“Stop!” Hiresha choked out the word at last. “Don’t kill him.”
Emesea shook her head. She gripped Sagai’s hand as if to pull him to his feet then stomped his arm. Hiresha winced at the sound of snapping bone.
Fingers hot as sun-cooked metal gripped Hiresha. Emesea’s smile showed all her teeth. She beamed at the enchantress. Hiresha felt queasy, both from Sagai’s crumpled state and from relief. She was rather attached to her own hands.
“Loved it,” Emesea said. “You almost flew away. You’re like a sleepy purple dragon. And those five men with spears must be dragon hunters.”
Elite guards tromped past a statue of a woman holding a baby camel. They broke into a run at the sight of Hiresha standing over Sagai. She was wheeled around by Emesea, pulled over the rooftops.
Hiresha had no idea how she kept pace with Emesea’s pummeling stride. The enchantress felt she was falling forward. She flailed one arm to keep her balance on the walkways between homes. She had to hold her skirts in her scarred hand to not trip.
“Can’t have you take to wing again,” Emesea said while surging over the hump arch of a street roof. “They’ll be ready to send camel riders after you. This way.”
Emesea led her down a stairwell and into darkness. Before Hiresha’s eyes could adjust, she heard the bells. Clanging notes sounded behind her, perhaps out of the tower from which she had leaped. Tinkling bells answered from the distance. Bells gonged nearby in an angry clangor. The city shrieked in metal tones.
“Off the streets!” A red sleeve fluttered as a guard waved. “Off with you! That’s curfew ‘til the bells stop.”
“Is it a fire?” A woman sniffed the air.
A man gripped the beak-shaped knife he wore as an amulet. “Someone raiding the city?”
“Let the watch worry over it,” the robed guard said. “To your homes.”
Hiresha gripped her head. The thought of all this uproar over her caused an echoing ring inside her skull.
“We’ll hurry us home,” Emesea said to the guard. She walked with the enchantress past a stall selling lion pelts, through a crowd of frantic eyes. Emesea pulled Hiresha by a merchant and between clotheslines laden with bright fabrics.
“Is Fos near?” Hiresha asked.
“With Inannis.” Emesea plucked down a dress from the display, glanced at Hiresha, then pinned it back on the line.
Hiresha scowled at the thought of Fos and Inannis together. “And my diamonds?”
“Inannis lifted those, too.” Emesea unpinned a red dress.
A pang of hope eased its way through Hiresha’s muscles. “Then why are we wasting time here?”
“Purple isn’t a good color for you right now.” She nodded to the stairwell, where the elite guards were squinting down the street.
“It won’t be the first time I hide it under an inferior color.” Hiresha pulled down a sheet of blue silk embroidered with stylized clouds. Her attempt to wrap it around her waist ended in a slipping mess. She had not dressed herself in a sari for years.
The merchant stepped in, scolding them for trying to buy when she had to pack her wares for the curfew, but she accepted Emesea’s coin quickly enough. When they had the sari draped over Hiresha, only one purple sleeve could be seen. Emesea covered it with her green shawl.
“I never thought I’d say this, but you have my thanks.” Hiresha lifted a corner to wipe a drop of blood off Emesea’s nose.
Emesea nodded and pulled a red dress over her head. It draped over her short skirt. They headed out. To the guards behind them, she and the enchantress would look like any other of the black-haired women shuffling down the street. Emesea did have shorter locks than most, cut at a slant and longer on one side, but thankfully her shawl had covered the strange hairstyle during their run. The guards should not know it.
It pained Hiresha to slow to a walk. The excitement of a reunion with Fos and her diamonds made her legs twitch with pent-up motion. Her heart beat as fast as the clattering of the bells. She shuddered each time a city guard glanced over her, even if he could never recognize her by sight.
They stopped by a fountain. It flowed in a miniature of the city’s onion-domed skyline. Emesea stooped to cup water into her mouth, and she motioned Hiresha to do the same.
“They’re locking down the city.” Emesea pointed.
The water felt like ice in Hiresha’s mouth. She glanced to the side. The streets were emptying, and she had a clear view of the gate leading to the blinding desert. Five guardsmen on camels clomped through the closing double doors. Their over-robes billowed. Their hands were rooted on sword hilts. They started talking to a man Hiresha knew to be an elite guard by his silver-etched spear.
“There’s two ways for us out of this city. The bloody way.” Emesea nodded to the men at the gates. “Or the hard way.”
Five men hauled on the red-painted gates. They boomed shut, darkening the street.
“I don’t want anyone dying on my account,” Hiresha said.
The broadness of Emesea’s smile was more intimidating than a man’s clenched fist. “Knew you’d say that.”
Emesea and the enchantress turned down a side street. Hiresha might have thought it night, except that families crowded doorways, peering out onto the abandoned lanes. A mother with children bobbing out from under her skirts shouted to Hiresha to hurry home. A father holding a scimitar asked for news.
“A dragon is loose in the city,” Emesea shouted back. “Hold your children tight or she’ll carry them into the sky.”
Emesea pulled Hiresha into an alley stairway to dodge a guard patrol. The enchantress suspected a dog had died on a nearby roof by the smell. Though she was crammed shoulder to shoulder with Emesea, Hiresha still had to yell over the bells.
“Are we going to Fos now?”
“No point to the big man if we’re not fighting our way out. We’ll be meeting him and my stick bug in Oasis City. That’s the backup plan.”
Hiresha felt uneasy. “What stick bug is this?”
“Inannis. Do you have the gem to cure him?”
The enchantress shook her head. “Used it today.”
Emesea turned away, looked out the alley. She pulled Hiresha after her.
“I shouldn’t like to put Fos at risk,” the enchantress said. “But might I have a few words with him?”
The shorter woman with slanted hair said nothing.
“And I’ll need my diamonds. I’ll be of no use without…”
A guard stepped from behind a building. Hiresha startled. Emesea swung her smile onto him.
The man peered at them with his bright green eyes. “Have you seen a woman in a purple dress?”
“Yes,” Emesea said, “she was flying between the towers. Amazing as riding a crocodile.”
Only then did Hiresha remember she was not wearing any visible purple. Her throat unlocked enough to sip a breath.
“Be home with you.” The guard waved them away.
“I can see it from here.” Emesea tugged Hiresha toward a red doorway.
“I suppose I should be grateful,” the enchantress said after she had gathered herself, “for my utter lack of height or other notable features.”
Emesea banged on the red doorway. They were swept into a room painted with a pattern of crimson lace. Copper cups dotted the walls in alcoves. The skylight shone ruddy, the hues of late afternoon. Children sat on a stairway ledge leading around the room, bouncing their legs. A man with a pointed beard bowed and spoke in a well-oiled voice.
“If only my house were worthy of such beautiful guests. My fare is poor, but how honored my family would be if you joined us for dinner.”
“We’re only hungry to be gone.” Emesea thumped the carpets beneath their feet. “Open your tunnel.”
“A thousand pardons, but the bells.” The man gestured to his ear with a hand bearing five rings. “I can’t let you through with the city ringing. I am an honest smuggler, after all.”
Emesea clamped a hand on his shoulder and pulled hi
m down to her level. “When you sell us out to the guards, you can tell them I threatened you.”
The man’s eyes traveled down from Hiresha’s sleeve—purple had slipped out from underneath the shawl—to the obsidian blade Emesea had pressed against his waistline.
The smuggler jingled a key ring, his mouth a sour smile. “I fear the tunnel will do no favors to your dresses.”
Pulling aside rugs uncovered a trapdoor. Emesea made the man walk ahead of them, carrying an oil lamp. A flame burned above its brass nozzle. The tunnel was a dusty crawlspace, and Hiresha expected the worm-eaten supporting beams to collapse from her sneezes.
When the smuggler shoved aside a rock to reveal the outside, Hiresha touched Emesea’s arm.
“Tie him up if you must, but don’t kill him.”
“Don’t see why I’d do either.” Emesea poured coins into the smuggler’s hand.
“Why,” Hiresha said, “we can’t have him telling the guards where we’ve gone.”
“They have to know. That’s the point.” Emesea guided the enchantress outside the tunnel and into a blast of salty breeze. “Where we’re going, those soft-heeled merchant's sons won’t follow.”
13
The Hard Way
Hiresha had lived a respectable life and had never been so near a beach. The sunset blazed across the sea. Water the color of molten copper seared her eyes. The surf roared.
She had a hundred objections. They jammed in her mouth, and one rattled out at random. “People die at sea.”
“Fisherman do,” Emesea said. “They go out every morning. We’ll not be so long.”
“The monstrosities under the waves—”
“Aren’t that big. The sea is. Probably won’t even see one, and then won’t you feel cheated?”
“A single monster could ruin a perfectly good day. Wait!”
Emesea dashed between the driftwood shanties, motioning the enchantress to stay where she was. Hiresha had half a mind to search out the tunnel again amidst the rocks. Before she could decide, she saw him.
Tethiel’s coat was dyed with the sunset. He rode out of the red glare, and the flicking tail of his horse swirled the sky’s hues with violet and blue twilight. His shadow loomed past racks of drying seaweed and gnat swarms, beyond skeletons of boats with their timbers stripped, up the city wall.
A chill peeled away Hiresha’s sleepiness layer by layer. Awake, every nerve tingling, she felt her dresses flowing over her skin, the fabric alive in the sea gusts. It was if she were drowning in silk.
“Lord Tethiel.” Hiresha nodded to the Feaster.
“Enchantress Hiresha.” Hooves clopped toward her. Behind the silhouette of the rider, the sun touched the sea, and the world warped with crimson. “Jaraah is celebrating you.”
The bells sang and screamed.
The city wall was red and hulking with shadows. What might have been a horse was stretched into the outline of a giant lizard with eight legs. The man who rode it lifted an arm that ended not in a hand but a snaggle of teeth.
“You were right to leave,” Tethiel said. “Nothing is more trying than a party, especially one held in your honor.”
The wind tore the shawl from Hiresha’s shoulder. She said, “I assume you heard I was expelled.”
“They can’t expel you. You are the Mindvault Academy. That’d be like a man cutting out his own liver to satisfy his hunger.”
“About as sensible, yes,” Hiresha said. “I find their hospitality involves too much surgery, and I’m leaving to begin anew.”
“That is why I came.” The mounted silhouette reached down to offer a hand. Dragons and crocodiles were emblazoned into his satin glove. Tethiel’s fingers bent at unnatural angles. “Your ties are severed, my heart. We may at last ride together and be gone with the dawn.”
Hiresha’s hand lifted halfway toward his before she realized it. She had imagined this countless times, leaving all obligations aside and riding into the night with Tethiel.
She withdrew her hand, resting it on her thudding chest. Just as often she had thought of telling this Feaster never to meet her again. Being near him was too terrible a delight.
“Tethiel, your favors are what caused my expulsion. I’ll accept no more.”
“Favors freely given are always too costly. But they are still better than favors forced.” He waved to the gatehouses on either side. They were opening. “The city men are afraid of the setting sun, of the sea, but they will come. They’ll escort you back to the party.”
“I intend to find my own way.”
The horse snorted and tried to chomp at Hiresha. Tethiel leaned to force him away, trotting his mount in a circle. The sunset pushed the shadows away from Tethiel’s face. Webs of wrinkles spread outward from eyes that had a ruby glint in the day’s last light. Hiresha thought she saw worry in the downward twitch of his brow.
“My heart, the sea’s an impassable emptiness. Not even that rabid hound you came with thinks otherwise. I can smell her terror from here.”
Hiresha stiffened. “We only mean to go to Oasis City. Doubtless we’ll pull back to shore in a few hours and make the rest of the journey overland.”
“The sea is a beautiful peril, a peaceful violence, and a watery desert,” the Lord of the Feast said. “Were you one of my children, I’d forbid you from going near it.”
“As I’m neither child nor Feaster, the matter is settled.”
Hiresha stepped away from him. The wind had shaken loose her sari, and the silk caught on the rocks. The dress snaked its way off her. Hiresha strode toward the sea in her gown of triumphant purple.
Over her shoulder, she said, “Once I’m secure, I hope we may meet as equals.”
“Don’t set your sights so low, my heart. Were you my equal, I would not condescend to appear in your company.”
Tethiel looked ready to say more, but he was interrupted by being cleaved in two by an obsidian sword.
Hiresha’s hands jerked to cover her mouth. The weapon looked like a wooden practice sword serrated with black glass. Tethiel and his horse split down the middle like a piece of torn papyrus. His halves shriveled into fragments of shadow that slithered out of sight.
Emesea lifted the sword overhead, spinning about, glancing to the horizon. “Burn the world! Thought I had him before sundown.”
The horizon was empty. The first star lit.
That was his illusion, Hiresha realized. He wasn’t harmed. Sometimes she thought Tethiel was immune to the obvious, and a bladed stick was an obvious thing indeed.
Hiresha unclamped her hands from her mouth. “I’ll thank you not to chop my acquaintances in half.”
“He was the Lord of the Feast, wasn’t he?”
Hiresha inclined her head. She suspected she had felt the rending cut of Emesea’s club more keenly than had his illusion. A buzzing tension in the air convinced her that Tethiel was still nearby. She hoped he would appear once more—not to help her—only long enough to say farewell until next they met.
Her eyes flicked up to the city gates. The open doors spewed men on camels. The guards would mob Hiresha.
The enchantress took hold of Emesea’s shoulder, was surprised by the hardness of it. Hiresha never thought she would be the one to pull Emesea toward the sea.
The two women jogged through the slums. Timid eyes peeped out of homes. Crawlspace doorways were blocked off with what looked like shields made of driftwood and netting. Two men whittling harpoons from bone looked up with frozen confusion, as if they were seeing spirits running by.
The last homes fell away. Emesea seemed to glide over the grey sand, but it dragged on Hiresha’s feet. She saw a line of men leaning forward on the beach. On second glance they turned out to be posts of brown glass, shaped with human faces in poses of anguish. Their eye-sockets and mouths drooped, melted, twisting. Wind-scoured fingers dug into pitted scalps.
Hiresha felt as if she had eaten a bellyful of slimy sand. She stopped. Once again she imagined herself taking Tethiel
’s hand and riding a deadly wave of illusion through the guards.
It would’ve been ever so easy, she thought. And easy choices such as that led to my expulsion and the skin-stitcher’s knife.
Emesea knocked the wooden heft of her sword against the leaning totems. “They’re only warnings.”
Hiresha could hear the thump of camels and the shouts of guards. If there is a way for me, it is forward.
“Warnings for other people.” Emesea propped her obsidian sword in the sand.
She hopped out of her red dress. Only a slip of a skirt remained. Her chest was bare except for a tattoo of a winding serpent. Its scales flashed blue in the dusk, and Hiresha realized that lapis lazuli must have been ground into the ink.
Emesea tapped her neck and the tattoo’s fanged head. “Met a sea dragon as a girl, helped save her hatchlings. She won’t let anything so much as nibble our toes.”
That sounded far-fetched to Hiresha, but the guards also sounded too near. Lamps wove through the fishermen’s houses. She could hear hollering and the snap of breaking wood.
Hiresha marched past the line of warning totems. Their tops had been polished into points. The enchantress could not help but notice that several of the glass stakes had been ripped from the beach and splintered.
14
Harsh Partings
The sand hardened with moisture. Tiny holes dotted the beach, and creatures scurried into them and squirted out water.
Hiresha’s nose wrinkled, and she followed a slaughterhouse stench to two boats. Men crouched around one. They scuttled away from the slicing sweep of Emesea’s sword.
“Leave my boats and keep your limbs.”
The men were stunned, either by Emesea’s aggression or by the tattoo that curved from behind her back to coil between her breasts.
The enchantress peered into the boat that stank. A maze of entrails gleamed up at her from a disemboweled sheep. Half its fur had darkened and matted, and the sand beneath the boat had turned black. Hiresha noted that the vessel was missing a few planks.
The enchantress asked, “Is this some manner of sacrifice?”
One man shook his hands at the boat with the sheep. “Don’t! You’ll bloody the tide.”
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