Fox's Bride (19 page)

“Diamonds and topazes are for commoners. Sapphires and rubies are the only jewels fit for a god's bride.” A merchant shoved out with two arms, each bearing scores of bracelets, studded with jewels from black to white to clear and spanning all the colors of the spectrum.

“Corundum is indeed the royal family of jewels.” Hiresha tapped a finger on her lips, striding to the next stall. “Yet, I have always admired the hues of garnets.”

A merchant wearing earrings the shade of pomegranate presented a tiara. Its stones shone so green they shamed emeralds. “My lady has a refined eye.” He glanced at the garnets on her gown with a questioning brow.

“Garnets will only scratch.” Another man lifted a tray of jewels arranged in the shape and colors of a rainbow. “Zircons! All the way from the Cloudcrusher Mountains.”

Other merchants heckled. “Dull!”

“Might as well buy glass.”

Hiresha strode to a man who had not yet looked up from his rug of wares. Amid crystal and rounded stones of rose quartz lay angular amethysts. She picked up one of the purple gems. “Sometimes the common jewel can surpass the rare in elegance.”

A grin crept onto the quartz-merchant's face. His smile slid away when the enchantress strode away from his stall.

The priest glanced to the horizon where the sky was turning red. “We won't stay long.”

Hiresha nodded, gazing from one hopeful merchant to the next. “Hmmm. There is only one thing for me to do. I must buy all of them.”

The merchant wearing the jangling bracelets thrust himself forward. “All the sapphires?”

“And the topazes, and the zircons, quartz, garnets, and colored diamonds.” With one arm still tucking the fennec against her, she unrolled the scroll with the scribe's hieroglyphs and her signature pattern. “Take your accounts to the Silver Crocodile.”

The merchants bowed and praised her. One wished her happiness in the afterlife.

“Less supplication,” she said, “and more packing of gems.”

The priest edged closer to her. “There is no purpose. The Golden Scoundrel will shower his bride with treasures in the next world.”

Hiresha said, “Cannot I indulge in one last worldly splurge?”

“The enchantress,” the priest said, “will not carry jewels with her into the sarcophagus. She shall go as she was born into the god's arms.”

“So you want me to place jewels on your bare body?” Maid Janny asked. “Wouldn't you rather try sleeping with something else? Last night as an unmarried woman, and all.”

The maid winked at the two guards positioned in the hall. They peered into Hiresha's room in the temple compound, but they stood too far away to overhear.

Hiresha undressed in front of them without blushing. She lay on a sagging rope bed, propping her head up with a wooden stand that served as a pillow. “Up and down my limbs,” she said to Janny. “And across my torso, then remove the jewels in the same order and place them into a sash. Will that be too difficult for your diminutive mind?”

Janny jerked a needle and thread in and out of a sash, stitching creases in them for scores of gem-sized pockets. Her arm lolled outward, pricking Hiresha in the arm. “Oh! I'm so sorry. Had an uncontrollable urge to stab an ice-crotch enchantress. Must be common among us small-minded folks.”

Despite the sting in her arm, Hiresha was yawning. She muttered something she hoped was biting while sleep dragged her downward to unconsciousness.

In the round laboratory, all the weight of fatigue and body left her. Pivoting on one toe, she Repulsed each dream jewel onto wall shelves. Baubles whizzed past the jewels to her, carrying the scripts of complex spellcraft. A veined bloodstone hovered above her as did the golden chisel, a lavish honey jar, and silver clamps.

Gems from the waking world winked into view on the basalt table. The maid must have begun setting them on the enchantress’ skin. Hiresha nudged herself through the air to stand over the operations table, where gems seemed to bud from the black stone.

“A set of triggering garnets will prime the magic in other jewels and serve as the first condition in enchantment activation.”

Ten purple garnets levitated from the table. Hiresha fanned her hands. Magic pinched closed the arteries in her fingers, and her nail beds whitened. She turned her palms to face her and decided she would not puncture her fingertips with gems. Pain aside, the gems would impede her sense of touch.

Hiresha held her face steady as she Repulsed apart the skin below her finger pads, between two knuckles on each finger. Pain thrummed up her wrists as she fitted the gems into the wounds. An Attraction closed the flesh around the garnets.

Her blood resumed flow. At the center of a red lump on each finger, a purple facet flashed. Any enchanted jewel she held would detect the nearby garnets, and half its activating contingencies would be met.

“Second condition.” The crystal menace of this voice came from a mirror. The Feaster admired her own hands, studded with enough sapphires to resemble the colorful scales of a reptile. “Within three seconds of being near a triggering garnet, the enchanted jewel collides with an object.”

“My ideas, not yours.”

Jewels paraded through the air between Hiresha's hands. The silver and gold tongs of their settings peeled from the gems, freeing them. They blazed with color as she enchanted them. Hiresha considered intricate spells that would cut off blood flow or put someone to sleep. Those complex magics could fail, and jewels so enchanted would have to contact the skin of her targets. A tunic would armor men against her.

She decided to employ the primary strengths of her magic. Though she tried Burdening spells, they required she melt dream jewels for power. Gems that carried Lightening magic she could make four times faster, and each had twice the strength of Burdening jewels. She poured magic of Attraction into the rest, and they glowed with the most power.

“Third condition.” This playful voice came from the reflection who twirled in her topaz gown. “We adore the fennec.”

“Speak for yourself,” Hiresha said.

The Feaster sneered at the other mirror. “You're almost as foolish as Pharaoh.”

“Say, we were thinking of what Pharaoh said.” The reflection balanced a jewel on a finger.

Hiresha said, “Not I.”

“And Pharaoh told us the fennec was only possessed sometimes. It's true.” Her yellow glove pointed to another mirror.

Within the glass, guests from the royal party shuffled in and out of view. The fennec ran between legs and onto a carpet made of petals. He began strutting in circles around Hiresha.

Hiresha squinted at the memory of the Water Palace. The field of focus constricted on the fennec. His elbows jerked with each stride, and tremors ran down his limbs as if he were uncertain where he wanted to place his paws. All natural grace had been stripped from him. A snarl twitched the black corners of his mouth amid white fur.

“The poor dear struggled for control,” the reflection said.

Hiresha's fingers throbbed around the newly implanted jewels as her heart beat faster. “So it wasn't animal training.”

The memory of the fennec completed his third circuit around the enchantress' purple skirt. In his following bow, the muscles in one leg tensed, and part of him tried to stand.

“The possession ended here.” The reflection pointed, and in the other mirror, the fennec leaped and latched his fangs into the closest person, his newly chosen bride. “He was confused and scared, so we'll have to forgive him.”

“I was chosen.” Hiresha massaged her fingers. Shards of anxiety began bursting within her head. “If not by a god, by a Soultrapper?”

“The Lord of the Feast was right.” The Feaster slammed her jeweled fist against the glass, cracking it. “The Soultrapper knows what you did to his apprentice, and now he's out to kill you.”

“I am uncertain of that assessment.” Hiresha reviewed the faces of those she had met. People blinked by in the mirrors in a whir of humanity, but she did not observe any significant facial slips that would hint at murderous wishes. She recalled the Lord of the Feast mentioning this Soultrapper would be ancient.
He could theoretically hide within a tomb,
she thought,
and control people and petite animals without.
“A Soultrapper would complicate my escape.”

“You have to find him,” the Feaster said, “and kill him first.”

Hiresha lifted ten colored diamonds in her palm. “This might explain what the thief Inannis said. That the vizier knew to find us at the south docks.”

The reflection said, “We'll have to take the fennec with us, too. We can't leave him to be some nasty man's puppet.”

The thought of having to overcome a Soultrapper daunted Hiresha. With his powers of possession, he might turn the whole city against her.
The way things have progressed, perhaps he already has.
She did not think the Soultrapper had attempted to control her own mind yet.
I must be ready to resist.

Freedom would be hard won for her and Chandur, she could see that. She would have to find corpses the Soultrapper had defiled with his glyph and remove the magic seals to weaken him. Her confidence still lit the jewels around her with rippling flashes. Now she had knowledge of what she faced and a means to surmount it. She felt that acknowledgment was due.

She nodded first to the Feaster in her mirror then to the smiling reflection. “I concede that you both have your uses.”

“Let me out.” The Feaster scraped her hands against the glass. “I'll track the Soultrapper. Sniff the coward out.”

Hiresha placed a blue diamond on her tongue.

“I'd even rip the Lord of the Feast apart if you have to.”

Tilting her head back, Hiresha swallowed. The jewel scraped her throat, but she Attracted it down to her stomach and held it there in case of an emergency. “I will do this my way. With enchantment and a plan.”

The reflection asked, “What's the plan?”

“To be ever ready to come up with a new plan.” She trickled the rest of the diamonds into her mouth.

A cool nose greeted Hiresha the next morning.

The paws of the fennec balanced on her neck. His furry chin grazed her cheek as he snuffled. Whiskers kissed her.

Hiresha wrapped three fingers under the fox's chest and between his forelegs. She lifted him as she sat up. “I'd not forgive any man who struck me, even if anger possessed him,” she said to the fennec. “You, however, are surprisingly affable, for a fox.”

The fennec angled his ears upward as she spoke. He then shifted in her grasp to scratch the inside of one ear with a back foot.

Maid Janny bustled into the room like the professional bustler she was. “Talking to animals now, are we?”

“You forget, Maid Janny, that I am an educator at the Mindvault Academy. Compared to the pupils I'm forced to teach, an animal audience is more of a lateral move.”

“Huh.” The maid stood in profile, moving a hand down a motherly bulge along her waist. She winked. “Am I beginning to show?”

Hiresha struggled with thinking through her drowsiness in the mornings, as well in midday and the afternoon, to be fair. When she at last understood, she said, “I presume you hid the jewels in your dress.”

“The priest sent a few stooges snooping for them, so I stashed the sashes,” the maid said. “Soon as you want jewels, just reach down between my baby kegs.”

“I should think not.”

Janny dressed Hiresha into a white gown traditional to the city while also clucking over the enchantress' hands. “Enjoy sticking yourself with jewels?”

“I'd sooner explain it to the fennec. Do make yourself useful and fetch me some pebbles.”

Janny left grumbling at the odd request. Hiresha glanced out a round window and noticed pilgrims thronged the temple compound even at the early hour. The sight of her holding the fennec sent them into a frenzy, with much waving of the arms and whooping. Guards on camels kept order, more of the riders than she cared to see. The pyramid shadowed all.

Uncertainty pattered its chilly feet up and down Hiresha's back. It was not that she feared to put her new enchantments to the test. She merely thought it best if the initial experiment involved fewer participants.

Janny returned with pistachios, saying they were as close to pebbles as she could find on short notice in a city. Hiresha took one shelled nut at a time, intending to practice her aim for throwing enchanted jewels. She hurled the nuts at a chair inlaid with silver.

The pistachios flew past the furniture to strike against a wall mosaic, hitting a painted guard crouching over a pyramid. The edible missiles pattered off his hooked sword and against the foxes stacked on his other arm, and on the lion by his side. One nut even found its way to land on the chair.

“This will not do,” Hiresha said, “I need a standing target. Maid Janny, against the wall.”

“Not happening.” She was tying twine around a rolled rug.

The fennec sprang down and retrieved a nut. The enchantress thanked him and rewarded him by stroking him down his back. As Hiresha continued practicing, the fox yipped with excitement, picking up each nut between his teeth and laying it at Hiresha's feet. His tail did not wag as she might have expected from a dog but tufted straight upward, proud as a flag. Of the two of them, the fennec seemed completely unconcerned how most of the projectiles flew wide of their mark.