Spells of the Curtain Volume One

by Tim Niederriter

  “You may be right. Of course, this problem could be alleviated if you were to lend me the actors you have among your entourage.”

  Kassel grinned. “Now I see it. How very like your father, you are, Saale Donroi. You see, he rarely spoke directly with me either, even when he was a Saale for my own court twenty-five years ago.”

  “You knew him?” Edmath clenched his hand near his sash.

  “I did. I’m sorry his deeds have caused you trouble. I’m sure he would not have wanted that. I will, of course, allow you to borrow my players. They are skilled in all sorts of performance, though historical comedies are their specialty. They are practicing their art in the southwest gardens at the moment, but I will send word to them to prepare for your celebration.”

  Kassel turned back to the urliens dancing around the Worm Tribe Monument. Edmath watched the odd creature a moment, smiling.

  “To think I’d meet my father’s old master after all these years.”

  “Your parents were more than servants to me, Saale Donroi. I counted them as friends.”

  Edmath glanced at Kassel. The Worm King smiled but kept his gaze on the urlien before them, a hint of sadness visible in his pale blue eyes, eyes, Edmath realized, all too similar to his own. Kassel nodded.

  “I look forward to my formal invitation. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

  “And you.” Edmath turned and hurried back down the path from which he’d come, recognizing the Worm King’s hinted desire to be alone. “Your Highness.”

  Edmath walked the path down to the southern gardens, wondering about the Worm King and his father, his father the Worm King’s Saale, the warrior, the dishonorable criminal.

  Edmath did not have a chance to see Chelka early on the day of the wedding. For the past week, they had been together only for moments and only as part of larger groups. He was beginning to miss her by the time he saw her in her white wedding clothes. The end-day was still bright, and the ceremony elegant, but until he saw her, he could not have described her beauty. Her hair was up over her head, unusually pinned in places, and the shadows of the bare skin along her arms and shoulders flowed with life and color.

  Chelka was flanked on either side by her mother and father, while Sampheli Mierzon stood beside Edmath under the great white-flowered tree in the garden’s center. Chelka reached them with a smile lighting her face in the partial shade. Sampheli chanted in the priestly language as Zemoy and Lesi moved off to the side, allowing the rest of the gathered guests to see Edmath and Chelka together. Chanting the words he recognized as the binding rite, Sampheli touched Chelka’s hand and then Edmath’s with the tip of her index finger. She led their hands to each other and completed the ritual of joining.

  “Now that these two lives have been joined,” she intoned in common Zelian. “The words of the youngest of the Zelian siblings come to mind.” Sampheli cleared her throat with a cough. “When we first walk upon the earth, our families, our parents and brothers and sisters are with us, our tribe. When we leave this earth, who then will be with us, but the family we create and also leave behind? He knew that marriage is not out of the necessity of the body, but out of the necessity of the heart. Let us pray that these two young people, dear to us all, never forget those words.”

  She finished speaking, and applause came from all down the garden path. Edmath and Chelka faced each other. He smiled. She glowed. They locked lips. The kiss was long but soft. The two of them broke apart and turned to face the crowd. They stood side by side as claps and cheers resounded.

  Chelka let out a wild whoop and pulled Edmath down the path between the guests by his hand. Edmath grabbed at his glasses with his free hand, to avoid the risk of them being swept off his face by the suddenness of the motion. He barely had time to glance back and see his mother’s beaming, wizened face. The ceremony was over, and Chelka, lovely Chelka, wanted to get to the festivities in a hurry.

  The sun was on the verge of setting when they reached the clear paved courtyard set aside for the squid dance. Chelka and Edmath made it to the center as the crowd formed a ring around them. Individuals unfamiliar with the custom had been briefed in advance.

  Edmath had insisted on that. He had been on the outside once before when he had attended the absent Benisar daughter’s wedding with Chelka. Ten lines formed from the ring on the outside of the circle, advancing toward Chelka and Edmath, who continued their slow circling and occasional moments of faster twisting and turning in the center as the music of the flutists from the Hearth Palace alternately sped and slowed and kept the pace.

  Edmath had a feeling he was getting much wrong. He danced, but not as well as Chelka, of that he was certain. Her enthusiasm graced her entire body and her legs moved in ways that made him want to laugh and kiss her all over again. This night they would be together, and the waiting until dusk would only make it greater for them both. Brosk approached from Edmath’s right at the end of one line of squid dancers. He laughed and threw up both hands as one of Chelka’s legs brushed Edmath’s calf, the cue for him to speed up the pace.

  The dance went on long, and intensely, the precursor to the meal and the play by Kassel Onoi’s actors. By the time they wound down, sweat ran down Edmath’s face and over his glasses. Chelka spiraled slowly down to sit on the smooth paving stones, swinging her arms wide out from herself and laughing as the lines of the other dancers broke up. Edmath crouched down beside her and offer his hand. As she wrapped her fingers around his, she shook her head, still grinning with the remains of laughter.

  “I suppose this is where I find out I’m dreaming.” She stifled her laughter with another hand. “Ed, you’ve gotten better at this.”

  “Perhaps, dear Chelka, I learned by watching you.”

  “And I dance because of you.” Chelka pulled herself to her feet on his extended hand.

  The crowd of guests, no longer dancing, milled about. They talked among themselves as they prepared for the feast. Servants from the Great Hearth carried tables into the courtyard and arrayed them with the food of the day. The gentle breeze from the south carried the smells of the festival food into the city. Edmath was glad the festival lasted for an entire week. He still wanted to attend it, though obviously, this celebration must be even better.

  The guests began seating themselves as Chelka and Edmath walked between tables, arm in arm, and greeted every group before taking their place at the central table. The sky began to darken as the players provided by the Worm King set up their stage and the musicians piped upon their flutes. The meal set out before them vanished seemingly as quickly as it had appeared. Edmath sipped from a glass of wine throughout the evening. He took it slow. He wanted to remember this night, a night when he could not stop smiling.

  He and Chelka watched as the stage rose up before them, with the actors in their costumes taking up positions even as the floor, lifted from below, carried them higher. The play was to be a historical farce, a light-hearted affair focusing on the time before Zel when the three warlords who had ruled the land had been young and more concerned with love than war. Edmath did not know the play. He had rarely had time for any of the oldest history lessons even before Lexine Park. Everyone knew about the warlords, but Edmath had never heard the deeper legend of their personal lives before.

  As a pale woman in a gray shawl made her way across the stage before them, Edmath turned to Chelka. She pointed at a man in a yellow Worm Tribe cowl, and a long trailing green sash. The sight of his gaudy attire made Edmath chuckle with little help from the wine.

  “This shall be interesting.” Chelka withdrew her finger and nodded at Edmath. “I think that man is the Red Lord’s friend, the jester.”

  “Of course. That is why he is dressed so ridiculously.” Edmath settled back in his chair and adjusted his glasses. The Red Lord had ruled the Worm and Swan Tribe lands to the south, while the land to the west was dominated by the White Lord, right up to the Crab Tribe bays and the Hare Nation of Roshi. The final lord, the Green Lord, dwelt to t
he north, in the Elk Country. “If he is a jester, perhaps the three lords are at a court of some kind?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”

  “You must forgive me.” Edmath drew in a breath and looked back over the actors, including a huge man with yellow Worm Tribe hair.

  Chelka stifled a laugh and shook her head.

  “Obviously, Ed. Yes, it is a court.”

  Edmath’s lip turned up at the corner as he remembered the many times they had talked together about this day back at Lexine Park. They had pushed it into the future only for it to rush into the present to meet them. Chelka’s smile came across as a cool shadow.

  “The three lords were all brought up in the court of the Meresul, the king of the Worm Tribe, and back then, the Worm Tribe and the Swan Tribe belonged to the same nation, so the Swan Queen was equal to the king. She demanded that the princes of other nations be invited into the court. That is where these three first appeared.”

  “Ah, I see. They were not famous then. Red, Green, and White, were nobility, but none of them were heirs to a throne, I remember that much.”

  Chelka leaned in toward him and squeezed his shoulder, with a simple motion that reminded Edmath of her dancing earlier that day.

  “Right,” she whispered in his ear. “But as the story goes, they each married a princess.”

  “A little like me.”

  Chelka shook her head.

  “They weren’t like you, Ed.”

  “I suppose I am not royal or nobility. Why else?”

  She smiled.

  “They did it for power.”

  Edmath put his arm around her and felt her side with his fingertips. He leaned his head against hers. Nobody could say he didn’t love Chelka. How could they? No, he thought, that was wrong. No one could say she didn’t love him. He might just be the greatest actor who ever lived.

  

  Night fell as the play went on. Servants and guards brought torches to lead the garden’s glowing moths to illuminate the festivities. Chelka and Edmath sat beside each other, laughing together through most of the jokes and the circuitous tale of how Red and Green made the two princesses the Worm Tribe to fall in love with them, and virtuous White pined over the Swan Queen’s oldest daughter.

  In the end, the three were married to their respective princesses, but, despite his watching the whole thing, Edmath couldn’t tell exactly how they managed it. The three actors and their actress-brides bowed and left the stage. Many guests rose to leave, as servants brought the gifts out to Edmath and Chelka.

  Most wedding presents were small things, tokens, and favors, but when the Worm King and his servants arrived at their table, the urliens bore more than the pouches of coins or the kind words of others. Kassel Onoi approached, taking from his creatures what looked like two long sheathed swords with fist-sized crystalline spheres at the tip of each blade. Edmath recognized the gifts, with some alarm. They were not swords at all, despite the resemblance of shape. Oresso Nane had called this sort of device a stethian, a tool for Saales. There could be no mistake.

  Kassel dipped his head slowly gaze on the stethians as he set them gently on the central table.

  “These belonged to your parents, Lord Benisar,” he said to Edmath. “One was your father’s, the other, your mother’s. I think you should have them both, as you two are both Saales as well.”

  “Thank you, your Highness. You honor us both and my parents’ memory.” Edmath leaned forward and looked over the stethians closely, taking in the wave-like patterns of their metal blades, visible through gaps in pale silken sheathes, inlaid with mosaic-like tiles of differently colored metal. Carefully, he lifted one of them and passed it to Chelka. She ran her hand up the inlaid side of the device’s edgeless blade.

  “They are quite a gift,” she said rising from her seat. “I have heard a little of them before recently. They are said to be the only true Saale weapon.”

  “I saw both your father and mother do much while wielding them.” Kassel shrugged his shoulders, sending his rega trembling in the wind. “I believe they will serve you well, Lord and Lady Benisar. I wish you luck all your lives.”

  “And also for you.” Chelka took the hand Kassel offered between herself and Edmath and shook it. “Your highness.”

  Kassel released her hand with a broad grin. He turned his back on them and made his way across the courtyard, followed by his servants in a trail. The War Empress, Marnaia Hayel came next and congratulated both of them, telling Edmath to keep her service in mind when looking for a future path for his career. Haddishal Rumenha, Ahenesrude Naopaor and his family including Brosk came next, then followed by what might have been a hundred other well-wishers and advisers.

  Zuria and Sampheli made their way from one side to stand behind the table on Edmath’s right. Chelka’s family took their place on her left as the Coral Queen and her children came to greet them. Razili met Edmath with a small smile and a bow, while Oresso hung back. Edmath saw the stethian at Oresso’s belt, so similar to the pair of Saale weapons lying on the table between them.

  Edmath didn’t want to speak with him, not when the Coral Prince looked to be in such a state. His eyes were darkened and his brow, brooding. He approached.

  “Lady Chelka.” He bowed to her and lifted his head, turning to Edmath. “Ed.”

  “Prince Nane, greetings.” Chelka smiled but Edmath could tell she was forcing at least part of it. The inviting shadows of her face were not the carefree dance of colors they had been before Oresso appeared. “My new husband and I are both glad you have come to wish us well.”

  “I have come to wish you well.” Oresso closed his eyes. “Excuse me. I was rude, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps you were, but no matter.” Edmath smiled at him. “All I ask is that you would excuse me as well.”

  “Excuse you?” Oresso’s hand passed over the grip of his stethian. “What should I excuse you for, ahem, Lord Benisar?”

  Edmath glanced at Chelka. She raised an eyebrow at him. He turned back to Oresso, a small smile on his face.

  “I never gave you a chance, really.” He leaned forward in his seat, hunching. “I’m sorry.”

  Oresso took a deep breath and turned to walk away. Edmath wondered how angry he might be at this moment. How angry could he be? He had known all along about Edmath and Chelka. Oresso Nane was too clever to expect anything less from the two of them.

  “I wish you well,” the Coral Prince said without looking back.

  Chelka opened her mouth to reply, but Edmath missed her words in the sudden buzz that went through his mind. It was a sound unlike any had ever heard before, and yet, it had no volume, though entirely clear. Edmath presumed it’s nature from his training. This sensation belonged to the sphere of humanity. The sphere sent out another wave of magic and this time words accompanied the buzz.

  “Treachery, treachery, treachery.”

  At the same moment, Edmath heard the sound of great wings. Twin miraches lifted from the grounds of the palace to the northeast. Chelka froze, looking at his face, fear suddenly mingled with the joy in her eyes.

  “The High Emperor is in danger. That was his voice through the sphere.” Chelka pushed back her chair. It clattered to the ground behind her as she flew to her feet.

  Edmath climbed out of his chair more carefully and looked at Chelka. Oresso Nane turned from his place next to the line, holding his temples. He returned to the table.

  “She’s right.”

  All around the courtyard people looked from face to face, as if questioning the fragment of news they had all heard. Edmath picked up the stethians sitting on the table in front of him.

  “We must find him, and quickly.”

  He handed one of the devices to Chelka. She took it and looked away from him. He knew how she felt. They had been so lucky to have this day and night, now it was disrupted. Duty came first.

  Oresso drew his stethian as Razili broke from the line to stand beside him, followed by Brosk,
and Yezani Rumenha. Zuria left Sampheli’s side and came toward Edmath’s table. Her double striker appeared in her hand.

  “We will need to get to the High Palace quickly,” she said. “Brother, let’s go.”

  “Of course.” Edmath strode around the table, followed by Chelka, holding her still-sheathed stethian. “Oresso, how do you activate this weapon?” He tapped his stethian’s flat side.

  Oresso shrugged as he started back down the milling line of guests and servants.

  “Strike a tear when you are ready. As far as I can tell, stethians activate themselves.”

  Edmath addressed the line of people, feeling unreal as he did it. He couldn’t possibly be giving this sort of speech at his own wedding.

  “Thank you for attending this union, friends, and forgive us. This is the role of Imperial Saales.”

  He fell into step beside Brosk and Chelka caught up on his right. Edmath marched down the line past the half-stripped stage. Razili, Oresso, and Zuria followed the three of them in silence. The War Empress and the Saale Emperor had already left the courtyard, but Zemoy met them on the path leading toward the central palace. He looked harried and his one eye was filled with suppressed rage.

  “I will organize things here and send troops to follow you as soon as I can muster them. Protect his grace.”

  Chelka bowed her head quickly. “We will do our best, father.”

  Edmath didn’t have time for his own reply, for Chelka broke into a run once she finished speaking. He raced after her, feed pounding the soft grass. They reached a wide path at a sprint with regas flapping in the cool northern wind. Edmath’s stomach thrilled with fear.

  Whoever had attacked the palace was prepared for a great battle. The miraches taking flight gave him more than a small hint as to who was inside. Thinking of the Roshi brought up the twinge of pain in his left hand where Ursar Kiet had injured him.

  “Be careful everyone.” He barely managed to speak between breaths while running.