Dark Lord's Wedding Read Free Page A

Devotees must have tossed wealth here for centuries.
    The gold nuggets shimmered blue in her light. When she reached to sift through the trove with a hand, the precious metals darkened to hues of violet. None of the treasure was in coins. Silver axe heads flashed. A jawbone was full of turquoise teeth. Broken knives of alabaster shone with turquoise-skull hilts. Jade frogs were everywhere. Some shattered, some crudely carved, some as big as toads, some blackened, some still pale, the frog effigies thrived at the bottom of the underground pool.
    Her red paragon diamond was not here, and yet its nearness itched against her skin. She would find it somewhere else in the drowned cavern.
    Tethiel squeezed her fingers. Yes, he had to breathe, and she ought to as well. She opened her other hand, and her amethyst piercings flashed. Water transformed into gas, and she held a bubble of air. She lifted it to her face and inhaled. It tasted of ancient rottenness, of death and forgotten lifetimes.
    Hiresha kissed Tethiel and shared her air with him. His lips shocked her as if with static. He cupped her face, and chills crisscrossed down her neck. Despite all the foulness around them, she was smiling. Bubbles escaped the sharp corners of his smirk.
    The treasure twinkled beneath them. What wonders she could build with such wealth. She might enchant the hoard with enough magic to dazzle the continent.
    If only she were willing to pry a fortune out of a god.
    The Bright Palm tried to ambush them with her knife again. They were whisked to safety, Attracted to the blue paragon. The diamond pyramid spun, each of its four sides frosted with an intricacy of facets. Hiresha cast the paragon before her, and it drew her and Tethiel to the surface and above. Rivulets of blackness drained from their clothes.
    “My red paragon is elsewhere.” She lifted her hand, and dream-shine glistened over the cavern’s walls. “I suspect something carried it out of the water.”
    “Why, that’s writing.” Tethiel pointed to the limestone, where black lines crossed each other in patterns like crazed hieroglyphs. “Someone must have been trapped down here, and he etched the walls with his madness. Or devotion. The two are so hard to tell apart.”
    “No human made this.” Hiresha pressed her palm against the wall’s slime. Her hand sank to the wrist. The markings appeared as if worms had crawled into the stone then died.
    “What monster then?”
    “Many small ones. This cavern is afflicted with pestilence.”
    Her world stretched and spun. She was above ground, in a village stricken with death. People wept, as did their ulcers. Hiresha pressed a purple garnet into each pockmarked hand, and her magic fought back the plague.
    She blinked and was back in the cavern. She was in both places. Lucid dream and reality spun around each other like a flipped mirror. Too fast to tell them apart. On this side, on this facet of being, the stone walls were diseased, not thousands of people. Tethiel held her hand. He hadn’t made a nation suffer for her sake.
    She had no reason to hate him, here. Even if the skin of her hand squirmed under his touch, she should not let him fall into water’s blackness. It would be wrong to leave him in this cavernous oubliette, to let him fight the Bright Palm and the skitterers over cold meat. Only in her other reality had he disappointed her.
    Of course, if she tried to abandon him in these depths, he could lash out at her sanity with a storm of fangs. He wouldn’t, though. He loved her. Enough to sicken a nation.
    “I’m sorry I was cold to you earlier this evening,” she said. “In my other facet, you deliberately disseminated a plague.”
    “A plague?” He faced her. They stood on the water, their feet dimpling the surface. “Whyever would I have done something so messy?”
    “For me. Only a dying empire would welcome me back.” She would not tell him how they had planned to marry in the city of her birth. He hadn’t