Dream Storm Sea (7 page)

“Hiresha! What’d you do to her?”

The spellsword stood on the rooftop above the latrine. He leaped. He sliced through the air, crossing over three buildings in one enchantment-powered bound. Sagai had already halved the distance between them.

11

Escape on the Wind

Hiresha could only imagine Sagai’s fury at seeing Naroh trapped by magic. He must have given in and investigated the women’s latrine.
A first-born prince would never have been so crass.

The enchantress slammed the tower door. It had three bars, all shaped like crescent moons. She slid two into their niches in the wood, but the yelling of her nerves made her leave the third. She ran up the tower. The steps alternated between blue and white tiles. Plates of glass were mounted against the walls, each etched with words. The script sped by.

A commotion below made Hiresha glance over the balustrade. At the base of the tower, people milled around sculptures of glassware designed to look like a flower garden. A crystal tree had lantern fruit. The visitors touched everything, no doubt leaving fingerprints on the exhibits. Their exclamations of awe turned to gasps of surprise when Spellsword Sagai bolted through them and launched off the blue floor. His enchanted boots touched the side of a lower balustrade then kicked him to a higher level.

His greaves make him Lighter than a jumping spider.
Hiresha had wanted Sagai asleep for a reason. She knew she had only moments, and the next stage of her plan required she nap.

She reached the top of the stair, found the door there locked.
That won’t do.
Backing away, she scrambled into a window niche. She pulled her purple skirt out of sight and folded her legs beneath her. Her shoulder blades dug into the glass as she closed her eyes.

If Sagai thinks I went through the door—if he doesn’t see me here—I can reach my dream.

Hiresha envisioned herself running down another stairway, this one in her mind. A void surrounded the marble steps. They trembled, stone sliding past stone. Behind her came the cracking sound of a door in the real world breaking.

The Fate Weaver is kind to me today. I fooled him.

The warped stairway straightened as Hiresha’s will bent it back into position. She reached the seventieth step, and from there she sprang straight upward into her dream laboratory.

A dais formed under Hiresha’s feet, and basalt flowed outward from it. Hiresha’s mirrors appeared, one showing an image of herself leaning against the tower window, her eyes shut. Hiresha sprang toward it. This image of herself had no mind of its own.

The enchantress would have argued the same of Intuition, who wrung her hands. She said, “Sagai has to be hopping-toads angry with us.”

“He certainly won’t give me a second chance to escape.”

Hiresha shucked off her purple gloves and reached into the mirror. The glass oozed around her fingers like clear mud. The reflection inside was her body sleeping in the Lands of Loam. Hiresha swept the woman’s dark locks over her shoulder then pressed her head back against the window. The nape of her neck touched the glass pane, and shimmering dream energy rippled over its surface.

She could command herself to sleep walk. This time she stayed sitting. Hiresha lifted one after another of her reflection’s arms to the sides of the window, and under each palm she set an enchantment in the stone. The sleeping woman’s hands dropped, releasing a magic that Attracted the glass to either side.

Hiresha could not see the window shatter. The image in the mirror was crafted of a memory. Hiresha could, however, predict how the glass must rend. How the shards must smash into the stone of the sill, how the sharp flecks must plaster the edges of the window’s now-open frame like frost.

The mirror displayed each probable outcome. It showed the sleeping woman tilt back into the empty air. Her hair splayed into a black fan. Her arms drooped alongside her, her palms full of the sun above.

Her body was falling.

“Now! Now!” Intuition hopped from foot to bare foot. “Lighten us.”

“Done.” Hiresha willed the spell with a thought.

The reflection of herself slowed to a standstill midair. Then she drifted. She spun legs over head away from the tower, flowing away on a breeze.

Intuition leaped with a cry of joy, her yellow gown spreading out behind her. “Oh! What if Fos looks up? Wherever he is in the city, he’ll see us as a purple leaf.”

The reflection’s eyes stayed closed even in the glare of the daylight. The tower with the bronze top moved away from her. She calculated she would be blown toward another dome patterned with blue and red diamonds.

“I am away.” Hiresha ran her fingers along the amulet worn by her reflection. The links had formed into clumps. They loosened at the enchantress’s touch, and the noose of a necklace drifted off her head. The amulet glided to the city streets. “I am free.”

Hiresha withdrew her arms from the glass. Her grin slipped at the sound of a third voice in the laboratory.

“You’re a spine-crushing fall above the rooftops, but that’s not what frightens you most.”

Within another mirror, a jeweled lady was upside down. She resembled Hiresha, in the same way the most beautiful woman in a city may resemble her little sister whom nobody noticed. The black sleekness of the lady’s hair fell upward over her bare shoulders, as if she were right-side up and Hiresha were the one the wrong way around.

Hiresha balanced a sapphire on her fingertip. “Pessimism is the most endearing part about you.”

“Even if all goes according to your plan, and the wind rescues you from the city, you haven’t a gem. Not even a goat to keep you alive. Your spellsword is dead or held captive between Emesea and Inannis.”

“No better ideas were offered,” Hiresha said, “so you can keep your gem-studded tongue locked in your mouth.”

Green jewels winked into view between the lady’s perfect teeth as she smiled. She wore what appeared at first glance to be a glittering dress with a blush-worthy fit. In truth, thousands of jewels riddled her skin. The pox of amethysts and sapphires branched into angular patterns within patterns, a fractal design of madness.

Once, a sliver of Feasting magic had punctured Hiresha’s consciousness. The enchantress had contained it in a mirror but had never succeeded in purging it. Worse, the intruder stole Hiresha’s ideas, sometimes the best ones, so the enchantress had to listen even if she wanted nothing more than to throw a thick cloth over the mirror.

“Your magic won’t be enough. Mine would’ve saved you in the dark streets of Jaraah.” The Feaster’s fingernail left an etching scrawl over the inside of the mirror. “It’s not too late to let me out.”

To the side, Intuition peeked around a mirror. Her rapid blinking gave away her fear.

“No need to worry,” Hiresha said. “Becoming a Feaster would prove Arbiter Cosima right. It would mean the elders were correct to imprison me.”

“You’d kill yourself before accepting your limitations.”

“The elders are wrong. As are you.” Hiresha scowled at the mirror with the upside-down Feaster. The enchantress turned back to the glass with her reflection drifting above the covered streets of Jaraah. “My plan has been a success. By the susurration of the wind I heard in the tower, I can estimate the speed it's carrying me. I’ll travel thirty miles in an—Oh, dear!”

Hiresha could sense it. They all could. The reflection’s body had changed direction, from skyward to a plummet.

Intuition gasped. “Our leg caught on something.”

“It’s Sagai.” The Jeweled Feaster banged a fist against the glass. “He must’ve leapt from a tower and caught you. May scorpions eat his eyes.”

The reflection’s arms fluttered forward and back as she was towed downward. A darkness beneath her solidified into the spellsword, his tattooed hand clamped on her leg. By her rate of descent, Hiresha knew someone of his weight towed her downward.

“Were he a statue,” the Jeweled Feaster said, “you could shatter him.”

“And since he’s mortal flesh, he’s impervious.” Enchanting a person required more than a direct touch. She would have to wake then carry him back into the laboratory. All her orbiting jewels flared red with Hiresha’s anger. “I can’t even Lighten him. Not in time.”

“Then Burden yourself,” the Jeweled Feaster said. “He may lose his grip.”

Hiresha let the Lightening enchantment expire. She tightened her body’s ties to the ground, doubling and redoubling the force of gravity. It felt like spooling gold wire over her skin. The difficulty of the enchantment cut into her.

In the mirror, her reflection flipped beneath Sagai. His body burst into mist while she analyzed whether he still gripped her.

“One and one-half seconds,” Hiresha said. “Before I impact into a roof.”

Time in the laboratory slowed as Hiresha’s thinking quickened. Her hands darted into the mirror, moving her reflection’s arms. Something impeded them. Someone was holding her.

The sleeping woman’s dark hair streamed upward. Then it flattened in a tangle as Hiresha felt her insides lurch.

“He’s trying to Lighten us,” Intuition said, “to save us.”

Hiresha tasted a bitter sting of envy that a spellsword could activate enchantments when awake. The magic in his boots would Lighten his sword and anything else he carried.

“I’ll overcome him.” Hiresha made a chopping motion of her hand.

In the mirror, the sleeping woman dropped like a stone. Sagai dangled after her.

“It’s over.” One half of the Feaster’s face hooked upward in a smile. “You’ll soon be enjoying the coaxing touch of vines in Nagra gardens.”

Hiresha asked, “And you’d be content with that?”

“No more than you. Not without gems, not without a say.” The Jeweled Feaster clicked a knuckle against the glass. “You may survive the first year. By the second, you’ll have freed your true self. Me.”

Her certainty chilled Hiresha. “I can always hold onto the Burdening spell. In another three-quarters of a second, I’ll crash into a roof.”

The ground in the mirror appeared to be a fog the same off-white color as the stone. Hiresha could not tell if she was directly above an archway covering a street, or if she shadowed a two-story building.

“You can kill yourself,” the Feaster said, “but you won’t.”

“In half a second,” Hiresha said, “I could prove you very wrong.”

“Ew!” Intuition shielded her eyes from the mirror. “We’d make such a mess.”

“And I might hurt someone, besides Sagai.”

Hiresha undid the Burdening spell. She felt herself come to a stop. And she awoke in the last place she cared to be in the Lands of Loam: Sagai’s arms.

Sweat dropped from his clean-shaven head into her eye. It stung.

She slapped him, wishing she still had the jewels in the back of her hand.

He dropped her. She slid down the side of an arched roof, passing a slit window. When she could stand, she felt her arms jerked behind her. Sagai had her wrists. He pulled, and her shoulders flexed to the point of popping from their joints. Scarlet pain bloomed over Hiresha’s vision.

“This is why you’re expelled.” His breath burned the back of her neck. “No enchantress would have done that.”

“No other enchantress would’ve had the will, you mean.”

Several women had converged on them in a rush of bright skirts and shawls. One said, “Master Spellsword, you saved her.”

“I saw it all. Someone pushed her from a window.”

Another pried a cork from a gourd. “I have wine for her. She looks faint.”

“And who wouldn’t be, in his arms,” a younger woman said.

“The moment he leaped after her, I was ready to drop my skirt,” a familiar voice said. The woman batted eyelashes painted green.

“He did the opposite of saving me,” Hiresha said. None of the women seemed to hear.

“What’s your name, Master Spellsword?”

“Are you from Nagra?”

“Excuse us.” Sagai lifted Hiresha’s hands over her head. He clasped both her wrists in front of her, leading her away. His voice pitched low and trembled with anger. “The enchantment on Naroh would shame even the barred gods. You’re reversing it.”

“My one regret is placing the topaz on her, instead of you.”

“Which hand of yours defied the arbiter by picking up the topaz?”

Fear prickled its way down Hiresha’s chest. “Which hand? Why does that matter?”

“Because that’s the one I’m cutting off.”

12

The Bells

With a crack, Sagai staggered forward. Hiresha was spun around. He thudded onto the roof, skidded, started to roll. A woman pounced atop him. Her eyes were shadowed with green malachite.

Emesea gripped his head, slammed it against the rooftop. Hiresha saw blood. The enchantress was no stranger to that particular fluid, but the violence shocked her. The crunch of Sagai’s skull against the whitewashed stone and the focused ferocity of the woman turned Hiresha’s insides to liquid.

An obsidian knife lifted for a killing blow. A jewel on Sagai’s shoulder flashed, and the black blade floated away. Emesea let it go and gripped his head again, her fingers denting the tree diagram on his scalp. The air throbbed with heat and screaming.

“Stop!” Hiresha choked out the word at last. “Don’t kill him.”

Emesea shook her head. She gripped Sagai’s hand as if to pull him to his feet then stomped his arm. Hiresha winced at the sound of snapping bone.

Fingers hot as sun-cooked metal gripped Hiresha. Emesea’s smile showed all her teeth. She beamed at the enchantress. Hiresha felt queasy, both from Sagai’s crumpled state and from relief. She was rather attached to her own hands.

“Loved it,” Emesea said. “You almost flew away. You’re like a sleepy purple dragon. And those five men with spears must be dragon hunters.”

Elite guards tromped past a statue of a woman holding a baby camel. They broke into a run at the sight of Hiresha standing over Sagai. She was wheeled around by Emesea, pulled over the rooftops.

Hiresha had no idea how she kept pace with Emesea’s pummeling stride. The enchantress felt she was falling forward. She flailed one arm to keep her balance on the walkways between homes. She had to hold her skirts in her scarred hand to not trip.

“Can’t have you take to wing again,” Emesea said while surging over the hump arch of a street roof. “They’ll be ready to send camel riders after you. This way.”

Emesea led her down a stairwell and into darkness. Before Hiresha’s eyes could adjust, she heard the bells. Clanging notes sounded behind her, perhaps out of the tower from which she had leaped. Tinkling bells answered from the distance. Bells gonged nearby in an angry clangor. The city shrieked in metal tones.

“Off the streets!” A red sleeve fluttered as a guard waved. “Off with you! That’s curfew ‘til the bells stop.”

“Is it a fire?” A woman sniffed the air.

A man gripped the beak-shaped knife he wore as an amulet. “Someone raiding the city?”

“Let the watch worry over it,” the robed guard said. “To your homes.”

Hiresha gripped her head. The thought of all this uproar over her caused an echoing ring inside her skull.

“We’ll hurry us home,” Emesea said to the guard. She walked with the enchantress past a stall selling lion pelts, through a crowd of frantic eyes. Emesea pulled Hiresha by a merchant and between clotheslines laden with bright fabrics.

“Is Fos near?” Hiresha asked.

“With Inannis.” Emesea plucked down a dress from the display, glanced at Hiresha, then pinned it back on the line.

Hiresha scowled at the thought of Fos and Inannis together. “And my diamonds?”

“Inannis lifted those, too.” Emesea unpinned a red dress.

A pang of hope eased its way through Hiresha’s muscles. “Then why are we wasting time here?”

“Purple isn’t a good color for you right now.” She nodded to the stairwell, where the elite guards were squinting down the street.

“It won’t be the first time I hide it under an inferior color.” Hiresha pulled down a sheet of blue silk embroidered with stylized clouds. Her attempt to wrap it around her waist ended in a slipping mess. She had not dressed herself in a sari for years.

The merchant stepped in, scolding them for trying to buy when she had to pack her wares for the curfew, but she accepted Emesea’s coin quickly enough. When they had the sari draped over Hiresha, only one purple sleeve could be seen. Emesea covered it with her green shawl.

“I never thought I’d say this, but you have my thanks.” Hiresha lifted a corner to wipe a drop of blood off Emesea’s nose.

Emesea nodded and pulled a red dress over her head. It draped over her short skirt. They headed out. To the guards behind them, she and the enchantress would look like any other of the black-haired women shuffling down the street. Emesea did have shorter locks than most, cut at a slant and longer on one side, but thankfully her shawl had covered the strange hairstyle during their run. The guards should not know it.

It pained Hiresha to slow to a walk. The excitement of a reunion with Fos and her diamonds made her legs twitch with pent-up motion. Her heart beat as fast as the clattering of the bells. She shuddered each time a city guard glanced over her, even if he could never recognize her by sight.

They stopped by a fountain. It flowed in a miniature of the city’s onion-domed skyline. Emesea stooped to cup water into her mouth, and she motioned Hiresha to do the same.

“They’re locking down the city.” Emesea pointed.

The water felt like ice in Hiresha’s mouth. She glanced to the side. The streets were emptying, and she had a clear view of the gate leading to the blinding desert. Five guardsmen on camels clomped through the closing double doors. Their over-robes billowed. Their hands were rooted on sword hilts. They started talking to a man Hiresha knew to be an elite guard by his silver-etched spear.

“There’s two ways for us out of this city. The bloody way.” Emesea nodded to the men at the gates. “Or the hard way.”

Five men hauled on the red-painted gates. They boomed shut, darkening the street.

“I don’t want anyone dying on my account,” Hiresha said.

The broadness of Emesea’s smile was more intimidating than a man’s clenched fist. “Knew you’d say that.”

Emesea and the enchantress turned down a side street. Hiresha might have thought it night, except that families crowded doorways, peering out onto the abandoned lanes. A mother with children bobbing out from under her skirts shouted to Hiresha to hurry home. A father holding a scimitar asked for news.

“A dragon is loose in the city,” Emesea shouted back. “Hold your children tight or she’ll carry them into the sky.”

Emesea pulled Hiresha into an alley stairway to dodge a guard patrol. The enchantress suspected a dog had died on a nearby roof by the smell. Though she was crammed shoulder to shoulder with Emesea, Hiresha still had to yell over the bells.

“Are we going to Fos now?”

“No point to the big man if we’re not fighting our way out. We’ll be meeting him and my stick bug in Oasis City. That’s the backup plan.”

Hiresha felt uneasy. “What stick bug is this?”

“Inannis. Do you have the gem to cure him?”

The enchantress shook her head. “Used it today.”

Emesea turned away, looked out the alley. She pulled Hiresha after her.

“I shouldn’t like to put Fos at risk,” the enchantress said. “But might I have a few words with him?”

The shorter woman with slanted hair said nothing.

“And I’ll need my diamonds. I’ll be of no use without…”

A guard stepped from behind a building. Hiresha startled. Emesea swung her smile onto him.

The man peered at them with his bright green eyes. “Have you seen a woman in a purple dress?”

“Yes,” Emesea said, “she was flying between the towers. Amazing as riding a crocodile.”

Only then did Hiresha remember she was not wearing any visible purple. Her throat unlocked enough to sip a breath.

“Be home with you.” The guard waved them away.

“I can see it from here.” Emesea tugged Hiresha toward a red doorway.

“I suppose I should be grateful,” the enchantress said after she had gathered herself, “for my utter lack of height or other notable features.”

Emesea banged on the red doorway. They were swept into a room painted with a pattern of crimson lace. Copper cups dotted the walls in alcoves. The skylight shone ruddy, the hues of late afternoon. Children sat on a stairway ledge leading around the room, bouncing their legs. A man with a pointed beard bowed and spoke in a well-oiled voice.

“If only my house were worthy of such beautiful guests. My fare is poor, but how honored my family would be if you joined us for dinner.”

“We’re only hungry to be gone.” Emesea thumped the carpets beneath their feet. “Open your tunnel.”

“A thousand pardons, but the bells.” The man gestured to his ear with a hand bearing five rings. “I can’t let you through with the city ringing. I am an honest smuggler, after all.”

Emesea clamped a hand on his shoulder and pulled him down to her level. “When you sell us out to the guards, you can tell them I threatened you.”

The man’s eyes traveled down from Hiresha’s sleeve—purple had slipped out from underneath the shawl—to the obsidian blade Emesea had pressed against his waistline.

The smuggler jingled a key ring, his mouth a sour smile. “I fear the tunnel will do no favors to your dresses.”

Pulling aside rugs uncovered a trapdoor. Emesea made the man walk ahead of them, carrying an oil lamp. A flame burned above its brass nozzle. The tunnel was a dusty crawlspace, and Hiresha expected the worm-eaten supporting beams to collapse from her sneezes.

When the smuggler shoved aside a rock to reveal the outside, Hiresha touched Emesea’s arm.

“Tie him up if you must, but don’t kill him.”

“Don’t see why I’d do either.” Emesea poured coins into the smuggler’s hand.

“Why,” Hiresha said, “we can’t have him telling the guards where we’ve gone.”

“They have to know. That’s the point.” Emesea guided the enchantress outside the tunnel and into a blast of salty breeze. “Where we’re going, those soft-heeled merchant's sons won’t follow.”