes with their amethyst pigments. Hiresha knew the priests had told him he would marry a woman with “eyes a’glitter.” One could say she and Fos were meant to be. In her other facet, the masses had tittered long over that detail, when they weren’t groaning and dying of pox.

“Are you sure you’re supposed to marry the lord?” Fos asked.

“I am certain it’s impossible for a mortal to be certain.” It wouldn’t do to exterminate all hope in Fos and the kings that she might yet marry one of them. Yes, Tethiel would approve, regardless of the means. “Especially when the groom in question takes his drinking more seriously than his husbandly duties.”

The king brute asked, “You saying he’s soggy cocked?”

Hiresha rolled her eyes halfway and gazed upward. “And could there possibly be another metric to judge a man?”

“Ha!” The king slapped the table. He grinned as he shook his head. How remarkable that a person could simultaneously resemble a rapacious orangutan and a slime mold.

Fos’s eyes reflected the brightness of her dress. “Then, will you return to the Empire? With me?”

The king clapped an arm over his shoulder. “With our armies.”

“I’ll not return to imprisonment, no matter how lavish,” Hiresha said. “A sleepy life of normalcy would make me twice dead, whereas with magic I’m twice alive.”

“Then are you the conquering type now?” Fos asked. “You look it. Could be solid crystal now, sure as fate. Bones, mind, and heart all cold and sparkling.”

“They would be warm and rather inefficient,” Hiresha said, “yet that’s beside the point. I’m the same woman you knew, though with less need to tolerate foolishness.”

“You were a healer.”

“I was always more.”

Fos must believe they belonged together, as he did in the other facet. Tearing away his expectations caused him tremors of pain she observed in his uneven breaths and the way he cupped his hands over his abdomen. Hiresha was hurting him, her friend of years, the man who had saved her life. To do otherwise she would have to accept the confines of his vision of her.

He stretched a tight smile across his face. “Whoever you are now, you’re the type ready to kill a few people at your wedding.”

“As few as possible,” Hiresha said.

“Is this what you really want? A crown? Armies? People moping about you bowing all day? The empress says it’s awful.”

“The empress is a featherhead,” Hiresha said. “And therein lies the problem. If I don’t take power away from idiots, they’ll continue to squander lives with their stupidity.”

“Then you are marching on the Empire?” A shadow passed over Fos’s face, from one of her dress’s moving segmented arms.

“Bet your stiffest sword she is,” the king brute said.

“She’ll do as she wills,” the potato king said, which proved he had some sense. The other men didn’t mark him.

“I couldn’t come with you, on the attack,” Fos said. “Even if I’m fated to.”

Hiresha admired the strength of belief in himself, in her. It had brought him through the jungle to sit tall beside kings. Of all the people in his life, he likely only had cared for his sister more than Hiresha. Tonight she had pushed away what could have been his marriage proposal. Seeing her this close to Tethiel might be Fos’s worst fear, and yet he still endured with a stiff jaw. She held out a hand to him.

He took it. His head tilted, ear lifting toward her. He expected her to speak.

She did not. Hiresha left him and the kings to wonder and dread.

“Won’t you join us?” Tethiel asked. He flickered out of sight while speaking. The former deepness of his voice changed. Each of the vowels now purred, and the words trailed with sibilance. It no longer sounded like a man. “My heart.”

Tethiel had promised. At last Hiresha would see. She tracked the voice toward another table. Her chest squeezed against the air she couldn’t breathe out. A chain reaction of expectations exploded with her in zings and jolts of curiosity.

Behind Elbe’s shoulder, holding a chalice full of a viscous darkness, Tethiel stood as a woman.

Tethiel had put on his feminine mask, or taken off her masculine one. She, Hiresha observed, had lost nothing in height. Tethiel’s eyes had the same dark undertow. She wore a frightful corset with proportions comparable to a hornet’s. The aggression of her jutting chest and hips met in a waist nightmarishly slender, only sufficient to fit her spine. The paleness of her hands pulsed with moonlight. Her red nails clicked together. They arched twice as long as her fingers.

Wrongness stung Hiresha across her brow. Itching jabs spread in shocks over her chest and down into the organs Tethiel appeared to lack. Hiresha felt as if she melted in a whirling concoction of whirling excitement and tickling stars. The air rushing into her lungs came with sharp pleasure.

Tethiel looked too believable as a woman, too similar and too different. A perfume wafted from her with the aroma of roasted coffee and recklessness. Nothing about her comforted Hiresha, only intoxicated. The same was true of Tethiel when a man. Hiresha might merely have accustomed herself to the other guise.

“I wish,” Elbe said beside her, “I could believe Lord Tethiel is a lady.”

“It is a fascinating speculation,” Hiresha said. Perhaps Tethiel had only claimed to be impotent to hide a deeper truth. She could never impregnate Hiresha. For the same reason, Tethiel might’ve agreed to forego children.

“Exalt in the uncertainty.” Tethiel held out the chalice to Elbe. The viscous drink stuck to the sides in a dark ring. “It is the essence of romance.”

Elbe tilted her chin away from the chalice.

Hiresha needed the Purest to accept Tethiel or the wedding victory would be incomplete. “Even if you knew Tethiel had been born a woman, you could not be certain. As you told me, women may have as much curse as men. A body we perceive as feminine may have a man’s soul.”

Across from Elbe, the jaguar knight flipped his tail. His whiskers twitched upward.

“And the opposite is also true,” Hiresha said. “A woman may reside in a figure others see as male.”

The beetle of Elbe’s earring bobbed its legs over her shoulder. She didn’t turn all the way to face Tethiel. “You believe women could be so cursed?”

“I’ve met one, a past colleague.” Resentment burrowed its spiky tendrils through Hiresha’s chest. The elders had betrayed Hiresha because they had feared how she might evolve her practice of enchantment. They had been right. “As you once told me, ‘Harmony makes us most truly women,’ not anatomy.”

Tethiel again offered the chalice. The drink was chocolate, with a cinnamon stick propped up within the glass.

Elbe closed her eyes. The same patterns crossing her butterfly eyelashes were painted as dark panes on her eyelids. She opened them. “Appearances cannot be trusted as much as actions. If you both act with harmony, then my heart will fill with golden sweetness knowing you are both women.”

“Swords may make people bow,” Tethiel said, “but it’s style that keeps them loyal.”