Fox's Bride (9 page)

A purr rattled with mucus. Whiskers trembled. The small creature shuddered in Hiresha's hands, its breath whistling. Half the cat's golden fur had fallen out. Two of its white paws felt feverishly hot against Hiresha's thumb.

Hiresha approved of cats. They hunted vermin and did not forcibly marry enchantresses. As the kitten shivered against her, her gloved fingers stroked its whiskered cheeks, and she found herself eager to begin. An enchantment could secure the kitten's health.
If only the other conditions could've been so easy.

“I will need a jewel,” Hiresha said.

The nobility surged forward. “I have a ruby for Pharaoh's cat.”

“My sapphire will suit better.”

“They're fakes. This is true Morimound diamond.”

“Take this topaz, from the empire's most devoted servant.”

Some went as far as to shove their gemstone rings and necklaces onto the enchantress. A citrine brooch was pressed against Hiresha's breast, and she cupped the yellow jewel in her purple glove.

“Now I require a place to sit. To contemplate.”

As she stepped forward to find a chair, her sleep-heavy eyes sagged. Her slipper landed on a dropped necklace, and her leg whooshed outward. Elder Enchantress Hiresha—a ringing embarrassment in her chest—toppled forward to land on the sand cat, in front of a crowd of the aghast.

Spellsword Chandur watched as a necklace of glittering blue shot out from under Hiresha's foot. Eyes bulging, he saw that the maid was not there to help. She had stolen off in search of wine. The nearest guard looked too surprised to reach Hiresha in time.

Chandur heaved himself forward. Muscles in his thighs and waist tightened as he strained and broke free from the grasps of the men holding him. The heat of his blood thumped within his neck.

She was tipping forward, the small cat in her arms.

Reaching out to pull her upright, Chandur felt the bite of the wood shackling his hands. He could have given up then, but he knew it was not his fate to allow Hiresha to drop in front of the empire's nobility.

Ducking in front of the enchantress, he pressed upward against her with his shoulder. His boot squeaked as he wrapped a leg around one of hers and used the leverage to right her.

“Thank you.” Her words were the faint sounds of a woman drifting toward sleep.

Only then did Fosapam Chandur notice twenty blades lowered at him. The royal guards had formed a wall of cutting bronze between himself and Pharaoh. A few of them stalked toward Chandur, but they stopped when Hiresha supported herself on his arm. All the court peered at her holding Pharaoh's kitten.

Hiresha's eyes only blinked open once every few breaths. He did not understand how she saw her way as she staggered forward, between the kneeling men and women, toward three seats: two thrones and a stool. The cushioned throne of the empire resembled a couch, except with no back and more jewels. A second throne of silver crouched on a lower dais, and for a teeth-gritting moment, Fosapam Chandur feared Hiresha intended to sit on it. Crocodiles formed the armrests, mouths shiny with fangs. A stool of inlaid ebony sat next to the Silver Crocodile's Throne.
She'll sit on the stool,
he thought.
She has to have heard of the Silver Crocodile.

The enchantress sat on the silver throne. The room gasped. Fosapam Chandur could not move, worried that whatever he did would disrupt fate.

Hiresha blinked then got up. “What is the point of a chair no one's to sit on?”

Pharaoh's peal of laughter ripped away all tension and replaced it with breathlessness. “Don't you worry. I sat on the Crocodile's Throne once and look! I haven't been eaten!”

With Hiresha safe on the stool, she rested the kitten on her lap. Fosapam Chandur hoped she could help the poor soul. It reminded him of an alley cat he had once given a saucer of milk, except two bands of dark fur wrapped around the forelegs of this desert kitten.

“Maid Janny,” Hiresha said, “my gloves.”

The maid hustled into view, set down two wine glasses, then coaxed off the enchantress' elbow-length gloves. Hiresha wrapped her arm back around Chandur's elbow.

“Spellsword Chandur, support me.” Her fine-boned hands nestled around the kitten. She bowed forward, and her hair curtained her face and most of the little cat. A sheen of white traveled down her black locks.

Concern for what she was doing dried his throat. First, sitting on a chair dedicated to the Silver Crocodile. Now, breaking an Academy rule by enchanting in front of all these people. A spellsword could be imprisoned for telling the trade secret of enchantresses only being able to cast spells while asleep. She was doing both, with an audience.

The spellsword lifted a concerned brow at Janny. She shrugged and raised a wine glass to his lips. He wetted his parched throat then bowed his head in thanks.

When the enchantress fell asleep, light from her amethysts turned half the silver throne violet. Reflected sparks of light traced over faces stretched with awe. Chandur listened to the guest's loud whispers.

“Look, she's dipping into her magic.”

“Are we quite safe?”

“Never seen an enchantress cast before.”

Chandur began to think that none of them realized she was sleeping. Though her shoulders bowed, the nobles seemed to believe she only concentrated.
Guess they don't expect her to sleep sitting, in front of them all and Pharaoh, too.
No other enchantress could have done it, that much he knew.
Gratitude for her skill eased the tension constricting Chandur's abdomen.
She'll help the kitten then find the fennec and the thief. I won’t have to meet the scorpions.

An exquisite note of pleasure sliced out of Pharaoh's mouth, and she lunged past her guards toward the shining enchantress. Spellsword Chandur was afraid she would wake Hiresha. He sidestepped as far as he could while still supporting the enchantress, nudging Pharaoh back with the wooden block of his shackles.

The vizier and his scribes had shuffled next to the dais of thrones. He leaned close to Chandur and doused him with a breath potent with the scent of sesame oil. “Did you just lay hands on Pharaoh?”

“Don't think I could have.” Fosapam Chandur lifted the block of wood covering his hands. Pharaoh was grinning up at him.

“In the reign of Queen Sting,” the vizier said, “eleven men were drowned in sand for touching the pharaoh. A relevant bit of trivia, you could say.”

“I didn't—”

“It would be a travesty for the elder enchantress to secure your pardon, only for a second crime to demand your execution.”

The spellsword told himself that he was not fated to be tied to the bottom of a pit and have sand poured over his head. He felt less than comfortable when Pharaoh swung herself around his arm. She hugged him, and though her grip was light, he could not breathe.

Her smile came up to the height of his chest. She was taller than a girl, but neither did she look like a woman. Fosapam Chandur thought something was different about her face, something otherworldly. It was not only the lotus leaves painted over her plump cheeks.

She asked, “Don't you love being in love?”

“Ah, what now?” He shifted in her clutches. He glanced to Hiresha, still asleep and pulsing with light.

Pharaoh beckoned him with a stiff hand.

He lowered his head, to hear what she had to say.

She pecked his lips then drew back and gasped. “You kissed me!”

“I didn't. You—”

Her lips darted in a second time. “You kissed me again! Vizzy, he kissed me!”

The vizier did not look up from his writing. “Must the city smother him in sand, Pharaoh?”

“No!”

“Brand his palms?”

The spellsword's blood scalded his veins. He felt hot and sick, buffeted between rulers of the empire, and he had to remind himself of the bright future the Priest of the Fate Weaver had promised him.

“No!” Pharaoh clung onto the spellsword's scaled vest. “Can't you see we're in love?”

“Forgive me, Pharaoh. My eyesight must be deteriorating.”

Fosapam Chandur snapped his gaping mouth closed.

Enchantress Hiresha swayed to her feet. Her amethysts no longer glowed. She rubbed one hand over a handkerchief provided by Janny. She then secured the yellow-jewel brooch to the kitten's collar. “The discharge in the sand cat's lungs is removed. This citrine should prevent further infection from the damp air.”

“Sandy!” Pharaoh launched herself at the cat. In her arms, he mewed triumphantly, slapping her face with his short tail. “Oh, Sandy. I love you more than all my mummy cats together!”

She ran off with the kitten, her squeals echoing down the palace halls. The vizier rapped his staff twice, and the nobles stood, some with hands pressed to their sore necks or backs.

“Pilgrims admire a creative execution,” the vizier said, looking past Chandur's right shoulder. “For every infidel sentenced to excruciating death, the city earns an average of seventeen hundred thousand ounces of silver.”

“I didn't kiss her,” the Spellsword said.

“Are you pronouncing Pharaoh a liar?”

“No. But she...that is we may have by accident....”

“What is this?” Hiresha touched his arm with a hand once again gloved, drawing him away from the vizier, for which he was more than relieved. “If you will excuse us, Vizier Ankhset, I should begin the search for my fiancé.”

“I would bow to you, Enchantress,” the vizier said, taking three more papers from his scribes, “but I am simply too busy.”

Chandur followed the enchantress out of the Water Palace. One noble left in front of her, and a young man led an ostrich to his master. A sedan chair waited for Hiresha. A pack of camelry guards waited for Chandur.

The enchantress touched Chandur's shoulder. He tilted his head to hear her faint words.

“While healing the young feline, I considered our position. I’m by no means assured of finding the thief and the fennec. And I might escape a sarcophagus with my own magic but never a guarded pyramid, not without you.”

He believed that fate would bring her success in freeing him, though he still worried her own destiny might end in the tomb of the Golden Scoundrel. He was trying to think of something encouraging to say when she continued murmuring in a voice he struggled to hear even arm and arm with her.

“Chandur, I order you to escape at earliest convenience.”

“Don't worry about me.”

Hiresha said, “There's no reason for you to also lose your life over this insanity. Escape, and, if—if necessary—leave me.”

The thought of abandoning the enchantress in this city sickened Chandur. He lost his chance to say so when guards pulled him from her. A grunt slipped out of him as they forced a pole behind his back and through the crook of his arms. They retied his legs.

“Stand in front of Pharaoh, will you?” A guard pushed him to the ground.

“Only the best for a spellsword,” another guard said with a flash of gold teeth. “It's Bleak Wells Prison for him.”

Feelings of alarm nauseated Hiresha when she learned the guards intended to take her to the prison.

“Not to stay,” a guard said. “To meet the priests.”

She was less than reassured. Few enough hours remained to her in which to find the thief and fennec; losing another made her more anxious than leaning over a ledge of the cliff-side Academy.

They carried her sedan chair past a granite statue of a woman sitting on a throne. Her speckled-white arms crossed over her bare chest, and she grasped a stone cobra and three golden arrows.

“Doesn't look the mothering type,” Maid Janny said.

“They say,” a guard said, “Queen Sting poisoned arrows with her breast milk. But even she never stole no poor, defenseless fennec.”

Hiresha battled off a yawn before she could speak. “For the last time, we did not abduct your flea-bitten god.”

She could not look away from Chandur as guards hauled him into a circular building of unwashed stone. Hiresha was escorted after him down a windowless hall. Soot stained the walls in fan patterns above braziers. The smoke stank of burning camel dung. Metal grated the floor in alcoves painted with hieroglyphs and adorned with carvings of snakes.

“You're in Bleak Wells now.” A man wearing key amulets leered at her and Chandur, half his crooked face in shadow. “I promise not to let the boys tip hot coals onto that pretty head of his, even if he kidnapped a god's bride.”

“He did nothing of the sort,” Hiresha said.

A moaning from a nearby grate startled Maid Janny. She edged back to the prison entrance.

“Put him down.” The jailer unlocked a grating with his amulet and gestured to Chandur.

Guards heaved up the metal bars. They removed his wooden shackles only to retie his wrists with rope, and the men gestured him to step into a basket attached to a cord. “Hold on, unless you want to break a leg.”

Chandur did not step into the basket but instead removed the rope hooked to it. Holding the cord between bound hands, he shook off a guardsman and hopped on his own and dropped into the oubliette.

Seeing him so willing to descend into a hole full of darkness made Hiresha shiver. She wondered
if he would see the sun again. That was, before they led him to his execution.

Three men spooled down the rope, slowing his fall. “Never seen one do that before.”

“Ain't natural.” A guard pushed the grating, and it slammed with a clang.

Hiresha covered her ears with trembling fingers.
What if the thread of Chandur's life is snipped short?
She hated to think she had guided him to that fate.

The guards yelled at Chandur to let go of the rope. They yanked and tipped over when the tension on the cord gave out. Two more guards carried the jasper sword on their shoulders.

One huffed. “More battle-ram than blade.”

Hiresha felt compelled to follow them. They lowered the enchanted sword into another oubliette, another black pit. The blade had been carved out of a single boulder valued at a hundred and seventy gold pieces, and enchanting it for Chandur had taken days, and before that, decades of mastering her craft. The reek of burning dung made her eyes tear.

Seeing both Chandur and his sword locked away made her think of her own future. Hiresha imagined the lid of the sarcophagus booming shut. Her breath shuddered in and out. Even if she saw no hope for herself, she would not let Chandur come to harm because of her. He had far more waking hours ahead of him.

Resolving to do all she could for Chandur, she straightened her back and strode down the corridor. Before she could leave the prison she received another shock. The Lord of the Feast knelt in front of a grating. The gloom in the hall swelled in time to his breaths, and his crooked fingers stretched shadows over the wall in the shape of fangs.

A guard gripped his sword hilt. “Who're you?”

“I belong here.” The Lord of the Feast spoke with such conviction that the guard muttered an apology and backed a few steps away.

A royal guard whispered an explanation of some sort to his fellow. Hiresha caught the words “Lord Tethiel” and “trades with the Dominion.”

“Hiresha,” the Lord of the Feast said, “my heart, this is a splendid surprise.”

She cocked one brow. “Is it really a surprise?”

“True, I could have followed your aroma. But I come here daily,” he said. “Gloating is my favorite form of exercise.”

Hiresha's face burned as she peered at the bars and the darkness below them. “Is Chandur down there?”

“This lofty abode belongs to a once-tracker for the Bright Palms. She hunted and baited five of my children into a rude impaling.”

The hush of his voice sent a trickle of coldness through Hiresha, and she imagined Bright Palms nailing the younger Feasters through their necks and chests, leaving them dead and hanging from their homes. Hiresha spoke with care. “I did not think working with Bright Palms could bring a sentence.”

“Apparently not content with murder, she also stole from a city temple. No doubt trying to enrich the priests with poverty, as per the Bright Palm’s tenets.” He raised his voice and spoke downward to the grating. “And her story will end happily. Instead of turning her heart to stone by becoming a Bright Palm, the organ will be freed from her chest, two days hence. I look forward to the event.”

Hiresha could not bring herself to feel sorry for the deaths of Feasters, who would have been murderers themselves. Her thoughts searched for a polite way to leave the conversation.

“Her scent grows richer by the day.” Air hissed through his nose. “Ah, prisons smell so lovely.”

The enchantress made the mistake of inhaling. A stink of filth and humanity seeped up from between the bars. The Lord of the Feast had to be smelling something very different. She winced at the thought of Chandur having to molder in his own waste.

“Your sword lug is imprisoned?” The Lord of the Feast did not truly ask it as a question. “Best thing for him. He fears less than a simpleton.”

“His name is Chandur. Fosapam Chandur.” She checked over her shoulder, seeing the guards had given them a bit of privacy. Her eyes drooped closed as she struggled against the wish to ask the Lord of the Feast to free Chandur. “Could you....”

Hiresha thought of the prison silent, all the guards lying dead. Each of the men would have families. Many of them were young, the first sons of merchants or the second and third of lords. Today's guardsmen might grow to be captains, fathers, wise men. A few years ago, Chandur had been one of them.

“Free him?” The Lord of the Feast completed her thought. “You're better off without him.”

“I'll be the judge of that, thank you.”
Don't ask for his help,
she told herself,
don't plead. The fewer ties with him the better. Even if you feel more awake with Tethiel close.
She strode past him.

He followed with a wide stride.
His legs had the outward bend of one used to riding,
and they brought to mind the time he had ridden away from her on the back of a many-legged basilisk
.
“A fine idea,” he said. “Better we speak someplace less enclosed by ears. And walking limbers the thoughts.”

“I did not ask for your interference.” Hiresha's skirt flowed back and forth over her legs as she tried to outpace him. “I make my own plans, and they mustn't include you.”

“Every plan should allow for the unforeseeable.” He was a few steps behind her now. “And I mean to talk about just that.”

A guard hailed her at the door leading into the daylight. “Enchantress, the priests will replace me with a baboon if I let you out. They're bringing someone to question.”

“We won't go far.” The Lord of the Feast nodded to a brass tower that shadowed the prison.

Hiresha stepped back into the building. “I will stay then. I have no wish to converse with Lord Tethiel.”

“The conversation you least want is the one that's most necessary.” He started toward the brass tower as if assuming she would follow. Over his shoulder he said, “You should know, my heart, being stuffed into a sarcophagus is the least of your worries.”