The dragon god’s light burned across his back. Jerani could run under the worst of the sun’s heat, but now he was sizzling. He didn’t even cast a shadow on the brick wall. The blaze went all the way through him.
And he went back to Celaise. He knew it was wrong. He might die here tonight, but he would be with her. Even if she had changed forever—even if she never spoke to him again—he could stay in the blessed shade of her shadow.
His knees trembled from the distant shake of hooves on the grasslands a lifetime away. His ears rang with the cries of his sister and his brother and his tribe. He was leaving them forever. Jerani waded against the flow of red.
Hiresha had chiseled herself into one purpose: Kill the god. She lashed out with dragon claws. She bit with crystal fangs. Tearing through his feather hide, she ripped out a jiggling spiral organ. This would be the first she catalogued. She would extract them all before she let the Winged Flame die.
The god bellowed. He cried a melody of breaking gemstones. He mocked her. That ringing blare was him laughing at her.
“I’ll find your heart.” Hiresha clambered over the god. All his cuts vented gas.
The Winged Flame snaked away. She clacked her amethyst claws together, yet he had escaped, for the moment. Gods and people alike enjoyed their futile gestures. The Winged Flame was trying to hide one of his heads behind his coils or something equally foolish.
She had the option to wait. Analyzing his motions might tell her something. Or it might waste her time, and this false god had taken far more already than he deserved. She had discerned where he kept a heart. His serpentine torso pulsed there with its beat. No human would’ve seen the slight difference in diameter in this winged confusion, yet Hiresha was greater than any mortal.
She beat her remaining good wing and twisted her scaled frame. Her tail lashed through the air. She spun through a loop of wings and reached toward the heart. The god might have more than one, she knew, yet soon he would have one fewer. Her claws were polished and enchanted to gleaming deadliness.
Their points stopped short. The god had tightened a coil of his body around her waist. She reached to gouge him. He spiraled faster and pinned her arms to her sides. She wriggled with a scraping of scales until she couldn’t move at all. The god constricted.
Her wing snapped. No! Her chest collapsed. She willed this to stop.
His noose tightened. Her spine shattered.
She Repulsed the god with all the force of life-changing dreams.
He broke her, and amethysts cracked into white chunks that plinked down to the city streets to explode against bricks and gash the unfortunate masses.
Hiresha was destroyed. She had been undone, ruined, and wrecked. Genius, she understood now, was no match for brutality. Hiresha could create nothing lasting. She was merely mortal.
And there was Jerani. Celaise didn’t know if he would ever stop pestering her.
She would’ve passed him by faster if she could. The lord father’s flood soaked up her True Gown, slowing her. His wine would stain her. She pushed it away. It came back, lapping, dripping all over.
She should fight him shadow for shadow. Celaise knew she could best him, but not tonight. He had caught the minds of too many people. The sky rippled with his black wine. For now, he was stronger. When it mattered, he would win.
He had given her so much, and he could take it away. She feared she must always do as he asked. She would never be free. He would rule through her. The lord was leaving his title behind, so it must not be all banquets of tasty souls.
And there was Jerani.
She needed to escape. More than the lord’s silly wine flood was holding her back. The Winged Flame engulfed the sky. The cascade of his heat smothered her. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t be. How could she ever live? The sun god could swoop down and gobble her up, even at night.
His curse had left her broken ever since she became a Feaster. She had also known she would carry its weight until she died, and the worst of it was, most people loved the Winged Flame. He didn’t bother them. They didn’t care who he persecuted, when they could bask in his gory power.
His scouring light fell on a rich woman and a poor man. She wore beautiful beetle earrings and had a trove of flower tattoos all over her oiled skin, but she still knelt to him. She kissed his mud-spattered fingers one by one.
“You are the most pure of women,” he said to her.
Their love shone about them as a second sun. The Winged Flame had kindled it. Celaise could see he had given them this, and she got broken bones.
And there was Jerani.
Celaise had left him behind only to turn a corner and face a pack of Bright Palms. They had come ready to kill, with obsidian swords and leather shields. Celaise’s heart clanged in her chest, shrieking, bruising. She would have to run, ride, escape, not die.
She pressed herself against a building. Her True Dress changed into bricks, layering over her, but it was too late. The Bright Palms had seen. They had surprised her. Now would they kill her. Why hadn’t she noticed them coming?
Because they smelled like people, all salted meat sizzling in a pan. They were afraid. They didn’t march like they were carved of wood. They crept and hesitated and had to goad themselves closer to her. This wasn’t normal, but she liked it.
Celaise collapsed her pleated brick skirts on the Bright Palms and crushed them to death. The Winged Flame had given her something after all. Under his light, the Bright Asses could be scared. She could protect herself, but it wouldn’t always be so. On any other night or day she would have to cower.
She had been hiding ever since she had become a Feaster, and she knew it wouldn’t stop. Running would be her life. More power just meant more spikes and hammers would come after her. Stick her, hang her up, hate her, kill her. She would never have peace.
And there was Jerani.
She told herself enough with looking back to him. He had nothing. The shadows didn’t sing for him. The night didn’t fold itself around him and grant his every wish. She shouldn’t feel anything for leaving him, not that itch between her heart and her spine. Bliss of velvet darkness flowed in to soothe the spot.
She shouldn’t think about Jerani. He had lied to her, again and again. He had dared tell her the True Dress wasn’t real. Jerani hadn’t said it for a while, but he still thought it. She could tell by the crinkle in his brow. He believed she just played with lies. She shouldn’t feel emptier each step away from him. He hadn’t said a single kind thing to her. Had he? All she could hear was the glug, glug, glug of black wine.
Power filled her. It sluiced through her, frothing, warming, bubbling, cooling. She could channel out as much as she wished to change the world. That’s all she was, a bottle full of black magic.
And there was Jerani. He crouched on a rooftop across from her. His spear balanced on his knees. The jaguar bracer she had given him wrapped around the smooth hardness of his arm. He squinted against the rain of wine, and the droplets angled over the scars on his face. His lovely face, his firm and kind face, the face that never judged her, never screamed at her, never threatening, always accepting.
What good was power if she couldn’t be free? All she needed was Jerani.
“Jerani, do you still have the wild magic? In the little glasses?”
“Yes?” He patted at his robe. “Yes, I do.”
“And they can stop me from Feasting?”
“The lord said they would.” Jerani lifted one of the shining bottles. “Forgot about these. Good thing I didn’t try to leave with them.”
Yes, she guessed the lord father would’ve gotten angry. Or worse, hungry. Drinking the wild magic herself could do both. He would chew her to shreds just to guzzle her juices. But then … “He does owe us.”
“And the wedding is over.”
Celaise lifted a hand to Jerani, and he hefted her onto the roof. She needed to hold him, to wrap his arms around her, and then cut him to screaming bits with the sha
rp feathers of her gown. “Ugh! Give me the bottle. I need to stop this hunger.”
The little glass jiggled in her hand like the beginning of a rockslide. It fizzed light over her palm that ate away at her glove. Beneath the blackness was pink skin.
This would work. She would drink this, and she would be free.
Her stomach lurched down, far into her leg where it quivered somewhere around her feet. A sick taste clogged her throat. Her heart thudded with power. She was already full up. She didn’t think she could drink anything.
The lord father would only kill her for trying. If not her then the lady. She had enchanted death into Celaise’s teeth.
Celaise pushed the bottle back to Jerani. “I can’t. I can’t.”
“You can.” Jerani folded his hand over hers. “If you want, you can.”
“They won’t let me go. They’ll—”
The sky boomed and crashed but not with thunder. Flashes of purple burst outward from the Winged Flame. The lady’s dragon had gone, and its scales tinkled down. One flipped and shot its way closer.
Jerani hefted Celaise and carried her across the roof. They hid in the shadow of the second story. Wood boards splintered behind them, and clots of garden dirt sprayed over the walls. The falling piece of crystal must’ve broken through the roof.
“Was that really her dragon?” Jerani asked.
“I think so.”
The Winged Flame looped over the city in victory rings.
“Then is she dead?” Jerani asked. “The lady.”
“No, I’d smell that.” The lady’s scent leaked down among all the others. It was a meat pie full of thick gravy and tender root vegetables that would be too hot to eat out of the oven but too tasty to let cool. “She’s close to despair. She could lose. They both could die.”
“The lord and the lady?”
“You were right. You and me, we could make it.” Celaise snatched the bottle from his hand. Before she could think about it, she drank.
Then she did hear lightning, blasting down her throat. The shadows in her wormed away from her stomach. Fires lit in her and set her heart ablaze. Her black wine soaked into her bones, trying to hide. The wild magic quaked them. Her spine broke to pieces then fit back together better than before. The last of her power pooled in her skull.
The wild magic erupted up her neck. It streamed into her eyes, all shades of greens and auburns no one had seen before, stuffing themselves into her brain. She soared through valleys, plunged into caves, flew up mountains, slammed back into her body.
She gasped in Jerani’s arms. She was shaking trembling gagging. He held her still with his warm solidness. He was so close, so all around her, and she knew he would never betray her. Jerani smelled of salt sweat, hot savanna dust, and man, not at all like food.
Celaise kissed him, and it was wonderful. She stood on her shaking legs and it was even better. “Ha! Ha! I’m not cursed.”
She could move without pain. She could dance. The wild magic must’ve beaten back the Winged Flame’s hex on her too. Celaise sprang around Jerani. She even picked him up, carried him through the rooftop garden. With a hop she cleared a spot that had caved in from a falling dragon scale.
“I’m stronger than I’ve ever been,” she said.
“You are.” He pressed the wet heat of his lips against her brow.
Pushing back, he gazed at her, and the deep darkness of his irises sent sparks chasing each other over her skin and her vision flashed the color of fresh oranges and tangerines. Or maybe that was the wild magic still in her.
Her True Dress was gone. That hurt, but she had the blue one she had tailored, the one Jerani had given her. The cloth was simple but good.
Jerani looked over her shoulder. He tore his attention away from her, to see what? She wanted to know why his scar lines bent. One of his brows raised. What was he looking at? Was he afraid? She couldn’t smell.
Celaise turned. In the downpour of wine, an outline of a man shone. He was a Bright Palm, and not just any one. He stood taller than Jerani, and the two looked so much alike, except that in every way that counted the father was a little less handsome than his son. And Jerani had never nailed Celaise to a tree and almost killed her.
“Gio,” Jerani said.
Whiteness bulged upward within the Bright Palm’s chest and shot in two lines up the veins in his neck. He would still have all his unnatural strength, and Celaise no longer had her shadows to protect her.
Hiresha slumped through the air. Down she drifted, to the top of the tower. The fennec sniffed her, and even his normally precious voice grated with its incessant chirping. The guests who presumed to speak to her sounded no better than squawks. She couldn’t listen.
Outrage still pounded in her skull like an enflamed tumor. She had fought the Winged Flame, rage against rage, and achieved nothing. The god’s wounds had closed. The feathers she had torn out had replenished. He bounded beneath the stars with no hint of injury or remorse at splintering her dragon masterpiece.
Though she had failed against the god, she could overcome the conflagration he had left in her mind. She walled it off with crystal reason. She contained it. Her magic contracted the engorged blood vessels in her brain. She forced her heart to slow. She dismantled the adrenaline in her blood, but there was more.
A volatile essence lingered. It kept her blood racing and threatened to return her to a boil. The god’s breath and vaporous blood, it had diffused through her lungs and into her chest. An enchantress couldn’t Attract the ethereal, only objects. Even all her colleagues together couldn’t have helped.
Hiresha was thankful to be greater.
She Attracted every part of herself to the side and away from the god’s essence. Hiresha isolated it. She willed it out of her body. It frothed in her grip, blurring the edges of her jewel piercings. She threw the nonsense off the tower.
Her vision cleared. The world expanded. Its dimension and definition returned. Fury must have distorted her sight and flattened her perspective. She could think again. Hiresha might as well have been resurrected.
She leapt above the guests. The jewels of her outstretched gauntlets tinted the whites of their eyes violet. “Fight him by controlling yourself. Breathe out his influence and remember who you are and wish to be.”
The Green Bloods had been fighting each other. Venomous fangs left blackened welts across blue and red skin. Hiresha pulled the two apart and extracted the god’s essence.
Saul panted against the tower’s woman-shaped balustrade. Their orb eyes rotated up to stare at the Winged Flame. “There’s no greater wrong than taking away another’s free will.”
“Mine’s back,” Ix said. “And nothing lives that my venom couldn’t kill.”
“The god must die,” Hiresha said. “He’s offended too much to countenance, yet we must kill him with dispassion.”
“Fools!” The Talon thrashed against the tower roof. Her enchantments bound his arms and legs together. “You can’t stop the sun. Appease him or—”
Hiresha willed his mouth to shut. “He is not the sun.”
The jaguar knight purred. He sat on his haunches in a nonchalance of spotted orange. His calm had never burned away. It hadn’t even been singed.
Hiresha assessed that the Winged Flame had affected everyone erratically. The assassins Sagai and Naroh stared into each other’s eyes, oblivious to the Bright Palm weeping mere feet away and the pandemonium in sky and land.
“You appear unaccountably content.” Hiresha Attracted the god’s essence from the assassins. She unbound them from their shackling enchantments and lofted them to their feet. “You might not even have cried out if this tower collapsed. Which it might, if you don’t help us.”
The Winged Flame dipped and arched over the city’s gardens. The red beacons of his eyes swung back to focus on the tower. He looped closer.
The assassins blinked. Sagai raked his fingers over his chest with its cherry blossom tattoos. “Will you arm us?”
“Will you trust us?” Naroh asked
“I will.” Hiresha summoned shards of her dragon. She sheared them into blades and enchanted them with all the sharpness of her mind.
“You shouldn’t fight an immortal.” Tethiel overshadowed the tower. He was both a hulking presence and simultaneously nowhere to be seen.
“And you shouldn’t be Feasting,” Hiresha said. “Reveal yourself, and I’ll calm you.”
“I’m not under any other influence.”
“That’s likely not true in a factual sense.”
His triangle sigil whirled around and shrouded the tower top. She deduced he was hiding whatever he was doing from her, and the ruckus below was pitching toward screams. She could very well tell him that endangering a city without her consent was hardly fit behavior for a new spouse.
They didn’t have time for an argument. The Winged Flame surged closer, and as he neared he grew from a ribbon of fire to a tsunami of feathers.
Hiresha didn’t even have a dragon now to pit against him. Not even all her living allies were here. Miss Barrows and her daughter had fled downstairs. That was for the best. But Celaise had gone. That was unforgivable. She was a bridesmaid, and she had left when Hiresha needed her most.
Celaise had descended into the city. The enchantment in her onyx teeth still bound her to Hiresha. Beckoning with her gauntlet, Hiresha Attracted Celaise by her dentition. The force of the pull wasn’t enough to rip off her face, only a tug to let her know she was wanted.
Hiresha also had to sort Guile into the category of absent. In hindsight, Hiresha could recall a particular mask flying to safety with the rest of the guests to the tower. There was no counting on any such divine assistance against the Winged Flame. Hiresha would have to dismantle him herself.
Her blue paragon whirred over her plated shoulder. The diamond’s spinning points formed a glittering haze.
Elbe braved the revolving death to embrace Hiresha from behind. The Purest wrapped her arms as far as she could around the breastplate. She kissed the side of Hiresha’s jutting copper collar. She couldn’t seem to control herself.
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