Dark Lord's Wedding

by A. E. Marling

  Hiresha cut out the woman’s heart and willed it to float overhead still twitching and spurting. Then the knife tore open the woman’s stomach. Out came the swallowed gold. Hiresha Attracted off the bile and gore and threw the nuggets onto the pile of loathsome treasures.

  The blood of the sacrificed mixed with Hiresha’s. She separated it drop by drop, unit by unit, before drawing her own back into the vein of her wrist. Some trace of those she killed must’ve still remained in the blood because it itched its way up her arm, burned in her chest, and scoured her heart.

  The last woman’s flashed grin may have merely been a nervous twitch. Hiresha had to allow it might not’ve been her intention to deceive. Or if the woman hadn’t forgiven, maybe Hiresha should’ve spared her anyway. Hiresha had killed the cleverest.

  Now her blood was soiled. Death flowed in her veins.

  “It is not enough.” The Talon lunged to a living woman, waving his pitiful flint knife.

  A wall of obsidian rose from nothing to block his path. A Feaster must’ve summoned the barrier. “The slaves were given,” Tethiel said from the ceiling. “They cannot be ungiven.”

  Hiresha nodded to him in thanks. “Those remaining may now go free.”

  The man Tethiel had spoken of as the king brute shook his head at her. “Half flayed or no, she’s still a woman and weak.”

  Hiresha had expected disapproval. Confirmation of her fears still disappointed her. At another table, Fos sat hunched, his shoulder blades pinched together. He wouldn’t look at her. He had come so far to see her, and she’d had to greet him with carnage.

  Hiresha hurled the gifts of gold up, high through the quartz apertures, into the heights of the dome. There the sparkling refuse would float until needed. If only Hiresha could toss the guests after it and give them as little thought.

  Bright Palm Alyla stepped forward carrying an old shovel with a notched blade of bronze. “This is my gift to you. It’s for burying all the Innocents you will have to kill after marrying the Lord of the Feast.”

  Hiresha crumpled the shovel into a mass of splinters. She warped the bronze blade around them to make a perfect sphere. “I’ve improved your gift. Now it will remind me of you, being composed on the outside and full of rubbish.”

  The Bright Palm didn’t blink.

  Though the kings and the other guests disliked Hiresha’s decision to kill half the prisoners, Elbe might see the good in it. She understood compromise. Her city had done as much with a pact with the Dominion.

  Elbe sat at her table weeping. Her entire cheeks were slick with tears, and the glaze of underserved judgment covered her tattoo of the sapphire bee. Elbe should know that sometimes death was necessary. New queen bees killed the larvae of their slower sisters. The Purest still blamed, judged, and condemned with her grief.

  Beside Elbe, the Bleeding Maiden covered her mouth in an obscene attempt to hide her giggling. The gleeful mischief in her eyes gave her away. Yes, Hiresha acknowledged, the Feaster had reason to gloat.

  The Talon had alienated all the guests from Hiresha. It had only taken him one maneuver. Hiresha would need many more to win them back. She had to believe she would succeed. Otherwise, all those women had died for nothing.

  Hiresha turned to her bridesmaids. “This calls for a change of plans and a change of dress.”

  40

  “I have moments of doubt concerning our wedding. They become hours, which stretch into days. How any love-fool arranges a marriage, I can’t imagine. It is an ordeal of planning.”

  “You adore devising plans, my heart, and my daily exercise is scheming. What better reason for us to wed?”

  “I was being politic. What I mostly have doubts about is you.”

  “Then we share that in common too.”

  “After I have received all the gifts,” Hiresha said, “I’ll choose which is best. Whoever gave it will gain the favor of my first dance.”

  The high guests stood, leaning their ears forward for her words, squinting at the glass plates of her new dress. Only the Talon slouched over his stolen seat, beating his bloody fist against the table and weeping. His histrionics seemed genuine to Hiresha, as much as they surprised her in a man who cut out hearts daily. She could only postulate her partial refusal to sacrifice in a similar manner had driven the priest to tears. He dribbled all over, and it wasn’t even his assigned spot.

  A woman with even less wholesome blood approached. The Bleeding Maiden held out a wooden pendent. Hiresha couldn’t help but note it lacked the dark richness of ebonwood or the luster of jet, and those precious woods could still hold only meager enchantments. The Feaster hadn’t brought a gift, only another insult. The pendent had the shape of a dog.

  “Did you imagine,” Hiresha asked, “that I’d need kindling?”

  “It’s a Bright Palm symbol,” the Bleeding Maiden said. “I thought it could protect you, just so all the nailers know you’re on their side.”

  The meaning was all too obvious to Hiresha. This simpering killer saw her as a stooge for the Order of the Innocent. The Feaster guests chittered. Their eyes traced lines of false logic from the Bright Palms back to Hiresha.

  The Bleeding Maiden touched her dimple. “Who could say why the Bright Palms worship a she-dog, but—”

  Bright Palm Alyla interposed with the even plane of her voice. “The Wise Hound was a brave guardian, and not a bitch.”

  The Bleeding Maiden pulled back the pendant. “Then it does seem less right for you.”

  “The Lady of Gems,” Tethiel said, “is not of the hound but the fox.”

  He swept a hand and a crimson trail of lace toward the common tables. There the fennec was chasing butterflies released in prelude to the next dinner course. To the great diversion of the guests, the fennec leaped over a sitting Bright Palm to come within a paw’s width of snapping a pair of black and white wings out of the air. The fennec landed with an explosion of chirps.

  The fox shot under a table, and now guests were laughing too loudly. “Ho-ho! Faster than a hare,” one said. At least some wedding guests were enjoying themselves and not being sacrificed.

  One Feaster hid her braying mouth behind a fan of multihued glass. It matched her dress, also Hiresha’s. The Feaster had crafted a crude approximation of the stained-glass gown. The impertinent woman had also worn it first. Hiresha had swept out in her newest innovation only to see it already copied.

  Hiresha had met this imitating Feaster before, and she was of no great mind. She couldn’t have anticipated the gown herself.

  Hiresha beckoned to the Bleeding Maiden, lurching her closer to hear. “I know you’re behind Physis’s dress mockery. If only I could say such antics were beneath you.”

  “Oh no! Did you mean for your wardrobe to stay secret? Your dressmaker must not’ve meant to betray you.”

  “I don’t blame Celaise, only the woman who coerced her.”

  “And people shouldn’t think you’re careless,” the Bleeding Maiden said. “Your designs were found out, and you never knew. But you would’ve taken more care if it weren’t just a silly wedding.”

  “Will you die before dropping your charade? You’re only half as stupid as you act, and intelligence trumps meanness.” Hiresha swept away to the Feaster in the glass gown. “To think, Physis, I once envied your beauty and your power.”

  The Feaster’s smile was both sharp toothed and brittle around the edges. “Will you fall asleep halfway through this party too?”

  Hiresha waved to the clutter of glass plates the Feaster wore. “Innovation doesn’t fit you. You have a list of my dresses? It will be most amusing to see you struggle with designs beyond your mental scope.”

  The colors faded from the panes of her dress. Celaise was overpowering the other Feaster and stealing her vibrancy. Now the woman didn’t wear stained glass but only a shop window.

  Hiresha revolved in the air, and polygons reflected off her gown and onto the guests in triumphant topaz hues. “Each time I leave to change dresses
, look to this woman. She’ll wear a prelude, which will illustrate the difference between desperate imitation and inspired craft.”

  All the magic the Feaster possessed was insufficient to hide her blush.

  Hiresha lighted down on the ceiling near Fos Chandur. He would be the last high guest to present her with a gift. Perhaps she should’ve felt more of a surge upon seeing him. It had been years apart for them in this facet, though they spent every day together in the other world. His hard chin and soft eyes were all too familiar.

  Uncertainty had left furrows in his brow. His grin quaked, yet his movement was as effortless as always as he knelt before her. He touched her feet, a deference she hadn’t tolerated in years. In him the movement was too graceful for rebuke.

  He looked up from her to the Feaster below. “She’s a tin trinket next to you.”

  It had to be obvious, then, for Fos to notice.

  “Ah, this is for you.” Fos took his gift from the hands of a veiled assistant and presented a fur coat. “You wore it when we saved the Academy. But you must remember. The coat is right there, on your dress.”

  Indeed, one panel of the stained glass displayed her wearing the white fur, in her triumph over gravity to defend the Mindvault Academy.

  “Looks like a conquering yeti.” Fos gulped on his last word. “In a good way, I mean.”

  It hurt when Hiresha chuckled. “You couldn’t know this, yet I only put on the coat as a last resort.”

  His face pinched in sour surprise.

  “No, Fos. The gift is apt. All too much. The coat saved me. Without it, I couldn’t have rescued anyone, and it came at a great price.” The fur must have been even more impressive when it was still worn by the winter bear.

  “Then it’s a heroic coat,” Fos said.

  “How quickly its accomplishments were turned against us.” Hiresha couldn’t enchant the fur coat anymore than the wooden pendant, yet his gift had value and thoughtfulness.

  Hiresha could declare this gift the best, the truest to her, and the winner. Doing so would likely offend Elbe beyond reconciliation. The Purest had given material wealth that must’ve depleted the city’s coffers, and her coin had bought the wedding palace.

  Declaring the fur coat as the best would be poor strategy. Hiresha would have to dance with Fos and his easy strength. She might need to give up Tethiel’s schemes of bringing great powers together under one rule. Hiresha could leave all of it behind and fly off with Fos on the amethyst dragon, live her life like Sagai and Naroh should have.

  Then her facets would be all too similar. Abiding Fos in one world already wearied her. Merely thinking about it was like grinding two diamonds together, rounding off their masterful edges until two identical spheres remained, lifeless as glass and devoid of fire.

  “Fos, thank you for coming a great distance from the Empire and facing greater dangers at my wedding.”

  “Always worried …” Fos glanced to Tethiel, then to the blood-splattered floor. The bodies had been removed. “Always thought this might happen.”

  “Human sacrifice at my wedding?”

  He lifted his broad hands palms out. “I mean, you have so much power. You’re juggling lives, gems, and hippos for all I know. Wait, let me think what I mean to say.”

  “Most advisable.”

  His eyes unfocused, both his natural one with the black iris and the mahogany one. Anyone would who saw him would think his gaze exceptional. Their first guess wouldn’t be that one eye had been pulped then regenerated by an enchantress.

  If only she could’ve done the same for the hearts of the women she had killed. And in the other facet, she wished her powers could’ve saved all those the Lord of the Feast had slaughtered in his death throws.

  Fos had been spared, not out of mercy but spite. No one punishes us like our friends. The Lord of the Feast had stabbed her with his thoughts.

  Death glared from every facet in maddening coruscation. Hiresha had to focus on one single world, one agony, one tragedy, where Fos was speaking.

  “We defeated a Soultrapper together. You ousted a second one from Morimound. They did whatever they wanted to people, and it wasn’t any kind of good. Hiresha, just don’t end up like them.”

  “What an unfair comparison. The Soultrappers brutalized and exploited to power their obsessions.”

  “Well, I mean, you weren’t putting hearts back into those women.”

  “I was saving lives. All across the lands, I could do as much good if not more.” She had tried to say it with all the confidence it deserved, yet she couldn’t find the right pitch of voice.

  “You must be right.” Fos spoke with the slow purpose of trying to remember each word. “But do you suppose the Soultrappers thought they were right?”

  Heat spiked within Hiresha’s skull, and miasmas wriggled across her vision in the beginning of a migraine. Hiresha quashed the headache by constricting her blood vessels. “Did the vizier tell you to say that?”

  Fos’s chin rose in a lump of embarrassment. Her guess might have been right, or else he was ashamed of her accusation.

  Hiresha massaged her right hand. Her smallest finger was pinched as if she hadn’t slipped the skin back on her arm correctly. The epithelial tissue constricted her by turns then felt loose enough to slide off. She must not have repaired all the severed nerve endings.

  How rude of Fos to voice her own fear aloud. Hiresha had saved cities from the tyranny of magic. Her own power could be even greater, her rule with Tethiel more dominant. And how fragile, an upstart could come at precisely the wrong time and ruin everything. It had almost happened already tonight. Hiresha could’ve died in her sleep.

  She would have to kill those two trapped in her dragon. To think, they could’ve lived out their lives together in happiness. Now the best they could be was a spectacle.

  No, Hiresha could never escape as they could’ve to a life of happy inconsequence. The magnitude of her magic couldn’t be hidden.

  Hiresha pulled her gaze away from her amethyst dragon. From this angle it seemed to be clinging to the dome upside down. She turned back to Fos and the winter-bear coat he had brought her. Hiresha ran her hands over the rough thickness. Its bristles scratched her palms.

  Yes, she admitted the Empire had sent her a thoughtful gift. She couldn’t call it an insult. Most of its value came from sentiment, and she could never enchant it to use against the Empire. Fos had carried the fur, yet the consideration may have come from the vizier.

  Hiresha let go of the coat. It floated through the crystal aperture and into the dome. The winter-bear hide joined the cyclone flow of the rest of the hoard. The gift had once meant so much to her, and now it was lost in gold.

  “What generosity!” Tethiel’s voice echoed off the crystal walls and her spine. “Those gifts outshine the stars.”

  Hiresha could yet summon the fur back. She could choose it and try to flee the blood of this wedding into a simple life. Sagai and Naroh had chosen poorly. They had doomed themselves with decisions that couldn’t be undone. Hiresha would have to be wiser.

  “Lady of Gems,” Tethiel said, “which guest gave the greatest of gifts?”

  She could delay her choice no longer. Hiresha would have to begin slaying opportunities until but one remained alive.

  41

  “Lest your tastes appear vain, always graciously accept the best. The only sour grape, my bride to-be, is that we can’t hire the greatest singer in the lands. His voice is not for sale.”

  “Then you are not referring to the empress.”

  “The second greatest, then, is Bethul Cavern Throat. He sold himself into servitude in Jaraah for two camels. No one but the caliph’s guests may hear him.”

  “Astonishing how common slavery is in nations where it’s outlawed.”

  “We must steal this legendary voice for our wedding. With your blessing, I’ll recruit Inannis for the heist.”

  “That jewel duper does owe me for grievances. He may kidnap this Bethul Cave
rn Throat, whom we could then free or otherwise compensate. You’re certain his voice will be appreciated?”

  “His is the natural-born talent that only comes with great practice.”

  “Here we agree. Dedicate your life in ceaseless work to perfecting a craft, and people will only insult you by calling you talented.”

  Now Jerani might have to fight. His heart started beating at battle speed, and his fingers throbbed with readiness. The lord had moved closer to the kings.

  “The lady should’ve chosen me,” the king brute said. “What kind of gift is gold? Terror bird feathers, that’s what a real queen wants.”

  The lord leaned over the table. Butterflies beat over his shoulders, and their wings were splotched in screaming-skull patterns. “The Lady of Gems is no mere queen.”

  “Can see that now.” The king didn’t take his eyes off the lady’s dancing. Brave, with the lord so close. Or crazy.

  The potato king edged away in a clatter of gold armor. He glanced back to the lady. “Maybe it’s for the best I didn’t have more gemstone to give. Her favor seems uncommonly dangerous.”

  “Very,” the lord said, “almost as dangerous as her disfavor.”

  The king meant the lady’s glass-shard gown, Jerani guessed. Or maybe it was just her headdress that spiked its way down her back in a jagged hair of many colors. Like blades of razor weed caught in the wind, the glass leaned behind her and would cut through skin at a touch.

  The Purest woman hadn’t cried out yet. She held onto the lady’s shoulder and waist, near the shards. The women circled in a dance flight.

  Jerani hoped the kings kept watching. Then they wouldn’t get up to surround the lord. Jerani might not have to test his spear against their axes.

  “A table full of kings,” the brute said and spat on the glass floor, “and she chose a woman runt?”

  “How do you think I feel?” The lord plucked a long candy from a servant’s tray. “At least I can have my fill of happiness.”