Iriset’s thoughts are interrupted by commotion outside, just before the thin lacquered wood door to the chamber sweeps open.
A man stands there, glaring.
Wary of playing her role, Iriset touches her fingertips to her eyelids politely, but otherwise doesn’t move, knowing from a lifetime in the Little Cat’s court to let a mystery present itself before she overplays her best guess.
“You are the daughter of the Little Cat?”
Lowering her hands, Iriset studies him in quick glances. The man presents extremely masculine-forward, stereotypically so, and is several years her elder, with curly black hair falling around his face to his chin, his short beard shaved into a repeating star pattern, and eyes glittering mirané brown. He has the sharp, symmetrical bones and wide-planed cheeks of the miran, but his rich tan skin is likely to come from Sarenpet blood. Red paint stripes across his temples and eyes, just like Sidoné’s, and he wears a plain black robe and trousers, flexible boots, and two curving force-blades at his hips. Those swords hum with contained force and it’s all Iriset can do not to reach for one to inspect it—she’s never held a living blade before! But she stops at the way his teeth bare in distaste.
She answers, “Yes. Iriset mé Isidor.”
“I am Garnet méra Bež,” he says, confirming his gender, “and I will study your face before you are allowed from this room.”
It’s rude and intimate of him to demand such a thing. “Do you serve Her Glory as Sidoné does?”
“No.” He crouches before Iriset with the controlled power of a griffon. “I serve His Glory, the Vertex Seal.”
She doesn’t drop her gaze, meeting Garnet’s with all the insult she feels. She senses she ought to show no weakness to this man.
Garnet examines her, flicking his eyes across the planes of her face, takes in her heavy knotted hair, her modestly tied vest, her cold hands clutched together upon her thighs. She guesses he memorizes her features and hands, everything he can use to identify her if she ever nears him or Lyric méra Esmail His Glory. Iriset has no paint to shift her cheekbones, nor kohl to change the shape of her eyes, no lip stain, and has not decorated herself at all, for she’s not been given the opportunity; besides, she wouldn’t have. Better to present herself like a plain spider, eager to please but knowing herself. A maskless face, open and honest. Spiders don’t pretend to be other than what they are. Let Her Glory choose the form Iriset will take. That will tell Iriset plenty.
Finally, and with simple formality, Garnet says, “While Amaranth’s handmaiden you will go every morning to Her Glory’s side and there be masked in the paint or cloth or ceramic of the day, to Amaranth’s will, and in line with her other handmaidens. If you are not with her, you are allowed a plain attendant’s cloth mask, in palace orange, red, or white.”
Iriset pinches her left thumb to her left forefinger, creating a circuit for the ecstatic force rushing through her blood.
“You will agree,” Garnet says, “or you will return to the prison.”
“I do not think you can take me back without Her Glory allowing it,” she argues gently.
“But her brother can, and he will if I insist.”
Her position is tenuous already. If Garnet méra Bež holds so tight to the ear of the Vertex Seal, it will do Iriset better to win him to her side. Though she hasn’t the least idea how to accomplish it: Within his inner design she senses a determined flow. He knows exactly who he is, and his loyalty never wavers. His choice whether to trust Iriset or not will come from her actions. From her own balance and proof of loyalty. And so she nods.
“Good.” Garnet stands, and Iriset does, too, as smoothly as possible. Her eyes are near level with his nose, and he doesn’t step away. Instead of lowering her gaze, Iriset boldly tilts her chin up to continue meeting his. He smells like most men she’s known: hair oil, sweat, leather, but something extra tickles her nose and reminds her of the stuffed eagle in Isidor’s office.
Burned and ruined now.
Iriset closes her eyes suddenly, aggrieved, and turns away, upset with guilt that she forgot the destruction of her father’s tower even for so small a moment. Distracted by the new game, she’s forgetting it isnota game. It’s her father’s life. And her own.
“Iriset mé Isidor.”
She glances over her shoulder. Garnet stands half out the door, giving her a dangerous, black look. “My mother works with the royal griffons and she has told me that once you are forced to threaten a young griffon, you have already misstepped with the creature, either through its temperament or your own. I would not like to misstep now.”
And he sweeps out of the chamber, leaving Iriset with the echo of implied threat heavier than would have been a threatitself. At least, she thinks distantly, his mother’s work explains the smell of dead eagles hanging about him like motes of dust.
Iriset waits, breathing flow and rising and falling and ecstatic forces through her body, as she had in that plain prison. Somehow, she feels worse here, antsier so near to power and plotting, so close to opportunities to help her father. She grits her teeth and keeps to her meditations.
Finally a scratching comes at the lacquered door and she straightens her legs to standing. Another girl in palace orange covers her eyes and summons Iriset by name, then leads her to a crescent banquet chamber.
The low, oval table in the banquet chamber is set with ceramic bowls for different drinks—tea, cloud liquor, and rose wine, and the greatest delicacy: chips of flavored ice with sprigs of rosemary and flecked golden saffron frozen in their centers. Succulents in perfect symmetry grace the center of the table, and the cushions for sitting are stitched in patterns that matched those layered, sharp leaves.
Amaranth mé Esmail reclines on a short-footed sofa, and around her several women with different appearances of femininity array themselves. Sidoné kneels near the Moon-Eater’s Mistress in a plain black robe and jacket, her mirané-brown arms bare, and her hair roped and free of any mask. She’s striking, raised at Amaranth’s side as a body-twin, taught the arts of war and defense that she might always be there to either protect Her Glory or die in her place. It is an old mirané tradition, and in the past generations, the insistence upon true similarity of looks has grown lax.
Amaranth presents herself like water. There’s nothing of steel in her pose, her clothing, or body. She’s the luscious flooding Lapis River, her baked mirané-brown skin sprinkled with shimmering glitter along cheekbones and shoulders, her eyelids blackened, and her hair tumbling in layers of rich black curls. Red moons clip back a few strands of hair at her temples. Sheer silk and the most delicate layers of linen drape her thick, rolling body, hugging breasts and hips and belly as if that cloth were the most blessed thing in all the world for being allowed to drift so near her flesh.
She smiles, and Iriset struggles to contain the flush of desire suddenly blossoming as if from a seed that’s always been inside her. Waiting to meet Her Glory.
Iriset wonders a bit breathlessly if this happens to everyone who encounters the Moon-Eater’s Mistress. Is it her morning ritual with the Moon-Eater that imbues her with such thick eroticism? Iriset murmurs, “Your Glory,” lifting her hands to shade her eyes.
