The globe of water burst, sweeping away a patch of snow. Hiresha leaned over the withered Bright Palm. Most of the jewels had shed from his cracking skin, but a few still were imbedded in his leather. The amethyst bracelet hung loose around a branch of an arm, his fingers twigs.
“My heart, behind you!”
Fos, too, called a warning. “She’s after you!”
Hiresha could feel the avalanche of light surging up the Skyway. Sheamab, last of the twelve.
With flawless clarity, Hiresha heard the voice of her intuition. I have to take the bracelet.
The enchantress yanked free the amethyst jewelry, slipped it on. She had no idea why, but did not question how possessing the bracelet would help her defeat the Bright Palm. She only had time to trust.
A moment remained to her. She stood up on the crest of the cliff. She pushed Minna out of harm’s way. An urge flashed through her to give the girl the fennec, but by then it was too late.
The staff slammed into her side, hooking her off her feet. The Bright Palm spun the enchantress over the cliff and flung her into the emptiness.
The storm-capped mountains revolved into a view of the moon. She clutched the fennec, and the amethyst bracelet. Now I understand. Hiresha felt weightless. Her worries breezed away from her like so much falling snow.
She glanced to the crest of the Skyway, to Sheamab sweeping her staff toward Tethiel. A ring of stones glittered darkly on her arm.
Sheamab would’ve seen me throw the amethyst bracelet. She would’ve known to remove the fennec’s collar if Mister Jewel Pox had fallen from the cliff. She didn’t expect this.
Now I have her.
The Bright Palm’s eyes flickered to Hiresha. Sheamab jerked a hand to her arm. Fingers alive with glowing veins closed on the amethyst collar.
The jewelry yanked her off the cliff. The Bright Palm shot toward the enchantress, one falling after the other.
Gravity had them both.
44
Three Thousand Vertical Feet
Sheamab careened through the air, staff angled over her shoulder and ready to stab the enchantress.
Hiresha tore off her bracelet, was eager to throw it, to watch Sheamab be pulled off in another direction of plummet.
Instead, she clutched the bracelet to her breast. I can’t throw it.
The enchantment in the fennec’s collar had a Lightening component. If Hiresha disposed of the bracelet, Sheamab would recover it in mid fall. The Bright Palm mastermind could then hurl the bracelet over and over, moving herself through the air until she reached the Skyway. Or she could toss it upward before impact. Sheamab would flip herself skyward at the last second, and the remaining drop may not be sufficient to kill a Bright Palm.
Hiresha realized all that in a crushing instant. And if I attempt to Lighten myself, Sheamab will float after me and be saved.
Uh oh. Someone didn’t think this through.
Hiresha’s stomach and guts angled downward. Her hair splayed then streaked behind her. Coldness forced its way up her coat to stab at her gooseflesh.
Her fingers spat out a jewel of Burdening at Sheamab. The Bright Palm swatted it with her staff, but the onyx stone stuck to the wood. The weapon gained the weight of a boulder, flipping Sheamab over. Around her neck, the loose coil of the chancellor’s amulet slipped off. Its interlocking circles flipped end over end into the night.
The Bright Palm slid backward into the enchantress then began sinking faster. Sheamab let go of her staff. Her legs latched onto Hiresha’s feet like a pinching beetle’s jaws.
“My heart!”
An after trail of light streaked after Tethiel’s wings. The swath of daggers arched behind him, his head aimed toward the women in his flight. Even so, he was receding from them, falling behind.
He’s partially Lightened. He’ll never reach us.
“The amulet,” Hiresha called up to him. “Catch the chancellor’s amulet.”
She glimpsed him circling around the disc and chain. Then her perspective reeled to a dark view of storm cloud.
The Bright Palm was clawing her way up the enchantress.
The fennec’s ears flapped against Hiresha’s arm. His squeaking might as well have been daggers piercing her. Can’t let him fall. She placed a Lightening jewel on his brow. The fennec was well used to being weightless in her dreams, and after she let him go, he swam into the air with swishing black-tipped tail. Looking back at her, he chirped five times in climbing octaves.
Swim to safety, my friend.
Sheamab’s hands clamped on Hiresha’s waist. The enchantress whipped her arms to the side and torqued her body around. The Bright Palm was not shaken off, but Hiresha did succeed in hiding how she placed a jewel of Burdening on the amethyst bracelet. She could not say then why she did it, only that she worried not doing so would ruin her, and she trusted her fear.
Both women lurched downward with the increased weight pressed against Hiresha’s chest. The enchantress had no time to throw the bracelet, not that doing so would have helped her now that she was in Sheamab’s grasp.
A hand sealed on Hiresha’s elbow. Another smashed together the fingers holding the priming garnet. Sheamab’s head filled Hiresha’s vision, a young face, and Hiresha remembered that Sheamab must not have been much older than Alyla. Did she hammer a spike into her own heart as well?
The enchantress could not tell if the locks batting against her cheeks belonged to herself or the Bright Palm. The moon dyed it all with a sheen. Within the grey of Sheamab’s eyes, light traced crisscrossed paths like silver embers.
“Through sacrifice,” Sheamab said, “victory.”
Hiresha could not have said if Sheamab meant approval for the enchantress’s tactic, or acceptance of death to kill the enchantress. Or both.
The falling enchantress had to shout over the wind whistling between them. “Through living, triumph.”
Hiresha knew that it took only seventeen and three-quarters seconds for a person of her weight to fall from the clifftop to the valley floor. Once, she had calculated it as part of a test. Does that mean I have twelve seconds left? It was too few for even an enchantress of her talents to fall asleep. Seven? So much time had seemed to have passed already, and the Burdened bracelet would quicken her fall.
It felt as if her body narrowed, squeezed on all sides by her increasing speed. Her tumbling straightened into a plunge, and the anxiety thrumming through her veins intensified past terror, beyond a ringing brilliance, into a molten bliss.
Downhill and to her right, the night sky opened between the valley floor and the storm bank. A luminous crescent soared, two thorns of silver moon pointing groundward while its light iced the clouds above. A shooting star traced a line of radiance.
A falling diamond, she thought, and it doesn’t look to be moving faster than we.
The panorama stung her with its clarity, bore into her with perfection, etched her with eternity. She knew she would remember the sight for the rest of her life, however many seconds that was.
The whooshing of the air grew so loud it seemed a chorus of a thousand singing voices. Hiresha glimpsed Fos above, his feet on the side of his jasper sword that he rode like a sleigh. He had the fennec under one arm and was plowing his way toward her through the air. Between Hiresha’s lead and the Burdened bracelet on her chest, she doubted he would catch her.
The women outraced all the falling snowflakes, the icy specks zooming up past them. Below, three frozen lakes shone with the moon and spread outward in her perspective as Hiresha dropped closer.
Sheamab’s eyes flashed from the amethyst bracelet in Hiresha’s hand to the amethyst collar still worn as an armlet. Bright fingers scrabbled to try to pry open Hiresha’s grasp.
Ah, ha! She sees how to save herself. The enchantress twined her fingers around the bracelet. She twisted her other hand, the one with the garnet, trying to free it but Sheamab had it between the vice of her ribs and arm.
The wind itself was slicing at them. Be
low was a crosshatching of town streets with snow glaring between the darkness of steep roofs. The white lines stretched further apart as Hiresha neared.
Sheamab yanked on the arm with the bracelet. The hand holding the Burdened jewelry was the only thing not battered about by the force of air. It made the arm an easy target when Sheamab bit it, sinking her teeth into Hiresha’s wrist.
The enchantress felt nothing, concentrating on twisting her other hand with the garnet free.
Her heart seemed to stop beating, so tight did her chest constrict from the agonizing passage of what might be her last instants. The town neared. Flickers of white from the moon reflected off brass chimneys. She had no wish to make a spectacle of herself plastered over the streets.
Hiresha tore her hand with her garnet free.
Sheamab seized the bracelet.
The enchantress’s numb hands could feel little. Her eyes saw only shadows amid the hazy greys of speed. She thought she pulled a Lightening jewel free of her sash, but, no, she had not. A sensation of scalp-splitting dread assaulted her that the gem had been torn from her fingers. She clapped her hands together and had to believe she had caught the loose zircon, though she could not feel it.
An ecstasy of final moments boiled through her veins as she rolled her hands over each other, hoping that the garnet would prime the zircon. The Academy guard tower spun into view, a river of ice coiling around it. Half Bridge was a bump at the bottom of the cliff.
Sheamab heaved the bracelet with both hands. Her plan had to have been to separate herself the thirty paces from the jewelry necessary to activate the enchantment. But instead of hurling away from her, the bracelet only drifted. It was too Burdened. Too slow.
The zircon shone through Hiresha’s hands as a teal star. She slammed it against her brow as she became level with the town’s square asylum and the minarets of a temple dedicated to the Opal Mind.
The world slowed. The wind silenced. Sheamab zoomed past downward. The bracelet fell after her.
Hiresha was pried free of gravity’s grip. As her weight drained away, as her momentum evaporated, she felt that the air had turned into hundreds of unseen pillows being thrown at her from all sides.
She flowed down a rooftop of black tiles, drifting upward and over the snow-crowned gutter. Sliding toward the street, she was dusted against snow patterned in cobblestone lumps. The enchantress was slung up again to the level of shuttered windows etched with baboons. She then flitted forward and back until she descended close enough to grip the grooves in the stone street.
The Bright Palm’s landing had not been so gentle. The enchantress had heard a crash of breaking, of ending. She never heard a scream.
Hiresha reveled in her breathing. Drawing air into her lungs took more effort, as if she were slurping it. And the snow-spiced air tasted richer than any clear soup she had ever enjoyed.
You have spun beautifully, Fate Weaver. Opal Mind, you inspire me. And as for you, Hiresha thought of her own intuition, some of your distractions are worthwhile.
Rapture shivered through Hiresha, an abandon of twirling zest and thrill. Second after second felt like a treasure placed in her hands by the gods, the time ahead of her an endless procession of wondrous possibility.
45
Half Bridge
Hiresha opened her eyes to see Fos standing over her, a pair of fennec ears blooming from his hand. She had napped to return herself to her true weight.
“Found your bracelet, and his collar, too. Broken to bits.” The spellsword curled a hand behind the small of her back and helped lift her to her feet. Fos passed her the warmth of the fennec, and then he said, “Don’t worry. I covered his eyes. Wasn’t a fit sight for a fox of his tender years.”
He ran his thumb over the back of Hiresha’s hand, no doubt feeling the bumps of jewels that she had left there. The pattern of purple spinels in her skin formed a crescent moon, and she had implanted them to celebrate living. She expected Fos to comment on it.
When he did not, she asked, “And what of a spellsword of tender years?”
“Only had to see half of it.” He pointed to his one eye and laughed, his tone ringing with pain.
The fennec mewed and pawed at Hiresha’s side. She cradled him and rested a hand on Fos’s arm. They walked together on streets of moonlight.
“I am sorry,” Hiresha said, “about your sister. If I had—”
“No, no. You did what any incredible, leap-off-the-wall, paragon gemstone of an enchantress should have.” His scruffy chin angled upward as he gazed at the mountain range. Stars peeked out from rents in the breaking storm clouds. “She’s up there, isn’t she? That’s where all the winds go.”
“If Alyla didn’t catch onto anything, then yes. The mountain wilds.” Hiresha thought of the times she had seen Lightened sarcophagi carrying dead elders on the wind. She swallowed hard thinking of Alyla among the tomb peaks.
“I’m finding her.”
Hiresha closed her hand tighter on his arm. “Perhaps it’d be best if you do not. Remember Alyla for who she was.”
“No, she chose what she chose.” His extended his arm, and the distance between himself and the enchantress widened. “She could be dead and I’d still have to search for her body. For a Morimound burial.”
“She’s not dead, and she’s more likely to find her way out of the SkiarriMountains than you. With what she is now.”
His jaw firmed, and his eye turned distant. “You have to be right. I guess all that’s left for me is to say goodbye to her. Until we meet again, Alyla.”
Fos said it to the mountains.
His gaze stayed on the heights as he drew Hiresha closer. He said, “When this is all over, when we’re all of us in the goddess’s grand cavern, she’ll be the same again, won’t she? Not a Bright Palm, but herself?”
“Certainly.”
They spoke no more until Hiresha stopped at a familiar building. She led Fos up a bronze-cast stair with perforations in the designs of lily pads.
Maid Janny’s doorway was emblazoned with the carvings of monkeys in play, or in lewd acts, depending on one’s mindset. Hiresha was not surprised to see light leaking from the keyhole. Of course she would be home and alive, saved from the plummet by my jewel and wild throw. Hiresha felt the Fate Weaver was aligning every thread in her favor.
“Janny, open this door at once.”
After a “thunk!” there was a sound of a rolling bottle. The light from the keyhole winked out. Janny’s voice had a tremble.
“Hiresha?”
“None other. Now open the door so we can congratulate each other on living.”
“Unless you’re a Feaster, who’d congratulate me opening my door at night by taking my life.”
A second voice, a man murmured something from inside. Maid Janny spoke over him.
“Plug your mouth. Trying to hear Hiresha.”
“Janny,” the enchantress said, “since you know it’s me, open the door. Fos is with me, and if he doesn’t have something to eat soon, his stomach is in danger of imploding.”
“Could be a Feaster who’s fooling me using your shrill voice and impatience.”
“My voice isn’t—Janny!” Hiresha rattled the vine-shaped doorknob, though she was smiling. Finding her friend to be alive was well worth the chiding. “Open this door or I’ll sprinkle diamond dust in your beer enchanted to turn you into a mute.”
“So it is you.”
After the sliding of bolts, the door was swung in. Red light and hearth-fire heat flowed out. Janny jiggled with tassels, and pink silk encircled her plentiful body. Her cheeks were slick and glistening with tears. She opened her arms and crushed Hiresha with softness.
Janny asked, “And my Minna? My Little Minnow, is she still bashfully living and not at all bashed?”
Hiresha averted her eyes from the muscle-bound man behind Janny who was scrambling to don clothes.
Janny turned the enchantress away from the sight of the nude. “A little grief therapy. N
ow tell me. Before motherly concern bursts me. Would hate to get any of the glop over you. Nothing ages a woman faster than children.”
Hiresha reassured her friend then said, “Minna is a resourceful girl. I intend to see to her studies personally.”
Janny closed the door behind Hiresha and Fos. The maid blazed the stove. The room filled with the aroma of cooking lentils and cilantro. Janny served butter-flour dumplings stuffed with cashews. Fos popped whole ones into his mouth but took his time chewing, his eye closed in silent appreciation. Hiresha nibbled and bathed her face in the steam of jasmine tea.
The two women enjoyed interrupting each other while recounting the doings of the last days. Hiresha abridged her telling for Janny’s sensitive disposition in regard to danger. Janny showed no such delicacy toward the enchantress. The maid had harangued the hapless mayor to send help to the Academy.
When Hiresha stood and motioned Fos to follow her to the door, Janny urged them not to go back out into the night.
“Most considerate of you to think of the Feasters’ safety,” Hiresha said, “but there’s scarcely any night left, and a few things remain to be done.”
The enchantress left Janny to her celebration with the younger man, who had looked bashful during the meal and said nothing. Hiresha and Fos returned to the street.
“Fos, I’ve made a decision in regard to our prisoners, the jewel duper and Novice Emesea.”
“He does what to jewels?”
“Falsifies then. Anyway, I promised they could walk from the Academy. I never swore they wouldn’t be arrested by the city guards. See to it that their freedom is short lived.”
“That’s a bit of a blindsiding,” he said, “but little enough I suppose, after what they got Alyla into.”
Only a block of town homes remained before the cliff and Skyway, but they stopped before reaching it. Without a word spoken, they both stared downward at the street in front of them.
Splinters were spread over the snow in a silent explosion. The shards formed rings, each circle a collection of brown needles that seemed to have been arranged as if by an artist’s hand. The splinters were embedded in a door on one side of the street, and they stuck out of the shutters on the other.
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