Hiresha refrained from asking the obvious question. Tethiel either had to know his vision could never be, or he had to think he could extinguish all the Bright Palms in the Lands of Loam. Hiresha thought the latter less than likely since the Bright Palms sacrificed their own emotions for healing magic and immunity to Feasting horrors.
She said, “The Bright Palms have no respect for the higher study of magic.”
“Was that why they were banned from the Mindvault? I thought it was their poor taste in clothes. No matter. The absence of Bright Palms is my favorite part of visiting here. Or should that be my second favorite?” One corner of his lips bent upward.
Tethiel caught hold of both her hands. He was close. His breath smelled of roasted coffee beans and autumn.
“Have you ever watched a hawk fly, my heart? Free in the sky, cutting through clouds, diving like an arrow.”
“I indulge in jewel carving, not ornithology.”
“And the gems suit you.” He touched the diamonds of her earring, and his hand grazed her chin. “With you, I am the hawk.”
He coaxed her to step onto a circle etched into the crystal, and with an uplifting sensation, Hiresha was pulled by enchantment in a well of gravity into the center of the room. She held onto him, and he onto her. They spun about each other in the air.
Triangles unfolded in geometric cascades from his back into faceted wings. They beat once as the couple swung around each other midair, and with a clattering flutter the two drifted toward the far wall.
In the light of her earrings, his eyes shone like pale sapphires. This close, the air that slid from between his lips warmed her brow, but she could not help but wonder. A hawk he may be, yet does he see me as another bird, or a mouse in his talons?
Their feet touched down at the same time. The trees had grown into a jungle around them, with curtains of fuchsia ivy, a haze of blue mist, and vines that parted for their footsteps. Roots also burrowed out of their way.
Again she wondered at his purpose in the Academy. Merely to see me? He may think my regenerative spellcraft could keep him young. Tethiel intruded on her life rarely, less often than she would wish, and usually when he needed her expertise. She worried he only cared for her magic.
“No, my heart. I respect you, and for that I come. Though sometimes I think if I respected you even more, I should stay away.” Jungle vines sprouted a ring of thorns around the Lord of the Feast to frame him with jagged points. He reached out to her. “Feasting magic is not improving to one’s health. The same is true for those who keep my company.”
She stared at his outstretched hand. “And you said you were confident in my abilities.”
“To defend yourself from Bright Palms, others who might hunt me, yes.” He sounded as if he might say more but did not. His fingers clicked together, and for a moment they seemed to make not a fist but a mouth of snaggleteeth. He let the arm fall.
The jungle and bright plants faded to nothing. Only Hiresha and Tethiel remained in the Ballroom. His pose slipped from kingly to slumped.
“I want you to know,” he said, “I never wanted my magic between us. If I could wish for one thing, it’d be that we neither had power.”
“Speak for your own magic. I have no need to give up enchantment. Or wish to.”
“Ah, my heart, but we must always give up the thing we cannot do without.”
The only light now came from Hiresha’s earrings, which cast the room in icy tones. “It is late. I already will sleep through half my duties tomorrow, and you doubtless will want to be gone with the dawn.”
Hiresha hated to leave Tethiel’s company. As awake as Hiresha felt around him and his magic, her fatigue would return with vigor when he left. The following stupor would last much of the next days.
“Goodnight, Tethiel.”
Before she could leave the Ballroom, he called after her.
“She fell.”
Tension sprang through Hiresha, stiffening her limbs. “What did you say?”
“You were worrying about an enchantress, before. I scented her surprise as she fell. And her terror didn’t taste of someone who’d wanted to end her own life.”
An image of a dress spinning downward flashed through Hiresha’s mind. “Are you suggesting an enchantress stumbled off a cliff?”
“Or the Mindvault dropped her.”
Hiresha’s heart beat once with a shock of coldness. The memory of the falling woman streaked through her mind. Is the Skyway safe? She dismissed the worry as being close to sacrilegious. The Academy’s enchantments had not once dropped a person in recorded history.
“Impossible,” she said.
“Is it?”
The enchantress wondered, Is it indeed?
8
Dream Laboratory
If only I could sleep for three days straight, Hiresha had often thought over the years, then I’ll free myself of this weight of fatigue. I’ll be cured, awake, and wide-eyed as the other girls.
Once, she had tried it. After gaining her first enchantress gown she had received a windfall of independence. She had taken the luxury of keeping her bed company for three days. The sun had dawned and set without her notice. She had abandoned her covers only long enough to tend to the necessities, for Maid Janny to ply her with a few mouthfuls of milk and rice. Returning to her pillows, she had dedicated herself to the sleeping cure.
On the fourth day, she had lifted herself from bed. She had stretched, yawned, and felt as tired as if she had not slept a wink. If anything, she had felt even more exhausted. I should have tried sleeping for four days…or five?
So it was that even after the Lord of the Feast’s claim that her most sacred and secure of places had dropped an enchantress to her death, she had no trouble sinking into slumber.
The Provost of Applied Enchantment dreamed of her laboratory. A dream of mirrors and jewels. Hiresha floated above a glittering dais, her magic buoying her into the air. Enchantresses could not cast spells while awake, but here her power pulsed as near as the green and red garnets floating by, each glowing with its own nimbus of color.
Mirrors orbited the domed ceiling of a round room of black rock. No doors or windows cluttered the laboratory, except for one skylight opening on constellations of pink and blue gems. The mirrors showed Hiresha in a sleek dress of spiraling amethyst designs. Her breath leaked from her lips as wisps of grey, but even in the frigid air and wearing a single, backless dress, she did not shiver, not in this dream she ruled.
“Lord Tethiel must have forged the writ of admittance,” she said to herself.
“Not by himself,” a reflection answered her. The woman in one mirror looked similar to Hiresha, except that she wore a yellow dress alight with topazes. Where Hiresha appeared upright and composed in the other mirrors, this reflection leaned forward with a grimace, wriggling her yellow-gloved fingers. “Bright Palms broke his hands, remember. He couldn’t hold a quill.”
Hiresha accepted the fact that most of what her reflection said would be pointless. Provost Hiresha had isolated the distracting elements from the rest of her consciousness into a mirror, but she was still relieved to have someone else in her dream to talk to.
“The pertinent questions are what is he doing here—”
“He came to see us.” The reflection held one hand over her heart, and the other clutched her throat.
“—and can we trust his word of Enchantress Miatha’s fall?”
Hiresha could remember the woman’s name now, in this lucid dream. One mirror flashed, opening as a portal into the enchantress’s memories. The image within the glass shifted to a remembered scene of Miatha being awarded her green gown, with Hiresha half-dozing among the faculty.
“What if,” Hiresha said, “Lord Tethiel knew of Enchantress Miatha, and he cast an illusion to make me see her falling. That is why none else noticed. Perhaps she is not dead but kidnapped.”
“We like to think so.” The reflection bunched her hands into glittering fists. “No, we chang
ed our mind. Why would Tethiel want to trick us?”
“To shake my belief in the Academy, perhaps.”
Hiresha made herself focus on another mirror. It displayed memories from earlier that day. In the glass portal, the falling Enchantress Miatha gazed back, framed by an unforgiving blue sky.
“She was dazed, disbelieving,” Hiresha said.
“We agree with Tethiel. She didn’t jump.”
“Probably,” Hiresha said. “Note the detail in her clothing, the fluttering ribbons. The wind interfaces with them in a most realistic manner. If this was illusion, Tethiel must have crafted the masterpiece, not Minna.”
“But it was day!” The reflection stretched her hands out of the mirror’s field of view. “Feasters can’t cast in daylight.”
“Anecdotal reports say the Lord of the Feast can,” Hiresha said. “I remain incredulous.”
The reflection pointed across the room to another mirror. “What about Minna? She was touching us, and she’s a Feaster. Maybe Tethiel worked his magic through her.”
“For a more direct link? A possibility.” Aches crawled through Hiresha’s chest. “Either the Academy’s magic is deteriorating, or Tethiel has a scheme.”
“Not good. Not good.”
A mirror showed Minna on the Skyway when she had dropped the fennec. Hiresha idly watched the scene play out while wishing enchantresses could better protect themselves from falling. Only spellswords could activate enchantments such as Lightening to stop a descent. Hiresha could save herself using her innovations in impact enchantment, a field of study by no means in the endorsed curriculum.
“We were so worried for Lord Black Toes,” the reflection said.
“I forbid you from calling the fennec by that name. His paws are white, besides.” Hiresha touched the amethyst bracelet on her wrist, the stones a match for those on the fennec’s collar. A warmth of thankfulness filled her that her magic had saved the fennec’s life. Yesterday’s one redeeming moment.
With a wave of Hiresha’s hand, a mirror displayed the RecurveTower. Hiresha had no intention of stinting on her nightly contribution to empowering the Academy. A stream of jewels embodying her magic descended from the skylight to sink into the mirror’s glass and be absorbed by the building.
“Tonight I’ll give my dream tithe a hundred times over, in case the enchantments are in some manner weakening.”
“We can’t imagine why,” the reflection said. “Everyone else should be doing their part like always.”
“And the Academy keystones should overcompensate in the event of any temporary shortage of magic.”
“Chancellor Oily Locks won’t like us saying there’s anything wrong with the keystones.”
“Not when they are her responsibility, no.” Hiresha had to admit, Tethiel’s meddling seemed more likely than any failure on the Academy’s part.
Thinking of the Lord of the Feast made Hiresha consider the girl she had invited onto the plateau that day. Two mirrors displayed Minna. In one glass she covered her birthmark with a hand after Janny had taken away her veil. In the other, Minna stood without a mark or stain on her face, holding her hand mirror, grinning with the power of Feasting inside her.
Hiresha floated in her dream, and her hair bobbed around her as if she were underwater. Even so, she felt heavy with worry.
“I do enough wrong by condoning one Feaster’s visit to the Academy. Minna cannot stay here. Her presence alone will scare enchantresses from their sleep.”
“We can’t expel her.” The reflection clapped her hands against her chest. “Janny’s heart would break.”
“Shove the girl off a cliff,” a third voice said. Ten shards of black sapphire clicked against the inside of a mirror. They were the nails of a woman whose graceful hands were studded with jewels of purple and green to the point they looked colorfully scaled. “She needs to die. The maid will cry but won’t blame you for what looks like an accident.”
The yellow-gowned reflection shied away, refusing to look at the other woman in the mirror. Hiresha faced her. The enchantress rubbed her gloved hands together, feeling the garnets imbedded in her own fingers. She had shown great restraint with her jewel piercings compared to this third woman. The lady looked like Hiresha, except more beautiful, her smile so wide and sharp that it threatened to split open her exquisite face with gashes from chin to ears.
“Even more ruthless than usual,” Hiresha said. “I would think that you’d preserve a modicum of regard for a sister Feaster.”
Hiresha resented the elegant and deadly intruder, the essence of Feasting magic that had snuck into her consciousness and plundered a piece of her mind.
The black-clawed lady in the mirror said, “Feasters have no true sisters. Only competitors.”
“I should murder someone so like yourself?”
The Feaster gave the enchantress a pitying smile, the same an adult might give a child who was worried a cloud would fall from the sky and smother her. “You care for Minna because you think she’s like you. Flawed. Teeming with Feasting magic—”
“I have never once—”
“—but she is weak. When you begin Feasting, you’ll be strong.”
Hiresha had mastered her composure in her dream. Her indignation only showed in the sharp turns as jewels zigzagged through the air of the laboratory. “I have no intention ever to begin Feasting.”
“Truth.” The lady tapped a black-sapphire claw against the inside of the mirror. “You’ll not let me out until you see no other way. So Feasting always is, and it is freedom. Even if Lord Tethiel finds it fashionable to claim regrets.”
“‘Claim?’” Hiresha asked. “This is even more amusing. Do you not trust Tethiel?”
“Of course not,” the Feaster said. “He’s tricked you from the beginning. Now he’s come to your domain to take your everything.”
“No!” The reflection peeked out from the corner of her mirror, fingers of one yellow glove pressed against the glass. “Tethiel cares for us.”
“He only visited,” Hiresha said. “Likely, he has already left.”
“Would you care to make a wager?”
Hiresha scoffed at the Feaster. “Don’t tell me you want him murdered as well.”
“Pointless.” The lady tossed her midnight hair and gazed away. “You would never listen to me even to save yourself. That is obvious.”
“I would if you ever spoke reason.” Hiresha blinked, which ended the dream. Even as the laboratory dissolved upward into blackness, she realized exactly what she had said, and she was frightened.
9
Ceiling of Elders
Enchantresses craned their necks to watch the elders ascend on six wallways, black and white paths leading between columns of blue marble. Each elder enchantress towed a train of gowns. The ceremonial dresses were woven into each other, Lightened so they swayed and shifted behind the elders like multicolored tails of sea serpents. Hiresha had armored herself with her full entourage of dresses. To be taken seriously, she had even donned the official golden hump.
She had decided she had no choice but to voice her concerns for the Academy. The chancellor would denounce her for it, Hiresha assumed, and she rather hoped the Ceiling of Elders proved her wrong, even if it meant public embarrassment. Hiresha’s tongue curled in distaste. Her worries sat rancid in her mouth, and she had found no appetite for food that day.
Alyla would be one of those to see Hiresha’s disgrace. The enchantress had given the novice the fennec and the amethyst bracelet to hold. The fox chirped in rapid succession at Alyla, but even his antics failed to bring a smile to her deadened face. She could not stop blinking, and Hiresha had noticed the skin around her eyes was puffy and veined.
Minna scared her terribly last night. Alyla, a girl who finds speaking in public frightening.
With their swaths of clothing, the elders could not sit down with any degree of certainty. To avoid the awkwardness of having to reposition a store’s worth of gowns, no chairs awaited the
elders. Instead, coiled silk hung between gilt posts, harnesses for the enchantresses to lean forward on in comfort. Hiresha stayed standing, as she feared to fall asleep.
On second thought, she gripped the rope. She hardly wanted the embarrassment of falling in front of all these women.
The chancellor, too, kept to her feet. Within the grotto of her oiled wig, her lips contorted in an expression directed at Hiresha that seemed to say the chancellor already knew what the provost intended and was thinking how best to ridicule her for it.
“This meeting,” the Chancellor of Precious Enchantables said, “was called to discuss the tragic, unfortunate, and undoubtedly self-inflicted deaths of Enchantress Miatha and a visiting lord.”
“Lord Tethiel died?” Hiresha’s hold on her purple lanyard tightened, the cord clumping into knots between her hands. She imagined Tethiel traveling down from the Academy, losing connection to the Skyway, and tumbling over the limestone cliff.
“The Ceiling does not yet recognize the Provost of Applied Enchantment,” the chancellor said. “For a point of clarification, the nobleman in question was Lord Yunderdones. In the midst of his tour two days previous, he slipped away from the other gentry. A witness report from Novice Emesea indicates that he ignored visitor guidelines and threw himself off the Academy Plateau.”
Balmy relief mixed within boiling worry in Hiresha. Two deaths in one solitary week. Perhaps the novice was mistaken, and he too fell.
To Hiresha’s left, the rector made a sharp noise of disbelief. Her fingers fidgeted over the ornamental daggers decorating her belt.
The chancellor turned her squint on the rector and her triumphant dome of white hair, a frizzy peak enclosed in a mesh of gold wire. The chancellor said, “The grandeur of the MindvaultAcademy is the closest experience to the afterlife the living can attain. Yet it must not be associated with journeys to said afterlife. Any implication of acts of violence would distract potential donors.”
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