Magic Banquet (8 page)

The Chef flourished a hand to the empress,
then to the swordsman. “The kraken’s magic will overpower those
that came before and fill you with good health. The perfect dish
after exertion.”

Aja lunged to her feet and winced. She spoke
thickly through her bloody nose and swollen lips. “It’ll cure
us?”

The Chef didn’t answer. He motioned for the
djinn to serve drinks.

Aja’s legs wobbled as she walked back to her
plate.

The empress flipped her arms up in delight.
“Aja! Oh, no. Your face is bleeding. Ew! Make it stop.”

What a terrible time for a bloody nose. Aja
scrubbed her lips clean on a sailcloth napkin, then turned back to
the empress. She was already chatting with the swordsman again.

“I won’t eat a monster, I couldn’t.” The
empress made a face. “Unless you will.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Is it even dead
now? How could we tell?”

“I’ll eat the kraken,” Aja said.

She would show them she wasn’t just a little
girl with a bloody nose. Maybe she hadn’t been too bold when the
kraken arm had crawled out, but she could have courage in her
eating. First she would have to wash out the taste of blood. She
reached for her glass.

Something black darted to the front of her
drink. This wasn’t the musical tonic. She stared face to face with
a fish in her glass. Its serpentine tail splashed as it lunged
toward her gaping mouth.

Falling back, she dropped the drink. The
crystal vessel floated down to the carpet, the fish a dark streak
inside.

“My drink tried to eat me,” Aja said.

“Nonsense,” the Chef said. “The tickler eel
merely wishes to swim down your throat.”

Aja crossed her hands over her neck, staring
at her glassware with its fish. A fin on the eel’s underside
fluttered. Rainbow colors shimmered down its side in a glaze of
greens and pinks.

“That sounds fair,” the lord said. He
lounged on the pillows beside Aja. “After the main course tries to
kill us, the side order should want to be eaten.”

The Chef sprinkled parsley over a plate of
what looked like green and black pearls. “The side item is avocado
caviar. Once in your stomach, the tickler eel will nibble the
caviar and release a pleasing shock.”

Aja grimaced at the eel in her glass. “We’re
supposed to swallow it whole?”

“It swims into your stomach. I already
explained this.”

At least the eel was small. Not that Aja
would ever swallow it live. A wriggler inside her? No thanks. She
could be courageous in her eating, but she wasn’t crazy. She puffed
out her cheeks. “Could I just drink more of that music tonic?”

“Tickler eel is a delicacy of the
Archipelago Kingdoms,” the Chef said and turned back to the
kitchen, “and you’d do well to treat their traditions with
respect.”

“Doubt live kraken is traditional,” the
swordsman said. He stood in the Chef’s way and nodded to the
empress. “You know who your meal tried to kill?”

The swordsman was a big man. The Chef made
him look scrawny. “I know only,” the Chef said, “that I serve men
and women at this Banquet. They become great by finishing.”

“And you serve kraken at every one?” the
swordsman asked.

“Many.”

“And never more’n one dies a night? One man,
I mean.”

“Never.”

“That’s the part I don’t see.” The swordsman
balanced his blade on his shoulder. “Why can’t two have died there?
Or all of us by the end?”

“The first death at a dinner,” the Chef
said, “leads to thoughtful dining. If there’s one crime in this
world it’s mindless eating.”

He cupped the swordsman’s shoulder with a
palm and lumbered around him.

The next sound in the Banquet was the rumble
of Aja’s stomach. If this kraken was medicine, she would gobble it
down. The Chef had told them the magical seafood would return them
to health, and snake fingers weren’t healthy.

She cupped the jiggling meat in her palms.
The sleeves of her robes stopped at her elbows. Any longer and they
would’ve draped in the sesame-seed oil. She buried her face in
food.

It tasted of sea spray and storm. The kraken
had a bouncy texture. The freshness of the meat gave each mouthful
a crunch. The sound was like biting into a roasted cricket. The
kraken tasted so much better than bugs. Aja cried a little. After
the first bite, her heart thumped. It sped faster with every gulp.
Her blood sang through her, and it dribbled from her nose onto her
dish. Red dotted the porcelain.

“I admire your appetite, my young truffle,”
the lord said. He whipped a black silk kerchief from his coat
pocket and lifted it toward her bleeding nose. “Allow me.”

By reflex, she reached to slap away his
hand.
Wait, my snakes!

Too late. The lord could never pull back his
arm in time before her asps struck.

Fourth Course,
Part II:

A Tickling

The snakes cowered from the lord. Instead of
biting him they kept their fangs to themselves and hid their
arrow-shaped heads beneath Aja’s palms. Goose pimples crept along
her arms and down her back as he closed in.

The lord smothered her nose with the
kerchief. He tilted her head. His finger prickled the nape of her
neck.

She flinched. Was he beginning to strangle
her? Or worse? In her visions after eating the oracle truffle, the
lord’s fingers had appeared sharp and jagged, like teeth. They felt
like points of coldness. Her head, cradled between jaws.

The lord said, “In a minute it’ll be over,
my sweetling.”

Ah! He would kill her. She knew he would.
She had to push away. Her arms, why weren’t they shoving? Her legs
lay dead on the carpet. She couldn’t move. His touch had more venom
than any asp.

Aja gasped. She could still breathe. He
hadn’t clamped his kerchief over her mouth, only pressed it to her
nose. His needle fingers hadn’t sliced into her throat, only held
her trapped. Maybe he didn’t mean to kill her.

She forced herself to look up, to meet his
stare. Except the lord’s curiously pale eyes gazed past her, to
Solin sitting on her other side. Crutches were propped against his
chest. The lord spoke to him.

“My honey crumpet, you didn’t hex the
tentacle.”

If Solin took offense at being called a
“honey crumpet,” he hid it behind his curtain of hair.

“Could it be,” the lord said, “you can only
curse something that resembles yourself?”

Solin grunted. He hunched over his plate of
kraken, and its oil coated his fingers.

“I thought so.” The lord lifted Aja upright.
“There, now you may resume your feast without any more sanguine
dressing.”

He had released her. She was free, no longer
trapped by his touch. Aja brushed the back of her hand against her
nose. It no longer bled. The lord had stopped it. She thought she
better be polite to him, so she spoke as if he were family. “Thank
you, Uncle.”

Still, Aja wouldn’t let him so close again.
If he reached toward her while she was eating, she would throw the
food in his eyes.

She crunched on more kraken meat, juices
flowing into her mouth. The sesame oil tasted like bread smoked
over a cedar fire. She would impress the guests by eating a lot.
She might not be as tall as the others, or as old, or as
glittering, but she could be the hungriest.

Colors brightened as she ate. The richness
of the carpet caressed her legs. The flame of the lamp warmed her
forehead, distant though the light was.

The crimson of the lord’s coat kept catching
her eye. Rose red. Sunset red. Blood red. How strange that he
didn’t touch his meal. Seafood was costly, a rarity, but perhaps
not to pashas and other such lords.

“You’re not hungry, Uncle?”

“Not for seafood, and never again. A voyage
took me across the Dream Storm Sea. I sailed with Janny’s mistress,
as it happened. There we had more than our fill of kraken.”

She couldn’t tell if he joked. His tone was
too even, his face too calm. Only desperate men fished the sea, and
boats never crossed it. Aja snuck another glance at the lord. He
had none of a fisherman’s swarthiness. His skin gleamed an inhuman
white, the hue of polished alabaster.

“The sea did wonders for my health,” he
said, “The miracle being that I’m still alive.”

The lord raised his voice to speak to all
the guests.

“Of course, too much good health will only
get a man killed. He begins thinking himself impervious, might
start picking up knives or swords. And there’s nothing more
dangerous a man can do than arm himself.”

He did not gesture as he spoke. His hands
clenched at his sides, fingers flicking together. One glove swarmed
with embroidery of sea serpents.

Warmth pulsed down Aja’s own fingers. They
were soft, and they didn’t hiss anymore. Scales twinkled as they
fell off her hands. She had her own fingers back, and the stiffness
had cleared from the petrified ones. Eating the kraken had cured
her.

Aja flexed her fingers one by one, then
fluttered them in a row. Hands were amazing. She hopped to her
feet, to dance with the empress. Ryn’s face was flush and
sparkling. Feathers molted down her arms, and she skipped in to hug
Aja. Aja returned the embrace, twining her fingers together.

Had Aja ever resented the empress? Aja
couldn’t do that to a friend, a sister.

The empress moved clumsily, and there was
something stunted about her fingers. Maybe they had always been
that way, but her smile was all joy. She and Aja pressed their oily
hands together and laughed. The other guests cheered.

They were seeing her. She was with them,
part of their family. Aja had wanted this.

When Aja whirled back to her place on the
carpet, she tripped over Solin’s crutch.

“Sorry, Uncle.”

He had cleaned the kraken grease from his
hands. He sat straighter, his shoulders wide and relaxed.

“Ryn got her arms back. And look!” Aja
swooshed her human fingers upward. “All there again. Did the kraken
make your leg right?”

Solin lifted the corner of a pillow covering
his leg. He let it fall back. “Didn’t expect it to.”

Aja’s heart sank. With two healed legs he
probably could dance like none other. He moved better than most
with only one. She had to say something to take his mind off
it.

“When the kraken first came, I didn’t know
what it was. And I couldn’t move. But something pushed me away,
your crutch. So I guess what I’m saying is thanks.”

Aja had heard the guests call him other
things, bad things, but he had been all quickness in helping. He
didn’t limp or teeter. He did acrobatics. Crippled or not, he was a
master of crutches.

“You’re great.” Aja hadn’t meant to say that
out loud. She wouldn’t speak another word. Her lips were locked and
bricked over. “I’ll protect you from the others.”

“Huh,” he said. “Aja, how old are you?”

“Fifteen,” she said because he might tell
her to leave if he knew she was only thirteen. “Definitely
fifteen.”

On the other side of her, the lord laughed.
“My dumpling, if you haven’t learned to lie yet you may have to
resort to telling the truth.”

Solin said, “You’re too young for such a
gathering.”

Aja’s face and neck burned. Sweat dribbled
down her back. No one was telling the empress she’s too young.

“Be careful, Aja.” Solin angled himself on
one crutch, bringing his cheek within inches of hers. “It’s you or
I who dies tonight.”

Aja flinched, and her gaze darted to his.
The one amber eye within his drapes of hair wasn’t looking at her
but at the carpet in front of her knees.

“The lord has a stake in protecting the
other three.” Solin nodded once to the swordsman, to Old Janny, to
the empress. “We won’t be missed.”

Aja rubbed her arms. The warehouse air
chilled her.

“May Purity forgive me for asking this….”
Solin pinched his eyes closed and tilted his chin away from Aja. He
was still close. He smelled of sweat and wood resin.

“What?” Aja asked.

“You shouldn’t throw in your lot with a
hexer,” he said, “but you’d be a hero in my land, one of the
Purest. If you bring me a hair of the empress.”

Aja’s eyes bulged. Had any of the other
guests heard that? They were watching the empress lift a glass to
her lips. The shimmering colors of the eel jumped into her mouth. A
lump traveled down her throat. Strange. That didn’t look so
bad.

“Her man would stop me,” Solin said. “And
the lord might, too. You could manage.”

A shawl covered the empress’s hair. A stray
strand wasn’t likely to drop in her food. She placed a dab of
caviar in her mouth, swallowed. Her brows shot up. Her lips spread
in astonishment, and she hugged her belly.

“What would you do with her hair?” Aja
asked. Hold on, what was she saying?

Solin’s jaw tightened. He pushed himself
away from her.

Aja floated in a bubbling wash of unreality.
A hexer didn’t just ask me to betray the Oasis Empire, did
he?
She wouldn’t, but she could imagine herself being called a
hero. Dresses of jewels, she would wear those every day, and she
would eat nothing but coconut-date delicacies. Everyone would
welcome a hero.

She blinked. Her glass wobbled and twinkled.
A rainbow spun inside, the eel. It was almost as small as a
tadpole. She could swallow it without trouble. Not that she ever
would.

She held the glass. Had she just picked it
up? It trembled. The swimming eel spun a whirlpool. Bringing the
glass to her lips seemed most natural.

Only when the fish hit the back of her
throat did she understand.
The kraken.
Its magic had done
more than cure her. She wasn’t herself.

Aja gagged, but the eel had already
stretched its way down her neck. Its fins brushed against her
insides like a feathering.

She clinked empty glasses with someone. The
empress handed Aja flatbread with caviar. The black beads tasted
like gems of salt. So delicious, Aja didn’t bother to chew.