“Executing enchantresses will hardly endear you to the empire.” Though Hiresha spoke to Sheamab, she did not expect to sway the Bright Palm. The enchantress did wish to give the thief another worry. “The vizier most often drowns anyone in sand who harms an enchantress. In your case he might have to resort to a burning.”
Inannis said, “Treaties have been signed after worse atrocities.”
Sheamab gripped her rope and slid a few feet as an enchantment failed beneath her. After righting herself again on the black and white tiles, she said, “I suggested a different strategy, but the final say among Bright Palms goes to the youngest present. Twenty-fourth tenet.”
Hiresha had not heard of that. “And who is the youngest in your party?”
Sheamab ignored the question as if it were never spoken.
The enchantress did not know how she felt about hearing that even Sheamab would have wished to avoid attacking the Academy. “Granting the last word to some young bumpkin who happens to have glowing fingers only further proves your order is flawed. There’s a reason why the child Pharaoh rules only in name.”
“A Bright Palm’s place is sacrifice,” Sheamab said. “I have always seen a better way, but in keeping myself alive through so many years, my judgment in the order is suspect.”
Without inflection in the voice, Hiresha had no way of knowing if Sheamab agreed with the idea or not. Then the enchantress remembered the Bright Palm would not even have the power to agree or disagree with the tenet, having lost all emotion. Hiresha’s chest clenched, but she could not tell if it was sorrow for Sheamab or an aftershock from another of the recent tragedies.
A carving of a swooping owl stretched its stone wings over the next archway. The hall’s stained-glass windows were of gold, brown, and white and patterned in heart shapes after the face of the masked owl. A stormy gloom outside cast the hall in shadows.
Inannis opened a door full of orange light. A fire crackled in a brazier, sparks Attracted through enchantment back into the copper bowl rather than onto the jungle-patterned rug. The panes of the latched window were full of the white of snow.
“A more pleasant prison you could not ask for.” The thief unfolded his delicate hands from his sleeves, turning them over the brazier and rubbing his fingertips.
Part of him wants to please me. The human part. He’s no Bright Palm. Hiresha dared to hope she could sway him. The Bright Palms pay him in healing magic. I can offer him a cure.
Bright Palm Sheamab was gazing between Hiresha and Inannis in a way that tickled Hiresha with anxiety. She can’t have anticipated my plan, yet, can she? Her magic doesn’t grant her the power to read thoughts.
Another Bright Palm jogged into the room, holding his spear and cudgel. “I have found you, Bright Palm Sheamab—”
“Where is your safety rope, Bright Palm Gio? Falling would only waste your magic.”
“I had to come alone,” the tribesman said. “The kitchen folk have locked themselves away from us and are threatening to spoil the food.”
Hiresha blinked her eyes open and closed two times before she understood. The servants are protesting? She suspected Maid Janny had arranged it.
“The threat is empty,” Sheamab said. “If the food runs out, they will starve, and we will live. Did you explain this to them?”
Inannis started to say something but was talked over.
“We did not, Bright Palm Sheamab.”
Sheamab threw the thief a rope. “You will descend with me.”
His fingers pattered up and down the cord, and he cast a longing look at the brazier’s fire. “I would be best suited watching Enchantress Hiresha. My eyes combined with a Bright Palm’s forceful persuasion. Besides, the enchantress still owes me a garnet from OasisCity.”
“You’ll have your trifle.” Sheamab lifted Hiresha’s bound hands and pointed at the purple jewels embedded in her fingers. “Pluck these out. Then her earrings. Shred her gowns and throw them from window. Leave her with not one jewel. The enchantress must be disarmed.”
Inannis pulled away from the brazier. “This room has become too cold for me.”
Hiresha’s eyes were huge as she watched him leave with Sheamab. She has thought of everything, has left me with no chance. Three Bright Palms advanced on her, unsheathing knives from belts. Two bronze blades flashed orange, and facets glinted on a third obsidian edge.
Burning, molten panic seeped through Hiresha. It felt as if her insides smoldered and blackened, and she could have cried out for Inannis of all people, for mercy, for anything. Instead of letting her sanity escape her mouth in a scream, she held it in. I must think. I must escape.
The neutral expressions on the three Bright Palms frightened her as much as their knives. As immovable as cliffs. Her head rang, and every pore of her body leaked a cold sweat as their knives swept in.
The diamond in her chest flashed, its redness faint through her layers of gowns. Its enchantment had awakened from the approaching weapons, and two of the knives were Burdened to the floor and broken. Hiresha wished she could have made the enchantment strong enough to repulse a third blade, but she had not expected to be attacked so often in one sitting.
The last bronze razor cut at the gowns draped over her shoulders. It scraped against the gilt and silver embroidery. After sawing at the same stretch of fabric for a few moments, the Bright Palm lifted the blade to his eyes.
“Dull as a stone now.” He spoke in the level tone of an observation. The stubble on his broad jaw was a similar length to his short-cropped hair, as if he shaved his head and chin at the same time.
The tribesman Bright Palm tore at her gowns, but the embroidery only cut his hands. Light leaked from the wounds, but they closed in seconds. The third Bright Palm, whose mouth was so small he had a fish’s expression, picked at the buttons on her back. How long it took the Bright Palms to undress her, Hiresha could not say. Even the deft Maid Janny needed an hour for the task. The men yanked and pinched, conferring with each other about the puzzle of each layer as if she were not there.
Little of Hiresha’s consciousness was. She plunged and whirled in crosswinds of terror, nausea, and fatigue. At one point she felt she was buried in snow, frigid on the outside but blazing within from the embers that filled her. A vessel of smoldering worry and ash. She entertained the strange thought that her clay skin would shatter.
Her senses returned in a flash of pain when something stung her finger. Her teeth ground against each other as the tip of a bronze knife dug a garnet out from her thumb. The jewel dropped onto the rug, and her blood dripped in dark stains.
Hiresha was naked except for her red silk undergarments. Light from the brazier reflected off the diamond embedded between her breasts. The Bright Palm with enough jaw for two men held her next finger in the vice of his hand.
They mustn’t take my jewels. When her next garnet was cut out, she also lost another measure of hope. With nothing to enchant, I’ll have nothing left.
For one moment, she thought she might be saved. Spellsword Fos might charge into the room, his greatsword held high. Or Tethiel might even barge in and distract the Bright Palms. But Fos fell off the plateau, and if he’s alive he’s lost an eye. And I told Tethiel to hide in the Grindstone workshop.
Waiting will be the death of me. I must act. Now.
She thrashed. She was held by the Bright Palm with the small mouth and the tribesman. The touch of their skin was at once too cold and too hot. Hiresha did not waste her time begging or pleading. Instead she clung to the thread of her focus and realized that she had but one chance left.
I must go to sleep. I must enter my dream laboratory before they plunder the last of my jewels.
She gasped and spoke through her clenched teeth. “I must sit. Or I’ll faint.”
“It’d be better if she was sitting,” the man with the knife said.
They shoved her into a chair painted with garden plants intertwining in torturous patterns. The wooden back dug into her spine. The fen
nec sprinted in circles around her. Between yips pitched as high as a bird’s whistle, he barked with such force that his small body twitched backward.
She lowered her head forward and closed her eyes, hoping the Bright Palms thought her in a daze of pain. Using the discipline of an enchantress, she imagined herself on a stairway leading down, away from the room where strangers carved out pieces of her.
The stairs shivered under her feet, rock scraping against rock, but she ran down them. Have to hurry. Have to be careful. I won’t have time for a second attempt.
Forty steps separated her from the blissful darkness of dream below. To either side of the stair waited the blackness of dreamless unconsciousness, which would ruin her. With the granite sliding back and forth under her feet, she had to keep her arms out to either side to maintain her balance.
A cracking rumble made her glance behind. A garnet the size of a boulder was tumbling down the stair. They must’ve pried it from my finger. The pointed pavilion side of the jewel flipped and slammed into a step, splintering stone. The gem tipped toward her. Hiresha saw herself reflected purple in the main facet of the garnet. In the glassy surface she appeared small, rooted in place.
It won’t end like this. It won’t. The enchantress threw herself to the side, sliding off the stair but clinging to the edge. Her legs dangled in a soothing wetness of oblivion.
The garnet smashed its way past her, gashing and breaking the steps. It bounced once more then fell off the end of the stair.
Hiresha pulled herself upright. She sprinted downward, she skidded, and she slipped over crumbling steps. She reached the end, where the garnet had fallen, and she leapt.
16
Dream Laboratory
Hiresha gazed down at her hands. Three jewels were missing from her right, three holes between her second and third knuckles that dribbled blood onto her palm. As she watched, a fourth jewel winked out of sight. In one laboratory mirror, another garnet tumbled down the stone stair.
Her yellow-gowned reflection banged on the silver-plated glass. “We have to get away with Lord Black Toes and—”
“You must promise them the death of Tethiel.” The Feaster had one hand pressed on the glass enclosing her, five black gems splayed over the translucent surface. Her scowl would have turned a tea cake to dust. “Promise them anything to make them stop.”
“I am surprised,” Hiresha said to the Feaster, “that you would overlook an opportunity to do injury to a Bright Palm. Find me ways to incapacitate them.”
The corners of the lady’s lips curled into a smile of red spines.
Hiresha turned to her reflection. “Search for the most likely path of escape.”
“Oh, yes, yes.” The reflection worried her hands together, bending down to study a model of the RecurveTower. “But we haven’t much time.”
“Too true,” Hiresha said. Even in the lucid dream’s rushing torrent of knowingness, she had only minutes before the Bright Palms removed more jewels in the waking world. “I have much enchanting to do.”
Levitating at the center of the basalt room, she swept her left hand—the one not yet violated—toward the shelves circling her. The glowing baubles inside were the mental representations of her spells, and she Attracted a round bloodstone and a platinum clamp.
The items zoomed to within grasp then hovered in the air. Hiresha channeled power through them, and thousands of paired Attraction spells shut the bleeding veins in her fingers. She bound the enchantment within the red diamond in her chest. Only the gem’s largest facet was visible, surrounded by skin, a rose-tinted triangle pointing upward.
“Can’t let them take our diamond,” the reflection said.
“Are you ready for an idea?” the lady Feaster asked.
“That you stole from my mind,” Hiresha said. “Very well. Is it good?”
“Not for the Bright Palm carving at you.”
“Perfect. Show me.”
Mirrors whirled closer to her, and they revealed the room in the Owl’s Hall as she had last seen it. Herself slumped on the chair, brazier glittering with heat, snow puffing against the outside of the window panes then pushed away by Repulsion enchantments in the crystal. The Bright Palms were shadows, fogs of probability. Two smears of darkness congealed into man-like forms on either side of her as she felt herself being straightened in the chair and held. The figures represented her suspicion that two men had clamped hands on her shoulders, though it could have been but one.
“The third Bright Palm is probably crouching in front of you,” the Feaster said. “Now look past him.”
The jewels of her discarded gown shone like multicolored embers within the mirror. Hiresha’s bond with those stones allowed her to sense their precise locations. They had been thrown in front of the window, to be soon cast out, she was sure. As fortune would have it, they were behind the third Bright Palm.
“An ill twist in his fate,” Hiresha said.
As she envisioned a spell, it manifested in a mirror. The jewels in the gowns were torn lose from the fabric—diamonds, rubies, onyx, opals—all hurling toward Hiresha, pulled by an Attraction of terrible force. The gems would pierce the Bright Palm, followed by a barrage of gold wire.
“We hate to ruin the gowns.” The reflection was running her fingers over the bent top of the model RecurveTower. “They survived the Bright Palm’s violence. And our amethyst gown is in there.”
“Better them ruined than the Academy,” Hiresha said.
She faced the gowns in the mirror then closed her hands together. Jewels that had orbited her in the dream laboratory now gathered between her palms. She molded their power into the Attraction spell that would puncture the Bright Palm hundreds of times over. The magic vibrated and pulsed in front of her, seen in the dream as a fistful of jewels. She set the enchantment to resolve as soon as she woke.
“A heart full of diamonds is more than a Bright Palm deserves,” the Feaster said. “Don’t forget to slow down any jewels that miss him.”
“The projectiles that come too close to me will be indeed Lightened to a standstill.” Hiresha rotated her hand, adding a ring of dream emeralds as a new layer to the spell.
She could not help but notice the fifth and final garnet embedded in her right hand disappear. A thought staunched the bleeding.
The Feaster folded her jewel-studded hands over each other. “Not much time left. Attract the fox’s collar. If you slip it onto a Bright Palm, he won’t be able to follow. He’ll be yanked back toward the bracelet which they’ve already stripped from you.”
“No!” The reflection cried out. “We want Lord Black Toes to be safe.”
“I’ll carry him. Right now I need every tool at hand.” Hiresha gestured to a mirror showing the fennec fox bounding around the chair. His collar of purple gemstones dangled around his neck, loose after she undid its Attraction enchantment. A ray of shimmering light connected his jewelry to an opal held motionless between the mirror and Hiresha. The gem’s spell would Attract the fox’s collar—Hopefully along with the fennec—to her as she woke.
The reflection gave out a shrieking whimper, clutching at her heart. Before Hiresha could think to chide her for oversensitivity, she felt the red diamond shift in her chest. It felt like a knife blade scraping at her soul.
“They’re trying to pry it out.” The Feaster snapped the swaths of her twilight gown, her face bending into the expression of a roaring lioness. “Enchant the last gems. Now.”
Hiresha leaped to the mirror that showed herself sleeping in the room. She plunged a hand into the glass, feeling as if she reached into thick water. Her fingers stretched toward the garnets fallen to the rug amid dark speckles, and she Attracted the jewels toward her sleeping form. One gem would not budge.
“He’s standing on it,” she said. “I have to make do with four.”
Lifting the right hand of her unconscious self like a puppet, Hiresha directed the garnets to fall between her fingers. The Bright Palms would see the gems zipping into
her grasp, but they would only have a second to react.
“Lightening enchantments are more practical,” she said, “so three of those. One Attraction, more forgiving to aim.”
She shredded the magical scripts previously in the garnets. Passing them to her left hand would prime their enchantments, since those fingers retained their implanted gems, for the moment. Preferably the garnet projectiles would enchant whatever she threw them at, but her accuracy while awake left something to be desired.
Having made hundreds such enchantments before, she crafted these four in less time than it took the jewels to twinkle in the waking world. Within the garnets winked motes of green, yellow, and red light.
“We have to go through the window.” The reflection pointed to another mirror, to where snow swirled against crystal panes.
“I’m wearing only lingerie.” Hiresha was still elbow-deep in the mirror, and she tapped her sleeping body on her bare shoulder. “They even tore off my jeweled slippers. Setting aside everything else for the moment, I can hardly walk barefoot over the snow like Sheamab.”
“They might hesitate to leap out after us. It’s our best chance.”
“Your time for napping is done. Look.” The Feaster pointed to the mirror, where the red diamond floated out of the sleeping Hiresha’s chest. Tendrils of darkness seemed to drag it through the air. The Bright Palms were trying to take Tethiel’s gift from her.
Hiresha closed her fist over the diamond. “When I awake, everything begins.”
“Take care of Lord Black Toes,” the reflection said.
“Good hunting,” the Feaster said.
Hiresha’s eyes blinked closed in the dream. They opened in the Lands of Loam.
17
Out the Window
The red diamond flew into Hiresha’s wounded hand.
The Bright Palm in front of her still had three fingers pinched together where he had been holding the jewel. His other hand gripped the knife. He stood at the sound of ripping gowns. Waking had unleashed the enchantments Hiresha had crafted in her dream, and the volley of jewels slammed into his back.
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