Dark Lord's Wedding

by A. E. Marling

  Jerani wandered off, flexing the hand Celaise had burrowed her roots into. They had slipped back out and left his flesh whole. She would never harm him. No one would hurt him. He tapped his fingers against his chin, looking at the mounds of gemstone.

  He had turned his back on the Lady of Gems. Celaise wouldn’t do that. The lady hadn’t been right. They never had met. Celaise had never seen a woman with jewel-studded arms. The lady had a pull to her. It was like she was at the center of a pit, and you couldn’t help falling toward her. Celaise’s insides slid forward. She had to lean back for balance.

  The lady’s dress wasn’t a total embarrassment. The gossamer would be like wearing a veil over the body, with gemstones filling voids in the fabric. The stones spiraled inward, smaller and smaller, as if descending into a bottomless madness. Not bad. The lady hadn’t even had black wine to make it.

  Oh, now Celaise remembered. She had seen that dress before, only a different color. Now it was yellow. Then it had been purple too, and the jewels hadn’t been glowing. The woman wearing it hadn’t been flying. Her eyes must’ve changed since Oasis City. Now they were a piercing lavender.

  “You’re different,” Celaise said.

  The Lady of Gems scratched the fox’s chin. She didn’t look up.

  “I’m to be your dressmaker,” Celaise tried.

  “I can see you’re a passable one.” The Lady of Gems glanced at Celaise’s root tresses. The lady didn’t smell of fear at all. “You can’t know the golden ratio, I assume?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You do have some natural intuition for beautiful proportions.” Her fox swatted at a necklace with a red jewel so large it would choke a grown man. “Yes, you may help with my wedding dresses.”

  “Dresses? You mean, more than one?”

  “One dress might suffice for most weddings. This one will be anything but ordinary. Did she imagine I’d need assistance making a single gown?” This the lady said to her fox, nose to nose. She turned back to Celaise, peering at the root maze of her skirt. “I can see you have an appreciation for originality.”

  Celaise bowed her head. She had brought night to the City of Endless Day. She could make a few dresses for this lady. This would be wonderful.

  “As an elder enchantress I wore twenty-seven honorary dresses,” the lady said. “An equal number of wedding dresses would have a pleasing synchronicity.”

  This would be terrible. Twenty dresses? Celaise would have to kill people for that much black wine, for so much power. Did the Lady of Gems know the cost?

  “Twenty-seven wedding dresses would also be absurd. No, I shall be reasonable and only require nine.”

  Had the lady been joking? She might still be. Nine gowns? Well, that would only take a couple lives. Jerani would still look at Celaise with his sorrow eyes.

  The Lady of Gems lifted her hand. A dragonfly landed in a flash of crystal wings. It carried a dead scorpion. The lady flicked away the stinger and gave the rest of the bug to the fox.

  Celaise leaned closer to the dragonfly. It had no insides, only a glassy clearness. The eyes were faceted gemstone. “You made them?”

  “One of my side projects,” the lady said. The dragonfly shot away.

  “What are these?” Jerani asked. He stood in front of the amethyst hoard. His spear only just reached the top of the pile. “I mean, will they be something?”

  “Scales,” the lady said.

  “Good,” Celaise said. “The merchants’ balances are always crooked.”

  Dragonflies swooped in loops of green and orange. The fox leaped after them, falling into a patch of maize growing at the center of the grove. Golden beetles crawled over the fronds. Bloodsucking beetles. Pricking beetles that would swarm and lay eggs behind the ear. Had any of the scourge scuttled onto Jerani?

  The beetles on the maize had interlocking circles and triangles on their wing shells. That was new. They had a red sheen. Oh, they weren’t the bloodsucking kind of beetles. They were copper. Real metal copper, engraved by the lady.

  “Are the beetles eating the leaves?” Celaise asked.

  “The corn louse already excels in that capacity,” the lady said. She glided past the maize beetles and toward Jerani with an upraised hand. Her fingernails gleamed like crystal. Maybe they were. “If I may, young man, I’d like to reward you with a simple enchantment.”

  If those crystal nails dug into Jerani’s neck, would he die? Turn into a dragonfly? The Lady of Gems might do anything to him. Celaise had to think of a reason to stop her.

  Jerani spoke first. “What will it do?”

  “Cure your foot fungus.” For the first time, the Lady of Gems feared. Her apprehension smelled of steamed asparagus.

  “You’re lying to him.” Celaise root-shambled in front of Jerani.

  “Wrong.” The Lady of Gems blasted her lavender gaze at Celaise. It didn’t hurt. It only felt like it would. “Your concern is admirable, yet I was only afraid he would refuse treatment.”

  “His feet are fine,” Celaise said.

  “They are.” Jerani wriggled his toes in his sandals. “They only itch.”

  “Time is my only enemy. Let us not waste it.” The Lady of Gems cycloned around Celaise and lifted her hand with its jewel nails to Jerani’s face. His face, not his feet.

  Jerani let her touch him. He stood there, eyes full of her shine, and didn’t dodge. He even gulped. He must desire her, the crone with her jewel pox. She had to be twice his age. He would leave Celaise as soon as he felt his debt to her was done. He didn’t love her. He never did.

  Or her black wine was souring her.

  Celaise stung all over on the inside, a bristling fullness. She had Feasted too much on the axe man. She needed to vomit.

  “Keep this out of sight.” The Lady of Gems handed Jerani an amethyst.

  He took it. Celaise had lifted a hand to stop him, but it wasn’t her choice to make. He could accept the stone if he wanted. It didn’t matter to her.

  “Celaise,” the lady said, “my enchantment for you will be more complex.”

  The Lady of Gems was engaged to the lord father. Maybe she meant Celaise and Jerani well. But if she was like the lord father, her kindness could kill.

  “There’s no decorous way to say this. I will need your teeth.”

  “My teeth?” Celaise pressed a gloved hand against her mouth.

  “Your onyx ones,” the lady said. “My enchantment will make everything fit better.”

  “No,” Celaise said. Jerani had given her those gemstone teeth, and that was magic enough.

  “You will fit better in your day body,” the Lady of Gems said. “The enchantment will make you as healthy as any other emaciated Feaster your age.”

  She was lying once more. Celaise couldn’t believe anything else. The lady’s powers couldn’t fight the sun god’s. She couldn’t make Celaise dance again. Celaise would never leap skyward, never laugh jumping, never skip or run in joy, never embrace another and love the feel of his body against hers.

  Celaise had her True Dress. That was enough.

  “No,” she said.

  “Think well before you refuse my generosity a third time,” the Lady of Gems said. “If you do, I’ll know you to be brainless, and I’ll have no use for you.”

  Celaise couldn’t breathe. The root cage of her dress was too tight. If the Lady of Gems sent her away Celaise would fail her lord father’s trial. His disappointment would be fanged.

  She had to accept the enchantment.

  Jerani was leaning toward her, his stance in the same slant as his spear in that adorable way of his. He thought the enchantment would help her. If somehow it did and she became fit during the day, she would no longer need him. He wouldn’t feel guilty about leaving her. His tribe’s debt to her would be paid, and he would return to his home in his savanna. He should return. He would be safe there. Even if Celaise would be alone.

  She couldn’t accept the enchantment.

  She had to. T
he magic wouldn’t work anyway. Nothing would change. She would always be half broken.

  Celaise should say yes. The lady hadn’t waited for an answer. The purple woman had already spun away to polish on another scale. Jerani was gazing at her with his big dark eyes. Celaise needed to tell them yes. But the words stuck in her throat.

  A chill breeze carried the scent of rotting flowers. The other two didn’t notice. They wouldn’t. They were not Feasters. That was black wine in the air, and potent. It smothered Celaise with moldy roses, their thorns piercing her lips.

  It was her. Celaise wouldn’t try to fight. She would go out and kneel to her sister and hope.

  Life was a jewel. Most people viewed it through a single facet. Hiresha had two. They aligned: one facet mirrored the other, and the resonance dispersed light within her as a fire of pink and blue sparks. They zipped along her spine and into her heart, quickening her pulse, dilating her eyes.

  In one facet, Hiresha the Flawless stood over a king stricken by plague. Servants wiped pus from his lesions with silk. He was a tyrant, and curing him would doom many. In the other facet, Hiresha the Exile leaned over a girl dying of miner’s lung. With each wheezing cough, more of her hair fell out. Black strands littered her frond cot. If Hiresha’s magic saved her, the Dominion of the Sun might learn of it, and all would be lost.

  “Nahui,” Hiresha said to the girl, “has your pee turned red?”

  “No.” She gasped and tried to grin. “It’s pink.”

  Blood seeped into her urine. The girl had been doubly poisoned by being forced to mine. “I told the King’s Spear to let you rest. He should’ve allowed you rest.” The king shouldn’t have sent children to work the mines. Hiresha shouldn’t have asked him for laborers. She might’ve ripped the gemstone roughs from the ground herself. She would have, if her power lent itself more to such undertakings, if such displays wouldn’t have revealed her magic to the Dominion.

  “Need to work.” Nahui hopped to her feet then crossed her twig arms over her chest and fought for breath. “Going to earn the best name.”

  “Your name right now is beautiful, Nahui.” Even if it only meant “fourth child.” Hiresha coaxed the girl to lie back down. “The one you receive on your renaming day will be even greater.”

  The girl would only live that long if Hiresha cured her with an enchantment. If the Dominion learned Hiresha had such spellcraft they would try to capture her. They needed her to make land ships to cross the desert for an invasion. Tens of thousands might die if Hiresha helped one. The equations were clear, the balance lopsided.

  All Hiresha had to do was let the girl die. Nahui’s own people didn’t consider her human yet, only a number, a might-be until she turned seven and was renamed. It was immaterial she had sickened working for Hiresha.

  The girl would die. Everyone expected her to. Soon Hiresha could whisk all the amethysts mined into the deeper jungle. She could break her engagement with Tethiel. Hiresha could work in peace, out of harm’s way and away from harming others.

  Neither would she be able to help them.

  Hiresha had sworn to improve the world with her magic. Sacrificing a girl for gemstone hardly seemed a worthy precedent.

  The girl hacked and made choking sounds. Drool trailed down her chin.

  “We haven’t much time before your mother returns with the water.” Hiresha wiped the girl’s mouth with a robe sleeve. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “I love secrets.”

  “This one is important. Telling might hurt many people.”

  “Love secrets.” The girl mumbled, her eyes fluttering closed.

  Vibrations of fate passed through Hiresha. This earthquake only she could feel. Her hand was less than steady as she slipped a jewel behind the girl’s ear.

  “I’m giving you a lucky stone,” Hiresha said. “It’ll protect you until you earn your brilliant new name, yet you must promise not to tell anyone about it.”

  The girl fiddled with the jewel in her hair. “It’s stuck.”

  “Promise me, Nahui. You must promise.”

  The girl gazed up with eyes bloodshot from coughing. “Promise.”

  In another facet, a different Hiresha gave the king an emerald mantis brooch. It would cure his pox. It would also weaken his heart over two months until the organ burst in his sudden death. One Hiresha killed, the other cured. Perhaps the balance was right. Or the dying despot was a sign to the exile Hiresha, to the Lady of Gems in her dawn facet, that she should let the girl expire. If it was prophetic, Hiresha ignored it.

  The facets spun about each other and then diverged in a lucid gleam.

  Hiresha was carving and polishing the day’s amethysts. The leaves trembled almost imperceptibly from the footfalls of men invading her banyan fortress. She dimmed the dreamlight in her jewels and Attracted a chisel to her hand. Keeping up appearances was such a nuisance. The intruders weren’t Jerani and Celaise. Hiresha knew this man too well by the sound of his mouth breathing.

  Macco the King’s Spear peered into the grove. When he spotted Hiresha, his brows quirked with disappointment at the same time his cheeks puffed out with relief. “You’re alive.”

  “And why would I not be?” Hiresha pretended to shear off a section of gemstone with the chisel.

  “A Feaster got into a nobleman’s house not a day’s walk from here. None got out.” Macco waddled into the grove, hips first, stomach puffed out as if he ate well enough to boast a king’s belly. “Macco knows you work at night. There are lights.”

  “True, my death might reflect negatively on your report to the king,” she said.

  Another warrior had come in with Macco, the man with the axe. Today Axe-For-Brains was blanched and shaky. His typical abscess of confidence had been drained. Either he had seen a Feaster or else he held them in mortal fear. Maybe he wasn’t a complete idiot.

  “Two strangers passed through yesterday. Told Macco you knew them.”

  “I can vouch for them both,” Hiresha said.

  “Who vouched for you, eh? That’s what Macco wants to know.”

  Hiresha wouldn’t belabor this conversation with him again. Her insight had earned a favor from his king. He should respect that, even if he was right to suspect her, as well as the newcomers.

  The young woman, Celaise, likely hadn’t been the one to Feast on the noble’s family, since Tethiel planned for her to rule. She had restraint enough to spare the young man who traveled with her.

  She wasn’t entirely without good sense. The flawed woman had at last consented to give Hiresha her onyx teeth. Repairing Celaise’s body would take a crystal-library worth of enchantments. Hiresha couldn’t begin any of them until the King’s Spear left. One topic had always sent him running. She would use it again.

  “Your miners are failing you. Some have weakened to the point of collapse.”

  The King’s Spear shrugged. “The underworld is not for the living.”

  “Ventilation shafts may bring more life down from the surface.”

  “How would you know, gem carver?”

  “I am first a sage, and I’m at your command.” You pride-bloated bullfrog. “If you wish me to advise—”

  “The king put Macco in charge, for his courage. Not you.”

  “I would not question the wisdom of your courage.”

  He waved his spear with its green band in front of her face. “Do you know what this means?”

  “Yes.”

  “It means Macco does the work of the king.”

  “Is that perhaps why they call you the King’s Spear?”

  “Yes,” he said, “and all his spears are coated with a Green Blood’s venom.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten since last you told me.”

  “This spear scratches your cheek and you’re going to die. But not as soon as you’d wish.” He leered at her. “That means it’ll hurt so much you’ll want to be dead.”

  With diamond poise, Hiresha restrained herself from rolling her eyes and laughing. To t
hink that mere years ago she had scoffed at actors, and now she was obliged to act for an audience of one.

  Hiresha gripped her neck and forced herself to grimace. She dropped to her knees. “No one could not fail to fear you.”

  The King’s Spear slapped his belly and then lofted a hand. “Macco has only taken thirteen hostages in battle. Someday he may do greater honor to the gods.”

  “Last time you said eight.”

  “What?”

  Eight hostages in battle. That had been the previous month, and the King’s Spear hadn’t fought as much as a large jungle rodent since. “Never mind,” Hiresha said.

  The buffoon and his goons left. Hiresha flitted out of the grove to where Celaise and Jerani slept. Hiresha held them both in deep sleep while implanting the onyx teeth into the bones of the girl’s jaw and skull.

  Time washed forward and back around Hiresha. Later the next night, after she had let them wake, once Hiresha had slipped out of this world and back through her own dreams, Jerani spoke to her.

  “Celaise told me they were like real teeth again,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Do see that she uses the teeth to chew something more solid than fear. Eating is a poor hobby but a good habit.” Hiresha turned to speak to Celaise, who was flicking her hem of stardust for the fennec to play with. “Your body must be strong and healthy when I reshape your bones.”

  Celaise stared.

  “Not to worry,” Hiresha said. “I won’t do it while you’re awake. Now, do you have a message for me?”

  “What? Oh, yes. The lord father will meet with you on Mindruin Peak.”

  “Here’s my counterproposal: No. Cursed mountaintops aren’t required for planning weddings. We’ll meet here,” she said. “I will also have need of a Feaster skilled at crafting faces. Perhaps you know of one.”

  “The Mimic, maybe.”

  “Send him to me. Or her.”

  “I’ll tell the lord father.” Celaise looked up from the fennec’s digging, toward the entrance of the banyan fortress. She rested three fingers against her chin, and she spread her other hand over the constellations that made up her dress. The nerves in her mouth had been deadened to pain; it couldn’t be her teeth that were troubling her.