Dream Storm Sea

by A. E. Marling

  “I have but one easy way forward, and that’s to accept my imprisonment. Anything else will be an ordeal.”

  An image of Spellsword Fos appeared in a mirror, looking as she had often seen him, his obelisk of a sword secure on his back and his hands occupied rubbing the fennec’s furry belly. Her memory of Fos’s laugh flooded her with warmth.

  She said, “I will return for them, once I have more gems.”

  “We’d give up all the gems for them.” Intuition placed her hands over her heart. “We love them so much.”

  “No, I’m merely used to their company and concerned for their wellbeing.”

  Hiresha closed her eyes on the dream and opened them on Jaraah.

  Biting her lip until the pain brought some measure of wakefulness, Hiresha saw a curious sight. A warrior in red robes permitted a beggar girl to lean against him. Her lamed foot bent at a wince-worthy angle as they walked. Her paleness contrasted with the warrior’s ebony skin. She met Hiresha’s eye.

  The enchantress focused beyond the street denizens to the alleyways. Some passages had stairs, and light trickled down them. Hiresha knew the city had an upper level of walkways reserved for women. Those who could bear the heat of the rooftops walked to market without need of a chaperone.

  Hiresha spotted a stairway next to words painted in flowing letters. The sign translated to “relief for women.” A stink of offal and burning incense wafted from this alley.

  “Stop.” Hiresha pointed with one finger; the rest of her hand clenched the topaz. “I must use the facilities.”

  Arbiter Cosima glanced at the sign. “This is not suitable for a lady. Can you contain yourself until the inn?”

  “Affairs will become even more unladylike unless I stop here.” Hiresha remembered to press her knees together, the universal sign of desperation.

  A guard was soon untying the ribbons that secured Hiresha to the top of the camel. Hiresha swayed her way to her feet, stroked the fennec’s whiskered cheek one last time, and handed him to Spellsword Sagai.

  “I’ll return for him presently,” Hiresha lied.

  Naroh led the way up the stairs. Hiresha glanced behind to see Sagai passing the fox to an elite guard. The enchantress had a moment of piercing worry, but the spellsword stayed at the foot of the stairs. As Hiresha had suspected, some places a prince would not go, even a third son.

  Hiresha had often complained to the Academy chancellor about the lack of female guards. Women can be spellswords, and men enchanters. Hiresha was certain of it, though today she was happy for the discrimination.

  Not one of Hiresha’s guards followed her to the open-air hall. A series of holes in a stone bench buzzed with flies. A few women sat with their skirts up, talking, waving away insects. Naroh grasped Hiresha’s arm, and the maid positioned herself beside the enchantress on the bench. They had not gone so far from Sagai. The first shout from Naroh would bring him up the steps sprinting.

  Hiresha noted the second flight of stairs leading to the rooftops. She spoke in a low voice. “I’ve heard that happiness is a matter of perspective.”

  Naroh studied her own yak-leather boots.

  “For example, I could’ve killed you with this jewel.” Hiresha pressed the topaz against Naroh’s hand. “Instead, you’re merely rendered speechless and stuck to a latrine.”

  Naroh’s mouth clicked shut. She tried to stand, but Attraction enchantments bound her to the filthy slab. Her fingers splayed out to either side, and she could manage nothing more than outraged grunts.

  “You don’t look happy. Well, I don’t believe that perspective nonsense either.” Hiresha smoothed down her skirt and strode toward the stairs.

  One woman cringed at the struggling Naroh. “Poor girl. We’ve all been there.”

  “The peril of insufficient prunes,” Hiresha said.

  She reached the rooftops. The whitewashed stone gave Hiresha the sense she walked atop an angular cloud. Every surface blinded her. Hope had numbed her legs, and she felt as if she floated.

  I am free. No one is watching me. How blissful to be overlooked.

  Children led their mothers over paths worn black by sandals. One woman carried a table’s-worth of glassware atop her head. She smiled at Hiresha. Hiresha smiled back.

  This is happening. I’m escaping. Now to reach a high enough elevation for the wind to carry me away. Hiresha would Lighten herself, and the salty musk of the sea would whisk her inland, into the sky and freedom.

  The enchantress took woozy steps toward a tower. Its onion-shaped top shone like a second sun. A bridge arched from her rooftop to a middle level of the spire. She touched the tower's blue-tiled doorway to rebalance herself. Excitement throbbed its way from her toes to her fingers. Then she heard Sagai’s shout.

  “Hiresha! What’d you do to her?”

  The spellsword stood on the rooftop above the latrine. He leaped. He sliced through the air, crossing over three buildings in one enchantment-powered bound. Sagai had already halved the distance between them.

  11

  Escape on the Wind

  Hiresha could only imagine Sagai’s fury at seeing Naroh trapped by magic. He must have given in and investigated the women’s latrine. A first-born prince would never have been so crass.

  The enchantress slammed the tower door. It had three bars, all shaped like crescent moons. She slid two into their niches in the wood, but the yelling of her nerves made her leave the third. She ran up the tower. The steps alternated between blue and white tiles. Plates of glass were mounted against the walls, each etched with words. The script sped by.

  A commotion below made Hiresha glance over the balustrade. At the base of the tower, people milled around sculptures of glassware designed to look like a flower garden. A crystal tree had lantern fruit. The visitors touched everything, no doubt leaving fingerprints on the exhibits. Their exclamations of awe turned to gasps of surprise when Spellsword Sagai bolted through them and launched off the blue floor. His enchanted boots touched the side of a lower balustrade then kicked him to a higher level.

  His greaves make him Lighter than a jumping spider. Hiresha had wanted Sagai asleep for a reason. She knew she had only moments, and the next stage of her plan required she nap.

  She reached the top of the stair, found the door there locked. That won’t do. Backing away, she scrambled into a window niche. She pulled her purple skirt out of sight and folded her legs beneath her. Her shoulder blades dug into the glass as she closed her eyes.

  If Sagai thinks I went through the door—if he doesn’t see me here—I can reach my dream.

  Hiresha envisioned herself running down another stairway, this one in her mind. A void surrounded the marble steps. They trembled, stone sliding past stone. Behind her came the cracking sound of a door in the real world breaking.

  The Fate Weaver is kind to me today. I fooled him.

  The warped stairway straightened as Hiresha’s will bent it back into position. She reached the seventieth step, and from there she sprang straight upward into her dream laboratory.

  A dais formed under Hiresha’s feet, and basalt flowed outward from it. Hiresha’s mirrors appeared, one showing an image of herself leaning against the tower window, her eyes shut. Hiresha sprang toward it. This image of herself had no mind of its own.

  The enchantress would have argued the same of Intuition, who wrung her hands. She said, “Sagai has to be hopping-toads angry with us.”

  “He certainly won’t give me a second chance to escape.”

  Hiresha shucked off her purple gloves and reached into the mirror. The glass oozed around her fingers like clear mud. The reflection inside was her body sleeping in the Lands of Loam. Hiresha swept the woman’s dark locks over her shoulder then pressed her head back against the window. The nape of her neck touched the glass pane, and shimmering dream energy rippled over its surface.

  She could command herself to sleep walk. This time she stayed sitting. Hiresha lifted one after another of her reflection’s arms to
the sides of the window, and under each palm she set an enchantment in the stone. The sleeping woman’s hands dropped, releasing a magic that Attracted the glass to either side.

  Hiresha could not see the window shatter. The image in the mirror was crafted of a memory. Hiresha could, however, predict how the glass must rend. How the shards must smash into the stone of the sill, how the sharp flecks must plaster the edges of the window’s now-open frame like frost.

  The mirror displayed each probable outcome. It showed the sleeping woman tilt back into the empty air. Her hair splayed into a black fan. Her arms drooped alongside her, her palms full of the sun above.

  Her body was falling.

  “Now! Now!” Intuition hopped from foot to bare foot. “Lighten us.”

  “Done.” Hiresha willed the spell with a thought.

  The reflection of herself slowed to a standstill midair. Then she drifted. She spun legs over head away from the tower, flowing away on a breeze.

  Intuition leaped with a cry of joy, her yellow gown spreading out behind her. “Oh! What if Fos looks up? Wherever he is in the city, he’ll see us as a purple leaf.”

  The reflection’s eyes stayed closed even in the glare of the daylight. The tower with the bronze top moved away from her. She calculated she would be blown toward another dome patterned with blue and red diamonds.

  “I am away.” Hiresha ran her fingers along the amulet worn by her reflection. The links had formed into clumps. They loosened at the enchantress’s touch, and the noose of a necklace drifted off her head. The amulet glided to the city streets. “I am free.”

  Hiresha withdrew her arms from the glass. Her grin slipped at the sound of a third voice in the laboratory.

  “You’re a spine-crushing fall above the rooftops, but that’s not what frightens you most.”

  Within another mirror, a jeweled lady was upside down. She resembled Hiresha, in the same way the most beautiful woman in a city may resemble her little sister whom nobody noticed. The black sleekness of the lady’s hair fell upward over her bare shoulders, as if she were right-side up and Hiresha were the one the wrong way around.

  Hiresha balanced a sapphire on her fingertip. “Pessimism is the most endearing part about you.”

  “Even if all goes according to your plan, and the wind rescues you from the city, you haven’t a gem. Not even a goat to keep you alive. Your spellsword is dead or held captive between Emesea and Inannis.”

  “No better ideas were offered,” Hiresha said, “so you can keep your gem-studded tongue locked in your mouth.”

  Green jewels winked into view between the lady’s perfect teeth as she smiled. She wore what appeared at first glance to be a glittering dress with a blush-worthy fit. In truth, thousands of jewels riddled her skin. The pox of amethysts and sapphires branched into angular patterns within patterns, a fractal design of madness.

  Once, a sliver of Feasting magic had punctured Hiresha’s consciousness. The enchantress had contained it in a mirror but had never succeeded in purging it. Worse, the intruder stole Hiresha’s ideas, sometimes the best ones, so the enchantress had to listen even if she wanted nothing more than to throw a thick cloth over the mirror.

  “Your magic won’t be enough. Mine would’ve saved you in the dark streets of Jaraah.” The Feaster’s fingernail left an etching scrawl over the inside of the mirror. “It’s not too late to let me out.”

  To the side, Intuition peeked around a mirror. Her rapid blinking gave away her fear.

  “No need to worry,” Hiresha said. “Becoming a Feaster would prove Arbiter Cosima right. It would mean the elders were correct to imprison me.”

  “You’d kill yourself before accepting your limitations.”

  “The elders are wrong. As are you.” Hiresha scowled at the mirror with the upside-down Feaster. The enchantress turned back to the glass with her reflection drifting above the covered streets of Jaraah. “My plan has been a success. By the susurration of the wind I heard in the tower, I can estimate the speed it's carrying me. I’ll travel thirty miles in an—Oh, dear!”

  Hiresha could sense it. They all could. The reflection’s body had changed direction, from skyward to a plummet.

  Intuition gasped. “Our leg caught on something.”

  “It’s Sagai.” The Jeweled Feaster banged a fist against the glass. “He must’ve leapt from a tower and caught you. May scorpions eat his eyes.”

  The reflection’s arms fluttered forward and back as she was towed downward. A darkness beneath her solidified into the spellsword, his tattooed hand clamped on her leg. By her rate of descent, Hiresha knew someone of his weight towed her downward.

  “Were he a statue,” the Jeweled Feaster said, “you could shatter him.”

  “And since he’s mortal flesh, he’s impervious.” Enchanting a person required more than a direct touch. She would have to wake then carry him back into the laboratory. All her orbiting jewels flared red with Hiresha’s anger. “I can’t even Lighten him. Not in time.”

  “Then Burden yourself,” the Jeweled Feaster said. “He may lose his grip.”

  Hiresha let the Lightening enchantment expire. She tightened her body’s ties to the ground, doubling and redoubling the force of gravity. It felt like spooling gold wire over her skin. The difficulty of the enchantment cut into her.

  In the mirror, her reflection flipped beneath Sagai. His body burst into mist while she analyzed whether he still gripped her.

  “One and one-half seconds,” Hiresha said. “Before I impact into a roof.”

  Time in the laboratory slowed as Hiresha’s thinking quickened. Her hands darted into the mirror, moving her reflection’s arms. Something impeded them. Someone was holding her.

  The sleeping woman’s dark hair streamed upward. Then it flattened in a tangle as Hiresha felt her insides lurch.

  “He’s trying to Lighten us,” Intuition said, “to save us.”

  Hiresha tasted a bitter sting of envy that a spellsword could activate enchantments when awake. The magic in his boots would Lighten his sword and anything else he carried.

  “I’ll overcome him.” Hiresha made a chopping motion of her hand.

  In the mirror, the sleeping woman dropped like a stone. Sagai dangled after her.

  “It’s over.” One half of the Feaster’s face hooked upward in a smile. “You’ll soon be enjoying the coaxing touch of vines in Nagra gardens.”

  Hiresha asked, “And you’d be content with that?”

  “No more than you. Not without gems, not without a say.” The Jeweled Feaster clicked a knuckle against the glass. “You may survive the first year. By the second, you’ll have freed your true self. Me.”

  Her certainty chilled Hiresha. “I can always hold onto the Burdening spell. In another three-quarters of a second, I’ll crash into a roof.”

  The ground in the mirror appeared to be a fog the same off-white color as the stone. Hiresha could not tell if she was directly above an archway covering a street, or if she shadowed a two-story building.

  “You can kill yourself,” the Feaster said, “but you won’t.”

  “In half a second,” Hiresha said, “I could prove you very wrong.”

  “Ew!” Intuition shielded her eyes from the mirror. “We’d make such a mess.”

  “And I might hurt someone, besides Sagai.”

  Hiresha undid the Burdening spell. She felt herself come to a stop. And she awoke in the last place she cared to be in the Lands of Loam: Sagai’s arms.

  Sweat dropped from his clean-shaven head into her eye. It stung.

  She slapped him, wishing she still had the jewels in the back of her hand.

  He dropped her. She slid down the side of an arched roof, passing a slit window. When she could stand, she felt her arms jerked behind her. Sagai had her wrists. He pulled, and her shoulders flexed to the point of popping from their joints. Scarlet pain bloomed over Hiresha’s vision.

  “This is why you’re expelled.” His breath burned the back of her neck. �
�No enchantress would have done that.”

  “No other enchantress would’ve had the will, you mean.”

  Several women had converged on them in a rush of bright skirts and shawls. One said, “Master Spellsword, you saved her.”

  “I saw it all. Someone pushed her from a window.”

  Another pried a cork from a gourd. “I have wine for her. She looks faint.”

  “And who wouldn’t be, in his arms,” a younger woman said.

  “The moment he leaped after her, I was ready to drop my skirt,” a familiar voice said. The woman batted eyelashes painted green.

  “He did the opposite of saving me,” Hiresha said. None of the women seemed to hear.

  “What’s your name, Master Spellsword?”

  “Are you from Nagra?”

  “Excuse us.” Sagai lifted Hiresha’s hands over her head. He clasped both her wrists in front of her, leading her away. His voice pitched low and trembled with anger. “The enchantment on Naroh would shame even the barred gods. You’re reversing it.”

  “My one regret is placing the topaz on her, instead of you.”

  “Which hand of yours defied the arbiter by picking up the topaz?”

  Fear prickled its way down Hiresha’s chest. “Which hand? Why does that matter?”

  “Because that’s the one I’m cutting off.”

  12

  The Bells

  With a crack, Sagai staggered forward. Hiresha was spun around. He thudded onto the roof, skidded, started to roll. A woman pounced atop him. Her eyes were shadowed with green malachite.

  Emesea gripped his head, slammed it against the rooftop. Hiresha saw blood. The enchantress was no stranger to that particular fluid, but the violence shocked her. The crunch of Sagai’s skull against the whitewashed stone and the focused ferocity of the woman turned Hiresha’s insides to liquid.

  An obsidian knife lifted for a killing blow. A jewel on Sagai’s shoulder flashed, and the black blade floated away. Emesea let it go and gripped his head again, her fingers denting the tree diagram on his scalp. The air throbbed with heat and screaming.