Brood of Bones (5 page)

He stole a glance at me.

“...purity of vessel.”

“Of course she’s pure,” Priest Abwar said. “Look at her, she’s untouchable.”

I asked, “Just what are you insinuating?”

“It is true,” Priest Salkant said, “the Fate Weaver has placed the elder enchantress at the center of the Loom of Life. As the Flawless, her thread will be long and all-encompassing.”

“I cannot be the Flawless. My travels to other nations have worsened me, and, well, I am not Flawless.” My fatigue blemished me in every way.

Abwar of the Ever Always said, “With the condition of the rest of Morimound’s women, we can’t be too particular. With the laying on of hands, she becomes the Flawless.”

“No! I insist not!” My imperfections would displease the gods and bring the city to ruin. I had only become an enchantress for the chance of curing my somnolence, and I refused to trap myself within yet another tedious role.

Priest Abwar slid his hand under my sleeve to fondle my naked arm. Salkant of the Fate Weaver traced a finger’s two-remaining knuckles down my neck.

Heat washed and crashed inside me, and I felt as if I had dived into a bubbling, sulfurous springs. I was drenched; nauseating steam spread through my chest.

“Look at her sweat,” Priest Abwar said. “She burns with the power of the gods!”

Salkant of the Fate Weaver nodded.
“And trembles with the weight of destiny.”

Priest Abwar withdrew his hand first and turned his gaze to the goggling, pregnant virgins. “Acolytes, return these bundles of blessings to their homes. Sunset nears.”

The priests
left,
and the girls began to plod away from the Court. Once I resumed control of my breathing, I said, “Spellsword Deepmand, you should have stopped the priests from inducing me. I mean, inducting me.”

“My apologies, Elder Enchantress.”
He laid a gauntlet over the gilded plates covering his chest. “The priests speak for the gods, and I thought your protestations appropriately humble.”

Maid Janny lifted her face from its formerly demure position. “You should’ve known something was deeply wrong, with her acting humble.”

After a firm sniff, I underwent the process of turning around to return to my carriage. Pregnant girls stood still to watch me pass, and I recalled the priest’s egregious claim that they had not quickened.

“You will have felt your child kick, of course.” I gestured to their gravid figures.

They looked among each other, nervous, saying nothing.

“Or a fluttering, a tapping, something reminiscent of a growling of the stomach?”

A few girls appeared uncertain. One said, “I don’t think so, Madam Enchantress.”

“Nonsense.
All women in your advanced state
quicken,
all those with child.”

“Then you must be right,” one said.

“Doubtless so.”
Yet, I did not feel reassured. Quickening was a crucial event, when the Fate Weaver tied a soul’s thread to a child. Its absence was unthinkable.

Agitated, I approached a group of mature, pregnant women who had waited under a banyan tree during the proceedings. They were embracing the virgin girls, perhaps their daughters, and accompanying them away into the gardens.

“You,” I said to one, “have you quickened?”

“Me? No.”

“What about you?”

“No, Lustrous Enchantress.”

“And you? You must have quickened.”

“I don’t think so, Flawless.”

“Do not call me that.” I stormed through them in a flurry of gowns to the next cluster of women. “Which of you have quickened?”

They looked away and held their silence. The air seemed to have left the sky, for I could not breathe and I gagged on my tongue. The ground appeared a long way below me, and I fell toward it.

I landed on my cane, catching myself. Deepmand steadied my shoulder.

“Elder Enchantress?”

I fled to the next pregnant pack, finding the same lack of response.

Reaching out, I touched two of their bellies. “Do you not understand? You would have felt your babies
move,
you had to have felt them.”

They shied away from my desperate tone, and I tugged at a glove, at last pulling it off. My bare hand gripped their engorged waistlines, one after another. Once I finally thought I felt something then realized it had been the shaking of my hand.

One girl asked, “Why is it so important? That we quicken.”

“Because...because....”

Rather than answering, I reached to touch two more women, feeling nothing but a tautness of skin, and I tried yet another but found only stillness. My hand remained on that abdomen, as I felt myself too weak to lift it.

“It means the Priest of the Ever Always is wrong.
About all of you.
There is no life here.”

Night Three, Third Trimester

I should not have said it, not in front of the pregnant women. The guilt struck me on the walk back to my carriage, and I began wringing my glove. Maid Janny coaxed the cloth from my fingers to pull it back over my hand.

Their children had to be deformed. I could think of no better explanation, and I grew dizzy imagining so many babies paralyzed in their wombs, perhaps entirely lacking legs and arms. The thought horrified me, washing me with deluges of heat and shockwaves of cold, and by turns I felt I would melt or shatter. I swayed and sweated, propping one hand against the coiling root of a banyan tree for support.

This could not be. I had to be wrong, yet any reassuring thought flew from my reach. I had to enter my dream laboratory to clear my mind.

Staggering into my carriage, I closed my eyes to see the hundred marble steps descending to sleep. I ran down them, even as the stair trembled with my anxiety and rippled from the heat
The
final step lifted me into the black, round room without doors.

Feverish warmth subsided into a chill. My dream maintained a cooler temperature to facilitate thinking, and a filigree of frost rimmed my memory mirror. Disordered thoughts flashed nonsense images and flickers of color over the glass. I gripped my head and forced the nonsense away.

Something was amiss in the bellies of the women in Morimound. If they carried babies, then those babies could never live.

I had heard once of a pregnancy that held no life, only thousands of pearls of skin, bubbles of flesh that multiplied until the mother burst. The midwife’s story had sounded incredible and, if it was true, would account for an eighth path to death for mothers, in addition to the retching death, which I had forgotten in the Court.

The midwife had thought that “froth womb” swelled a mother’s belly faster than a true child, and I did not believe that was the case here, given the women I had seen thus far. The length and quality of their hair and nails gave me an estimate of how long they had carried, as those areas were affected by the feminine oils released in pregnancy. The fact brought small solace because, if the women did not suffer from froth womb, then they faced something that I had even less capacity to explain.

I could mull over the potential causes, such as an epidemic of tumors, yet I sensed the sun had set in the real world, and Sri the Once Flawless would be helpless in her cage. The priests had poisoned her with wormwood then had left her to the mercy of Feasters, condemned for a pregnancy over which I doubted very much she had any control. I could save her; I would save her, lawfully as the Flawless.

Awaking, I directed Deepmand to travel downhill toward the execution cage. Maid Janny entered the carriage and then closed the door behind her.

“You can drive tired horses to death if you like,” she said, “but you won’t have me outside at night. My tastiness would be the death of me.”

“The relative tenderness of your tissues is beside the point,” I said. “Feasters do not consume the physical.”

“Nothing worse than a picky eater.”

Janny sat across from me, scrunched against the sideboards. The carriage had been built to hold six people, permitting her just enough room to squeeze inside among my gowns. My enchanted earrings shone blue light over her grey dress and bonnet, which she filled with an amorphous body. Freckles flawed her face like air-bubble inclusions in an emerald.

Her smile lines remained even as she lowered her chin and frowned. “I know, I know. They slurp souls or some such. Found a girl in a gutter once. Thought she was sleeping drunk and had gone and ruined her dress. Slapped her, and she was cold as used bathwater.”

“Maid Janny, every word you speak further elucidates your ignorance. Feasters do not imbibe souls. Their magic drains power from fear.”

“Don’t care what all they eat, if it comes from me. Breastfeeding was bad enough.”

“It is an honor of motherhood.”

She fretted in her seat, knuckling her chin. “We shouldn’t be out and about at night. We shouldn’t, we shouldn’t.”

“You should have more confidence in Spellsword Deepmand,” I said. “He is trained to defeat Feasters, and I suspect Morimound to have the second least incidence of them of all the major cities.”

“Easy for you to be brave.
A Feaster would go hungry rather than listen to you lecture about its dining etiquette.”

I did not care for Maid Janny in the least. Neither did I wish to sympathize with the person who by necessity scrounged underneath my gowns to remove used chamber pots.

She peered out at the deserted and dark streets as they whisked past. “The men in robes said something about gods, but how do they know the women didn’t all have a good tumble in the loft?”

“Exactly what are you implying about the strong-fibered women of Morimound?”

“That they had some belly on belly.
They sweet-dreamed.
Aired the mattress.
Paid the lord.”

“Maid Janny!”

“Oiled the sword.
Danced the sheets.
Husked the corn.”

“Did you neglect to hear the Lustrous Priest pronounce those women virgins?”

“Poor girls.
They missed the best part of having a baby.”

“You refer to no more than a means to an end,” I said. “Maid Janny, it is well that you are unattractive, or you would be entirely insufferable.”

“It is well you’re rich. Or so would you.”

Janny’s impertinence gave me an excuse to contemplate her dismissal. My finger would point out from the carriage, and she would leave, too surprised for a retort.

With my next breath, I remembered her helping me on my first days in the Academy. She had guided me up walls along gravity-defying paths, huffing as she did from the weight of the child she carried. Maid Janny had been young then and I younger still, a girl lost and frightened in an upside-down world.

No, I would sooner do without one of my hands than part with Maid Janny, although I would never admit it to her. To deceive her into thinking I cared nothing for her words, I engaged in sleep.

As jewels meandered overhead in my laboratory, I estimated fifteen more minutes would elapse before Spellsword Deepmand procured the key from the jailor then returned to the execution cage to free Sri the Once Flawless.

Janny’s uncouth tongue reminded me of the admonishment of the Fate Weaver’s priest: The pregnancies might not be divine in origin.

A physical explanation seemed less than imaginable. I trusted Morimound women to know whether or not they were virgins, and none of their faces showed an excess of guilt when the priest proclaimed the girls as chaste. The pregnancies of elders such as Sri the Once Flawless rendered a theory of normal conception even more dubious. If geriatric fertility was widespread then I could rule out all means less than supernatural.

I pondered in mid air at the center of the circular room, my gowns drifting around me. To prevent them from enveloping me entirely in a satin cocoon, I batted them back from my face as if parting curtains. I also dimmed the jewel lights, with a thought, for an environment more conducive to meditation.