The jaguar knight sat on her haunches, or his, forelegs straight. The dark markings of the coat spread over the furry chest. The jaguar’s eyes were level with Hiresha’s. She had the great cat’s full attention.
“Four months from now will come a blood moon,” she said. “Have your shadows told what I intend for that night?”
The hexer looked to the jaguar knight. The great cat did not glance back.
“I will marry the Lord of the Feast.”
Not so much as a whisker twitched in surprise. The jaguar knight had heard.
“I request the Dominion hold back its obsidian edges until after the wedding. Then we may decide if we must be allies or enemies.”
“Wait.” The hexer’s eyes glinted up at her. “You’ll wed the Lord of the Feast in the City of Gold?”
“I will.”
“You mustn’t. You can’t, not there.” The hexer hunched over his crutches. His voice was soft but firm. “Lord Tethiel is a man.”
The hexer knew. If he told the matriarchs, it could be disaster. “Tethiel did mention dining with a hexer. You may think you know him. At best, you’re familiar with his illusions. As you cannot be certain of his true gender”—Hiresha glanced to the jaguar knight—“it would be wrong of you to mention anything to the Purests.”
“They would not hear me,” the hexer said. “But this is wrong. You should not marry a man.”
The jaguar snapped jaws over the hexer’s arm. If the great cat tore him apart, Hiresha would have to ward away the blood. No, the jaguar released him with the same suddenness. The fangs hadn’t pierced the skin. The hexer still would’ve felt a toothy pressure of disagreement.
“You don’t speak for the jaguar knight,” Hiresha said.
The great cat scoured new lines of green into the trunk. Hiresha wished she could be certain of their meaning. They were different from the glyph language common to the Dominion. Someone in the city might be able to help her study them. For now, she would have to rely on the hexer’s translation.
“He says—”
That answered the question of the jaguar’s gender. The great cat might be female, yet his was a man’s soul. He had likely been raised outside of the City of Gold.
“He says the Lord of the Feast is another avatar of the Obsidian Jaguar.” The hexer ground his crutches into the clay soil and tried to hide the tremor of scorn in his voice. It might’ve also been sorrow. “You must be a great woman to marry him.”
The firelight revealed flickers of the man’s clean-shaven features. They pinched together in a tightness of pain. He was mournful. The jaguar beside him looked smug with his dark lips angled up behind his whiskers. His ears were less perky than the fennec’s, however. The pitiful things on the great cat looked stunted.
“The jaguar knight will speak for you in the City of Endless Day,” the hexer said. “The warriors will not attack you before your wedding.”
That could mean they would attack on her wedding night. She compared the most recent claw words to the past ones on the trunk that now bled sap. The hexer seemed to have spoken true with as much accuracy as he could.
“And after I am wed, what then?”
The jaguar knight was licking his paws. After he finished, he walked past the marked trunk. His tail swished as he sauntered into shadows. She deduced he would not answer her. He would leave her to wonder.
The hexer lowered himself on his crutches to stamp out the fire. Before its light went out, two eyes flared green in the darkness. The emerald gaze burned into Hiresha then was gone. The jaguar must’ve looked back.
She could kill them both. That was always an option. Then the next time someone found her reliquary, they wouldn’t let her wake. They would kill her. Hiresha’s insides ground against each other like soft fluorite gems amidst hard diamonds.
The jaguar knight would think her beholden to him and his god. Perhaps she should fly past to their capital and face the Winged Flame herself. Or she should stay far away.
The great cat thought himself an ally of Tethiel. Maybe he was. Tethiel might’ve even promised him something. How terrible that she might only be respected through Tethiel. If she broke the engagement then she might have to battle the warriors day and night, and she could only be conscious half that time.
She flew to her dragon to lean against it. Her fingers played over the perfect angles of its scales. If only it were more than a statue when she slept. She should try to enchant more contingencies in its crystalline mind, to allow it to react outside her direct command. Its vision would have to improve beyond recognizing gross differences in light and dark. If her magic scripts were flawed—if she made but one error—the amethyst dragon could lash out and skewer anyone on its crystal claws: Miss Barrows, the young Jerani, or even Tethiel.
“Will you protect me? Or would you devour my friends?” Hiresha asked. Her dragonflies sometimes ate ladybugs. Hiresha would need to devote more time to their jewel minds before she dared trust a larger construct.
The gem scales chilled her skin. A dragon might not be a sufficient protector. These warriors weren’t some backwoods provincials who had run from the first sight of an amethyst claw. The jaguar knight and hexer were two powers of this land. She couldn’t cow them. Neither would they frighten her.
The dragon lumbered after her as she skirted from tree to tree. The jungle floor had more prints than merely the dots of the hexer’s crutches and the jaguar’s paws. A taller man had prowled nearby, and she knew the width of those feet and the spacing of that stride. They were Jerani’s. The lopsided gait would be Celaise’s. She hadn’t relearned to walk evenly yet, and her prints flanked his. They had traversed arm and arm.
They had no good reason to go so far north of the city. Their tracks looped around the trees beneath her reliquary. They may have been searching for it. Celaise might have scented Hiresha’s fears. How strange to think she might detect frights while Hiresha slept and dreamed of another world. Hiresha had to entertain the possibility any Feaster might be able to find her.
The jaguar knight couldn’t have smelled emotions. He might’ve caught human scent on the reliquary and confirmed his suspicions with Celaise’s circling footprints below.
Hiresha touched the roughness of her giant-geode bed. Freeing it from gravity, she lifted it in her palm despite how it was larger than she. Hiresha only fit inside with a quarter-inch to spare. Soon she would outgrow it. The hexagonal crystals came to a point against her scalp and brushed her toes while she floated inside, dead to this world.
She could carry the reliquary to a new hiding place yet nowhere that would be safe. The time had come to leave it behind. Dangers would press her from every side. She would have to surpass them all.
22
“My design for the wedding palace requires forty-two tons of refined glass.”
“I trust it’s not one of those petty wedding palaces, my heart. Those are ever so tedious.”
“If you insist, I’ll enchant it. First I’ll need to recrystallize the glass into quartz. Only pure silicates will suffice, sold by the master glassmakers of the Oasis Empire.”
“You doubt they’ll sell to you.”
“Some might tend to call me a traitor.”
“The Oasis Empire trades with the City of Gold. Let Purest Elbe order your glass.”
“The glassmakers will have to suspect the silicates are for an enchantress.”
“Loyalty and decency rarely outweigh gold.”
“It would be much to ask of the Purest.”
“You saved her eyes and her position. It’d be wrong not to ask Purest Elbe for a favor. There’s nothing so selfish as refusing a gift.”
“Tethiel, why didn’t you tell me the Purests believe you’re a woman?”
“I thought it too inconsequential to utter.”
“If they find out you lied they’ll ban the wedding. Is that not of sufficient consequence?”
The vitreous silica reformed under Hiresha’s hands. Its disorder bec
ame structured, from common glass to crystal. Its surface rippled then subsided into interlocking hexagon facets.
“Your touch brings harmony,” Purest Elbe said. Her blue headdress of feathers reflected off the column Hiresha was reshaping. A bee hummed in to land on one newly crafted plane. The insect wasn’t harmed; Hiresha had already extracted the crystal’s heat.
Hiresha said, “The six-sided shape is a tribute both to your city and the natural formation of quartz.”
The Purest circled the column step by step. Bees swirled around her, perhaps attracted by her peppery fragrance. She moved with such deliberation that she would never be stung. “May we speak of your sea monster?”
“You must mean my amethyst dragon.” Hiresha had to conclude this was in regards to the incident at the city harbor.
The Purest’s robes flowed. Bees crawled over the dotted trails in the fabric. She neared Hiresha with palms open, holding a blue orchid in each.
“The dragon is a construct,” Hiresha said. “A servant and my guardian.”
“A dragon is a creature of Strife.” The Purest spoke with such gravitas that she could’ve taken a breath between each word.
“Mine is a dragon without hunger. Think of it as a counterbalance to the Winged Flame.”
The Purest lifted the orchids to Hiresha like a blessing. Their perfume wafted over her with scents of citrus and raspberry. The petals neared her skin without touching. The Purest likely wished not to distract overmuch from the crafting. It was well that Hiresha was busy arranging solidifying glass into trigonal structure; otherwise, she never would’ve waited for the Purest’s reply.
“If you use Strife to defeat Strife, then Strife wins.”
That sounded logically dubious, yet it wouldn’t do for Hiresha to argue with the Purest. She had purchased all the vitreous silica. Her caravans had hauled it over the desert. Hiresha would find no better place for her wedding, at the edge of a city, freshened by sea breeze and cooled by jungle mist. She would be patient.
“With harmony we rise above the tide of violence,” the Purest said.
“I do agree that killing is the first and last recourse of the brainless.”
“Harmony makes us most truly women.”
That, Hiresha could not let stand. The Empire had ostracized her for what they believed a lady enchantress should and should not do. She would not accept the same on this side of the sea. Her finger pads squeezed against the amethysts within her palms. If she shouldn’t argue, she could at least discuss.
“I interpret that to mean,” Hiresha said, “that a woman shouldn’t fight to defend herself, that she should only accede and accept with a doily-stitched smile.”
The Purest lofted her hand above her shoulder and posed in an aspect of listening. From her left side dangled a stag-beetle earring. Azure shone off its lustrous wing shell.
“I knew a woman.” Hiresha glanced to the sea and its spray haze. “She was an effervescence of aggression. Shocking and strong, violent and no less feminine because of it.”
“A woman can be resolute in her nonviolence. She can be strong in her calm. She can be powerful in her drive for peace.”
“She can also die to a child with a spear.” Hiresha avoided saying “a boy with a spear” as to not offend the Purest.
Men were working all over the palace foundation, carting in stone and hoisting plates of silica. The Purest looked at none of them. Her amber gaze passed over and never focused. She would not see them. She refused to acknowledge they even lived.
The Purest drifted her hand with its cupped flower toward her guards. The six women were armored in only scarves of red, though for weapons they carried blowpipes as long as staves. The vials on their belts likely were full of poisons for their darts.
“In this world of Purity lost, sometimes we have no choice but Strife.”
Tears glistened in the eyes of one guardswoman. They all looked at the Purest with expressions taut with devotion. One caught a man staring too, and the woman pushed him away by his face.
“But Strife never must be our first choice,” the Purest said.
“We must be capable of violence, or we’ll be ruled by it.” If Hiresha had been merely an enchantress and properly helpless, her conversation with the jaguar knight would probably have begun and ended with abduction. “Ascribing ideal traits to women limits the breadth of their lives. It hurts them. It is comparable to saying our only virtue is beauty.”
“When a woman acts with violence, Strife’s curse has overcome her true nature.”
“That line of reasoning forms a perfect circle.” Hiresha wouldn’t waste more time talking to Elbe if she wouldn’t understand.
Dream power flowed out of Hiresha in waves of ethereal brilliance. The glass in the column flowed then reformed. The silica started even more confused than the Purest, yet Hiresha sculpted it into a pattern in which it could comfortably rest for millennia. As the silica relaxed into place it released heat that softened the nearby rock and aided its transformation. Hiresha levitated along the column, changing it inch by inch and fusing its plates into one perfect whole.
If only opinions were as easy to reshape as stone.
“You are right,” the Purest said. “Faith should not be proven with reasoning, circular or not.”
“That you considered the possibility of being wrong means you’re no fool.” Hiresha lifted her hands from the glass. It cooled as she descended to meet the Purest face to face. “I admit I’m all too accustomed to talking over people’s heads.”
What a relief it would be to have someone else to converse with besides Tethiel. The fennec was eloquent in his way, yet he never took their discussions seriously. Why, the other day she had even resorted to speaking to her dragon construct.
“We have different views. Different ways of speaking,” the Purest said. She brushed an orchid over Hiresha’s fingers and up her arm. It tickled her with softness. The wing beats of bees vibrated across her skin. “We still want something similar.”
“To be left in peace.”
“An end of bloodshed,” Purest Elbe said, “as much as that can be in a cursed world.”
“I won’t achieve anything of lasting significance by dismembering people with my dragon,” Hiresha said. “We agree thus far.”
Elbe passed behind a column. The faceting warped her image into blues and whites.
“Yet I insist my dragon is less inherently violent than a shark,” Hiresha said. “And apex predators are elegant, worthy in their own right, and not to be discriminated against.”
Purest Elbe leaned closer. She had no regard for personal space, yet her slowness gave more than enough time for Hiresha to step away, or push back, should she wish. Nothing about Purest Elbe threatened or imposed. Her orchid fluttered against Hiresha’s cheek.
Elbe asked, “Then may I see your dragon? If you made it, it must be beautiful.”
Hiresha allowed herself a smile. “You may.”
“And may I confide in you, Hiresha?”
“We can correspond, certainly,” Hiresha said. Purest Elbe waited so long between speaking that she might as well send a letter. “Not that I object to you and your bees, yet I predict you have exquisite handwriting, Elbe.”
Their noses touched. Turquoise teeth flickered between Purest Elbe’s lips. She never opened her mouth far while speaking, perhaps to avoid swallowing a bee. “I have heard something about Lady Tethiel that may shock you.”
Purest Elbe knew. Of course she knew he was a man. Elbe was slow but not stupid. She would stop the wedding. She would have the men she refused to acknowledge smash down the crystal column with sledgehammers.
Hiresha’s pulse tripled its rate. Her magic seized her heart, stopped it from thrashing about in her chest. She held in her sweat from beading on her brow. She clamped oily excretions in the pores of her armpits. She stretched her vocal chords to keep them from strumming with guilt.
“I have heard many things of Tethiel,” Hiresha said. “Th
e weight of such a past could sink a ship.”
“My concern is,” Purest Elbe said with a breath of honey and peppers, “Lady Tethiel may not be a woman.”
Hiresha needed to deny it in the most plausible way. She had to convince. She had to lie. If she didn’t then her wedding plans would crumble. Tethiel and she could achieve so much together. It had to be worth deceiving this woman. Hiresha owed her so much for the vitreous silica, yet the truth was too high a price. Hiresha needed to begin her marriage with a falsehood. She should.
She couldn’t. Hiresha slumped. She let go of everything. Her skin leaked. She exposed all her uncomfortable humanness. If her betrothal demanded lies, then marriage with Tethiel might commit her to all manner of atrocities.
“I’m eighty-seven-percent confident,” Hiresha said, “that he’s a man.”
23
“The only weddings worth attending are forbidden. Consider, my heart, how the disapproval of the matriarchs would entice the kings.”
“You presume to tell me that you plan on our marriage being banned?”
“Success is certain once you’re censured. Our marriage can’t be a quiet affair. It wouldn’t suit our purposes.”
“I won’t invade a city for the sake of a wedding.”
“Why, I’d siege a fortress to rescue your bridal veil. But you’re right. We shouldn’t take over the City of Gold.”
“Yet we can’t do without a city’s infrastructure. Kitchens to prepare a banquet, people to serve it. Flowers. Guest accommodations. A ban would deny us all this and more. How do you propose to overcome the logistics?”
“By leaving the problem to you.”
The women hurled Jerani into the pit. Flies burst from the darkness, pelting against his skin and into his mouth. Jerani huffed them out. He whirled his arms behind him, angling his body in his fall. Needed to get his feet under him.
The city guards hadn’t thrown him into a well, not some clean pool that he could’ve climbed out of after a cooling dip. By the smell, he could’ve been dropping into a hyena’s butthole. The base of the pit rushed up gloomy and jagged. Were those spikes?
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