Dark Lord's Wedding

by A. E. Marling

  “Give Macco the dragon,” the King’s Spear said. He wheezed, still cradling his broken arm. “You’ll be rewarded.”

  “A dragon is its own reward,” the lady said.

  “You owe Macco, woman.”

  “Do not presume on me further. Tonight I dreamed of trauma and woke to unrest.”

  Jerani thought the King’s Spear would back off. He must see. The lady was above him. She didn’t even look down. She was gazing at a line of scales fitting into the hindquarters of her dragon.

  Macco got all the louder. “The King’s Spear chooses, not you.”

  He reached toward her. Macco dared to grab at her ankle. The bottom of her foot shone with four rings of gem lights, one nested within another.

  She flipped away from his touch and faced Macco. Her dragon’s crystal-crest head also glared down at him.

  Jerani backed away between two trees.

  Macco lifted his broken arm. “The charm didn’t work.”

  “Are you accusing me of not keeping a promise?” She touched his spear on its green band. It tore out of his hand, and she flung it over her shoulder.

  He bellowed and ran after it.

  The spear turned about midair and skewered him. The lady said, “No warrior shall kill you.”

  He opened his mouth, and dark foam came out. He tugged at the spear as if he could pull it free of his chest. As if he could live.

  He was snapped up into the air by glowing fangs. The crystal dragon swung its head from side to side. Parts of the man were flung off into the treetops.

  “And you shall be above all other warriors,” the lady said. She turned to Jerani.

  His heart dropped into his feet. Had he offended her somehow? Had the fox been hurt in the battle?

  “Help the people back to their homes,” she said. “I must carve the last of the amethyst.”

  An elephant of weight lifted from Jerani’s shoulders. He ran, bolted into the grove. The lady wasn’t mad at him, and she had cured Celaise. And now they had a dragon. The lady said something behind him. Her voice was hard.

  “The time for hiding is over.”

  PART

  II

  20

  “Those with power can never be free.”

  “If you think power is a burden, try being powerless.”

  “Oh I do, my heart. Every day under the sun.”

  “And I, from midday to midnight.”

  Hiresha had to reflect that she might’ve avoided all the misunderstanding, if only her dragon had wings. Rather than fly, it swam down the Gargantuan River. Its hollow body floated half-out of the water. Hiresha could see through its scales to the manatees bobbing below. The dragon’s tail swept back and forth sending ripples as far as a mile upriver.

  Each motion meant Attracting hundreds of scales together. Her magic supplanted muscle and bone. Rays of power fanned out between the tail and flank, pulling the former to the latter. More threads spanned within the crystal cavern of its chest in a shimmering lattice. The dragon swam in undulation. What a pity only she could see the beautiful straightness of the magic vectors, their unity, and how they combined into greatness.

  Moving the dragon with flight would be a new novelty and puzzle. She would need canvass from twenty-four sailboats to complete the amethyst-spine wings. For now, standing on the dragon’s brow was joy enough. The river’s polished surface flowed by, first brown from silt then a clearer aquamarine as the river broadened and deepened. Air rich with the scent of damp soil and resin wafted over her, pushing through the gemstone pores of her dress and filling her with coolness.

  Brimming with calculations, lit by tropical sun, bathed by river breeze, Hiresha needn’t dwell on the horrors transpiring in her other facet. She refused to. It was a world away.

  Amethysts jutted from the dragon’s brow as horns. She had been right to keep these crystals as roughs, to leave them in their original six-sided formation in tribute to their natural geology. The dragon’s eyes were polished orbs of clear quartz, with purple specter inclusions. She could will the eyes to gaze back at her. They glistened with magic, if not intelligence. They couldn’t see, not yet. Hiresha had not created life. She had made something superior.

  The citizens would marvel. She and her dragon reached the city before the river reached the sea.

  Boats surged upward in her wake then listed back down in the water. A fisherman covered himself with his net. The beauty of the dragon must’ve been too great for him.

  “Caiman!” A boy took one look and jumped out of his boat. Then he tried to climb back in, still screaming. “Giant caiman!”

  “Dragon, you mean,” Hiresha said. “The snout doesn’t even approximate the rude dimensions of a black caiman’s.”

  The people did not appear to see the distinction, even when Hiresha lifted the dragon above the water. It gripped a pier, and its touch was so light that the planks didn’t even shatter. The dragon was all poise and precision.

  Men scrambled every which way, dropping their jugs in watery crashes. One trampled a boy into the mud while looking back and shouting. “Monster!”

  “Mama! Mama!” A girl with flower designs painted on her skin tumbled from a rooftop through a trapdoor into her home. In a voice of undiscouraged excitement, she said, “I saw Strife! Look!”

  “Think of it as a crystal sculpture,” Hiresha said, hopping down, “which I can control.”

  The dragon caught her in an open palm of amethyst; the scales glittered around her feet. She stood in a geode of her own design. Leaning between two claws, she grinned down at the citizens.

  They fled through the riverside market. A wicker cage tipped over, cracked, and out flew parrots in a shock of yellow and blue. One woman huddled under a cart displaying thirty-five varieties of orchids.

  Hiresha had to theorize the citizens couldn’t sufficiently see through the clouds of bees. Stingers surrounded the people with danger, and yet they hid from her splendid dragon.

  A woman carrying a toddler ran straight into the open sewer. She hadn’t been paying attention. She had been scared blind. Now she or her young son might break their skulls in the fall, unless there was enough padding of excrement. The merest scrape might still cause infection.

  Hiresha reached out with the dragon. Her magic flexed. Thousands of scales shifted and slid at her command. Directives blasted from her with the speed of thunder. They were barely fast enough.

  Amethyst claws slipped around the woman’s waist and legs. Any mistake would’ve gouged her, yet Hiresha hadn’t made any. The dragon cradled the woman and her child. The mother had some manner of poem tattooed on her back.

  “Run!” She ripped apart the hip sling holding the toddler and dropped him onto the street. “Run and don’t look back. I love you!”

  Hiresha slapped her brow into her hand. She should not be angry. She shouldn’t be disappointed, or flushing with the sticky hotness of embarrassment all the way from her ears to her toes.

  She set down the woman. Hiresha maneuvered the dragon into a thoughtful pose. Keeping the construct still might reassure people. Curiosity could draw them back.

  Gulls came first. Flocks splattered the dragon with globs of viscous white. Hiresha willed the scales to Repulse the filth, and it dribbled down. One gull landed on the dragon’s shoulder with a gecko in its beak. The bird plopped down the dead creature and started pecking, spilling entrails over crystal.

  “I can see that I was in the wrong to bring you here,” Hiresha said. “This is not a reflection of your majesty, my dragon. Not that your feelings can be hurt by people’s lack of acuity. Be thankful that you’re inanimate.”

  She guided the dragon back into the water. It swam her beyond the city’s freshwater harbors and into the swirling saltiness of the Sea of Fangs. No watercraft went out that far, and she and her construct were alone. Hiresha tried different strokes, various methods of movement to see which would be most efficient. The dragon sidewinded over the waves. She had to distract herself.<
br />
  Hiresha couldn’t think of her sunset facet, where a pack of jaguar knights had last night stolen over the desert and rampaged through Oasis City. It never would’ve worked if the plague hadn’t weakened the empire, if the guards hadn’t diverted their attention to caring for the sick, if Hiresha had been able to wake in time to drive out the invaders.

  Tethiel must’ve told the Dominion when to attack. No, Hiresha didn’t know that. She couldn’t prove it. The jaguar knights may have only arrived during the hours of her comatose sleep by chance.

  The great cats had left bodies with heads crushed. Limbs had been snapped, chests caved in. The hexed felines were quick, quiet, and hard to kill with gemstone volleys. Hiresha could drive them from the city, given time, yet the rest of the Empire needed her to fight the plague.

  She mustn’t allow the reality of her sunset facet to contaminate this one. That night she had built her dragon, she had woken all too ready to kill Macco. Perhaps she should’ve abided him and left him behind. She had no reason to fear little minds like his anymore in this world.

  No, she should strive for happiness in one facet, at minimum. All she had to do here was plan a wedding with Tethiel. Disgust spread down her throat in a briny slime, and she wheezed. Even if he never betrayed her in this world, his actions in the other might make him intolerable.

  She would focus on the sea. A shark fled from her dragon. A larger sea monster surfaced. The colossal worm prickled with red tendrils. The water sizzled around it, and it reeked of sulfur salts. Its eyeless head opened in a cyclone of teeth.

  A curious specimen, she thought. Her dragon could likely dissect the sea monster, yet to kill it she would want a greater motive than curiosity. She would outpace the reach of this and all sea menaces. She skimmed away on her amethyst triumph to the coast.

  The dragon loped over the beach, droplets spraying from its scales. Her reliquary was still safely Attracted to its underside and hidden. She would nest it somewhere out of sight in the jungle then find another place to seclude her construct.

  Its scaled shoulders swiveled to squeeze between the trees. Bromeliads tumbled down from the branches. A city was no proper place for a dragon. Therefore, she would keep it out of sight until the citizens pleaded for another chance to see, or until such time as she could secure a respectable set of wings.

  21

  “My heart, we must invite the jaguar knight.”

  “I’m inclined toward the opposite.”

  “He’s more than the champion of the Dominion. He rules the black market. An invitation dropped at any street corner would end up in his hands.”

  “His paws.”

  “How well-groomed they are, and stronger than even he knows. I’m of the opinion he only killed his wife by accident.”

  “He’s a hexed abomination, and I don’t want him at our wedding.”

  “Hiresha, my gemstone star, if we turned away every abomination then our list of attendees would be short indeed, and less one groom.”

  Hiresha awoke to a jaguar basking in the moonlight. He lounged with regal ease on a bough. The tree was his throne. While his black-speckled tail flicked, his stub ears turned halfway toward her.

  He did not look, yet he must know she was there. Though he hadn’t seen her float out of her bed of crystals, he must have tracked her scent to the reliquary. She had hidden the giant geode high in the canopy. She had thought that here, in the wilderness outside of the city, she could be safe, that the warriors of the Dominion would not soon find her.

  She had miscalculated. Hiresha had underestimated. This jaguar had discovered her. There was no mistaking him for a normal apex predator. He wore an obsidian bracer on his foreleg, with the pale jade of a blocky skull glyph. It wasn’t enchantment that had transformed this man but hexing magic that had forced his soul into a majestic animal.

  Now the jaguar waited in plain sight. He hadn’t tried to pounce on her as she left her reliquary. The inconspicuous rock of the geode bore no evidence of claw marks. He could’ve batted her reliquary to the forest floor. He could’ve smashed it open with his heavy paws. The jaguar could’ve dragged her out by her neck. Even that wouldn’t have woken her, locked in her other facet, yet she would’ve felt her mind tear apart as he ripped out her viscera.

  Though her protective magics in the amethyst bed were strong, the jaguar’s strength was legendary. Hiresha doubted herself safe even hidden away and encased in glittering enchantment. Maybe she never would be again.

  Every insect in the jungle might’ve well been crawling over her skin for all the prickling itch. A stab of pain in her chest felt like a clot had cut off her blood, that her heart would rot in her ribcage.

  She glided in front of the jaguar. “You must wish to converse.”

  The great cat gazed at her with golden eyes. The round pupils made them look all too human. His left ear was torn and notched. A symmetry of spots slanted over his brow. More lined his cheeks, with a mustache of whiskers arcing down.

  The jaguar didn’t speak. He likely couldn’t with his anatomy. He inclined his head to the side, toward the light of a campfire below. He leaped lower, springing off a trunk then climbing face-first down a vine. Hiresha descended after him, after her. The jaguar was female. Curious what assumptions one made of the Dominion’s most elite killers.

  The jaguar made a deep coughing sound, and a man at the campfire hopped up on his crutches. He carried two bronze-shod supports polished to a gleam. He didn’t appear infirm when he pivoted around on one crutch with a dancer’s grace.

  “Enchantress,” the man said. He propped the crutches under his arms and stood beside the jaguar. “This one speaks for Xochi, Jaguar Knight of the Dominion, Avatar of the Obsidian God.”

  Long hair draped the man’s face in shadows. Firelight pulsed behind him, spreading its redness over his arms at his sides and revealing the tattoos on his hands. Between his knuckles jutted a six-sided figure. It was a black honeycomb, the sign of a hexer. The signs had been covered with bandages when Hiresha had glimpsed him before, years ago in Oasis City. Then one of his legs had been ruined. Interesting. Most interesting. The hexer might’ve even been the one to bind a warrior’s soul into this jaguar.

  The abomination could’ve mauled her in her sleep. The two of them hadn’t chosen to ambush her. They likely hadn’t come with the intent to harm. Nonetheless, she willed her paragon jewels to slice through the air around her in intimidating orbits. “I am Hiresha, the Lady of Gems, and I speak for myself.”

  The great cat lifted a paw to a tree. Claw spikes scratched lines in the bark. The crosshatches and twinned loops had to be words of a kind. The jaguar didn’t write as much as paint with flicks of her arm, or his. That part wasn’t clear yet. The name “Xochi” referred to a flower yet wasn’t necessarily feminine. Hiresha had seen a boy in Gangral city answer to it.

  The hexer read the jaguar’s words. “The Obsidian Jaguar welcomes all outcasts, all the brave, all the cowardly, all traitors—”

  “I am not a traitor,” Hiresha said.

  “You are far from your land,” the hexer said.

  “My land abandoned me,” she said.

  The jaguar’s whiskers lifted, and black lips drew back from a grin. The left lower canine glinted gold.

  “Then will you join the Dominion?” The hexer leaned on his crutches toward the jaguar’s writing. “With your magic, the sun will burn for another hundred centuries.”

  “With my magic and the blood of thousands. You may well have forgotten to read that part.” Hiresha peered at the scrawl. The etched words were not too complicated. The paw lifted between segments of meaning. “If the jaguar knight sincerely asked for my consent, then my sincere decline will be accepted.”

  “The jaguar knight doesn’t kneel to the Winged Flame, but his light casts the greatest shadows. This is his age. This is his land, and he must have his due.”

  “And sacrificing his own people isn’t enough for him?”

  The fur on
the great cat’s nose wrinkled.

  The hexer exchanged a look with the jaguar. “He is a greedy god.”

  “At least you’re not too blind to see it,” Hiresha said. “I’ll not partake in his wars.”

  “Then the sun god will bring the war to you. His warriors are coming.”

  “Did they ask you to threaten me first?”

  “The jaguar knight heard of you first. News travels fastest through the shadows.”

  With them spouting maxims such as that, they must’ve heard of Tethiel. Hiresha wouldn’t mention him just yet. They should respect her first for her own power. “I can enchant, yet I am not an enchantress.”

  She deadened the nerves in her hand and then Attracted the tissue apart. A cavity opened between the white-cord tendons and pebbly bones, a passage large enough for one of her amethysts to float through. The gem passed from one side of her hand to the other. The flesh folded back together, and her skin sealed. She didn’t allow a drop of her blood to fall to the soil.

  The amethyst she balanced on her fingertip. “I am a woman, yet I’ll not be frightened. I can leap over the sea. I can craft my own dragons.”

  The hexer’s hands tightened on his crutches, yet he didn’t startle. The jaguar also looked less than surprised. These two must’ve heard of her dragon. The jaguar knight yawned, tongue spearing out between teeth longer than fingers.

  The jaguar wrote, and the hexer spoke. “You will battle the Dominion’s warriors?”

  “That’s not what the jaguar knight said.” Hiresha pointed to the scratch marks. She had seen enough to guess the rudiments of the language. “It wasn’t phrased as a question.”

  The hexer flinched. His guilt meant she had been right.

  “If I’ll not submit, I must fight,” she said. “Perhaps I should expect no better outcome. I did come to your land. I do defy you. I only hoped you would respect my wishes, or if not them, my dragon.”