Gravity's Revenge (31 page)

The enchantress was flattened into the snow. Disbelief raked her with its claws of nothingness.

“A clumsy ploy,” Sheamab said. “Your intent was obvious when you mirrored my steps.”

The blunt end of the staff stabbed downward at Hiresha’s eye.

Hiresha tossed a jewel at the arch that selectively Attracted her out of harm’s way. The gem released her from the curve of stone the next moment, and she hurled a spray of pink and yellow jewels. Sheamab was forced to retreat. Hiresha was required to groan from the bone-creaking pain in her leg and a deeper, more crushing hurt in her chest.

She predicted everything,
Hiresha thought.
Even my intuition wasn’t enough to outthink her.

As Hiresha took a limping step, a new thought ambushed her.
I know how the thief learned of Tethiel’s visit. He hired Inannis to forge our signature on the writ of admittance. Tethiel’s crooked fingers couldn’t have done it themselves.

Hiresha would have screamed at the Lord of the Feast, if she but had the time.
Tethiel was foolish to trust Inannis.
Or he was wrong to think threats would keep the jewel-duper silent.

She passed Fos, who was still on his knees. His fists were clenched near the bare feet of his once-sister. Hiresha considered Lightening the girl off the plateau but knew that would hardly endear Fos to their cause.

Beyond the spellsword, Tethiel was swerving out of the reach of the Bright Palm’s spikes. The Lord of the Feast’s wings had lost their fire. Snow sprayed in a sweep of razor feathers. When the Bright Palm lunged, Tethiel fanned his wings into copper sails, and the wind hoisted him twenty feet away.

I have to dispose of Mister Jewel Pox, so Tethiel can help me trick Sheamab.
At the same time, she thought,
I hope Tethiel dies.

Hiresha was shocked at herself. The staff whistled closer, and the enchantress threw herself to the side and scattered a few topazes behind. Her own intuition had distracted her to the edge of peril. As she shoved herself up from the snow, she resolved to focus, to push away all extraneous thoughts. Except that the knowingness that crept upon her was faster than thought, and now that she had begun to listen she could no longer ignore.

Tethiel knew about Inannis and Emesea. He knew she worked with the Bright Palms, a hound to track his children. Tethiel should’ve guessed he’d be betrayed.

Hiresha tried to push thoughts of Tethiel’s blunder out of her mind. She hobbled closer to Mister Jewel Pox. The man’s back was turned, his attention on chasing the Lord of the Feast. In seconds, Hiresha would be close enough to hit him with a gemstone volley. In a few steps, she could strip the plateau of the eleventh Bright Palm and leave Sheamab all but alone.

Tethiel hadn’t even had a good reason for hiring Inannis. I would’ve invited him to the Academy.
Hiresha bit her tongue, willing herself to focus.

The sound of sandaled feet beating against the snow grew louder behind her. Apprehension sluiced into Hiresha’s veins like a venom. Doom beat in her heart.
If I don’t turn now, Sheamab will catch me. She’ll hit me again.

Hiresha pushed her fears away. The clearest route to victory lay before her, and she would not quail from taking a bruise with the fate of Tethiel and the Academy in the balance.

The Provost of Applied Enchantment hobbled two more steps. She lifted her deadly azurite from her sash, the jewel shining blue between her fingers like a bead of day’s sky.

The staff hissed behind her, and the enchantress felt an explosion in her leg. Pain sliced above her ankle and below her knee, splitting the limb in two. She collapsed. When the staff cracked in again, the bones in her hand splintered with an agony of searing needles. The azurite flew away and was lost.

Sheamab stepped over her, and Hiresha was left lying in the snow. She pulled at the length of her coat, saw her leg bent at a hideous angle, sole pointing to her left.

Amid the throb of her hand and the screaming numbness pulsing up her waist—even amidst the realization she had been struck down and immobilized—Hiresha was haunted by a more terrible truth.

Tethiel knew the Bright Palms would follow him to the Academy. He brought them here on purpose.

The Lord of the Feast was no fool. Hiresha knew that he would never have commissioned Inannis for an unnecessary forgery without reason.

To lure them into the Academy. To further alienate the Bright Palms from the empire, to trick us into siding against them, into killing Bright Palms when he could not do so alone.

The Lord of the Feast had betrayed her in the worst way. He had invited discord and death into her sanctuary. Then she had shared his nightmare to cure him, when by all rights she should have listened to Fos and let the Feaster die for his crimes.

He caused all the suffering and loss. All because of him.

Worst of all, she knew she had allowed him to do it.
I could’ve refused his help in Morimound, in
Oasis
City
. A word of warning from me would’ve made the spellswords turn anyone of his description away from the Skyway. I should’ve tracked him down years ago with the Bright Palms.

The enchantress channeled all the pain of her broken body into envisioning him dying to nails through the heart and being bludgeoned by Fos’s jasper sword. She even thought of herself choking him by shoving jewels into his mouth, though that image tore at her with fiery nausea. Trapped by hurt and anger at the Lord of the Feast, she did not see the man himself bending over her. It took his voice to startle her to the present.

“They’ll find where I’ve gone soon.” His wings smoked, shrouding them both. “My heart, can you stand?”

“Traitor!” Hiresha reached for something ruinous in her jewel sash, moaned when the pain in her broken fingers stopped her.

His smoldering-black eyes darted up, looking at something approaching. “Can’t hide my footprints from them. My heart, make yourself weightless so we can fly away.”

Hiresha ripped a button to dig her good hand into her coat pocket, scrounging for the red diamond. “You had such confidence in me. You thought I’d kill Sheamab and everyone she brought with her.”

The enchantress hurled the red diamond. The priceless gem spun so that its triangle shape seemed a circle. It passed through Tethiel and out the other side. For a sweet moment, Hiresha thought the jewel with its defensive enchantments had somehow pierced his skull. She realized soon enough that he was in truth standing elsewhere, out of sight.

“Illusion-casting coward!” She scratched at the air around her, trying to grab him. “At least a grain of good will come from all this. Your death.”

The image of the Lord of the Feast closed his eyes, the corners of his lips spiking downward in sorrow. Hiresha doubted he felt any such emotion.
He commands his illusions to look as he pleases. And even if it were true, if he did regret, it would help the fallen enchantresses not at all. It wouldn’t bring Alyla back to being human.

“He’s here!” Hiresha cried out, hoping the Bright Palms would hear her. “The Lord of the Feast is near me.”

“Farewell, then, my heart.”

The man before her dissolved into shadows. Moments later, two Bright Palms sprinted past.

“The cliff,” the jeweled one said. “He’s making for the cliff.”

Hiresha pushed herself up to an elbow, and even that small movement loosed firestorms of pain up her leg. She blinked away sweat and watched Sheamab toss something to Mister Jewel Pox. He slipped a bracelet on his arm and lagged behind while Sheamab raced to the edge.

Her open hand pushed away the gloom, and the night unwound from around the Lord of the Feast. He was leaping over the cliff, feet leaving the ground, wings spreading in bristling razors. Starlight glinted in lines tracing over the daggers.

He’ll escape.
A wash of emotions dug into Hiresha. Anger, regret, relief, bitter joy, and sorrow. Part of her still wanted Tethiel to live. It felt like one more betrayal.

The Lord of the Feast flew off the plateau. The Bright Palm vaulted after him, over the cliff edge.

She’s too late,
Hiresha thought.
He’s too far.

Sheamab paddled her feet midair and threw her arm forward, the staff sliding through her grasp until she gripped the tip. The other end snapped downward to clip the Lord of the Feast’s wing.

He was flipped sideways, spinning downward in flashes of metal wings. Hiresha felt a tearing sensation within her, then a burst of elation as Sheamab began to fall.
Now I’m rid of one of them at least.
Fate has twisted into a ribbon to give me this one boon.
The enchantress wanted Sheamab to die more than ever.
After what she convinced Alyla to do.

Sheamab turned about midair and was pulled back onto the cliff.

“No!” Hiresha cried out and beat the ground with her hands. Pain lashed up her left wrist, and she saw flashes the color of gangrene. She could only guess Sheamab still wore the fennec’s collar, and the bracelet she had tossed Mister Jewel Pox had been Hiresha’s own amethyst jewelry.

The Bright Palms watched at the cliff edge, and Hiresha could only imagine them peering down at the falling Lord of the Feast.
Will he right himself? Is he flying away free after endangering everyone?
He had jumped off far to the right of the Blade, and she could not imagine him crashing into it.

A voice caused her to look up. “Hiresha!”

Fos bent over her, brushed snow from her hand, the one Sheamab had struck. The enchantress noticed that her fingers twisted in an unnatural way, and she could not help but think,
Like Tethiel’s.

She glanced around her for the red diamond. As much as the thought of touching the jewel disgusted her, it did carry her Academy access enchantments. The snow must have covered the jewel because she saw no sign of it.

The spellsword’s brow was clammy, and his teeth chattered. “I—I shouldn’t have let her do this to you.”

“A vicious understatement,” Hiresha said.

Fos said, “But I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘She’s my sister. My sister. My only sister.’”

“Now you’ll have fight them alone. Fos, Sheamab tricked Alyla into becoming a Bright Palm.”

He did not look so certain.

The enchantress went on, “At least, your sister would never’ve submitted to it if not for Sheamab coming here. Where’s your sword?”

A focus returned to Fos’s eye, a desperate purpose. He reached above his shoulder, but his hand clamped on air. He gazed over the plateau, a haze of darkness with stray snowflakes drifting. Unseen clouds above had robbed the night of stars.

The spellsword stumbled away. At the border of what Hiresha could see in the light of her blue-diamond earrings, he cried out as if he had spotted his sword. Before he could bend over to take it, a lean figure wrapped her glowing hands around his waist.

“Alyla, let go!”

“You must not become less innocent,” she said.

Hiresha squinted, saw him pry loose her hands and take another step. Alyla grabbed his feet and spoke in a voice of perfect disinterest.

“Stop.”

The spellsword fell into the snow as if slain by that one word. He seemed unwilling or unable to rise.

Sheamab found a weapon against him,
Hiresha thought with bitterness.
She turned Alyla into a tool.

Hiresha pawed at the snow around her, then dug. She could not find the red diamond.
The diamond blessed by gods. I was wrong to throw it. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Two figures of light ran through the darkness, toward the spellsword. Hiresha shouted a warning.

“Fos, run!”

He moved inch by inch, as if Alyla’s hold on him drained him of all of his vigor. By the time he had pushed himself to his knees, the other Bright Palms were upon him. Hiresha could see shining veins in the arms that wrapped around him, and she could hear Sheamab’s voice.

“Bright Palm Alyla, take the rope on Bright Palm Rommick’s belt and bind the spellsword’s hands.”

“Yes, Bright Palm Sheamab,” Alyla said.

40

Antechamber

Sister was binding brother, and Alyla’s passionless voice hurt Hiresha more than her broken bones. Beyond even that, the enchantress worried what would happen to Fos.
Sheamab put out his eye and had him tossed over the cliff the first time.
Also, the women in the crystal ballroom were as good as trapped. Hiresha knew she had to do something.

She had one knee smashed and swelling, another leg far worse, and her jewel-throwing hand broken. She still had her mind.
A mind clamped between fatigue and pain.

Reaching across her coat, she pried open her left pocket with her right hand. The vial of diamond dust felt tiny.
As small as my last chance.
Having her jeweled fingers useless would make the gambit even more dubious, and Hiresha realized she no longer had confidence anything she did could defeat Sheamab. The enchantress could hear the hollowness of her resolve in her shaky voice.

“Sheamab, would you accept my challenge to a game of Sands?”

Hiresha worked the vial up her sleeve.

Sheamab marched into view, staff cradled in her elbow. The Bright Palm gave no sign whether she had just seen the Lord of the Feast fly to safety or break his skull on the cliff, and her voice held to the same mind-grinding calm.

“Why would you think I might accept? Games no longer hold purpose.”

True, now you only play with people’s lives,
Hiresha thought, but she said, “This game might, if there’s a wager attached. Defeat me at Sands, and I’ll use my skill in enchantment to open the Ballroom door. Right now, it’s locked against you.”

“I accept,” Sheamab said. “Alyla, bring a Sands board.”

“Yes, Bright Palm Sheamab.”

Hiresha felt no relief, only the clenching worry that here again, she would fail. Though she had no intention of completing the game, she knew she had to do everything in her power for a chance at deceiving Sheamab.

“If I lose I’ll be betraying my colleagues and students,” the enchantress said. “You must hazard something of equal value.”

Sheamab’s hair took on a blue gloss in Hiresha’s enchanted light, the Bright Palm’s eyes two motes of white. “I promise not to kill you or any others in the
Mindvault
Academy
, should I lose.”

The wager chilled Hiresha, and she was thankful she would not have to rely on it. “I must accept.”

Hiresha pinched her eyes closed, for a moment overwhelmed by the onslaught of pain. She pushed her left hand in the snow to try to numb it. “Sheamab,” she said between gasps, “I don’t expect you often played the cooperative version of the game.”

The enchantress alluded to the two paths of victory allowed in Sands, to keep the Bright Palm’s focus on the game and away from suspicion. Some Academy students eschewed competition and instead worked together to create new patterns of sand on the board. Given Sheamab’s audacious comments about her skill at the game, Hiresha doubted she had ever been the type to take joy in making art with a friend.

The Bright Palm crouched over Hiresha, and in her daze of hurt, the enchantress believed Sheamab lowered herself to whisper her answer. Except Sheamab said nothing.

She jerked off Hiresha’s jewel sashes, one after the other. Losing them rattled her bones and gashed her soul, more so when Sheamab marched under the gateway arch and tossed the clumps of purple fabric off the plateau.

The Bright Palms left Hiresha in the darkness and snow. The enchantress followed their light, sensing them even past her field of vision. By the way they faced each other and moved at a plod, she expected they were carrying Fos to the Crystal Ballroom’s entrance hall.

Hiresha used the time to search for the red diamond. She scrabbled at the snow, gaining nothing more than numb fingers. To crawl on her side, she pushed with one leg and pulled with one arm. Each movement spiked what felt like a nail into her knee, and each jostle to her other leg blanked out her vision with knuckle-biting pain.

Under the snow she found more snow. And stone.
Did Sheamab take the red diamond as well?
Hiresha had not seen her run her hands through the powder, nor anyone else. She wondered if the Lord of the Feast could have somehow scooped the jewel up with his razor wings. Hiresha could not imagine him balancing the diamond on a blade all the way up to a belt pouch.
Perhaps he kicked it away from me, hiding behind shadows as he did so.

The malice of her thoughts caused her to sprawl trembling in the snow.

Mister Jewel Pox returned to heft her over his shoulder. He gave no consideration for her broken leg, and the jolting hurled her into a faint. Darkness churned within her along with a stink of burning grasses that she remembered from her childhood. Upon wading her way back to alertness, she could only think that the smell had leaked into her mind from her dream world.

Everything is fraying.

Hiresha was lying on tile in the entrance hall of the Crystal Ballroom. She felt bare, exposed, with her jewel sashes stripped from her. Her fingers darted to the vial of diamond dust up her sleeve, found it still there. Pushing herself to an elbow, Hiresha saw Fos trussed against the wall. Beyond him, enchantresses crowded the other side of the Ballroom’s door of crystal. Hiresha spotted the dean with her mismatched gloves and the rector with her bandaged ears, all peering at her.

If I fail now, they all will see it.
With her other jewels gone, Hiresha knew she would have but one throw.

Alyla entered with a board under her arm crosshatched with white lines. The girl set it on a table and arranged vials on either side containing sands in all the hues of mold.

Sheamab lifted a glass vessel filled with black. “If you are conscious, Enchantress, we will begin.”

“Something appears to have denied me the use of my legs. You can hardly expect me to compete while lying down.”

Mister Jewel Pox hoisted Hiresha up by her armpits. He dangled her at arm’s length as if she were a pot of soured milk. She suspected the treatment of her leg would have been met with approval by the average torturer.

“She’s not a straw doll, you know,” Fos said.

Mister Jewel Pox never glanced at the spellsword.

Sheamab flicked the lid off a vial. “Because you challenged me, I will take the first throw.”

Sand streaked in a sickle shape. Hiresha’s earrings tinted the board to shades of blue. Part of Hiresha thought,
I have her, she’s playing,
while another part panicked at having to aim while thick hands dug into her sides.
Once I attack Sheamab, Mister Jewel Pox could throw me into the wall.
And if I miss either one…
Sheamab stood with her staff nestled in one arm, her fingers curled around its shaft. Any instant, she could strike.

Hiresha scraped her words out of a dry throat. “You can’t expect me to play while being dangled. I must have a chair.”

“You made no mention of chairs before agreeing to play. The board is set. You will either make a throw or concede.”

“This should be a contest of the mind, not how long I can bear pain.”

“Are you concerned, Enchantress, that I place insufficient value on your bodily comfort?”

“Do I hear a Bright Palm attempting to jest?”

Hiresha let the vial in her sleeve drop into her cupped hand.
I have to go through with it, hope I survive long enough and with sufficient diamond dust left to incapacitate Mister Jewel Pox as well.
With two fingers cupping the diamond dust, the same hand picked up another vial. Blue-frost sand filled it. In the light of her earrings she hoped both vials would look similar.

“Is there no tenet against attempting humor?” the enchantress asked. “A pity…”

She pretended to fumble the vial, hoping Sheamab would see it as arising from numb fingers or a pain spasm. Hiresha clasped her hands together to stop the glass vessel from dropping to the floor.

“…you wasted your intelligence by becoming a Bright Palm. I think I should’ve liked to meet you…”

Switching positions of the vials, she brushed the one holding diamond dust against the garnets on her broken fingers.

“…before you became a murderous icicle who twists the tenets for her own use.” Hiresha thumbed off the vial’s cap.

The game board smashed upward as Sheamab lashed out with her staff. It bit into Hiresha’s knuckles, and the vials were flung from her grasp, trailing a sparkle of sand and crushed dreams.

Hiresha slumped in the male Bright Palm’s hands.

Sheamab returned her staff to its position propped against her thigh and inner arm. “Once again, Enchantress, I knew I would defeat you after your first move. Which was to accept my wager using the same words that you refused only last night. At that time you preferred I throw your maid over the edge. Tonight your intent could not have been to defeat me in this game.”

Hiresha glanced down the hall. The diamond dust glittered in a pathway across the floor and up the wall. The carpet had been powdered and turned weightless, and now it lolled upward. Fos eyed the bulging fabric mournfully. Beyond him and on the other side of crystal, enchantresses shook their heads, hands pressed against their own chests, and their lips moved as they spoke to each other in soundless disappointment.

Defeat felt to Hiresha like being wedged at the bottom of a chasm, crushed between two planes of cold rock.
No way out now.

Sheamab grabbed Hiresha from the other Bright Palm, pinching the enchantress’s arms between glowing elbow and ribs. “The game was not of Sands. But after your clumsy sleight of hand you are nonetheless beaten. I claim your wager. You will open the Ballroom door.”

Hiresha rolled her chin upward so she met Sheamab’s gaze. Their faces were so close that the enchantress’s nose brushed the Bright Palm’s jaw. Hiresha knew that breaking open the door would put Minna, the elders, and the rest in danger again. At the same time, a voice inside her said,
They have no food, no water. They’ll have to surrender soon anyway. Give the marble heart what she wants and open the door, maybe she’ll let you live.

The enchantress pushed away the thought. Perhaps more spellswords would climb to the plateau in the next hours. She would not deny the Academy its last desperate chance. Even if that meant the Lord of the Feast had survived to warn the spellswords, had escaped the bone-shattering fate he deserved.

“Dispose of me how you see fit,” Hiresha said between her teeth. “I’ll not open that door.”

“Wrong again, Enchantress.”

Sheamab slung Hiresha around and seized her from the back. A black line whipped over the enchantress’s vision, and the staff smashed into her throat. By reflex, Hiresha’s hands gripped the shaft on either side of her neck. Two fingers on her left hand stuck upward, useless. The enchantress pushed, and Sheamab only pulled the staff tighter. Hiresha sensed veins pulsing with magic wrapped around her, and she felt she was being choked by light.

The Bright Palm held Hiresha so close that their faces pressed together, cheek to cheek. Sheamab carried her to the crystal door. Enchantresses gawked on the other side, their fingers clawing their way up their gowns to touch their own throats.

“Open this door…”

Hiresha’s vision flashed red in time to Sheamab’s shouting.

“…and I won’t snap her neck.”

Don’t do it.
Hiresha gagged on the words. It felt like her head was about to be pinched off her shoulders.
Don’t trust her.

Through the crystal, the rector’s ebony hand gripped the orange lace on the dean’s shoulder. The big woman made wide sweeping movements with her other arm, while the dean maintained her look of tragic constipation, crystal key in her fist.

I can’t let them open the door, even if I can’t speak.
Hiresha’s chin trembled from side to side, bumping into Sheamab’s cheek. The enchantress was trying to shake her head, to warn the others, but the Bright Palm shifted one side of the staff into the crook of her arm to seize Hiresha’s temples, mashing Hiresha’s skull against her own.

The enchantress felt the shining magic leaking into her, soaking her with a deadly sense of peace. She would be calm, yes, she would accept her fate with dignity.

No! No!
Pushing away the tranquility, Hiresha fought and struggled.