“You are right,” Tethiel said, “the reward is too great. The winner, then, may ascend to the ceiling and attend the marriage ritual. Begin!”
In none of her planning had Hiresha predicted her guests would tear apart childlike dessert effigies and hurl their dripping limbs in streaks of reds and greens. She could hardly call it decorous. The hexer lifted an arm from his crutch to throw a papaya ice. The noblewoman risked her gown to toss yellow powder flavored with pineapple. An old woman in coarse yucca cloth cackled as she lobbed an infant’s head of watermelon. Even the Bright Palm set down his spear and took aim with his food.
Hiresha leaped away. She sprang off the crystal wall and twirled between the pillars. A pity this dress covered the kraken-eye jewels on her back, though the onyx orbs about her person did give her a sense of movement and shifting light. Few guests anticipated her flight, and even the decadent projectiles that should have hit her did not. She Repulsed them away. As inefficient as that power was, she could turn aside a bit of sweetened slush.
The misses fell back down on the low guests, splattering them. The men and women cried in outrage and delight. They began aiming for each other. The wedding had turned into a multicolored mêlée. Hiresha expected Tethiel was satisfied with herself. Though her contained expression could scarcely qualify as a smirk, there was a sense of the monstrous glee lurking behind her, each terror half seen and smiling with a crescent of fangs.
The guests wouldn’t ever hit Hiresha. The spidersilk dress would stay pristine and—
A metallic crawling traced around Hiresha’s neck and down her back in skin-crinkling undulations. She was sensing someone steal her engagement amulet. Its warning enchantment had activated. Yes, the stalactite podium that had once held her red paragon was bare.
A needling on her brow guided her gaze across the ceiling. A Feaster moved there, obscured by a meager cloak of shadows, carrying her jewel. Someone dared touch it. He or she presumed to soil the faces of divinity.
Three specks of guava ice landed on Hiresha’s skirt. They stuck to the silk.
She sprang off a column, bolting toward the gem thief. The concealing magic burned away as the Feaster stumbled into Bright Palm Alyla. It was Lantern Head, and he flailed the necklace at the Bright Palm, trying to slip it on her, attempting to let go of the chain. The enchantment wouldn’t release him. The gold links imbedded into his skin, and his nearness to the Bright Palm burned away his paper face. Strips of red peeled off to reveal a toothless man with rolling eyes.
Hiresha Attracted the paragon diamond from him. She seized him, as he had seized her jewel, her wonder. She Lightened him to toss him to pieces against the wall. He would be the one to shatter. “You’ve made a horrible mistake.”
“No.” Tethiel pattered her fingernails on Hiresha’s shoulder, each as light and quick as a spider leg. “Not him. The Bleeding Maiden has.”
The Feaster in question sat across the table, her knees pressed against her chest. Her breath caught, and her lips parted in a perfectly angled pout. “What have I done?”
“Inspired too many of my children to mischief,” Tethiel said. “That duty belongs to the parents.”
“I—I always have been true to you.” Redness welled from her tear ducts.
“She was warned,” Hiresha said. A fingerprint smudged her paragon’s trigonal face. Hiresha willed the slime away. “She defied.”
Yes, Hiresha thought it past time and yet still too soon. If it were a simple matter, the Bleeding Maiden would’ve already been dead. Jewels would’ve crushed her skull. Her insufferably dainty neck would’ve been choked by Hiresha’s gold necklace. They had to beware of this Feaster’s backlash.
Tethiel must’ve given a mental command to Celaise. The girl slid forward with an expression of coerced determination, brows spiked. The whites of her eyes surrounded bead pupils. The feathers of her dress ruffled into dark spines. She came up behind the Bleeding Maiden.
Still the false waif didn’t break from her act. “Why would you always side with the Bright Bullies against us?”
Her ploy had been to pin the engagement necklace onto Bright Palm Alyla, as if she were the one Tethiel would wed. The statement would’ve been clear, if infantile.
Exterminating the Bleeding Maiden could do even more damage to Tethiel’s position. Hiresha noted all the Feaster guests craning their necks up to the ceiling to see. One of them, a man with two gigantic scorpion tales for arms, tapped his stingers together in a pose of tense anticipation.
Hiresha had to strip the Bleeding Maiden of her support. “You would agree then that there’s nothing more despicable than one Feaster betraying another to a Bright Palm?”
Her gasp came with three distinct notes, almost squeaks. Blood dribbled from one nostril, and she sniffed it back up. She was mocking them, laughing behind that veneer of trembling meekness. “How could any in the family do such a thing?”
“How indeed?” Hiresha asked.
This could go wrong in seventy-three different ways. If the Feasters rebelled, the chaos would cast the lands into an age of darkness. Hiresha Attracted her red paragon with such force into her palm that pain surged up her arm in vermilion blasts. She depended on the support of Alyla.
Hiresha stepped behind the paralyzed Bright Palm. “Last month, the Order of the Innocent waylaid a caravan carrying wedding funds. Three Feasters died. Someone betrayed them.”
Alyla gazed from her chair. She didn’t speak. Lines of light pulsed up the veins of her neck.
“Mother Pepperfire was the informant,” Hiresha said, “though not of her own will. Someone drove her to the Bright Palms.”
The Bleeding Maiden touched her lips and glanced up to Tethiel.
“Alyla and I exhumed Mother Pepperfire yesterday,” Hiresha said. “What we found may surprise everyone but you.”
Hiresha stabbed the grave soil with her shovel. The ground was rust red, more clay than dirt. She Lightened it then slung it over her shoulder. Though she could’ve used more magic, it would not do for people to say the bride was too quick to rip corpses out of the land.
Digging the dead Feaster back up with the help of a Bright Palm added a modicum of respectability, even if Alyla had stripped down to a loincloth. She had tapped a nail into a tree then hung up her dress.
How unprecedented. Hiresha hadn’t ever heard of Bright Palms taking precautions against splattering their formal wear. They never wore any. They couldn’t even feel to fear ruining their clothes. River patterns wound over the skirt in reference to familiar flood plains; in those waters the diamond wealth of their homeland was mined.
“The dress is a compromise,” Hiresha said between shovelfuls, “half intricate display for my benefit, half painfully common materials for your order.”
“You dig alongside me, even with all your servants and power. That is also a compromise.”
“You were such a bright student,” Hiresha said. “Is your order willing to compromise in other ways?”
“I was given the power to negotiate.”
“As I recall from my brief study of your tenets, you bury everyone four feet deep?”
“Yes.” Alyla jammed her shovel down with a squish. An odor of rottenness burst up and filled the nostrils.
“Then wait.” Hiresha held the woman’s hand. It glowed, yet she wasn’t warm. With their magic-based metabolism, Bright Palms were always colder than one would expect. “I need to find proof in this Feaster’s grave that the Bleeding Maiden sent her. I need witnesses to it, and yours is the last word they will trust.”
Alyla gazed back over her shoulder, at the people gathering between the rainforest trees. More and more were coming from the town gates to watch.
“I’m summoning two of my bridesmaids, one a Feaster.” Hiresha waved her hand, and two of the amethyst jewels in her palm glowed brighter than the others. She spoke quietly enough that the townspeople wouldn’t overhear. They hadn’t ventured too close to the stinking grave. “You won’t take offense w
hen I ask if any tenet bars you from lying?”
Light traced through a vein in Alyla’s cheek. “The tenets decree we must protect the Innocent. We would have no reason to tell an unjust lie.”
“You can only tell useful ones, such as a falsehood designed to destroy an especially pernicious Feaster.”
“There is no other kind of Feaster.”
“I see. Then which tenet differentiates Feasters from those not to be killed on sight with sharp implements?”
“The twelfth tenet, with its nine stanzas. Feasters will prey first on the meek, then on the mighty. Stanza six.”
“Yes, I believe we may yet work together to create an unprecedented arrangement.” Less promising to Hiresha, only seventeen minutes and twenty seconds remained before she had to fly back to her dragon. She would have to go to sleep, to wake in the sunset facet to kill the Lord of the Feast. “If the Order of the Innocent no longer had to concern itself with Feasters, you could focus on serving people in less violent ways, correct?”
Alyla did not speak or disagree. The thin layer of ground beneath them pulsed with the heat of decay. Soil shifted. Maggots crawled out, white spots on red loam.
“Let us theorize I can remove all the Feasters from the lands. Such a service would be worthy of your cooperation, would it not?”
The Bright Palm didn’t so much as blink, even with a fly padding its way across her cheek. She nodded.
“The first step in the plan is to find proof against the Bleeding Maiden.”
“And the second step?” Alyla asked. “It would need to be a large one, in theory.”
“That almost sounded like a jest, yet then there are no tenets against snideness either,” Hiresha said. “Never mind the intermediate steps for now. I’d like a promise that if I execute my side of this bargain, your order would accommodate me.”
“In what way?”
“You would add a tenet.”
“And it would be?”
“‘No man or woman younger than twenty-five years of age shall be made a Bright Palm.’ I cannot help but feel your order preys on the young and the emotionally vulnerable. It is possible for those reasons I lost someone very dear to me.”
Alyla had always been a lean girl, and her transformation into a Bright Palm had left her even more slight. There was so little of her left, scarcely more than magic circulating around human bones.
She didn’t meet Hiresha’s eyes. She didn’t deviate her voice with any inflection that would hint of prior timidity or present sadness. “You told me my brother would also come to your wedding. You meant Fosapam Chandur.”
“In the sinkhole I mentioned he might. Now I know he will.”
“I remember tossing a hot brick back and forth with Fos and other children. Some got hurt, but we kept doing it. Why? There was no point. I laughed and laughed, and I don’t know why.”
The question that interested Hiresha more would be why Alyla had asked. She couldn’t desire to know, unless she believed the knowledge would aid her in fulfilling the tenets in some way. Perhaps she only attempted to build another tie to Hiresha. “I may be less qualified than most to answer, yet I believe movement itself is a joy to the young. Contests of various sorts build camaraderie among friends.”
“I accept your theory.” Alyla took a hand from her shovel and extended her arms in an offer of an embrace. “And your terms.”
“That was rather abrupt.” Hiresha leaned over the grave to accept. Touching the Bright Palm had all the cheer of hugging a lamppost. Even so, Hiresha did not let go. “As you’ll feel no compunction against breaking your word, I must also promise to destroy your order, should you sabotage my designs.”
Not one muscle in Alyla tensed at the threat.
The boisterous voice neared of Miss Barrows. She slid down from a mule with a plop. “Why’d you call us all the way? And what’s that stink? Did a camel die with its humps full of piss?”
“I need you to observe,” Hiresha said. “Everyone, I’ll thank you to come forward.”
Miss Barrows lifted the side of her skirt to cover her nose. She winked at one of the men from the town who approached the grave. Miss Barrow’s daughter hung back from the Bright Palm, staying on the far side of the mules.
“Particularly you, Minna.” Hiresha channeled power through the twenty-third amethyst on her left palm and into the corresponding jewel Minna wore as a toe ring. The magic Lightened her and Attracted her forward.
“No!” She reached for a hanging vine to stop her slide through the air. “I’ll stop Feasting. Don’t let her bury me.”
“I haven’t time for your dawdling. Now look down.” Hiresha flung out the last layer of dirt from the grave.
The remains of Mother Pepperfire writhed and bulged with new life. Grey wormlike creatures with legs pattered out of the tears of her skin. The jelly molds were hard to distinguish from her decaying body at large. Her clothes had begun to blacken.
Hiresha suppressed the excitability of her olfactory nerves then drifted over the grave. Dipping her jeweled fingers into the mess, she searched for any scrap of proof that could link the corpse with the Bleeding Maiden. Feasters weren’t the self-sacrificing type, and it wasn’t unreasonable that Mother Pepperfire would’ve wished for others to avenge her for being forced to snitch to the Bright Palms then die.
There was nothing. Not so much as a scratched message on the skin. The industry of Mother Pepperfire could be called into question. Or maybe Hiresha was wrong to blame her. The terror of the Bleeding Maiden might go so far as to render thinking of betraying her unbearable.
The Bleeding Maiden was far too cautious. She might never be caught, through honesty.
With the corpse shadowed from sight by Hiresha, she Attracted a patch from the decaying dress. She also extracted a streamlet of blood from what was left of the liver. The redness pattered against the cloth. The stain itself could be a sign for the Bleeding Maiden. Hiresha pulled out the moisture to leave an auburn pigment, as if the blood had dried over days. She palmed it. The maneuver took only seven-eighths of a second.
Hiresha poked apart the corpse’s hand bones in view of the witnesses. Mother Pepperfire hadn’t been holding anything, yet Hiresha lifted the bloodstained patch. “What is this? It must be important, enough for a death grip. Minna, do you know what it might mean?”
Minna thrashed her head from side to side. She hadn’t so much as looked. Her eyes were locked on Bright Palm Alyla. Minna’s fingers clamped around her mirror.
“No matter.” Hiresha forced apart Minna’s fingers and closed them again around the patch. “Hold this for me, and bring it tonight.”
Much of the town had clustered as close as their noses could bear. They weren’t looking into the grave so much as at Hiresha’s floating feet, her dress, and the garment the Bright Palm had left hanging from the tree.
Hiresha had two-hundred seconds left; she calculated she could spend that many at this grave and not one more. “Who among you watched Mother Pepperfire die? Most of you? Then you’ll be able to tell me how many times she muttered ‘Bleeding Maiden’ before death.”
The people from the town looked back blankly.
“The doomed woman might’ve only had the breath for ‘maiden,’” Hiresha said. “You could’ve mistaken it for a groan. Bright Palm Alyla, how many times did you hear her say it?”
“Once or twice, before the second nail went into her neck.” The Bright Palm lied with the same monotone.
“Very good,” Hiresha said. “Now who else remembers?”
“I do.” This woman wore a giant snail shell for a hat, with the elegance of its spiral painted in striking colors.
“And me,” a man said.
“Yes, she did. She did.”
“Heard the Feaster say it five times, and that she was sorry for what she done.”
“Six! I heard six.”
Memories were ever so gelatinous and shapeable. Hiresha said, “I am gratified you’ve remembered.”
&nb
sp; She had built a meager connection between the treachery and the Bleeding Maiden. It might give her Feasters doubts. It would have to be enough. Hiresha had time for no more.
“Now I must away to my wedding, yet I’ll be certain to return on my honeymoon procession.”
A scattered cheer went up, which turned to a roar when Hiresha soared. She burst through the forest canopy with a snapping of twigs, a splash of rain droplets, and a scattering of pink nymph bugs with turquoise-bright legs.
Kill the Bleeding Maiden. The three voices of the lord bellowed within Celaise, shaking her insides against her ribs and spine. Don’t let her cast. Don’t let her Feast. Leech the last drop of black wine from her veins or I’ll do the same to you.
He couldn’t mean it. Celaise couldn’t fight her eldest sister. Celaise knew she couldn’t win, couldn’t do anything but die.
The Bleeding Maiden sat facing the Bright Palm and the lady, but that wouldn’t help. Wounds opened on the back of the sister’s head and neck. They made oozing mouths, and they spoke with a single a bubbling voice.
Has the lord father sent you to die, little sister? Celaise heard her, couldn’t shut her out, couldn’t hide. Covering the ears did nothing. The Bleeding Maiden could speak into minds. She was already as strong as the lord father. Watch out. Come any closer and my blood may spill on you. And you know what that’ll do.
Celaise stopped. How could she escape? The Mimic watched her from among the veiled slaves. Celaise’s arms were crossed tight against her chest, but she bent one hand toward him for help. The Mimic didn’t move. Nobody would help her, except Jerani.
Only he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t. Behind him loomed a shadow of the lord father, and black fangs Jerani couldn’t see were reaching their spine points around him like a caiman turning its head sideways to strike. Obey, the lord father said, or watch him die.
Celaise took another step. She was sweating so much fear that she could even smell herself. Then she had to wade into the aroma of the Bleeding Maiden, and all else was gone. Old rose petals choked Celaise. Too close to her sister, too close. Something wet and red flopped down from under the Bleeding Maiden’s skirt and began wriggling to Celaise, to strangle her with its rubbery pulsing coils.
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