Magic Banquet (5 page)

The swordsman blinked at the empress then
lowered his blade. “You make a strong argument.”

The empress had stopped them with a song.
Aja had to be her friend.

“If you hurt Solin,” the empress said, “I’ll
be too upset to eat. The Banquet would be dead!”

The swordsman clenched his weapon with both
hands, one on the dull edge of the scimitar. “The hexer came here
to kill you. He followed us, I think.”

Aja glanced at Solin. Could it be true? Her
itching arms drove her to scratch. Her fingers felt numb and
slippery.

Someone had pulled gloves over her hands
without her noticing. How had that happened? The fabric was
strange. Its pleats almost looked like scales. A dotted brown
pattern stretched from her nails to her knuckles. Aja had never
seen gloves that only covered the fingers before. Each fingertip
bulged to the sides, too much like an asp’s head.

Someone shrieked.

The empress pranced toward Aja. “No fair,
why do you get beautiful snake fingers?”

Aja lifted her arms. The tips of her
serpentine fingers split. They opened into fanged mouths. She had
ten snakes attached to her hands. They coiled to gaze back at her
with golden eyes. Her thumb flicked out a forked tongue.

Second Course,
Part II:

Transformations

Aja’s fingers had never moved from side to
side before. They bent in all the wrong ways, like Solin’s leg. Her
scaly, twisty fingers—How awful! She had to be rid of them. She
shook her hands, but that only made her snake fingers hiss.

“You did this to her, Hexer?” The
swordsman’s eyes whipped forward and back. One of his pupils was
black, the other brown. The stew hadn’t changed them. He had walked
in with a mismatched pair. He looked on Aja with a scrunched and
sour expression.

I am hideous.
She thrust her hands to
the side, not wanting to bite herself. Her fingers twined about
each other with the scraping sound of scale on scale.

“I’ve done worse,” Solin said, leaning on a
crutch, “but not this time. Not to her. Not to you.”

“What?” The swordsman touched his face. A
golden stubble erupted from his chin. His jaw retracted, and his
ears cupped into furry cones. His nose flattened and turned pink.
Only his eyes stayed the same, black and brown, catlike and
striking.

The empress swung around his arm and reached
to touch his whiskers. “You’re the handsomest lion ever.”

He juggled his sword between his two paws,
then let it drop. He stared at his finger pads. From the waist
down, he still looked human. After swatting himself around his
neck, the lionman said, “No mane? I don’t even rate a mane?”

“Oh no!” The empress lifted her hands to her
veil. Feathers spread from her fingers in fans of blue. “Are you a
lioness?”

Old Janny muttered something about him being
a fit young lion. Her tone sharpened to alarm when her feet changed
to hooves. Her sandals fell off. The back of her skirt bulged—Aja
jerked her gaze away but had to return for a look. Nothing scarier
lifted from the paisley skirt than a goat’s tail. Old Janny reeled
about on four shaggy legs with cloven feet.

Everything went blurry, and Aja had to drop
to one knee. Her snakes struggled at arms’ length as if trying to
wriggle out of her hands. Aja blinked her stinging eyes and looked
past those thrashing coils. At the Banquet it was one frightful
change after another.

The empress’s sleeves erupted with feathers.
Crests of metallic blue spread to her shoulders. Where she had once
had fingers, the plumes thinned to the point of transparency, a
lace of cyan.

The empress spun, her eyes upraised, her
wings curving with her motion. “Now I’m finally me!”

She sang a few notes with such a force of
bliss that other songbirds would’ve landed in awe.

“I’ll show you,” the empress said to the
lionman. Feathers ruffled at clothing, and after some effort, the
empress lifted her shawl to reveal a medallion. A bird of turquoise
hung upside down on a golden chain. It had a beak of silver and a
blue-gem eye. “See? It’s me. Only smaller.”

The empress had flaunted the same jewelry
yesterday, at her procession. Aja’s fingers hissed at the empress
and stabbed with their tongues.

A wingbeat fluttered the empress up to the
lionman’s height. She pressed her veiled face against his and made
a kissing sound. She said, “Thank you for taking me to the best
dinner ever!”

The lionman’s cat ears drooped. “The vizier
is going to kill me.”

“He’ll be happy for me. I’ve always been a
bird trapped in a girl’s body. That’s why I wouldn’t take my milk
as a baby. I sprayed it from both ends. Mother wouldn’t cough out a
single juicy worm for me. So cruel!”

When the lionman cringed, his fangs
showed.

“We all changed into what we were meant to
be,” the empress said.

“Into chimeras,” Aja said.

The empress’s tone of voice broke into
splinters of shock and concern. “But, Aja, you didn’t want to be a
snake. How could this happen?”

The lionman’s paws pulled the empress away
from Aja’s snapping fingers. His voice had an undertone of a growl.
“Guess this is what the Chef meant by ‘affinity.’”

“He hurts women.” Solin waved a crutch at
Aja without looking at her. “Some nights, the Chef kills them. We
must stop him.”

Brown lines of fur rose vertically above the
lionman’s mismatched eyes. “Why didn’t you change? You ate the
stew.”

Solin shrugged. “Balanced the meats.”

“Didn’t work so well for me.” The lionman
extended his claws. “Or maybe it worked just right?”

“Ate less of the snake,” Solin said. “I know
what I am.”

The lionman nodded, and his whiskers bobbed.
“Don’t think it’s my fate to stay half cat, and the empress can’t
keep her wings forever—”

“Yes I can!”

“—but how do I know you didn’t hex us all?”
The lionman stroked the fur on his brow while staring at Solin.

“Guess you don’t,” Solin said.

The lionman extended his claws. “Touch Ryn
again, and I’ll have to try out these new mouse-catchers.”

Breathing was never easy for Aja when
surrounded by people who wouldn’t look at her. She had to get away
from them, from the Banquet, from everything. She slipped into the
shadows.

Asp fingers forward, she searched the
dimness for the warehouse door. The tongues of her snakes flicked
toward one direction. The air was crisper that way, more of the
sandy stink of the city night. She stumbled into the door. It
creaked. Her snakes wouldn’t grip it. They recoiled instead. She
couldn’t feel much through the scales. She had to move her palms in
circles until she found the latch.

The door’s locking bar slid up. She could
leave now.

If she did, none of the guests would
remember her. It would be as if she were never there, had never
lived.

Nothing waited for her outside except
loneliness and hunger.

Aja thumped her forehead against the door.
The locking bar made a similar sound when it fell back into place.
She could run from the Banquet, but not from her own fingers. Out
on the city streets, people would scream at her. If they had mercy,
they would throw her in a cage as a curiosity. If not, they’d stone
her to death. No, she wouldn’t dare leave until she had her human
fingers back.

I have to rebalance myself
. She slunk
back to the Banquet.

Her spine bent from side to side as she sank
back upon the pillows. And now for her stew. Her snake fingers bit
at her spoon and pushed it away. When she cupped the bowl between
her wrists, the snake meat floated closest to her lips. Her pinkie
flicked its black tongue at her eye, and she dropped the stew.

The bowl righted itself on a section of
carpet emblazoned with a mountain valley. The stew floated in a
jiggling sphere back into its glazed pottery home.

Aja slumped and stared down at herself. At
least her toes had not also grown into snake heads. She hissed a
sigh.

“No reason for sibilance.” A woman with lips
like red-hot coals leaned over Aja’s shoulder. She was the djinn.
“Your new fingers are prettier than your old ones.”

“I…I don’t want to be a chimera.”

“The snake is a noble animal compared to
others.” The djinn wore only one piece of jewelry, a necklace with
a dangling key. The handle of the ornate key spread from the bronze
shaft in a sunburst pattern.

The djinn gave Aja a horn cup full of
steaming liquid. Her snakes wrapped around its inlaid runes.
Carvings of warriors fought against a giant wolf. The horn cup
smelled of honey with a vinegar sharpness.

“This mead comes from a hall of fallen
heroes,” the djinn said. Steam wafted around her winged helmet from
the many horn cups levitating behind her. She handed one to the
lionman. “You’ll drink it tonight to honor those who have expired
at the Midnight Banquet.”

The lionman had to hold his cup between two
paws. It cracked under the force of his grip and leaked. “People
die here? Die at dinner?”

“You didn’t know?” Aja asked. She guessed he
hadn’t been raised in the city.

The djinn gave mead horns to the remaining
guests. “The Chef leads you on a culinary adventure to the limits
of the human palate. Only by obeying the etiquette of each course
can you be safe.”

The lionman bowed to look the empress in the
eye. He said, “Leave with me now, and you can keep the wings.”

“I’m staying.” The empress puckered her lips
over a mead horn. “The world is a delight, and I want to lick it
all!”

He ran a long tongue over his whiskers. “How
many die at each Banquet?”

“One,” the djinn said. “Always one.”

“What about Ryn?” The lionman patted her
between her wings. “And me? How’s the spell broken?”

Aja twisted toward the djinn to hear her
answer.

“The magic in the next course may overcome
the changes, unfortunately.” The djinn lifted her last cup herself.
“Now raise your horns for the dead. To those brave fools who risked
and lost.”

The djinn touched the mead to her lips, and
it lit on fire.

Aja drank. The mead had a strong taste. Her
ears popped, and she heard the throaty songs of men laughing in the
face of death. Her vision rippled, and the darkness above
solidified into rows of spear shafts. The weapons held up the
roof.

Beneath the mead’s bold flavors of sweet
battle lust and bitter doom, she tasted something gentler. Mint
leaf? Thyme?

Aja could be just as bold. She would stay
and eat whatever she had to make her fingers human again.

The djinn said, “May you risk and win.”

Side Dish:

THE EMPRESS’S TALE

Silver is my favorite color.

Silver toe rings. Silver moonshine on silver
mirrors. Silver notes sung by a songbird. Silver drops of mercury
rolling over my palm.

Have you ever held mercury before? It’s so
heavy! And a little slimy, but it’s the source of all beauty.
Mother told me so.

“
Rub this tincture of mercury over your
face and arms every night before bed,” Mother said. “It will make
you splendidly pale.”

The mercury would turn me into a girl of
silver. I knew it would. Sterling and perfect. Once light reflected
off the gleam of my cheek, Mother would love me.

The alchemy transformed my dreams to silver.
I could feel myself becoming heavier, more metallic, from my
tingling fingers to toes. I started to see only in silvers. All
colors became grey. I could hear silver bells ringing in my ears
and nothing else.

I forgot how to sing.

Then I knew I had to stop. The beauty of
mercury was killing me. I pleaded with Mother. “I’m not a strong
enough little bird. If I’m silver, I’ll never fly.”

She commanded the servants to smear the
tincture over me, no matter how I cried. But one of them, a girl
with sunflower hair, listened to me. She swapped out the mercury
tincture for a paste of tin. It looked the same but couldn’t change
me, hurt me.

All the colors returned to the world.
Auburn. Happy carmine. Tangy chartreuse. Cerulean. Lavender.
Queenly magenta, too. And fuchsia—I love saying “fuchsia.” Singing
it is even better. Few-chiaaa!

But silver is still my favorite.

Third Course:

BASILISK LIVER PÂTÉ

SERVED WITH BOTTLED SYMPHONY

“For this entrée you’ll require a hand fan,”
the Chef said.

“That blush-worthy, is it?” Old Janny
accepted a folded fan. She sat with her four goat-legs folded under
her skirt, half animal, half woman. “So, Chef, when is the
entertainment coming? Hoping for some oiled-muscle dancers, but
anything will do so long as it distracts from the company.”

She nodded across the carpet to the lord.
His gloved fingers appeared normal now, and Aja thought them much
less terrifying than her own.