I wanted to banish the memory from my dream, yet I forced myself to peer inside it, to count the clusters of venom sacs surrounding the thing’s beating heart. I identified the toxin as similar to that found in the bite of a coral snake, for which I had an antidote shelved and ready: an enchanted powder of emerald would neutralize the venom.
Within the unchild, the brain connected neither to brainstem nor to its internal muscles; this abomination would have no self-control. I found this curious yet not unanticipated. The muscles within the unchild had contracted at the moment when magic had invaded my dream from an outside source. A row of canine teeth had protruded on both sides of the oval of bone, digging into the womb for traction, while the halves of its shell had separated enough to revolve. Sharp bone edged the narrow ends, and one side of the ovoid had cut one way into Faliti, the opposing side slashing the other.
The sight gouged my insides with fear, hurting me as if I too carried an unchild.
The bone ovoid had shattered, the forces applied by its muscles and the womb greater than what the undeveloped bones could withstand. I had no doubt that by the end of the third trimester, the stronger bones of the unchild and its more complete mineralization of cartilage would allow it to slash its way out of the abdomen.
The old and the young need not have the strength to give birth; the unchildren would birth themselves, ripping out of their mothers and leaving them to die in blood.
My arm sliced through the air as I exiled the unchild from my dream. I felt foul, shriveled, and dead, mummified in my gowns.
The Lord of the Feast had claimed we would become slaves. I began to believe him because any man responsible for the unchildren would have dominance over Morimound; we could not resist his will in anything, or he would maul all our women, from the inside. The Seventh Flood could sweep over the city in seconds.
Whoever he was, this man wished Morimound’s devastation. He hated the city, and I would find him at the ball among the foreigners. I would have to find him. Only, I was no longer certain I could control him.
Night Thirty-Seven, Third Trimester
My life would culminate tonight.
My disease of somnolence had led me to the Mindvault Academy, where I had studied flatworms and salamanders, learning regeneration to finance studies of my unrelenting desire for sleep. Although I had eased others of their relentless weariness, mine had proven unresponsive because I had not been destined to leave the Academy yet. I had surveyed midwives and analyzed pregnant women in preparation for the day I would find a cure.
The Fate Weaver had molded my thread into the pattern needed to save Morimound. She had given me knowledge and magic, and I had to believe they would be enough to free Morimound’s women of the unchildren.
The last guest had arrived at my manor. The sun had set, the doors locked and bolted. I strode among the dignitaries of other realms, my gowns fluctuating in small air currents and appearing to grab at any who strayed too close.
I was flustered with the foreigners crowding my rooms and lounging on my furniture. Anything they scratched, I would have to replace.
The men wore gossamer linen or flowing robes embroidered with dancing monkeys. Plants from Nagra's magical gardens interwove their collars and sleeves, fat flowers sickening me with their weight of perfume.
Their wives were no better, some infested with jewelry childishly modeled after insects. Other women boasted vines that curled around their fingers and held their drinks for them.
I had a boy at my side with an effeminate face, and he wore the dressings of a proper woman, complete with interlocking designs of henna up his arms and legs, bracelets and anklets jangling, gems braided into his hair, and his brows painted yellow and tufted after the elegance of a cockatoo.
I asked the guests, “Are the women of Morimound not beautiful?”
My sagging eyelids opened long enough for me to catch the reactions toward my womanly boy. Later, I would analyze their responses in my laboratory for surprise, suspicion, and animosity, as the guilty party would expect every woman to be pregnant. A few other boys sashayed about in blouses and skirts to emulate the wives of Morimound’s higher society.
My eyes shut and refused to open; I wondered how I could stay awake another moment into the night. My gowns prevented me from pinching myself to alertness.
“Elder Enchantress Hiresha.” Mister Obenji’s voice sounded next my ear. “There is a gentleman outside. He claims to have arrived late.”
I forced open one eyelid. “You told me all the guests were present.”
“I did. And you previously admonished me to refuse this individual’s entry to the estate.”
“If he was not invited then he has no business here. Direct him to wait out the night in the gardener’s shed.”
“He protests an oversight, that you must have meant to invite him. An ambassador Tethiel, and his daughter.”
The name connected in my mind with a jolt, and my heart lurched into an escalation of beats. I bowed my head, my headdress hiding what must have been a horrified expression. I followed Mister Obenji’s feet into the hall, Deepmand behind us.
“Mister Obenji,” Deepmand said once we had reached the gold-leaf stairs above the door, “if I could have a word alone with the elder enchantress.”
The aged servant left, while Maid Janny stayed and was duly ignored.
“Elder Enchantress,” Deepmand said softly, “you must not allow him into your manor.”
“I would be better to refuse and anger him?”
“You and your guests could be harmed.”
My thoughts were quickening, and I felt almost awake. “He could frighten them from outside just as readily. His illusions penetrate walls.”
“Appeasement encourages more demands.”
“The women of Morimound cannot afford more enemies.”
He held his voice respectfully quiet. “When will you refuse him, Elder Enchantress? If not now?”
My answer terrified me too much to be spoken aloud: When the unchildren are gone and my city is safe. I wondered if I would truly accept any demand to achieve those results.
I started down the stairs, yet Maid Janny backed away. “Not going down, no thanks, not if he’s there. I’ll be in the kitchen, comforting the wine barrels.”
With her gone, I had to slide open the door’s viewing window myself, and the exterior of its silver bars reflected crimson from the glare of an ostentatious coat. The Lord of the Feast waited on my doorstep, and he must have recognized my eyes.
“Enchantress Hiresha, allow me to present the debutante Physis, my daughter. May we come in?”
A woman sparkling with spinel jewels had her arm locked around his, her low-cut, jeweled gown shamelessly derivative of enchantress fashion. Her features reminded me of the Feaster woman who had sat in the High and Dry Inn’s parlor couch, as if the two were sisters—one stricken by a lifetime of poverty and hunger, the other boasting the curvaceous health and confident gaze of a woman in her prime.
“I cannot invite into my home people of your sort.”
“You have nothing new to fear,” he said. “Physis has already played the mouse inside the Mindvault Academy.”
With two fingers, she pulled down the corners of her full, crimson lips for an exaggerated frown; her teeth were painfully white and appeared subtly too sharp. “You wear such an unhappy face, Elder, in your sleep.”
I happened to know I did frown in my sleep, in concentration. My insides twisted at the thought of a Feaster leering over me in bed. I recognized that elements of her face were similar to the novice Kally, who had gone missing from the Academy and was assumed a runaway. She could have crept the halls at night and spied on me for years, concealed as long as she had controlled her urge to Feast.
Nonetheless, I said, “You have no place at this ball.”
He said, “We could always find another way to amuse ourselves in this city, at night.”
I imagined him slipping illusions of snakes dow
n chimneys, maybe even tricking people to think their homes were shaking and collapsing down onto them. I glanced past the gilded stairs, toward the ballroom. “Would you promise to harm no one? And none of the furnishings.”
“My word is worth the lives of many men,” he said, “and I swear we’ll harm no one. Unless we must.”
Closing the peephole, I leaned my brow against the door. Deepmand made no move to unlock it, and I had to shove the bar open myself.
“You may enter,” I said.
The lady Feaster lifted a corner of her skirt with two fingers and walked inside with a deftness she had lacked during the day. I accompanied her and the Lord of the Feast to the ballroom, gnawing my lip as I remembered stories of Feasters causing mayhem at nightly gatherings. It was a small consolation to know that “Physis” had never harmed me in the Academy.
After Mister Obenji had introduced them to the guests, the Lord of the Feast turned to his companion.
“Now, my daughter, mingle but no dining.”
She leaned closer to him, running her long red nails over his throat. “Get stabbed and die, Father.”
The lady Feaster swept over the reflective marble floor, guests parting around her then trailing behind like papyrus scrolls caught in a winter gust.
The Lord of the Feast stepped beside me. “Is it not grand for one’s children to have your well-being foremost in their thoughts?”
“I would not know.”
I strode away from him, toward a dais fashioned after the one in my laboratory, although this one merely had clay tiles shaped in diamond designs. Standing atop the platform, I cleared my throat because, with the Lord of the Feast here, I had wakened enough to remember what I should have said at dinner.
Deepmand clapped his gauntlets together, and the smashing clang drew all eyes to me.
“I welcome you to Sunchase Hall, on the eve of the Flood Moon. Morimound will observe a month of silence in remembrance, rain being the loudest sound in the streets. Tonight, however, we will have music.”
While musicians plucked out some manner of racket, attention drifted from me and chatter resumed. A guest sauntered to the Lord of the Feast. “Ambassador, am I to understand your carriage broke?”
I worried how this conversation would progress.
“Were you trapped out at night?” asked one woman. “I’d be deathly scared.”
“I was deathly bored,” the Lord of the Feast said in his restrained tone, “and uncertain whether attending a ball would worsen that condition. Of course, I found myself surrounded by Feasters, which settled the matter. Nobody is more tedious than those who talk of nothing but their last meal.”
Instead of recoiling in terror, the women tittered, and the men slapped Tethiel’s back. I told myself not to be surprised that his flippancy tickled their infantile minds.
Although I tried to ignore the Lord of the Feast’s chatting, I could not take my eyes from the lady Feaster; men seemed unable to escape her, and clusters of them begged her to dance. Perhaps they misinterpreted her hungry smile and brazen stare. She might subliminally elicit a fight-or-flight impulse, which their base minds misinterpreted as arousal.
Her ostensibly enchanted gown no doubt drew them: Its jewels changed colors as she moved, from red to green to blue to black. The gems cycled hues in the opposite direction she spun, making them appear bright insects scuttling over her silk.
The neglected women clustered, whispering and smiling behind their hands while flicking their eyes to the Lord of the Feast. They touched their scarab amulets out of nervousness, some giggling, and approached him in groups. I wondered at their attraction; the curiosity and uniqueness of his mannerisms apparently overcame their inadequate minds.
“He rode in after dark,” one woman said as her group passed me on the way to him.
“And he didn’t look at all frightened. My Brendock would’ve soiled his robes.”
“He couldn’t be a Feaster, could he?”
“What a dreadful thought! I hope I’m the first he asks to dance.”
I judged that while the possibility of his being a Feaster appealed to the women, any certainty of the truth would repel them. Snorting at their childishness, I glanced at the Lord of the Feast. He possessed more than a fearless gaze, I granted. Slack shoulders aside, his features brought to mind portraits of kings, not the overfed and inbred variety but the pedigree who conquered lands with bands of dauntless followers and proclaimed themselves sovereign.
As two groups of women closed in on the Lord of the Feast, he protected himself by stepping to the center of a group of men and directed their conversation toward me.
“The Enchantress Hiresha surely can tell us,” he said. “Is it true ‘Morimound’ means ‘Hill of the Dead?’”
“Yes,” I said. “In reverence to those whose lives ended in the six floods.”
His voice remained unassuming. “My children tell me you bury your dead within the walls of your homes.”
“Because we are civilized,” I said. “Rain torrents unearth any buried in the ground, and only heathens use pyres.”
“Still,” he said, “the perfume of the dead must linger.”
“It is the scent of mourning.”
“That strikes even me as rather macabre.”
From atop my dais, I scowled down at the Lord of the Feast and the surrounding foreigners. His circle included a Morimound merchant, who had already inebriated himself. The man kissed the boy mimicking his wife with entirely too much enthusiasm.
The Lord of the Feast interrupted this offensive display. “Do you ever fear the deceased will break through the bricks and rise up in your homes? I’m sure to have such a nightmare.”
“Do not answer him,” I said. “You will ask no more questions of that nature, Ambassador.”
“As you wish.”
A woman cleared her throat in prelude to introducing herself to him, yet he continued to speak to me.
“I also know, Enchantress, the meaning of your name. ‘Hiresha’ is ‘the queen of gems.’”
The Lord of the Feast surprised me not insignificantly, as few enough people in Morimound considered the meaning behind my name, and never foreigners. He must have had his Feasters creep around until they found its meaning.
“My father was a diamond polisher,” I said by way of explanation.
The sweating head of the Morimound merchant wobbled and rolled as he tried to focus on my gowns. “Whysh no diamondsh? Lots o’ color. Lots and lotsh. Too goodsh for diamonsh?”
“These yellow and green jewels are diamonds, as are these blue ones.” I touched my earrings.
“Yesh, but you aresh the Flawlesh. You should haves flawlesh diamonsh.”
“I am merely an enchantress. And the color impurities grant the jewels metallic properties, increasing their enchantability.”
“Diamonds are like people,” the Lord of the Feast said, “only the flawed can be flawless.”
I glared at him. “Why must everything you say be nonsensical and offensive?”
“The truth, I fear, is ever thus.”
He appeared oblivious to his rudeness in distracting me. I should have been attending to the expressions of my guests.
A foreigner coughed into his hand before speaking. “Madam Enchantress, I have never heard of blue diamonds. Yellow ones, yes, but not blue.”
“They are rarer,” I said, scanning faces in the crowd. Salkant of the Fate Weaver detached himself from an adjacent circle of conversation and began listening to the group gathered around me. The priest had attended alone, without a woman mimic, as his wife had died in childbirth.
“Is blue the rarest color?”
“No,” I answered the foreigner. “Diamonds are the tears of the Ever Always, the hardest substance on Loam. They fall from the sky—”
Priest Salkant lifted an arm then made a fist. “And should falling diamonds pierce to the center of the world, the Fate Weaver would crush them in one of Her eight divine hands.”
&n
bsp; “The force would turn a diamond pink.” I finished for him.
I had slept with a diamond in my hand, trying to change it to pink with massive internal Attraction. Sadly, my grip was weaker than a god’s.
“Silver diamonds are rarer than pink,” Priest Salkant said.
“True,” I said, giving up on checking faces for the moment, “yet I theorize that if the goddess holds a diamond longer, if more of her force channels into the jewel, it will redden. A red diamond would be the rarest.”
“Enchantress Hiresha, my heart,” the Lord of the Feast said, “when you speak of jewels, your eyes shine like diamonds.”
I turned, not wishing him to stare into my eyes. “That is impossible. Human eyes can never attain a diamond’s luster.”
No one before had ever compared my brown eyes to diamonds. Brown diamonds did exist, and I felt an urge for a mirror, to compare the hues.
A woman nodded to the Lord of the Feast and whispered to her friend, loud enough for everyone to hear. “If I had as many jewels and silks, he’d be fawning over me.”
“A lace chaser, to be sure,” the other hussy said.
They could have only meant to provoke him and draw his attention, and I hoped he would acquiesce and stopped pestering me. I worried what people would say if he stayed nearby the entire night.
“In distant lands,” the Lord of the Feast said to me, as if the women had not even spoken, “they believe when a dragon swallows a diamond, the furnace in its gullet bakes the gem red.”
“I had not heard of that.” I felt close to exploding with exasperation.
Forcing my gaze away from the Lord of the Feast, I examined those dancing with the boys dressed as women. My heart beat at over twice its normal rate, and I could read some facial expressions, although none were incriminating.
My attention continued to slide to the lady Feaster, at how the jewels on her gown sparked and shifted colors as she spun from the arms of one man to another. The gems had to be an illusion. She licked her lips at some of her partners; instead of repelling them, her vile behavior lured more.
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