“Yes, we must trust the vizier precisely that far.”
Hiresha dropped the woman into the sea. Being made of lead, she sank without struggle. Hiresha hadn’t wanted to portray herself with eyes closed, yet when the statue turned over in its drop, Hiresha’s own likeness glared wide-eyed back up at her: judging, angry, and bitter. Hiresha was drowning her past in preparation for her future with Tethiel, and her former self had the right to be resentful.
Elbe and the other Purests might not approve of this ritual. It did have connotations of self-sacrifice for a husband. Hiresha had been taught she had no value until she married a man. That was but one of the many parts of her past that she would do well to drown.
A white breaker foamed over her effigy. A gangrenous light shone up in the water from the citrines of the statue’s dress, from Hiresha’s dress. It had been a perfection of ratios, yet Hiresha would innovate ones even better. She would wear her mastery.
For now, she was free. Unbound by clothes, shed of regrets, she leaped over the waves. Head first, spinning, touching down, she jumped another three miles. The water congealed under the amethysts in her toes. Wind streamed through her, bracing and exalting.
The dreamlight in her citrine dress would fade. Perhaps a behemoth of the deep would eat it and her effigy. Hopefully the beast wouldn’t break too many teeth on the statue’s lead, and the statue would pass without the digestion of significant quantities of heavy metal.
Waves rippled past beneath Hiresha. Swaths of shimmering jellyfish lit the sea turquoise. A fleck of red on the horizon grew into a hearth fire. A lone home twinkled atop Perching Island, a lump of rock with its base eroded by the tides into a precarious pedestal. The island would not teeter over if Hiresha jumped off it. That would be improbable. Still, she passed over without touching. From there, taking a course perpendicular to the mainland would point her to within a two-degrees heading of Morimound.
She bounded there within the hour. The hilltop metropolis overshadowed the flood plain. The City of Diamonds wasn’t like the one of Gold. Morimound was dark. No one walked the streets at night. If anyone cracked open their shutters and saw a woman unclothed and covered with jewels flying over their homes, well, the observer would have to guess her a Feaster.
Hiresha vaulted over buildings that had once towered above her, past narrow streets that had forced her carriage to a crawl. Over walls, uphill, around a garden ziggurat, between the strangler fig trees, she came to Sunchase Hall. The three wings of her home ended with pyramid roofs. In the sunset facet, Hiresha’s manor glowed with its window walls all lit. Her home bustled with life of the convalescing in the other world, as well as with death. Now there was only absence, darkness, and silence.
The marble steps leading to the door chilled her soles more than the sea spray. Once Tethiel and his daughter Feaster had stood in exactly this spot. She had worn a dress that’d mocked the jeweled fashion of enchantresses. He had spoken to Hiresha through the door’s viewing aperture and coerced her into inviting them in. Tonight, the door was shut. If there was anyone inside, they wouldn’t dare let her in no matter what she claimed. Perhaps she should’ve been as firm and never allowed Tethiel in all those years ago.
She pressed her palms against the doors. On the other side of their thickness, a bronze-inlaid bar held them closed. She Lightened it, eased it up and away. Hiresha pushed the doors open. Cobwebs crisscrossed the balustrade of the entranceway’s grand stairs.
Someone still lived here. Foot trails had been worn in the dust. In the east wing, breaths whispered from the other side of doors. Hiresha float-stepped to her bedroom, listened, and then opened the door.
A shroud covered the empty bed. The drawers of her cabinets were also bare. The enchantments on the locks of bronze safes had been broken, likely by the Dreambreak Gauntlets. Her jewels were gone. The Empire must have confiscated them but left her manor to the spellsword and his family who had retired there. Deepmand at least had dutifully fulfilled every expectation of him.
Before leaving, she wrapped a sheet around herself. Its dusty stiffness made it feel like funeral wrappings.
By the volume of snoring, Deepmand and his wife slept in the beryl room. Across the hall in the carnelian room, someone tossed awake in bed. Hiresha drifted near a door set with a bead of chrysoprase. The stone was dark in the light of her amethysts, yet its enchantment would’ve kept its color strong. The gem’s magic greeted her touch with a twinkle of green. The luster was close to the gleam of plant leaves after rain.
Any daughter would’ve felt wealthy to be named Chrysoprase, or so Hiresha had thought. It seemed like the hope of another person. That someone had drowned deep in the sea. Now if Hiresha adopted a girl, she would be akin to a princess. How strange to think, yet Hiresha would become a queen of sorts, if Tethiel had his way, if she married him.
She could speculate on whether Tethiel would be a kind king. Likely he would not, except when it served a deeper purpose. He would be a competent king, compared to the low royal average. A wise king he would be by foisting the complex decisions on her. A powerful king, absolutely.
Hiresha had to decide if she should marry him into power. Trying to force him away might spark the same shadow war of her sunset facet, yet she would not wed out of duress.
She watched the carnelian door for three seconds before the child on the other side gathered the resolve to open it. Bare feet had shuffled from the bed. A girl leaned out of her room. Her face was longer and her cheeks less plump than when Hiresha had last seen her. She was Deepmand’s daughter. In the other facet, she was buried in a mass grave.
As fate would have it, the gap in the living girl’s teeth had grown even wider. Her leftmost incisor had not descended or had been broken off, and now the central one was gone as well. Two adult teeth poked from her gums when she gasped.
“I’m sorry if my light roused you.” Hiresha flourished her fingers. The girl would’ve been able to see the purple glow beneath her door.
“I’m not dreaming?”
“This may be a dream. It may be real. I can only tell you with certainty that it’s not your dream.” Hiresha touched the closed door, and it creaked as she freed the chrysoprase. “Tomorrow, you’ll find this gone and know you didn’t imagine me.”
“You’re the enchantress.” The girl pointed. “They’re looking for you.”
“I’m sure, yet I shan’t stay. You may tell your family that I’m happy they still live here.”
The girl’s wide eyes followed the blue paragon as it circled Hiresha. Then the child stared in gap-toothed astonishment as Hiresha implanted the chrysoprase into her chest amid the red sparkle of diamond dust. Hiresha didn’t allow herself to feel any pain, only pressure from her skin folding around the perimeter of the round gemstone.
“You should be on the other side of the seas,” the girl said. “You can’t be real.”
“Possibly so. That’s my secret. I don’t know what’s real, and thus I can do anything.” Hiresha slid toward the girl with palm out, slowly, slowly to prevent frightening her. “Farewell and goodnight.”
Hiresha must not have had all of Elbe’s measured grace because the girl flinched back. She struggled in Hiresha’s amethyst embrace, yet only until a spell unlocked the drowsiness in her mind and put her to sleep. Hiresha laid her on her bed across from her dozing sister and closed the door.
Hiresha slipped through her manor’s corridors. One parlor door must not’ve been opened for years. It had settled into the doorframe. It screeched. The room had been upholstered in the hue of pink topaz. Hiresha had once had tea here with Tethiel. Now canvas hid all the furniture. Cabinets were hulking ghosts, and couches were wooden-footed beasts.
Only the blue-topaz parlor was open. The family had turned it into a playroom with a toy giraffe on wheels and a chaos of game tiles. Hiresha had once received Alyla here, as hard as that was to imagine, before the girl had been tricked into becoming a Bright Palm. In this room Hiresha had met Alyla�
�s brother, Fos, and encouraged him to train as a spellsword. Hiresha had thought she had been helping the orphans. They might’ve been better off left alone.
Hiresha passed through the gardens. Thistles had overrun all the flower beds. The manor’s servants must’ve all left, except perhaps for one. A light flickered in a room of the north wing. Hiresha would investigate later. For now, she returned to the family side of the manor and knelt over the burial site of her parents.
Their life stories were etched into the marble floor, along with the dates their souls had passed into the Fate Weaver’s cavern. The goddess herself spanned the ceiling in a mural with her eight human hands and spider body.
Now was the time for Hiresha to tell her parent’s graves of her marriage. Yet they wouldn’t hear her, from deep at the center of the world. They might’ve even seen the wedding already woven in the grand tapestry of life. Though she had planned to ask the Fate Weaver whom to marry, Hiresha ought to be able to make the best decision on her own. She wasn’t a priest attuned to the goddess’s prophecies, and even the trained often misunderstood her will.
Hiresha’s words and questions burned inside her, unspoken.
She lofted up from her knees. A shelf at eye level held her parents’ most prized possessions. One carved hippo looked fuchsia in Hiresha’s jewel light, though it was truly pink.
“This is real ivory wood,” her mother had said often enough, “and worth more than your sleepy skull. ‘A pink hippo brings you good fortune,’ he told me. Well, pah! Now I have a slug for a daughter. Least my hippo doesn’t eat so much.”
A spine of resentment thrust through Hiresha’s midsection, barbed and tearing. She seized the pink hippo. Throwing the effigy against the wall would splinter it into bits of inconsequential kindling.
She brought the hippo up to her face instead. All her mother’s insults had happened in a past life. Hiresha needn’t concern herself with them now. The rotund creature had been carved with its snout curved in the likeness of a smile. Her mother had been right about the wood’s rarity, at least. The animal effigy wasn’t too sacrilegious.
“I’ll bring this to the wedding, not for good fortune, but for you,” Hiresha said to her mother’s grave. “You were never kind, yet you did provide for me. I hope you’re satisfied, mother. Now that I’m speaking to an empty room, you’ve made me feel stupid one last time.”
Hiresha lifted the hippo overhead. The wooden creature’s stubby feet turned in the air as the effigy floated after her. She crossed back to the manor’s entrance.
A rap-tapping sound echoed down from the stairway. Hiresha waited, and wisps of green, blue, and yellow light zipped down the stairs. A lantern was held aloft with diamond backing. The stones would all have carving defects, yet they still cast a strong spray of fire.
“Lustrous Enchantress,” the old man carrying the lantern said, “I knew you had returned.”
“Most intuitive, Mister Obenji.”
Decades of troubles had aged him in the last few years. His ten rings clattered loose on his gaunt fingers. His hands had lost all of their agility, judging by the disheveled way he had tied his black turban. It would be unfair to reprimand him for the state of the grounds. He would be the only servant left, and he had lost more than his youth.
“You have outlived your wife.” Hiresha walked up the stairs rather than leaping, as not to alarm him. She folded her hand against his chest and heart. “I have lost a friend. Lady Sri was a great woman.”
Hiresha had wished to say, “Is a great woman.” In the sunset facet, Sri still lived. She had returned to govern the city after her husband had died of plague. In each facet, one in the elderly couple had lost the other. They had married in their eighties, and the grief of separation looked to be killing Mister Obenji. Or perhaps the joy of their union had been all that had kept him healthy.
A tear rolled down from his drooping and inflamed tear duct. “A great woman. The best.”
“Would you have married her again, knowing you’d have but three years?”
“Yes, and sooner if I could.” His shaking hand fluttered against Hiresha’s. He squinted at her jewels. “Is this why you were exiled? This brilliance?”
Hiresha smiled at him then frowned. If not for the juvenile decisions of the Ceiling of Elders, she might’ve been here to save Sri, to save Mister Obenji. Each word stung her tongue and chafed her throat.
“I regret I cannot live in Sunchase Hall.” In this facet it could never be. “I cannot even stay another hour. I’m going across the sea to marry, and I may never return.”
“Lustrous Enchantress, my rest will come easier knowing you will be married at last.”
His tone implied that she would’ve remained in some fraction a failure until marriage, yet she would let that pass. “Let us hope I find as much contentment in thirty years as you and Sri did in three.”
He tapped his lantern. The candle smelled of beeswax from the City of Gold, peachy and smooth. “Excuse this foolish thought of mine, but I wonder what would’ve happened if I had joined the goddess first. If Sri had lived beyond me.”
Tingles raced over Hiresha’s skin in spider-web patterns. Everything connected, from facet to facet, world to world. “She would’ve returned to her station as arbiter.”
“But, they would’ve reinstated her title?” He propped himself up on his cane, standing taller.
“Her position, if not her title, and she would’ve continued her good works even while missing you every day.”
“You believe so, Hiresha?”
“I know so.” She cupped the old man’s emaciated hand then flew backward out the door. Her red and blue diamonds spun ahead of her, and a pink hippo skimmed behind.
One-quarter of the way back over the Sea of Fangs, inspiration struck her in a blast that left her ears ringing. She arched her arms over her shoulders and revolved in circles above the heave of froth and salt.
How obvious it was. She could never abide Tethiel in one facet while battling him in the other. She had but one possibility to resolve the discord between her worlds. The solution would be brutal. Two nights from now, her wedding with Tethiel would begin. The day before, in her other facet, she would have to kill him.
33
“In all the Empire’s better cities, the groom pays a bride price to her father. You may give it to me, to account for the wedding’s expenses.”
“Where I was raised, the bride’s family paid the groom a dowry to be rid of her.”
“I, being gracious, will overlook your savage upbringing.”
“Don’t overlook my faults. What else is there to admire?”
“Certainly not your logic. You have vaults full of ill-gotten gains, and I do not. It’s clear which marriage tradition should take precedence.”
Crocodiles pulled carts full of treasure. Jade blocks carved into gruesome hearts, the black gloss of hematite mirrors, bronze-inlaid chests glittering with myriad preserved insects, sheaths of the brightest feathers, masks of copper complete with wigs of real hair, jaguar skins, and gold coin from the Empire, the hoard rumbled down the city’s streets.
Chains bound the spoils to the crocodiles with spiked harnesses. Each of the beasts was longer than fifteen feet. The reptiles lifted their hulks off their bellies to walk with a prowling stride. Women dashed their children out of the way. Their shrieks of surprise ended in cries of excitement. The fearsome size of the crocodiles was mitigated by the colored patterns painted on the square scales of their tales and the round ones down their backs. Each monster walked with mouth open, and between the jaws a bird of paradise preened itself.
Hiresha had to concede that Tethiel had done well. What a cool upwelling of relief that the wedding would be paid for. She could marry without owing anything to anyone. She breathed in, and even the city smelled less loathsome. To be fair, that was in part due to the incense burning on the crocodiles’ backs. The smoldering sweetness coated the back of her throat.
“We’ll capture their
minds,” Tethiel had said before the procession. “People will talk of our wedding for centuries.”
“Yes.” Hiresha turned away, lest he sense she plotted against him in the other facet. He could misinterpret her thoughts, believe she wished his death in this world as well. She could scarcely breathe through her forced smile. Worrying about it would only give him more opportunity to know.
He rode at the front of the treasure parade on his basilisk. He had blindfolded the monster with red ribbons. She traveled at the end of the procession in a pavilion held between the spines of her amethyst dragon.
This time, people didn’t run. They gasped. They cried out in fright and wonder.
“Bigger big caiman!” A child with half her face painted pointed at the dragon.
“That’s no caiman,” her mother said. She swayed as she blinked up, and she wrapped her arms tighter around her child in her hip sling.
Hiresha threw down festive armfuls of rat poison. The pellets fanned out from her fingers in white arcs. They rained amongst the people, who threw up their arms and laughed in high squeals. A child grubbed some of the poison into his mouth. Fortunate for him that Hiresha had planned for this eventuality. Unless her test results were wrong, the worm-briar extract additive would be too pungent for humans to stomach, and indeed, the child spat all the poison out.
To the rats and roaches, it would taste only as bad as rotten cheese. The city would have a little less scurrying on the night of her wedding.
Hiresha wouldn’t have to think of those clawed feet clattering about, up her legs and over her back with cold pinching. There was no reason to imagine a tide of vermin flooding her wedding palace, except that’s all she could see. Something had gone wrong. Something wasn’t right.
Maybe even all the treasures wouldn’t be enough to pay for the wedding. That might be what was bothering her. She would estimate the value.
The riches, they didn’t sit still in their chests and vases, even accounting for the rumble of their carts. The feathers squirmed. One moment, there were seventy-three together, and the next, only seventy-two. Coins disappeared as well only to blink back. There was nothing definite, nothing solid and countable, only a glittering impression of wealth. The onlookers likely wouldn’t notice the discrepancies, yet each stuck Hiresha in the eye.
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