Brood of Bones (22 page)

After swallowing twice, I said, “Alyla. Ah, what are you doing here?”

“Our house was empty, except for Yash, and mother never liked me being alone with him.” She held the broom handle before her as if she could hide behind it. “I guess we weren’t alone. Mother was still there, in a way.”

“Has the bricker laid her in the floor yet?”

I regretted my words as soon as tears welled over her lashes to roll down her cheeks. She wobbled her head from side to side.

“We couldn’t pay
him,
the bricker said he wouldn’t do it for less than five silvers. It’d be a bigger job, he said, because of her tummy.”

“Mister Obenji will attend to the arrangements.” I reached out to pat Alyla’s arm for comfort, yet I was uncertain that would be proper, as her mother had died to my negligence. I cringed; feeling like an inch-long splinter had been shoved under my thumbnail.

“I’m so glad my brother isn’t here to see this.” Her tears dribbled onto her belly.

Maid Janny stepped up to her and hugged the girl, making the motion seem natural and easy. Of course, Janny had an unfair advantage over me: I could not hug anyone in these gowns.

I offered what support I could by gripping the sleeve of Alyla’s blouse. The gesture seemed wrong, somehow. “You may stay here, of course. However, keep away from these shards. If you slipped and fell on your baby, er, I mean, I do not like to think what could happen.”

“I will! Thank you, I will! Oh, should I call you ‘Miss Flawless?’”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Wait, where is your father?”

“He’s down in Stilt Town.”

“Why is he not with you?”

“He said...what he said was he had to break your wall.”

“The Flood Wall?”

A memory smashed into me of Abwar of the Ever Always leading a mob downhill, and I wondered if it had happened yesterday or today. I wished to believe the mob had since come to its senses and dispersed.

“Deepmand, can you see the Flood Wall from here?”

“I admit a suspicious amount of dust in that direction, Elder Enchantress.”

“Drive me there. Morimound cannot lose its greatest defense.”

On the ride downhill, I dreamed of my meeting with the Lord of the Feast. He had mentioned that the mass pregnancies would lead to the enslavement of Morimound, for hundreds of years, which sounded like the doing of a god. I hoped he was mistaken about that or had lied. I might not be able to detect his prevarications due to the control he kept over his face: Not once had I spotted signs of fear, even during mention of the Bright Palms.

Stilt Town swarmed with men, and ladders piled against the Flood Wall. Pick-axes swung, and hammers broke off stones piece by piece, which were then stacked into baskets on pulleys. I could not believe what I was seeing. Morimound was destroying its one hope; without the wall, the Seventh Flood would come in only a matter of time, maybe as soon as next month. I tried to tell the men this, in a calm and dignified tone.

“Morimound faces sufficient disaster in the mass pregnancies. We must not remove the Flood Wall.”

Few heeded me, amid the shouts of, “For your daughters!” and “Unwall the wall!” Mud prevented me from leaving the carriage, as did my shaking muscles and lightheadedness; the exertions of my heart at the morning’s meeting had left me exhausted.

I needed the city guard to stop the disassembling, yet most of them manned the pick-axes and carried away baskets of rubble. Neither could I gather much support from the acolytes; many gathered around Abwar of the Ever Always as he sacrificed oxen, goats, chickens, and even pet dogs. The bloodied mud surrounding him sickened me.

Dark stains and grime covered his green and white robes. “The Wall is spittle in the face of the Ever Thriving, Always Dying! We are not above His will! Forgiveness will come only when the Wall is ground to gravel.”

The possibility that my wall had angered a god heated me into a stupor. An irrational fear grew in me that I would sweat until my tissues shriveled to nothing, like the fleshless Feasters I had witnessed today.

Even after I regained my aplomb, the guards would not listen to me, and neither would the civilians, perhaps for good reason. I pictured the Loom of Life, where a black thread of my fate severed all the other strands in Morimound’s weave. My wall might have doomed the city, as could my dealings with the Lord of the Feast.

I knew I could concede nothing to him, should we ever meet again. If we did reconvene then I would have another chance to detect his lies, and I could not afford to miss any information that might save Morimound’s women. In addition, I wished to test whether I would have the same physical response: A surfeit of adrenaline had evoked greater wakefulness than I had ever felt outside my dreams.

“Elder Enchantress,” Deepmand said from the carriage door, “I must insist we return to the manor before sunset.”

His concern was reasonable, as encountering the Lord of the Feast at night would place me entirely in his power. His presence in Morimound unnerved me to no end;
every dusk
would be like sleeping on an executioner’s block, wondering if the axe would fall and he would attack the city.

More Bright Palms could counter him, yet summoning them would require time and—given his reaction today—would likely infuriate him.

As the carriage skated over the city streets, I watched the sky. It changed to pink, and I began to resent the pedestrians slowing me. Children flocked across the street, playing a game in which they touched a brick from each age in the city’s history. Dots of glaze marked the clay blocks, with blue for the Seventh Age, green for the Sixth, and so on. The children scrambled everywhere to find the older bricks, which bore marks of red and black.

I shook my cane out of the window. “Go home. Your mothers will be worried.”

Women at a well set down their urns of water to shriek at me. “There she is!”

At first, I thought they approached to thank me, or compliment me, yet they beat the sides of the carriage with their fists and shouted without any social nicety.

“What have you done to us, Enchantress?”

“Do we carry the seed of the Always Dying?” A woman clawed at her own belly, weeping. “Can you tell us that much?”

I cowered as far back in my carriage as the silk harnesses would allow, unable to say anything.

By the time we crossed into the Island District, the sky had darkened to red, and the lanes had all but cleared. We raced through parks alongside flowers closing their petals for the evening, and I discovered my left hand to have a death grip on my cane.

The sun had dipped out of sight behind the banyan trees, yet I still believed we would reach the manor before it set. A cadence of hooves on bricks behind the carriage prefaced a rider passing us, yet I did not recognize the implications of the man until I saw his lurid red coat.

“Enchantress Hiresha, I request your presence in my realm.” The Lord of the Feast leaned from his saddle toward my carriage window. “I must show you something.”

My heart began to race, and I banged my cane against the carriage roof to urge Deepmand to drive the horses to a gallop.

The Lord of the Feast said, “Can you outrun your fears?”

The thudding of my blood began to clear my mind, and I remembered that Feasters grew more dangerous if one fled from their magic. I glanced at the sunset, wanting to think that the Lord of the Feast could not cast both day and night, despite what rumor told. I wished to disbelieve it so much.

In trying to escape, I might die, yet by following the Lord of the Feast, I endangered many. I did not know which peril should be preferred, yet I had to choose.

“Spellsword Deepmand, slow the team to a walk.”

The fop’s horse lessened his pace as well, and the animal gazed in at me with a single black eye.

I straightened myself, pulling my arms from their harnesses. “I cannot follow you into your realm. My place is in Morimound.”

“It’s not far.” He nodded to the purpling sky. “Just ten minutes away.”

With deep breaths, I hoped to keep my heart rate below the point where my teeth throbbed from excessive blood pressure. Being under the stars beside the Lord of the Feast was the most frightening experience I could imagine, yet after his threats in the inn, I believed a refusal might endanger more than merely
myself
.

By agreeing, I reasoned, I might gain some concessions. “First, tell me why I should trust you.”

“I keep all my promises.” The corners of his eyes creased in amusement. “A man’s death threats are only as good as his word.”

“Then, will you swear to my safety in the night?”

“My children will not harm you, except with my leave.”

“That is no assurance at all!”

“I never give more.”

I wished for my magic. If I could enchant when awake then I could protect myself by
Lightening
him to the weight of cattail fluff and letting the wind carry him away.

“Spellsword,” the Lord of the Feast said, “I believe there is a perfectly dreadful fountain on your next left. Be a good heart and drive to it.”

Over the clop of hooves, I heard Maid Janny weeping and Deepmand trying to comfort her. The carriage stopped near the sound of water trickling. When my hand opened the carriage door, I noticed my fingers did not shake; I had settled into the serenity of knowing that my fate this night had been decided by a goddess before my life’s first breath.

In the fountain, water flowed between miniature ziggurats and down hundreds of tiny blocks representing Morimound homes. It really was dreadful. Strangler fig trees surrounded the fountain, their trunks a mesh of root branches as if normal trees had partially melted, oozing down and spilling over each other.

The Lord of the Feast took a long step down from his saddle, without using his hands. The horse snapped his yellow teeth in my direction in a carnivorous manner then bent down to drink from the fountain.

I began, “Lord of the Feast—”

“Never call me that.” His hands tensed into fists. In the blue light of my earrings, his coat had turned dark. “Not unless that is what you want to see. My name is Tethiel.”

I was not about to call him by his first name, as a lady should only assent to that for the man she had married. “Well then...before your interruption, I wished to note that you once claimed we had much to discuss. Did you lie?”

“Not in the slightest.
Oh ho!”
His chin dropped to regard a moth that had landed on his coat's carnation. As its wings fluttered, their eyespots blinked at me in a most forward manner.

“Your magic could not have caused the mass pregnancies,” I said. “They must concern you in some other way.”

I followed his glance upward, after the moth, to find the sky sprinkled with stars. The muscles between my shoulder blades tensed.

“If you think about it,” he said, his face solidifying back to a blank expression, “the worst a Feaster will ever do is scare someone to death. Morimound faces something less pleasant.”

“The unchildren.”
I gripped the ruffles of fabric over my throat. “Are they the progeny of a divine?”

“I would humor you, Enchantress Hiresha, but I’m supposed to be angry right now.”

If he was angry, I could see no trace of it in his calm demeanor. “Because of your mood, the women’s lives will all be risked?”

The left corner of his painted lips dropped a seventh of an inch in sadness. “Enchantress Hiresha, nothing I do will be for the sake of your people, or you.”

I had guessed his motives self-interested, yet to hear him say it outright in no way encouraged me. He would demand something, some boon in return for his aid, and I could only wait and worry what it might be.

My blue glow turned his powdered face to the color of a frozen corpse’s, which spoke. “And here they are. Pall, Wane, Gorge, show the enchantress your metal.”

Shadows stood around the fountain, despite a lack of anything to cast them. One shadow sharpened in focus to become a handsome man in dandy clothes, who darted to Deepmand’s side to kiss his bearded cheek, and when the Spellsword swiveled in his armor to seize him, the man back-flipped into the darkness.