Fox's Bride (30 page)

Inannis thrashed awake in the darkness of his warehouse hideout. Shivers ran along his burning skin, and his mouth felt as dry as sun-baked clay. He gagged on the desire to cough, his throat clenching, his eyes blinking, seeing nothing. He risked no lights. Underground as he was in a cellar full of wine jugs, no one was likely to hear him and discover him. His hacking would startle Emesea from her sleep, though, and he wanted her to rest. Her ordeal in the Bleak Wells Prison had robbed her of strength.

His hand clenched over his mouth, Inannis listened with concern to the sound of her breathing. Short hisses of air escaped from her lips. When his hand found her shoulder, her skin chilled his fever-hot fingers. The reed mat crinkled under her as she tossed and turned. Her whimper surprised Inannis.

Emesea's courage had always astonished him, and he went through several possibilities in his mind before realizing she had to be in the grip of a nightmare. He lifted a hand from his mouth, thinking to wake her from the bad dream. Before he could, he heard a suspicious sound.

Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
It sounded close to the skittering of a scorpion. He would stomp it like he had the others, and he shifted his head to try to locate the origin of the noise.

Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

Inannis thought it came from above, in the warehouse. His heart clenched, and sweat itched its way down his arms at the thought of someone blundering around. He had chosen this building because the owners were too suspicious of guards drinking their wares to allow anyone to stay there overnight. The threat of Feasters on the darkened streets would have kept all robbers out except the reckless. He and Emesea should have been alone, but this sounded human in its consistency.

Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

He decided against waking Emesea. Her prowess lay more in brawling and force of will than stealth. Inannis slunk between the unseen pillars and stacked jugs by memory, climbed a ladder's steps, and pressed his ear to the trapdoor. The last thing he wanted was some desperate idiot trashing the place and raising the suspicions of the owners.

His hands strayed over his sash, fingers brushing over lock picks and vials of poison. He checked his stilettos in their arm sheaths.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

The noise reached a frenzied tempo. It did not come from someone knocking on the trapdoor. It sounded farther up and sharper, like the drumming of fleshless fingers against metal. Inannis had an eerie sense he heard his name called in the distance.

He took a few ragged breaths then cracked open the trapdoor and peeked. Shadows shifted over the floor that was glazed white with starlight. Something moved in front of the third-story window. Inannis imagined an owl pecking at the glass with its beak.
Sounds like a flock of them.

The trapdoor lifted another inch. Inannis craned his neck to glimpse the window without revealing himself. What he saw stunned him with fright, but he held his gasping terror in like his sickness and made not a sound.

A pack of vultures pressed black wings against the glass panes, each with a white beak scraping the window. Or so it seemed. They slid away as one, leaving a slime of drool over the glass. Only then did Inannis realize that it could not have been vultures because they did not swarm about at night. Rather, scores of white fangs had tapped the glass. Something hulked outside. A voice echoed through the wall.

“I smell you, fox thief.”

A giant's face pressed against the window, an eye the size of a cauldron with an iris of sifting white and black sands. A triangle brand adorned the statuesque forehead, and whips of fear snapped through Inannis. He knew the tales.
Three sides, three heads, no mercy. The Lord of the Feast.
Inannis dared not even move to shut the trapdoor. The colossus spoke.

“How surprised I was to scent the familiar fears of a dead woman. 'Emesea,' was it?” Chimney-sized nostrils flared as they sucked in air. “She died the day before her execution to spite me, or so I thought. Now I think she must’ve been stolen, like the Golden Scoundrel before her, by a not-priest afraid of dying to Blood Judgment. I must say, the fox stampede was well done.”

Inannis glanced down into the cellar. The booming voice must have woken Emesea, but he heard nothing from her.
Can she wake from her dream?
Worries for her pooled in his chest like so much blood and mucus.

“Yes.” The corners of massive lips spiraled in an impossible smile. “What a shame for you to have gone through all that bother, only to lose her now. But I consider myself a reasonable nightmare. Do as I say, and you'll both live.”

“You….” Words stuck in Inannis' dry throat. He spoke half to convince himself. “Feasters must be invited inside. You can't come in. Not unless I open the door.”

“That is our law, but I do not rule by example.”

With a cracking and a crumbling, one wall fell inward. Orange light spread over rows of warehouse vats. Flames licked red from between mismatched and jagged fangs of a reptilian head. The night dragon loomed over Inannis, its scales black, its eyes trailing a green glow. The maw unfolded its mesh of teeth and spoke with the same booming voice.

“You'll steal the keys to the tomb of the Plumed God. Tonight. Now.”

Inannis would have widened his eyes at this, but he was already gaping.

“And you'll go first into the pyramid. Are you much familiar with tomb traps? If not, tonight they will become familiar with you.”

The priests had a habit of destroying the records of tomb architecture, once built. Inannis had still bought drinks for artisans who designed traps, and the thief had been amazed how many secrets people would share as boasts to a man dressed as a priest. He had dreamed of robbing a god's tomb, but the risk had given him pause. Those dangers shrank in his mind in comparison to the toothy snout hanging above him, baking his forehead with its flaming hunger. If he could have been honest with himself at that moment, it would have likely taken only a fire-breathing camel to give him sufficient excuse.

Inannis' cracked lips hurt as he licked them. “Consider it done.”

Chandur watched himself carry Hiresha through unfamiliar passageways. Stone blocks arched overhead. He would have felt lost in the gloom and was relieved someone else knew the way.

His arms rested her on an ancient couch. Dust misted around her, and the fabric frayed under his touch. When he pressed close to her, he could feel her heart drumming, and her eyes were as open and wide as he had ever seen them.

He admitted he had not expected this to happen. True, Hiresha had a shapeliness about her and an intensity he admired, but his need for her surprised him. An emptiness scorched his insides and forced him to pull her closer. His hands slid over the spirals of jewels on her belly, to the taut skin of her flexing back, and lower.

His fingers stroked aside her hair, and he plucked a trail of kisses from her ear to her jeweled sleeve. Her body was at once soft and firm, warm and cool from ridges of jewels. Her breaths puffed hot against his neck. He thought someone had once told him not to touch unmarried women where he now touched the enchantress, but this felt so right that he snuffed all doubts.

She stiffened in his grasp, and her eyes turned distant. He felt he should lean back, ask her what troubled her. Instead his hand parted the slit of her dress, and his palm ran up the fine hairs of her leg.

“Wait.” She pressed her hands against his chest.

Excitement budded over Hiresha's skin at his coaxing touch, and she had begun to understand why Maid Janny squandered her time with strangers.

Why would I agree with Maid Janny?
A sense of wrongness whispered within Hiresha. Though she felt awake, she sensed she had forgotten to do something. She pushed Chandur back and gave herself room to think.

As she often did in moments of uncertainty, she reviewed her life plan.
Plans are critical,
she thought.
A life unplanned is a life of chaos.

First, cure myself of my somnolence.
She could not remember researching a solution to her condition, but she felt lucid enough now. She could focus on Chandur's eyes and see the individual lines in his irises like strands of brown silk. Behind him against the stone floor, twelve jars stacked against the wall, some shadowed by his shoulders. She saw something that could have been the white of the fennec's tail whisk between them into the darkness.

Second, marry, preferably Chandur. Third, transfer my enchantment work to Morimound and raise a family.

Now she believed she understood. The stirring unease in her stomach was because she started to stray from her plan. “Chandur,” she said, “we must marry.”

He blinked three times, and the following seconds ground and scraped over Hiresha. She worried she had offended him by proposing, rather than waiting for him to ask her. Worse yet, he might refuse, or laugh at her, or walk away without saying anything as he had at the First Trader's Inn.

He grinned, and the sight stung Hiresha with relief.

Pulling her to her feet, he kissed her hand. “Hiresha, I know just where to find your engagement and marriage necklaces.”

Over the years, she had imagined many men laying the twined necklace of marriage over her shoulders. Long ago, she had even thought Chandur's father might be the one, but his son had surpassed him in every way.

Fingers laced with his, she bounded with him down the stone passageways, past tables gleaming with curved knives and urns stuffed with limbs ending in hands, feet, or claws. Unease scratched at her composure, but she chided herself for being nervous, as all brides were. She joined Chandur in laughter, and their joy echoed through the tomb.

Chandur fell to a hush as he rested a hand against a stone door. A painting of a dead man wrapped in linen had browned and smeared. Guards followed the spellsword with heads down, expressions somber. None of them seemed to notice the whiff of foulness that made Hiresha's eyes tear.

“This is a sacred place,” Chandur said. With the help of three guards, he shoved the door inward.

A stench of rotting meat blasted over Hiresha, and she staggered back. Chandur pulled her into a room with two square sarcophagi, and she thought she would choke. The air clogged her throat, and she worried it would discolor her dress. Only the thought of Chandur and the marriage they would share gave her the strength to overcome the reek.

Skeletons and half-decayed figures were strewn over the floor below the stone coffins. Knucklebones stuck into the underside of Hiresha's slipper and pained her. Eye-sockets and shriveled eyelids stared up at her with pitiful blankness. Ribs piled in stacks of rounded sticks, and backbones were clutters of lumpy disks, tinted blue in her light.

Part of her felt she should have been alarmed, but the men seemed reverent and eager to enter the crypt. She stepped over the corpse of what looked like it once had been a woman, skin yellowed, sagging, and split open in places. The whites of bones showed through the ends of her fingers. Her decaying gown webbed her. In her stiff hair were flakes of brown that once might have been flowers.

“They all were betrothed to the fox.” Chandur knelt and cupped a chin of a dead woman. Her skin sloughed off at his touch. “The Royal Embalmer convinced only these few to escape with him. So many were blinded, but some recognized true devotion. Over the years, the embalmer robbed the fox god of thirty-four brides.”

“Then he brought them here?” Hiresha's chest clenched as she tried to speak. “And he—”

“He had to kill them.” Chandur unclasped two scarab necklaces from the dead woman's neck. He stood and stroked the edge of the smaller sarcophagus. Scarab shells littered the stone lid, each with a message etched into its shiny back. “He killed them to prove to Ellakht how much purer his love for her had been. And still is.”

A gold chain was coiled around Hiresha's neck. She shied away from his hands, not knowing quite why. She could not remember sending out wedding invitations. Her guests, the guards, seemed strangers to her.
This tomb is not the venue for which I had hoped.

“Hiresha, I will not harm you. You are different from the other brides. More cunning. More magnificent.” He wrapped his arms around Hiresha as he bound her with the necklace. “No, I will dedicate everything to you, love you as I would have loved Ellakht, so she may know what a mistake she made.”

“As
you
would have loved her? You said, 'I.'“

The Soultrapper is controlling him.
The thought pounced upon Hiresha.
Using him as a vessel as he did each Royal Embalmer through the ages. I have to escape. Have to find my jewel sash and—

She twitched, felt a tingling sensation in her mind, and wondered what she had been thinking. All she knew was that Chandur was tying a scarab necklace about his own throat. A guard rested a hand on each of their shoulders. He had a square face and a tuft of hair sticking out at odds with the rest of his black locks, but his voice resonated in the crypt.

“Those come here to marry this night, take off your necklaces.”

Hiresha touched the clasp behind her neck but did not try to undo it. Following the Morimound custom, she untied Chandur's necklace for him, and then he undid hers. A bone cracked under her foot, and she winced, hoping her guests had not noticed. She wanted everything to be just so on this day.
Or t
his night?
The guards stared on, rapt.

“Fosapam Chandur, your band is trust. Hiresha, your band is affection. Turn the two into a band of marriage.”

The guard had misspoken part of the ceremony.
He should have said my band is 'commitment.'
Hiresha sighed under her breath. Not everything was turning out quite as she had hoped. She had expected the Flawless of Morimound to preside over the ceremony, not some man in dusty robes with a bow strapped to his back. The iris gardens of her estate would have awed all those who flocked to see the union of the most celebrated of enchantresses. This tomb cramped the guests, and the bones distracted her since she had to look down to avoid stepping on them.
And there is a definite odor.
All the discrepancies pained Hiresha as much as would any mistakes in the carving of a paragon jewel.

Because what is marriage,
she thought,
if not the most precious of gems?

She consoled herself that at least Chandur had chosen to wear her color.
How thoughtful.
Hiresha might have wished him also to wear the sword she had enchanted for him as its jasper presented so well with the purple coat. Still, he gazed down at her with a flattering intensity as they linked arms and wound the two necklaces together.

The sight of the gold scarabs also pricked her. Diamonds were more traditional in Morimound, but she supposed they were marrying in another city, after all.

Why? Why would we marry here?

She shook her head, wishing she could focus on the joy of the moment, rather than on trivialities. Her life had been planned around this marriage.

Chandur lifted the twined necklace up over her shoulders. He kissed her brow between her eyes once, then bound the two ends of the gold chain.

She trembled against him. Her stomach heaved and spun with what she could only assume was bliss.

He kissed her forehead a second time. With a “snick,” the last cord closed around her throat.
Fate Weaver, I thank you. Opal Mind, I honor you. I am married, at last.
She felt sick with happiness and wretched with pride.

“Hiresha of Morimound, you are now Hiresha Chandur.” The guard dabbed his eyes with his over robe. “Fosapam Chandur, you are now a husband. May you treat your wife as the diamond that she is.”

The guards cheered his name. They clomped over the bones to clasp his arms. One man's words whistled between his missing front teeth. “Ol' Fos the Follower, married? Never would've guessed. You must've prodded him like a grumpy camel.”

“In point of fact, I was the one to propose to him.” It seemed to Hiresha she had done it not so long ago. She supposed at her age, a short engagement had to be respected.

“I knew it.” The guard chortled.

“A drink! Drinks to a married guardsman.” A guard lifted an ancient jug and pried out the clay stopper. Another man blew dust from green glazed cups faded to yellow. They poured a black liquid and passed around the cups.

“Ack! It's vinegar.” A guard puckered his lips.

“What? Used to suckling from a camel's teat? You a priest or a guard? Drink it.”

“A drink to the bride! May she bear many sons.”

“Two sons,” Hiresha said, “and two daughters.” She had their names picked out after gemstones.

A guard with sleek black hair and striking blue eyes touched Hiresha's sleeve. “I'm envious,” he said. “He's a great man.”