“I never expected to be without Fos. With an enchanted sword he might have dealt with the Murderfish.” Hiresha lifted her arm from the jar, leaving its water pure. She blew the frost of salt off her hand. The crystals vanished. “And now I’m trapped on a boat with the Lord of the Feast and Emesea the Traitor. Though my other choices involved surrender or murdering city guards to escape.”
The Jeweled Feaster paced, her long legs swishing by within her mirror. “You haven’t asked Emesea about Fos, where he is. You’re afraid what she might say.”
Hiresha glanced at a mirror displaying Emesea’s face. “When she told me we’d meet him in Oasis City, her tone of voice changed, and she maintained eye contact to see if I’d catch her lie.”
The Jeweled Feaster bared her teeth in a manner that might frighten a charging lion. “Even then she planned to abandon him.”
The enchantress said, “Yet she shows no stooping or face-plucking gestures that would hint at guilt.”
“We hope that means Fos is free,” Intuition said. “Maybe he rescued the fennec, too.”
“A romantic idea that assumes Emesea would feel any guilt at killing.” Hiresha allowed herself to view a cherished memory of the fox dashing across a tea table at the Mindvault Academy. Tail raised in triumph, he had smacked a honey spoon and launched the sticky projectile at the chancellor’s face.
The Jeweled Feaster drew her faceted claws over her neck. “If Emesea hurt Fos, you’ll have to kill her.”
“I do owe her a betrayal,” Hiresha said.
“We don’t like the idea.” Intuition peered up at the mirror with Emesea’s face. “Hurting her would be like breaking a garnet with a unique hue. She’s one-of-a-kind-ceptional.”
“She’s indispensable for now.” The enchantress willed the mackerel to float between her hands. “I need to extract the wild magic from this fish. There’s only one problem.”
“Nothing like that has been done.” Intuition leaped, legs tucked upward, and spun about in the air. “Never ever!”
“Perhaps it’ll be like dispelling enchantment scripts from a medallion.” Hiresha tried it. “No, not at all.”
She felt a touch foolish, flummoxed by a fish. An enchantress could Attract any thing to her hand, but magic had no form and no weight.
“How can I grip what cannot be held?”
After thirty-seven attempts, she wondered if she wasted her time. Yet she had seen the mackerel spark with a dazzling defensive magic. More than that, she could sense power remained in the dead creature.
“I don’t believe it can be isolated,” Hiresha said.
“Not with the techniques you learned in that crypt Academy full of well-dressed mummies.” The Jeweled Feaster lifted a rose. She pressed a finger in its center and Attracted. All the petals remained on her finger in a spiral of thorn-shaped red, leaving a bare stem in her other hand. “Try a new perspective on the problem.”
“Yes, a new point of view,” Intuition said. “One person sees a desert, another a paradise.”
“I prefer my unique outlook on life, that of persistent intelligence.”
All the same, Hiresha gave the matter some thought. She decided if she could not Attract the wild magic, she might seize and yank the entirety of the mackerel and leave behind its fishy power. She tried it, and it failed.
The enchantress studied a mirror showing herself in the laboratory, a true reflection, except delayed by a few seconds. She detected the moving fish had trailed a ghost of light, a glimpsed halo of color, though each time she viewed the scene again that hue changed. By lagging behind the fish, the magic appeared to have ties to matter and be subject to inertia.
“It is like a substance,” she said, “but without dimension.”
“A contradiction,” the Jeweled Feaster said. “Now you’re getting somewhere.”
“As far as I can determine, the universe is made of ninety-five percent contradiction. And I’m not certain about the last five percent.”
Hiresha Attracted the fish again and bent her will on seizing the wild magic. It felt rather like trying to gather a smell in one’s hand, only harder. As Hiresha channeled all her focus into the aquatic specimen, every mirror blinked out.
She needed only four dozen attempts. In the end, the dreamer’s belief in herself overcame petty impossibilities. A glob of wild magic levitated between her fingers. The size of a pearl, it hummed in and out of existence. Eddies of light stormed within it like a melting opal.
Intuition held her hands up to it. “It’s warm! And it smells like the nowness of spring days.”
“Please stop talking,” Hiresha said. “I’ve had all the nonsense I can manage.”
Hiresha could Attract the bead of wild magic into parts. She divided it into a thousand grains. They fizzed between her hands. Her mind pulled back the flecks of light that strayed too far from her fingers and Repulsed those that came too close to her skin.
The enchantress reached into a mirror displaying herself sleeping in The Paragon. She spread her hands, and the wild magic started sifting off the side of the boat and into the water.
The Jeweled Feaster tapped on her glass. “You wouldn’t have wanted me to distract you earlier, but the Murderfish is still tracking you.”
Hiresha had not seen any signs of pursuit while awake. Viewing the same seas in the dream, she detected differences in the average shapes and heights of waves. Something gargantuan swam behind their boat, too deep to see. The surface still trembled with its passing.
The enchantress had the ear-roaring urge to jerk her hands out of the mirror, to hide in her dream and never return to a world with perils sporting so many tentacles. She knew, though, that it would not do. I can’t be weak in front of myselves.
Hiresha’s lips pinched together in a look of intensity, not a scowl. She withdrew her hands from the glassy sludge of the mirror.
“I don’t have the traditional means for an enchantress to protect herself. For any surety of escaping this sea, I need a new technique.”
“Taste the wild magic,” Intuition said. “It’ll make us strong, like the fish.”
“Not as strong as a kraken,” the Jeweled Feaster said.
“True,” Hiresha said. “I’ll let Tethiel and Emesea experiment. I must keep my mind clear for new opportunities.”
“New last chances.” The Feaster glanced upward.
Beams of ruddy light descended from the ceiling. The dais’s diamonds took on the tint of rubies. The full moon of the dreamer had slid into view through the skylight. Some might have called it a “blood moon,” but Hiresha preferred to think of its hue as between that of a fire opal and a ruby.
23
Dragon Song
Hiresha awoke half-drowned in bilge water and stinking of fish. Her head rolled as she tried to focus her eyes. Everything was dark.
“The Murderfish tipped the boat once, and even that didn’t wake you,” Tethiel said. He sat with his hands pinned below him. His teeth chattered as if he huddled in a snowy gale rather than a balmy night’s breeze.
“You slept half the day,” Emesea said. She stared down the length of her knife. She lifted a ballast stone and swiped it against the blade, breaking off a fleck of obsidian.
“And half the night.” Tethiel pinched his eyes closed and clenched his teeth.
“Time sleeping is always well spent,” Hiresha said.
“Then your conscience is clear. I have many regrets,” he said. Sweat beaded across his brow like little moonstones. “They all involve eating that fish. I haven’t said anything worth hearing in hours. I might as well be dead.”
Hiresha dabbed her sleeve over his head. His skin burned. She had never seen him so disheveled at night. “You look uncomfortably close to death.”
“It’s only the strain.” He drew a shuddering breath. “Not to Feast. Wild magic poisons inhibitions.”
The enchantress glanced over the sea. “You’re saving your power for the Murderfish?”
Tethiel e
yed Emesea sharpening her knife. Then his gaze scorched its way up Hiresha, and the dregs of her drowsiness drained to leave a thrilling tension.
His tongue flickered over his lips. “Right now you both look ever so appealing.”
“Oh,” Hiresha said.
Emesea sighted down the length of her knife again. The obsidian achieved such razor thinness that its edge appeared clear as glass. She nodded to herself.
“What I meant, my heart, was how did you summon such a distinguished entourage?” Tethiel pointed his chin toward the back of the boat.
Hiresha frowned. Worry zinged up from her heart as she peered over the side. She could not help but imagine she would once again see the dark slat of the Murderfish’s eye.
A plethora of fish swam after them. Some lit the waves yellow, others orange. Some had spines on their fins, others graceful tails that flowed behind like veils. One slithered in a line of red, an arm-length sea snake. They flapped against each other, trying to be closest to the boat planks. Water from their urgency splattered Hiresha’s face.
Tethiel said, “You waved your hand like a queen, and your subjects came.”
Hiresha thought back to her time in the dream laboratory. “I suppose there was the matter of my tossing wild magic overboard. Distilled wild magic.”
The press of fish enticed Hiresha with its flapping, splashing, flitting liveliness. She found herself reaching toward the water. She twitched her hand back, out of reach of the snapping teeth of a leaping fish.
Emesea crouched beside Hiresha. The warrior lashed an arm out, snatched a trout from the sea, and bashed its head against a plank. The fish lay still in the hull beside the mackerel.
“Useful, with our net gone,” the warrior said. “Next time, save some of the sea nectar for me.”
Hiresha had no intention of doing so. She’s wild enough already.
Tethiel’s hands twitched as if trying to free themselves, but he kept them trapped under his legs. “Eme of the Sea was good enough to distract me with her tales. I hope she’ll continue.”
The warrior asked, “Want a story about the gorgeous or the ferocious?”
“To me, they’re the same,” he said.
Emesea gutted the fish with a few flicks of her wrist. She spoke of a green whale, underwater volcanoes, a school of deadly fish called the Fanged Typhoon, giant fire worms that cooked the sea, cronefish that sweated inky death, a lobster whose claw could snip time, and tentacled creatures that mesmerized by the shifting patterns on their skin. Meanwhile, blood dripped from the fish that hung from the rigging.
The enchantress would have protested the sea stories, but their terrors seemed to calm Tethiel. They had quite the opposite effect on her. Hiresha felt as if sea fleas hopped over her skin, nibbling at her composure. Any moment the Murderfish could smash us to the inconsequential. What could we do to stop it?
When Hiresha thought of a more productive topic, she blurted it out.
“Your dragon,” she said to Emesea. “You said you’d call it.”
“Only if we needed scaly help.”
Hiresha scowled. “And being whipped about a by blue-blooded—”
“Fine.” Emesea reached for the oilskin sack. “Keep your dress on.”
Tethiel cast Hiresha a damp smile. “Does the Provost of Applied Enchantment now count dragons in her social strata?”
Hiresha felt an itching heat. Embarrassment should have stopped her from asking Emesea about her dragon. It seemed so unlikely, but the warrior had done nothing but challenge incredulity.
The enchantress said, “If he can drive off the Murderfish, I’ll be most pleased to make a dragon’s acquaintance.”
Emesea rummaged in her oilskin sack and pulled out panpipes. The third-shortest cylinder had been crushed. Emesea tried to reshape the pipe by wedging in a finger.
Tethiel asked, “Are those made of dragon teeth?”
“Condor quills,” she said.
“Honesty is the most unbecoming habit,” he said. “Oh ho! I might be on the mend.”
Emesea pursed her lips against the panpipes. Her first note was the mournful cry of a drowned soul. Her second, that of a bird calling for her lost nest mate. The third, of wind whispering through a cave eroded into a sea cliff.
The depth of emotion shocked the enchantress. Hiresha felt pinned against the planks by sorrow. The sound punctured her from heart to spine. She could not help but think of friends that had been taken from her.
The fennec, with his white ear tufts. Fos, with his boyish smile and easy grace. Maid Janny, with her rude winks and insufferable faithfulness. The maid’s daughter, and Alyla, too.
The panpipes vibrated with sadness. The melody had notes of silence, from the broken pipe. Hiresha would wait for a sound that never came.
The enchantress recalled her first courtship, her first disappointments. She thought of the children she had once been certain she would raise. She remembered the twisting tower of the Academy now forbidden. She imagined her diamonds forgotten in some dusty chest, perhaps dropped, damaged, drowned.
She thought of the years of life lost to her disease.
She saw herself dying alone.
The song ended in an upward trill, as if a songbird thought she recognized her mate in the distance. Or perhaps, Hiresha thought, she at last admitted to herself that what was lost won’t return.
The sea was hushed. The wind had stilled, and the sails sagged slack.
Emesea rested the panpipes upon her knee. Her cheeks reflected blue from the nearest dream storm. The enchantress needed some time to realize the warrior cried.
Hiresha’s surprise redoubled when she spotted tears on Tethiel’s face. Streaks crossed down the lines etched on either side of his mouth. His shoulders slumped as if he carried a great burden.
Only when she felt a drip on her chin did Hiresha admit that she too had wept.
She needed three swallows before she could speak. “Will your dragon come soon?”
Emesea shrugged. “If she heard. The seas are wide, and they are many.”
The warrior slung herself down, facing toward the side of the boat. She nestled one arm under her head. The enchantress assumed she slept.
The stars winked out of view as Hiresha too descended toward slumber. On the stairway in her mind, she heard Tethiel’s voice.
“I’ll watch for the inevitable.”
She turned back to see marble steps leading up to an archway filled with night sky and a dream storm as azure as sapphire.
“If the Murderfish returns and I expect the worst,” he said, “should I wake you? Or is there peace in your dreams?”
24
The Rogue
Hiresha woke to the sound of weeping. Shallow breaths were interrupted by wheezing catches in the throat.
The enchantress unpeeled her cheek from the planking. A dampness on her face forced her to worry that she had been the one crying, but no, the noise continued. The thought of anyone on that boat sobbing baffled her. Hiresha could not guess whom she would see in tears.
A greyness clung to the morning. The air hung dead, the sail limp. Waves only lapped against the boat.
Emesea hugged the prow. She faced the emptiness of water.
The enchantress knelt beside Emesea, only then realizing that the warrior might have wished to weep alone. Yet Hiresha saw no shame on her round face, no embarrassment that another witnessed her dribbling nose, her waterlogged cheeks, her chapped lips quirking in pain.
“I miss my stick bug,” Emesea said.
“Your what?”
“My Inannis.” She commanded more jaw line than chin, and her tears dripped down the center of her face. “Did you know he saved me from the prison in Oasis City? No one else could’ve done it.”
“From Bleak Wells?” Hiresha had suffered just to see Fos thrown down the prison’s oubliette.
“Inannis is an avatar of the Obsidian Jaguar. He hated when I told him that, but only a man blessed by the god of stealth and co
urage could’ve gotten me out. He did so much for me. Except follow me to sea.”
Hiresha remembered the slight man struggling against the waves, calling out and coughing. “He was afraid?”
“He was a coward then. I knew he’d be, that’s why I bought this boat without telling him,” she said. “I still had stupid hope.”
The Paragon scraped its way over a patch of maroon seaweed. Air sacs bobbed, and a spiny hair of plants bristled and clung to the wooden planks. Hiresha worried the hundreds of barbs would drag the boat to a standstill, but the seaweed let go with the next wave.
A clot of fluid dangled from Emesea’s chin. She turned to Tethiel sleeping. “He is even more afraid. But he followed you.”
Why did he? A fluttering sensation filled Hiresha as if she had swallowed a songbird live. Tethiel had known of the dangers and still defied her wishes to try to keep her safe. She supposed she could not have expected more of Tethiel. Or less. And would I ever do something so reckless for him? That, she did not know.
The enchantress had told Tethiel to wake her, if all was lost. She wanted her life to end with her eyes open.
She said, “It does suggest a fearsome level of dedication.”
“Maybe I was meant to follow Inannis. Could we have been the next Jorano and Graia?”
“I don’t know—”
“The strength of their love turned them into trees with trunks woven together. Only to burn because they honored each other more than the gods.”
“Why did you take me to sea?” Hiresha asked. “You couldn’t have left Inannis for my sake.”
Emesea’s pupils looked like eclipsed suns wreathed in gold fire. She peered at the enchantress then gazed to the open sea to the west. “I meant to take you to the Dominion of the Sun.”
Hiresha could not say she was surprised. Betrayal was the foundation of their relationship. The audacity of the plan still astounded her, to think they could sail over the Dream Storm Sea. “To give your realm its first enchantress?”
“You could bring more honor than a thousand warriors.”
“On that theoretical point, we agree.”
“My people keep a better history than your gold-sucking scribes. This is the fifth age.” Emesea lifted a stubby hand and counted off her fingers. “In the first, man displeased the gods. All but the bravest of us were turned to monkeys. We failed again in the second age, and the gods covered the Lands of Loam in ice. The third age ended in rot and famine. In the fourth, titans stomped cities to dust. The fifth age will end in fire.”
Dream Storm Sea Page 14