Deepmand shifted beside me in a clink of metal, and he tugged at his beard.
I left the bedroom before I had a fit. Descending the ladder almost killed me even after Maid Janny had climbed up to hold my shoulder.
Once safe on the ground floor, I said, “I will dine here.”
“Surely not, Enchantress,” Faliti Chandur said, walking down the ladder. “We’re reduced to drinking tea and eating field peas, nothing I could serve you.”
“Maid Janny will retrieve my meal. And tea is the only suitable drink for women of childbearing years.”
Janny muttered, “And who’d want those years?”
She returned from the carriage with a basket and my ottoman, and she helped manage my skirts while I approached the padded stool. Faliti could use a normal chair, which she did, setting in front of herself a bowl of eggs and rice.
Faliti asked me, “Why did that enchantress choose you, anyway? Those years and years ago. Out of all of us working the rice paddy, she picked you.”
“She saw me sleeping in the rain.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“I have significant aptitude for enchantment.”
“I don’t believe it. She could’ve taken any of us to your land of fancy dresses.”
Janny cut my broccoli florets into quarters, and she shucked greater beans, which had been steamed. She placed a napkin and silver fork into my hands.
“That can’t be what you eat,” Faliti said. “That’s food fit for the muddies working fields.”
“After a certain point,” I said, “quality of sustenance is independent of cost.”
“You’re mocking me. You came to this house to gloat and mock my ill fate.”
My hands began to tremble, so I hid them under the table. “Faliti Chandur, you are fortunate beyond measure.”
She barked a laugh. “You call unpainted bricks and only one servant fortunate? And look at you, the woman with the city in her hand, and you never had to stoop for it. You never were forced to carry a man’s child or weep over a miscarriage!”
The bowl of egg and rice smashed against the wall, and I stared from its dribbling yellow chunks back to Faliti. She sat still and composed as if she had not just thrown her meal.
She asked, “Did the priests really make you the Flawless?”
“I am not flawless.”
“Well, I know your plan, Resha. You will try to take Harend from me, but I won’t let you. He’s mine and still will be no matter how many gems you flash in front of him.”
I glanced at her marriage necklace, a twined chain of gold bearing a diamond. “Faliti Chandur, you will refer to me as ‘Elder Enchantress Hiresha,’ or not at all.”
I struggled up from the ottoman then left the house.
As Deepmand drove me uphill, I pondered the potential truth of Faliti’s claims. My dream held more than my laboratory, and one of its other rooms contained a portrait of Harend; I had thought to one day wed him even though he was married to Faliti.
I saw no point in marrying anyone until I could stay awake between kisses.
The carriage stopped at the God’s Eye Court, and acolytes and petitioners gathered as close around me as they dared. “Lady Flawless, I have a dispute over aquifer shares.”
“And I represent a man wrongly trampled on the very streets of this city.”
“The bridal price hasn’t been paid for my daughter.”
“Quiet!” I raised my hands, my sleeves fanning out in a spectrum of fabrics ranging from red to green to purple. “I am only interested in babies, mothers, and—most to the point—babies inside mothers. Acolytes, you will make reports of women’s general health, size, weight, and how many per thousand have miscarried and quickened.”
The day simmered, and I strained to remember what I had planned next to say.
“Make special note of any not pregnant. Furthermore, you will bring women ordered by their age and place of residence for my examination tomorrow in this court.”
As the acolytes formed themselves into work teams, a one-armed man approached me and kneeled to touch one of my myriad hems. I lifted a hand both in acknowledgement and to cover a yawn. My mouth snapped back shut when he spoke.
“Elder Enchantress and the Flawless of Morimound, someone is murdering our women, and I can tell you where to find him.”
“Tell me of this murderer, and do so without calling me ‘Flawless.’”
The one-armed man winced as he rose to his feet. I believed I recognized him as the wine merchant from the previous night.
“I spend most days in the Bazaar, long enough to see things, you understand. I’m Anlash Niklia, vintner of Anlash’s fine wines, including the legendary Liquid Diamond.”
“I did not ask your occupation. Do the murders implicate the pregnancies?”
“The pregnancies? No, not at all.” He ran his only hand through his long, wavy and well-oiled hair. “Well, in a way. With so many women being as they are, and many wishing to be—hmmm—less so, they find certain merchants who sell certain herbs. Do you understand my meaning?”
“I am not one to understand meanings.” I bit my tongue, realizing what I had just said.
“I’m sure I meant no disrespect to your virtuous personage. But some of less repute buy, well, poisons meant for the child they carry.”
The sun burned above me, and sweat seeped from my headdress and ran down my brow.
He said, “Only, the herbs aren’t just poisoning their wombs, they’re killing the mothers.”
I clenched my cane, trying to exhale as much of the heat inside me as I could. Nothing angered me more than mothers coming to harm, and I thought of Sri and her liver rotten from wormwood. Yet, I could not dismiss such herbs as a potential means of freeing any women who carried an unchild, although I maintained hope that some women had normal babies. Some must have quickened.
“Name the herbalist responsible, immediately,” I said.
“Noblin, southwest Bazaar.”
“He will be apprehended without delay.”
“I also wanted you to know, Elder Enchantress, having my fine wines served in your manor would give me the greatest of pleasure.”
“I have no interest in intoxicants.”
“But you were so interested in my information. I hoped that interest could spread to my wares, as it were.”
“I think I understand. Very well. For your assistance, you will have my patronage.” As I left the Court, acolytes hopped away from my gowns. “Deepmand, the carriage.”
While sleeping, I considered how I might help Alyla and all the rest most at risk in childbirth. I could pull one girl into my dream and perhaps find a way to dismantle the unchild, if unchild I found, yet such an effort would be futile on the citywide scale. Since I would require an hour with each woman, the labor would take years and would obliterate the Propriety Pledge, revealing the enchantresses’ disgrace.
Herbs such as wormwood might make the task more feasible, if the will of the Ever Always could be surmounted by poisons. I doubted that, and thus I had to hope the women had been seeded by the magic of a mortal.
We arrived at the Bazaar seventeen minutes later. The crowds parted to stare at me and at my back, and I remembered I wore a golden hump, which I sometimes forgot about because it weighed less than air. In the Mindvault Academy, a curved spine signified the seniority of an elder enchantress, yet I realized the implication was lost here. My golden hump bewildered onlookers, although I would not do without its enchantment, for my safety.
Someone to my right whistled. “Wonder what the enchantress hides under all those clothes.”
Deepmand stepped to face the speaker but apparently failed to spot him in the crowd. To counter the indignity, I lifted my chin to new heights.
“Such lasciviousness,” I said to Maid Janny. “Men confuse ‘enchantress’ with ‘wanton charmer.’”
“How unfair. Doubt you’ve charmed a single person in your life.”
“Quite right, Ma
id Janny. Oh dear, are those Bright Palms?”
“Hark the signs! Hark the signs!”
Two Bright Palms shouted at the passersby from a podium constructed of rice barrels. “The Lord of the Feast hides among us, but by three signs you will know him....”
I strode past merchants hocking their wares and competing with the Bright Palms in volume to see who could cause the most headaches in a day.
“Alligator oil, for all your tooth pains!”
“Wildebeest roast, killed by my son’s own spear!”
The Bright Palms continued their ranting. “...The Lord of the Feast has no teeth to speak mercy....”
“Get your cheetah cub here,” a red-faced merchant shouted. “Nearly tame!”
“...no ears to hear your pleas....”
A woman merchant bowed to touch the hem of my nearest gown. I could not bear to look at her, wondering if she carried an unchild within her.
“...and a black triangle on his brow, where soul left body.”
I glanced at the Bright Palms as they began their chant anew. Before seeing the Feaster’s horror at his mention, I had hypothesized the Lord of the Feast to be a myth invented by the Bright Palms to garnish attention and support.
We traversed to a stall with hanging herbs and a pungent smell. A foreigner stooped over a ledger, his white whiskers tufting out below his wire spectacles. When his nose tipped up toward me, lenses enlarged his eyes into two watery black pits.
“Herbalist Noblin,” I said, “you are selling poisons to the women of Morimound.”
“What? Who’re...who...oh my, but I’m not poisoning anyone.”
“Wormwood is a poison.”
“A poison is a substance and a dose. I swear on the honor of the Founder that I never gave a poison dose, and I have the notation to prove it.”
He shoved the ledger toward me, tipping piles of herbs and a mortar off the side of the table.
“You will see,” the herbalist said, running his fingers over lines of squiggles on which I could not focus with my mind thick and my gowns smothering, “that I wrote down the herb and dose, and here the recipient’s sign. These are times when I refused to give a second dose.”
“This list appears to be pages long,” I said. “If so many asked for a second dose, the first must not have been especially efficacious.”
“I admit I could’ve received poor batches of black cohosh and slippery elm bark. The rue and mugwort have had fewer requests for second doses.”
“Maybe the first dose is killing them,” I said. “Spellsword Deepmand, take herbalist Noblin to the nearest guard. The city will hold him, until I judge what the Fate Weaver has spun for him.”
A gauntlet clamped onto the herbalist’s hand, and he groaned as Deepmand dragged him across the square. I followed, having otherwise no idea how to find my carriage. After we had deposited the herbalist, a school of acolytes blocked Deepmand’s path.
“Lustrous and Elder Enchantress Hiresha.”
The man’s voice came from behind my right ear.
Priest Salkant of the Fate Weaver stepped into view. His words would have startled a few drops of urine out of me, if not for my impeccable bladder control.
“Priest,” I said, again inclined to leave out the “Lustrous” honorarium.
“I have seen an event in the webs, which you must know about, but no one else. With your permission, I will whisper it in your ear.”
“I am not in the habit of receiving whispers from men, yet in this case, I will acquiesce.”
His robes bore the yellow on black coloration of an orb-weaver spider, and as he leaned toward my neck, I had a jolt of fear that he would bite me. Instead, he covered both sides of his mouth with his fingers and half-fingers and garbled something in my ear.
“Excuse me?” I said.
He whispered again, and amid the clamor of the Bazaar and with my thoughts moving at the speed of mold, it sounded something like, “Severs mud in cry fiefdom.”
As I believed I could determine what he had actually said in my dream, I merely nodded.
He leaned back, his chin upturned in a frown. “You understand why news of this gravity could not spread.”
“Indeed not.”
“There is no confusion in the weave. A certainty, I’m afraid.”
“I wish I knew what to say.”
He said, “We can do no more to prepare ourselves than live these last years to their fullest.”
“I will contemplate this.”
Priest Salkant tapped his fingers together, gaps forming between the amputated ones. “Sometimes I believe all these soon-to-be mothers as an omen of it, though if that be so, it’s a pitiless one indeed.”
Not understanding the reference, I let my attention solidify on his hands. “I could regenerate those fingers.”
I regretted my words even before Priest Salkant gave me a puzzled look. Utilizing my magic on him in Morimound would be another transgression of the Propriety Pledge.
He waggled his truncated fingers. “I hardly notice them anymore, and I understand that healing a finger would cost me an arm and a leg.”
“My fees are high to discourage pestering, yet I would not charge a priest of Morimound.” I sighed inwardly, realizing I was encouraging him.
“You are indeed the Flawless, but I’m sure you have more important concerns than a few fingers.”
“Of your two assessments, the latter is undoubtedly true. May your life’s thread be long, Lustrous Priest.”
In leaving, he laughed, although I did not see why. I wanted to determine what he had whispered with minimal delay. Inside the carriage, I bid Maid Janny hand me the herbalist’s ledger and the pouch of wormwood, a dried plant with the appearance of a fern with short fronds, which I emptied out on the street, observing as I did the rain of dried plant matter. A page of the ledger turned under my fingers every second, my eyes glossing over the notes.
I broiled in my own sweat, yet I forced myself to begin descending toward sleep because I had to analyze the herbalist’s doings and the whisper of the Fate Weaver’s priest.
On the twelfth step, I heard a boy shouting. “Mister Spellsword! Mister Spellsword! Tell the enchantress that Lady Sri has fallen, and Mister Obenji fears the worst.”
I pushed the carriage door open. “My boy, did Lady Sri break any bones? Has she gone into labor?”
His eyes popped at the sight of me. “Uh, she landed on her side, and now her hip is swelling like a corpse in summer. Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Fast feet and slow thinking, that’s what they say ’bout me.”
Irritation flashed through me at the thought of Sri the Once Flawless leaping from her sickbed only to break a bone. She seemed to have the audacity of a youth without the mistake-absorbent body.
“Elder Enchantress,” Deepmand said from the carriage perch, “I will make full speed for your estate.”
“No,” I said.
“Elder Enchantress?”
I touched my fingers to my forehead, which burned. Sri had likely shattered her hipbone and would die of internal bleeding within days. My magic could save her, yet the spellcraft would require hours, while a Bright Palm could heal her in seconds.
More to the point, I did not think I was ready to confront another unchild, or feel again what might be a god breathing into my dream.
“My boy, run back to the manor with an acolyte of the Ever Always, and have him splint her leg and give her milk of the poppy. Then proceed to the nearest chantry and beg a Bright Palm to heal her. Make certain you tell them she is destitute.”
“Des-ti-tute. Right.”
I waved him away then slumped back into my silk harnesses. Panting, I thumped my cane against the ceiling.
“Move to the shade.”
Once I slipped into sleep, I summoned my mirror to show my conversation with Salkant of the Fate Weaver. After I blotted out all the other sounds of the Bazaar, his whisper echoed in the laboratory.
“The Seventh Flood will come
in my lifetime.”
All the floating jewels held still, and with a wave of my hand, the mirror turned black. Fears mixed inside me with pangs of helplessness; I curled up, drifting in the air in an approximation of the fetal position. My gowns spread out for twenty feet in a pool of blue, purple, and black fabrics, intermingled with red satin, dashes of white scarf, and islands of green taffeta.
The mirror sounded the whisper again, so I could be sure.
“The Seventh Flood will come in my lifetime.”
Sri the Once Flawless had dreamed of a Seventh Flood that would destroy the city in a wave not comprised of water. Likewise, the Third Flood had not involved overflowing rivers but invading foreigners, and I could not help but wonder if the Seventh Flood related to the mass pregnancies.
I wanted to believe that the Fate Weaver had brought me back to Morimound to help the women, yet her priest had predicted doom.
Priest Salkant must have misinterpreted the webs, I reasoned. The Flood Wall I had built would prevent torrents of muddy water from drowning Morimound’s people and sweeping away the majority of their homes.
Still, I felt I had plummeted through a thousand feet of icy air without clothes.
To distract myself, I summoned the herbalist’s ledger, and it fluttered open inside the mirror. I read each page at a glance, seeing that Noblin had first sold less dangerous herbs but had run out. Most women had tried to obtain a second dose, and when he refused them, they returned again, signing under different names. It was evident from their style of pen strokes. Through deception, the women received second, third, fourth, and, in one case, fifth doses, in the hopes of expelling their pregnancies.
Either the herbalist had trouble identifying people through his spectacles, or he had allowed the women to escalate the dosage without thought for their health. I suspected the former, in the light of the horror on his face when I had accused him of murdering the women.
The godsent children seemed to have a resiliency to poison. These women had swallowed dose after bitter dose of wormwood. I feared for the health of Alyla Chandur because her angry mother had purchased four doses. Although Faliti Chandur had not signed under her correct name even once, I recognized her handwriting.
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