Dark Lord's Wedding (59 page)

“It is time for a change.” The lady lifted her arms and whirled in shades of gems. The glass palace groaned, creaked, echoed with pings. “The blood moon is nearly here.”

Guests swayed to their feet and started smelling anxious.

“Not to alarm you,” the lord father said, “but if you leave your seats just now you’ll die.”

Each of his breaths came out as wine fume. That’s how he always got his way, but Celaise had never seen it before. She should seal his lips to bottles and not let anyone else drink in his presence.

“It is we who’ll leave.” The lady swung her feet overhead to land on the ceiling.

It and the whole dome shifted upward an inch. The Talon gripped the table. Celaise pressed her gold key safe around her throat. Her heart didn’t beat. It hummed.

“I thank you for attending.” The lady waved down to the common guests with silver keys. “Goodbye.”

“And goodnight,” the lord father said. “We hope that on your deathbeds, tonight will be your most pleasing memory.”

Whatever would soon happen, the Chef first climbed to the ceiling. He nodded his thick chin to Celaise. A few slaves followed carrying ebony chests. Then came the bridesmaids in her dresses.

“Celaise.” The lady’s fingers twinkled when she gestured. “I’m ready for my next gown.”

The lord father was wasted on the lady. She could never appreciate him to the depths of his power, but Celaise chose to help her anyway. Weaving the dress would be a pleasure.

Celaise passed the youth Jerani. He gave her a goofy smile, tried to meet her eyes. That jaguar medallion on his chest, she had given it to him. Strange that she would have. She had done so much for his sake, and now he was like a stranger. Looking at him meant nothing. He wasn’t anything, and once he had been.

Should she feel something for him? She didn’t, and that absence opened in her like a pit pulling her heart downward in a sickening fall.

Black wine shimmered through her. It embraced her from the inside, and she was right again.

She brushed past the youth. The lady needed Celaise’s mastery. The night was hers to command, and her rule would be long and delicious.

53

Who is that Man

Who Lies Submerged?

The Lady Hiresha brought the castle down. Six steps, six slamming leaps, and all its crystal crashed. Only the oval dome flew free.

First the ceiling had turned. The upper tables had flipped upright. The guests had gasped. They swung up with surprise and cheer. Stomachs slewed to the side. Hearts soared. The view tipped up from ballroom to fog, from mist to night, from starscape to gleaming moon. The thief’s light had risen full as a silver sun.

The ballroom’s center pillar now pointed up. Those killed at the wedding then hung overhead. Tapestries unfurled around them, down the crystal column. They were sails, and this the prow.

“A sky ship,” the empire man said. “Think it’ll carry us to the moon and back?”

The king with savage eyes asked, “Is it farther than your Empire?”

“The ritual will be held at sea,” the Lady Hiresha said. “The wedding palace has served. We must set our sights higher.”

She dipped down through the tide of mist and landed on a pillar that had once held up the dome. It shattered at its base. Its facets flew apart, crumbling upward to her. The crystal castle shuddered.

She leaped, flew, and stepped onto the second column. It splintered. Cracks bolted through the walls. The towers swayed, and their bells tolled. They gonged their ringing hollowness. They broke free.

“She’s really smashing it down?” The empire man peered through the glass dome, now the glass hull.

“Just a building,” the king said.

A tower cracked and began to fall. The Lady Hiresha smashed down on the third pillar. Crystal crumbled. It sprayed and glittered. It flew and flashed. It rained and tinkled, but not on the lower guests. They huddled together. They hid under tables. They danced and cheered, but none were hurt.

The fourth pillar fell at the same time as a tower. It impacted. It exploded. The fog lit with shattered moonlight. The bell clanged once more as it broke in two.

The Lady Hiresha had more than the power to create. She could destroy. “If she can break a castle of crystal, one of stone would stand only a little longer.”

“You think she’d do it?” the empire man asked.

“She could,” someone said in a quiet voice.

“No land is safe from her,” the clerkish king said. “Even mountains may shake.”

“Let them all fall,” the savage king said.

The Lady Hiresha’s jeweled feet touched down on the fifth pillar. It burst. The castle’s ceilings whitened with cracks and fell in. The crystal thicket was uncovered. The glass thorns had turned red with blood. She might’ve saved it to hex her guests, but it too was smashed. Red dust burst upward. Crystal stormed.

The last towers flattened. Their bells clattered, cracked, and then fell silent.

The air shook and rumbled with the throat singer’s howling. He spread his arms and sang the song of wind, of earthquakes, and of bird shrieks. His voice matched the force of the demolition.

On the sixth column she stopped. On the final pillar she stood. It remained tall. In her new dress of glistening ice and steam she oversaw the wreckage. Glass spread down the hill in star-like rays. Everything had broken outward. Each guest below the Lady Hiresha lifted their honey drinks in salute.

“Hope they all have thick boots,” the empire man said. “Or they’ll have to fly out too.”

“Come dawn,” the same someone said, “they’ll find a path leading out of the shard fields.”

He gazed over the shining remains. “Guess a fortress of windowpanes wouldn’t have lasted long anyway.”

“The enchanted castle could’ve stood for a hundred years.”

“It’ll be remembered far longer,” the Lord Tethiel said. He appeared at the crystal ship’s balustrade, leaning in front of the empire man, who edged away. “What endures, we ignore. What is gone, we treasure.”

“By fracturing the castle,” came the quiet voice, “the Lady Hiresha recreated it larger in the minds of the future.”

“Just so,” the Lord Tethiel said. “And what’s the point of making something beautiful if you cannot destroy it?”

“She would disagree,” someone said.

“That she would. And it’s past time I introduced you to her.”

The other man, Fos, had stomped away. Guests would see the lord speaking to himself and looking the foppish fool. No one else would notice whether or not someone stood beside him.

He chuckled and reached beyond the edge of the crystal ship. The Lady Hiresha spiraled up from the fog and clasped his hand. Gloves of water shimmered over her arms, crystallizing into ice at her shoulders. A cloak of steam rose behind. Like all her gowns, it bordered on the laughable.

Together, neither lord nor lady looked foolish. Their eyes shared secrets. Their folded hands were as intimate as an embrace. Seeing them together warmed the heart and needled the fingers. They would be a force, as inseparable as thunder and lightning.

“Hiresha,” he said, “this is Guile.”

The Lady Hiresha had a cutting gaze. The gemstone hardness of her eyes could grind through granite. She pierced the Mask, and she saw. What an impaling sacrilege to be seen, to be known, perhaps even to be remembered.

The violation passed. The eye poison stopped dripping as the Lady Hiresha lost focus. She blinked. She had lasted as long as a god. Pressing a hand to the interlocking ice crystals over her chest, she bowed. “I understand you will lead us through the ritual.”

“It would be a privilege. All doubts have gone,” someone said. “The lord and lady will be such a deft couple that people would weep at their coming and celebrate at their passing. Or should that be the other way around?”

“No, that’s right,” the Lord Tethiel said. He leaned closer to the Lady Hiresha. “My heart, I crossed paths with Guile when I was but a young Feaster with no appetite at all.”

“As he is now. My Lady Hiresha, you had made him young again.”

“Yes,” he said. “The only difference is that this time I’m wise with despair.”

“Then you agree you’re hopeless,” the Lady Hiresha said.

“Despair doesn’t get its due,” he said. “Hope can lead men endlessly toward misery, while a dash of despair can clear the eyes.”

“Then wedding her was your act of despair?” This voice was quiet.

“Marriage always is.” He wrapped his arm around her waist. “And may we have many long and forlorn years together.”

Someone said, “If he uttered such drivel in the Kingdoms, he’d be banished for another lifetime.”

The Lady Hiresha asked, “I presume you were the god who exiled him?”

“We were too alike,” the Lord Tethiel said.

“That is a lie,” someone said.

He straightened the buttonhole in his coat. “We could never get along.”

“And that was true.”

With an excitement of squeaks, the desert fox jumped onto the railing. His ears flopped back and forth as he peered down. The crystal ship sailed through the fog. They were above the city, with tall buildings rising like islands.

The Lady Hiresha pulled the fox through the air and cradled him over her shoulder. He batted at the ice crystals dangling from her ear.

Someone asked, “This is the Golden Scoundrel?”

“A divinity of adorability.” The Lady Hiresha glanced away from her pet, and her sight grazed close. “I hope you won’t feel inadequate being only the second-best god of cunning in attendance.”

“Best of all to be the one overlooked,” the quiet voice said. “Many pray for Guile, and what a clamor they make. None are as precious as those who shout against the existence of an eighth virtue. They deny and deny and devote themselves in secret.”

“Have you met the jaguar knight yet?” the Lord Tethiel asked. “You’d get along like cloak and dagger.”

“The jaguar keeps an army of slaves,” someone said. “When my Lord Tethiel and Lady Hiresha rule together, will you do the same?”

“We hadn’t discussed it,” she said. “And we should. It could be a point of discord.”

“I’ve told you I can’t abide slavishness,” he said. “A man who accepts adulation is diminished by it.”

“And a woman who accepts?” The Lady Hiresha flicked the fox’s tail into his face. “Have we resistance to false praise?”

“I couldn’t say,” he said. “Mine has always been deserved.”

“You must be a man,” she said.

The Lady Hiresha hadn’t meant to taunt the Lord of Illusion. He may have put on a face for her of a different gender.

“Only at my worst.” He grinned deep down where no one could see.

The fox yapped, trilled, and warbled in her arms. The Lady Hiresha scratched the fox’s chin and turned from the lord. Her eyes searched but didn’t find. “Before you vanish completely, Guile, I have an awkward question for you. Did you steal one of the groom’s fingers?”

“No,” someone said. “Guile would never do such a thing. Nor lie.”

The Lady Hiresha’s laughter clashed and rang.

Her red diamond necklace dangled from her wrist. She had double-wrapped its chain. A Feaster had tried to take it and been caught. She must have deep ties to the jewel. It would have to stay hers for now.

“To answer you,” the Lady Hiresha said, “I cannot help but wonder if slavery is kinder. In the Empire, the poor are treated worse than property.”

“And in the Alliance of Masks, people enslave themselves to the virtues,” someone said. “All seek, yet almost none rise to godhood. Freedom is cruel at its best.”

“Then so shall it be,” the Lady Hiresha said. “Slaves will earn their freedom.”

She leaned far over the side of the ship with her fox. The small animal didn’t heed the danger. If he contained a spark of divinity, he hid it beneath a golden fluff. His fur flowed beneath fingertips. His droppings were less pleasant, grey sticky things with a sharp reek.

Was this how he treated a fellow god?

He barked a birdsong. The Lady Hiresha spun around and glared. “You stole my fox.”

“Only because your red diamond couldn’t be taken,” someone said. “It was your ladyship’s own fault. You must to see that.”

“I perceive very little of you.”

“Most flattering of you to say so. Did you have a preference for who you’d like to conduct the marriage ritual? Identities can be so fluid.”

“Anyone venerable and impressive, I should think,” she said. The fox hopped back into her arms. “Now if you’ll excuse me, Guile, I must set a course for my ship.”

She strode past the Lord Tethiel and his guards. The young man, the one not yet a leper, had betrayal growing in his heart. He spent less time watching over his master than gazing at the bridesmaid in the raven gown.

“You should remember yourself,” someone told the young man. “Better to stretch a promise than snap it.”

The young man nodded. He blinked, glancing around. Then he twitched into a crouch and looked up. The gemstone dragon looped over the ship in a gleaming arch.