Prophecy was for small minds and orphans. Hiresha wouldn’t say so, however, since Fos had in fact lost both parents.
“Only asked because they did for me.” The protrusion in Fos’s throat bobbed down then up again. He glanced past her then to the kings at his table.
They leaned in to hear. Fos likely wished to speak with her in private. She would have to disappoint him more than once tonight.
Fos cringed at the onyx orbs of her dress then lifted his chin farther. He was gazing into her eyes with their amethyst pigments. Hiresha knew the priests had told him he would marry a woman with “eyes a’glitter.” One could say she and Fos were meant to be. In her other facet, the masses had tittered long over that detail, when they weren’t groaning and dying of pox.
“Are you sure you’re supposed to marry the lord?” Fos asked.
“I am certain it’s impossible for a mortal to be certain.” It wouldn’t do to exterminate all hope in Fos and the kings that she might yet marry one of them. Yes, Tethiel would approve, regardless of the means. “Especially when the groom in question takes his drinking more seriously than his husbandly duties.”
The king brute asked, “You saying he’s soggy cocked?”
Hiresha rolled her eyes halfway and gazed upward. “And could there possibly be another metric to judge a man?”
“Ha!” The king slapped the table. He grinned as he shook his head. How remarkable that a person could simultaneously resemble a rapacious orangutan and a slime mold.
Fos’s eyes reflected the brightness of her dress. “Then, will you return to the Empire? With me?”
The king clapped an arm over his shoulder. “With our armies.”
“I’ll not return to imprisonment, no matter how lavish,” Hiresha said. “A sleepy life of normalcy would make me twice dead, whereas with magic I’m twice alive.”
“Then are you the conquering type now?” Fos asked. “You look it. Could be solid crystal now, sure as fate. Bones, mind, and heart all cold and sparkling.”
“They would be warm and rather inefficient,” Hiresha said, “yet that’s beside the point. I’m the same woman you knew, though with less need to tolerate foolishness.”
“You were a healer.”
“I was always more.”
Fos must believe they belonged together, as he did in the other facet. Tearing away his expectations caused him tremors of pain she observed in his uneven breaths and the way he cupped his hands over his abdomen. Hiresha was hurting him, her friend of years, the man who had saved her life. To do otherwise she would have to accept the confines of his vision of her.
He stretched a tight smile across his face. “Whoever you are now, you’re the type ready to kill a few people at your wedding.”
“As few as possible,” Hiresha said.
“Is this what you really want? A crown? Armies? People moping about you bowing all day? The empress says it’s awful.”
“The empress is a featherhead,” Hiresha said. “And therein lies the problem. If I don’t take power away from idiots, they’ll continue to squander lives with their stupidity.”
“Then you are marching on the Empire?” A shadow passed over Fos’s face, from one of her dress’s moving segmented arms.
“Bet your stiffest sword she is,” the king brute said.
“She’ll do as she wills,” the potato king said, which proved he had some sense. The other men didn’t mark him.
“I couldn’t come with you, on the attack,” Fos said. “Even if I’m fated to.”
Hiresha admired the strength of belief in himself, in her. It had brought him through the jungle to sit tall beside kings. Of all the people in his life, he likely only had cared for his sister more than Hiresha. Tonight she had pushed away what could have been his marriage proposal. Seeing her this close to Tethiel might be Fos’s worst fear, and yet he still endured with a stiff jaw. She held out a hand to him.
He took it. His head tilted, ear lifting toward her. He expected her to speak.
She did not. Hiresha left him and the kings to wonder and dread.
“Won’t you join us?” Tethiel asked. He flickered out of sight while speaking. The former deepness of his voice changed. Each of the vowels now purred, and the words trailed with sibilance. It no longer sounded like a man. “My heart.”
Tethiel had promised. At last Hiresha would see. She tracked the voice toward another table. Her chest squeezed against the air she couldn’t breathe out. A chain reaction of expectations exploded with her in zings and jolts of curiosity.
Behind Elbe’s shoulder, holding a chalice full of a viscous darkness, Tethiel stood as a woman.
Tethiel had put on his feminine mask, or taken off her masculine one. She, Hiresha observed, had lost nothing in height. Tethiel’s eyes had the same dark undertow. She wore a frightful corset with proportions comparable to a hornet’s. The aggression of her jutting chest and hips met in a waist nightmarishly slender, only sufficient to fit her spine. The paleness of her hands pulsed with moonlight. Her red nails clicked together. They arched twice as long as her fingers.
Wrongness stung Hiresha across her brow. Itching jabs spread in shocks over her chest and down into the organs Tethiel appeared to lack. Hiresha felt as if she melted in a whirling concoction of whirling excitement and tickling stars. The air rushing into her lungs came with sharp pleasure.
Tethiel looked too believable as a woman, too similar and too different. A perfume wafted from her with the aroma of roasted coffee and recklessness. Nothing about her comforted Hiresha, only intoxicated. The same was true of Tethiel when a man. Hiresha might merely have accustomed herself to the other guise.
“I wish,” Elbe said beside her, “I could believe Lord Tethiel is a lady.”
“It is a fascinating speculation,” Hiresha said. Perhaps Tethiel had only claimed to be impotent to hide a deeper truth. She could never impregnate Hiresha. For the same reason, Tethiel might’ve agreed to forego children.
“Exalt in the uncertainty.” Tethiel held out the chalice to Elbe. The viscous drink stuck to the sides in a dark ring. “It is the essence of romance.”
Elbe tilted her chin away from the chalice.
Hiresha needed the Purest to accept Tethiel or the wedding victory would be incomplete. “Even if you knew Tethiel had been born a woman, you could not be certain. As you told me, women may have as much curse as men. A body we perceive as feminine may have a man’s soul.”
Across from Elbe, the jaguar knight flipped his tail. His whiskers twitched upward.
“And the opposite is also true,” Hiresha said. “A woman may reside in a figure others see as male.”
The beetle of Elbe’s earring bobbed its legs over her shoulder. She didn’t turn all the way to face Tethiel. “You believe women could be so cursed?”
“I’ve met one, a past colleague.” Resentment burrowed its spiky tendrils through Hiresha’s chest. The elders had betrayed Hiresha because they had feared how she might evolve her practice of enchantment. They had been right. “As you once told me, ‘Harmony makes us most truly women,’ not anatomy.”
Tethiel again offered the chalice. The drink was chocolate, with a cinnamon stick propped up within the glass.
Elbe closed her eyes. The same patterns crossing her butterfly eyelashes were painted as dark panes on her eyelids. She opened them. “Appearances cannot be trusted as much as actions. If you both act with harmony, then my heart will fill with golden sweetness knowing you are both women.”
“Swords may make people bow,” Tethiel said, “but it’s style that keeps them loyal.”
“My rule will begin without bloodshed.” Hiresha glanced at the red stains on the floor below. “To as great a degree as possible.”
“War only leads to war,” Tethiel said.
“And for peace you must make peace,” Elbe said.
Hiresha allowed herself to hope they had swayed the Purest.
Elbe reached to the chalice. She took it, and she drank. Hiresha k
new then they had her. The corners of Elbe’s eyes pinched with distaste. She set the chocolate drink down.
“Too spicy,” Tethiel asked, “or too sweet?”
“You poison me with sugar.” Elbe slid the pinkness of her tongue over her upper teeth. “It has none of honey’s melody of flavors, only the bitterness of slaves harvesting the sugarcane.”
“How deliciously awkward.” Tethiel touched a fingernail against the bloody redness of her lips. Her head twitched around at an owlish angle as she looked behind at the jaguar knight. “When it was our dear orange who smuggled in the sugar.”
The golden fur of the great cat’s broad nose rumpled. An immense tongue spread out to his platter to flick another locust into his mouth.
“Sugar tastes of Strife,” Elbe said, “and it ruins the palate.”
The honey baroness would have a keen interest in suppressing the sugar trade. Hiresha pushed the chalice between Elbe and the jaguar knight. “Perhaps you both could reach an arrangement.”
“Xochi could remove his blessing from sugar smuggling,” Tethiel said.
The jaguar knight snorted.
“And in return,” Hiresha said, “Purest Elbe would ban sea fishing.”
The jaguar’s ears perked up. Their fuzzy white interiors angled toward Hiresha.
“With seafood illegal, the black market would surge with demand. Fishermen would then have to pray to the Obsidian Jaguar for favors,” Hiresha said. She estimated the total catch would also go down. More sea creatures would be safe, and fewer fishermen would risk their lives in the Sea of Fangs. Hiresha’s promise to a lost friend would be kept.
“The City of Flowing Gold is not the only port,” Elbe said.
“Only the largest,” Hiresha said. “Assuming I could secure cooperation throughout the Dominion, would you both agree to the pact?”
Elbe regarded the jaguar knight with a beat of butterfly lashes. The jaguar knight stared back with gold-foil eyes.
Above them both, Tethiel motioned to Hiresha with a gesture like a bursting kiss. Tethiel’s sharp fingernails flicked outward in front of her lips.
Elbe held out her hand to the jaguar knight. He opened his mouth, each fang longer than her fingers, yet she didn’t jerk away. He licked her palm.
“Then we are agreed,” Hiresha said.
Tethiel clapped her hands together. The lacy darkness of her stigmata tattoo surged across her brow in doily tentacles. When she spoke to all the guests, none reacted to her new appearance. Hiresha deduced only she could see the change. Most everyone would still see Tethiel as a man and hear his voice as masculine.
“The ritual nears, and soon you’ll taste the final morsels of the evening. The last course will naturally be your firstborns.”
A cup dropped in the shocked silence and bounced off the table with brittle pings.
Fos coughed out a locust wing. “Are—are you serious?”
“How could I be, my overstuffed dainty? You don’t even have a child,” Tethiel said. He did enjoy his hoaxes. “The last course will only be a bouquet of ice treats.”
Servers carried the ices in on platters. The desserts sweated a mist of coldness.
“Remember to eat too much,” Tethiel said. “The pain in your belly will distract you from the greater ache of a meaningless existence followed soon after by an empty eternity.”
Hiresha recognized the flavors of ice she had selected: melon, peach, and lemon, among many. The treats had been sculpted into the shape of infants, each plump and grinning. She hadn’t agreed to that. Tethiel must’ve had reasons, likely bad ones.
The chubby arms of the ice sculptures were cut off and served on platters. “Does look like my firstborn,” the king brute said. He started wolfing down his dessert.
Fos snuck a finger from his own plate.
“How awful,” said one woman below on the common tables. She dipped a spoon into a head of a blueberry ice. The infant’s expression stayed serene, almost beatific. The woman swallowed part of its face. “How delicious! The flavor is rippling over my skin.”
“Tasting with your skin?” Miss Barrows asked. She had descended from the ceiling. “You must’ve had too much blue honey. Or just enough.”
Hiresha had a few moments to herself, between pacts, and she would spend the time with Miss Barrows. Hiresha dropped from the ceiling, flipping around a swinging chandelier. Ropes of silk trailed after her.
Miss Barrows dipped her finger into the blueberry ice head and sucked. Her jowls bounced as she giggled. “Come down to join me for treats, you old cobweb? Suppose it’s too bad for you there’s no flavor of fly blood.”
Hiresha had asked much of Miss Barrows to stand amidst the golden orb weavers. “You’ve grown as courageous as Fos, Miss Barrows. Have you considered training in weaponry?”
“Cutlery, maybe.” She swiped a spoon and ate a nobleman’s lime ice with it. He opened his mouth to protest, yet she stopped him with a kiss. Afterward, she chortled and licked her green lips. She scooped out another spoonful from the infant’s soft belly and lifted it to Hiresha. “Try it. You’ll never meet so sweet a babe.”
“No, thank you.”
“Get every satisfaction you can now. The joys of marriage end at the wedding.”
“Though I’ve memorized all the knowledge bequeathed by the Opal Mind, I may never understand why people waste their lives pursuing pleasure.”
“Don’t know why you’d waste your time on anything else.”
“You shouldn’t expect too much of yourself in the capacity of philosophy, Miss Barrows. Your skull is likely now entirely full of fluids.”
“My aptitudes are more fun.” Miss Barrows winked and elbowed Hiresha, redundantly. “You’re going to be a married woman soon. Let Ol’ Janny know if you need any advice on blowing off the dust. You know, playing nug-a-nug. The horizontal constitutional. Bed galloping.”
“I understood the first reference, yet I refused to consider.”
“You would, you dry mummy.”
“Semi-sentient simian.”
“Gem grubber.”
Memories aligned in Hiresha of all the arguments she had enjoyed in the past with Miss Barrows, of all those they might have in the future. It was like a corridor of framed mirrors, each pleasing in its familiarity.
“Miss Barrows, I would grieve to lose you.”
“Ho-ho! Would you?”
“Yes.” It had happened yesterday in the other facet. Many had fallen into the sinkhole of shadows. The city of Morimound had collapsed, and Hiresha had been pulled to this world before she could preserve any of her friends in metabolic stasis. By the time she returned, Miss Barrows’ mind would’ve decayed beyond saving, as little as she protested needing it. The pain of remembering warped everything, stretching the figures around Hiresha into stick insects with human faces.
Hiresha focused on her blue paragon, into its flashing celebration of facets. She was in her dawn world. Here, her friends lived. She wouldn’t let them die. Now there was but one Miss Barrows between the two facets, and Hiresha could soon recommence calling her by her first name.
Miss Barrows upended another spoonful of ice at the same moment a smoke ring passed close by. Both dessert and soot entered her mouth. She spluttered.
Hiresha turned on the smoker. The woman stank of rotten tea leaves. “You may now put out your pipe,” Hiresha said.
“What?” The clouds the woman puffed out were discoloring the yellow orchid petals of her dress. “Always smoke after a meal. Or while beekeeping.”
“That may be, yet you never smoke after my wedding banquet.” Hiresha Attracted all the vital essence from air near the burning leaf, asphyxiating the flame. She then levitated the pipe out of reach above the woman’s head and her flower hat.
Three Feasters prowled past the woman’s dispersing haze. They stalked between the tables, converging on a Bright Palm sitting by himself. A Feaster made of obsidian shards asked him, “Don’t want any ice treat?”
“His
heart’s already frozen.” The disembodied voice came from a Feaster with a flickering lantern for a head.
“Ice babies, like eating little Bright Palms.” The third Feaster appeared to be a charred skeleton, a female one by the dimensions of her hips. She slathered prickly-pear ice into her clattering teeth. The pink slush splattered down her neck bones and ribs.
The Bright Palm said nothing.
The lantern-headed Feaster turned to look at Hiresha. Light glared through a dragon design cut into the red paper on top of his shoulders. Even as empty-skulled as he appeared, the Feaster couldn’t dare consider attacking the guest in front of Hiresha.
The Feaster threw a handful of orange ice. “That’s for nailing the Fire Eater.”
The glob slapped against the Bright Palm’s face. He blinked one eye but otherwise stayed still.
“And that’s for Ant Breath.” The charred skeleton tossed more ice. The obsidian lady did the same, and then more Feasters of all manners of frightful forms were throwing sweet slush at the glowing man.
The Bright Palm couldn’t take offense. The food attack was more childish than harmful, and Hiresha considered if it would be right to let it proceed. The Bleeding Maiden might’ve instigated it only to ridicule Hiresha for stamping it out. Other guests grabbed handfuls of dessert. A man plastered a noblewoman’s dress of white-moth wings. She screamed, if not for shock then for the expense of her clothes.
Hiresha gazed up to Tethiel. The Feasters were her responsibility.
She was still wearing the fractal jacket Hiresha had given, only illusions must’ve tailored it to fit Tethiel’s new frame. “Let us have a game,” she said. “Whoever colors the lady’s silk-white dress will gain the prize of her kiss.”
All the low guests turned on Hiresha. Their hands dripped with pinks and blues.
“I think not,” Hiresha said. “Lord Tethiel is too free with my favors.”
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