Absolutely wretched sobs, drawn out from the awful hollow in her chest, because he loves someone who doesn’t exist, because Shahd stayed for her, and her father is dead, and she killed Erxan with her bare hands, and and and so much, and it’s all Lyric’s fault but she loves him back! She does, she can’t help it, and what is she supposed to do about that? About the people in the center of this? Stick to the plan, shake the empire to its core because that’s what they deserve, that’s what everyone who pretends the laws of Holy Silence matter more than lives and healing and progress and science and hope and all those other things Iriset doesn’t believe in but must be better. Absolute Silence is a design flaw, and if nothing else, Iriset hates a design flaw, and once she latches on she’ll never let go until she solves it or gnaws it into ugly, unanswerable pieces.
Lyric walks up the spiral stairs with her in his arms and deposits her, crying, on the bed. He vanishes and returns, pressing a cup of water to her lips, but she’s too upset not to choke, so he drinks from a different cup and kisses her with the sharp taste of honeybite on his tongue.
Then he takes off his shoes and hers, and climbs into bed, wrapping her up, and he just begins to talk.
Whatever comes into his head about what’s going on in the empire is what he tells her: There was recently a regime change in Huvar, and the new kings have sent extra taxes to prove they’re more loyal than the last city leadership, which causes its own hassle for accountants and could be a smoke screen for something yet to come. General Lapis left Moonshadow to head back toward that territory just in case. A food shortage far in the west of the empire in what used to be the Land of God (Ilium Valocally, he says) caused a rift in the regional government, half of whom claim it’s Aharté-blessed drought to clear out thepeople for a generation or so, while the other half say it’s just bad farming because of the empire’s assimilation laws that give the native farmers who know how to cultivate the land from hundreds of years of experience very little impetus to help the homesteaders. Several force-bridges are delayed in construction across jungle canopies in the empire-controlled Eastern Bow, probably because of their fire dragons, but also probably because of a bribery scandal that stretches from the distant construction sites all the way to the Ribbonwork precinct here. A man was arrested outside the town of Melit on suspicion of planting a bomb on behalf of a local insurgency; he claims he was in that desolate neighborhood harvesting lightning truffles, which is so ludicrous a defense he’s being brought to the Holy City for a mirané trial. And that barely touches on the intricate plots and issues occurring within Moonshadow itself: this so-called Silk rebellion and whether to disrupt honest graffiti artists to curtail it; the implementation of a new tax upon artisans and whether architects count as such; constant arguing over whether to lift the second-generation marriage restrictions—just to name a few of the most pressing. Lyric keeps talking until her hitching sobs slow, and she can draw long, eight-count breaths, leaning into him and listening to his voice.
He doesn’t realize, but Iriset begins to really listen to what he’snotsaying, her brilliant mind seeking patterns, and she concludes hazily that Lyric’s job is less to directly rule, and more to act exactly as his title suggests: He’s the Vertex Seal, the pinnacle of the arc of justice, and from his height his most important task is determining where the attention of the throne needs to settle from moment to moment. He’s a focusing steeple, drawing power and law, and from him power and law spool and spiral to hold down the weft and warp of the empire.
Iriset wants to say, “You’re an architect, too,” like she said to Amaranth once.
She wants to say it, to push him into so many arguments built to make both of them better. That’s the lie she tells herself most often: that they’re both going to be better people at the end of this, molding each other with arguments and love. Because isn’t it love, this feeling when he comes into a room still discussing a scheduling mishap with Garnet, and makes his way to her just to absently touch her hair? Isn’t it love when they sit across a low table during dinner with his mother and sister, and Amaranth says something outlandish, but instead of arguing with her, Lyric catches Iriset’s eye for her alone to see his amusement?
It’s warm, it’s desperate, it fills her up to bursting. Isn’t that love? It’s selfish and eager and aching with guilt, but isn’t it love all the same?
Or is love impossible if it begins with a lie?
Yet when she drinks her water and kisses him, when he doesn’t need to talk anymore because their mouths are busy, as his lips burn down her spine and he presses his teeth to the rise of her hip, when he digs his fingers deep inside her as if to plant his gentians there, Iriset forgets she’s ever lied about anything in all her life.
The last thread of silk
Iriset hides for two days.
Sidoné arrives the first morning with coffee to tell Iriset that the assassin was a Seal guard, but they know nothing about his suspected employer. The moment he was defeated, his Seal guard mask buzzed with ecstatic energy that flowed into his mouth and nostrils and eyes and ears, surging to disrupt his brain functions. Beremé and Garnet and Sidoné, who hates to agree with the mirané prince, agree the real culprit had been near enough to know when their plan failed, and somehow triggered the mask’s shift with a very well-hidden trail of architecture. Menna tore apart the garden looking for any remaining threads or empty spaces in the palace’s design to account for it, but hadn’t been able to prove anything. (Thank the red god Iriset hadn’t had a chance to put down her anchor in that garden yet.) Three people who wore versions of the jade cuffs to track their motions through the palace complex had been near enough, including Shahd, but they’ve been cleared. The truth is that most people with enough influence or motivation to wish Singix harm are not required to have their access andmovements tracked like attendants and handmaidens. The Vertex Seal decreed a temporary law that everyone entering the palace complex needed to be cuffed or carrying a similar mark that would allow them to be traced. The Architect of the Seal had to bring in additional designers on a work-for-hire basis to get enough constructed, set, and tuned as quickly as possible. Iumeri Selk is working with Menna to make a list of everyone near enough to be able to trigger the death-design. It includes Amaranth, Dove méra Curro, Iumeri himself, and Diaa, many of whom Iriset had seen just prior to the attack. There are six others so far, all miran but one.
Iriset hides in the menagerie gardens with Huya pretending he’s not there, too, playing up her very real grief and possible (badly timed) pregnancy to be left alone by everyone. She dedicates the first day to wallowing in self-recriminations, denies even Amaranth’s offer to borrow a handmaiden, and the second day she spends studying the griffons as they soar against the glass dome of the menagerie. She watches as they catch rising force, as their wings cup around it, shaping themselves to lift or dive or gracefully circle.
She has an idea about flying—or at least about falling up.
But that night before she can start working it in, Amaranth appears in the Vertex Seal’s suite and insists on a family night. Iriset somehow finds herself curled up in the large alliraptor bed with Lyric and Amaranth as well as Garnet and Sidoné, who arrive with pillows and extra blankets, pajamas and snacks, sweet tea for Lyric but honeybite for the rest of them. Iriset is coddled and comforted and not required to speak or act at all. Garnet is the first to raise his glass for Shahd, and Iriset realizes as far as he and Lyric know, Shahd is the second attendant to die in Singix’s place.
Iriset knocks back the honeybite and asks for another.
She lays with her head in Lyric’s lap, ear pressed to his thigh, as he and Garnet laugh over a story of the first time Amaranth returned from the Moon-Eater’s Temple successful in her solo awakening. She’d kissed fourteen people, Seal guards, attendants, mirané ladies, gardeners, and the old Architect of the Seal before Sidoné calmed her down—and Amaranth insisted she had to kiss two more for a round sixteen, a holy number! Her Glory had dragged her entourage (large even then) to the Vertex Seal’s office where Lyric was studying with their father and laid it all out for them. Esmail had been amused, but left it to Lyric, who could not argue that sixteen was indeed a holier number than fourteen, and so Amaranth needed to complete her design for the good of the empire. Fortunately, there with them, always, were Garnet and Sidoné, who Lyric suggested would be the best finale. The body-twins accepted their kisses, Sidoné with a laugh and Garnet only reluctant because he was shorter than Amaranth at the time and disliked being reminded of it. Later, Amaranth had teased him that it had been her kiss that bestowed upon him the growth spurt necessary for those broad muscles and proud stature.
The alliraptor bed tilts breezily beneath Iriset, and Lyric caresses her hair, laughing softly so that it vibrates through his body and into hers, and she’s relaxed and not thinking at all of what extreme power everyone at that slumber party wields, the destruction they cause, or what is certainly soon to come.
When she transitions back to some semblance of her daily royal life, Iriset is not above using her volatile emotional state to spendmore time alone, supposedly idle with reading and mask making, which she does do—but the focused alone time allows her to layer specialized ribbons, like the kind that pull skiffs across the city, into her graffiti. They aren’t designed to pull skiffs to and fro, but to lift her high into the sky. She’ll be like the griffons. Or a numen herself, a creature of power with reams of silk exploding around her like spider legs, like rays of sunlight, like wings.
When she imagines her display, it’s glorious. She’ll make Silk into a god.
It is kind of hilarious that of everyone in the palace complex besides the Vertex Seal himself, Iriset is the only person not required to wear a locator cuff. Lyric had originally thought to allow exceptions for Amaranth and Diaa as well, but Amaranth took one anyway, to show her support of the policy and prove she has nothing to hide. Diaa reluctantly did the same, though certainly lectured her daughter over it in private.
Since she’s not being traced, Iriset manages to use the secret lover’s door in the study to sneak out of her quarters late at night without anyone noticing, to plant three more anchors. There are only seven left to go. And nine days until Bittor’s deadline.
Most visitors from outside have stopped coming, thanks to the annoyance of having to wear a tracking cuff. But not whirlwind-of-chaos-and-fun Nielle mé Dari. Nielle offers to make the journey regularly, seemingly delighted at the hint of danger. When Nielle comes to work with Iriset and share a meal, or visit the handmaidens who haven’t “broken free,” as Nielle puts it, their easy camaraderie feels like a different kind offriendship than any Iriset has experienced before, because Nielle doesn’t appear to want anything from Iriset—from Singix—butfriendship.
She definitely doesn’t believe Iriset is anything but a gentle princess. It’s safer that way.
They spend the afternoon of the seventh-to-last day making masks in the Blue Between Sea and Sky Courtyard, and failing to gain access to the numen. Iriset has made a mask of its face and took Nielle with her to attempt a visit under the pretense of gifting it the mask—with the null disruptor button pressed to the underside. It couldn’t be arranged in time and Nielle had to return home. Iriset will ask her husband to intervene next and grant her an audience with the numen. She knows she can persuade him.
Iriset holds the mask in hand now. It’s delicate ceramic and glazed not quite the exact silver-gray-pink shade of the numen’s skin, but close. She glued black glass beads at the edges of the eerily round eyeholes and painted jagged black lines emanating from those eyes. The mouth is gritty and sharp with pink quartz shards. It’s horrid and she likes it.
When she enters her quarters, the finches and skull sirens are in a tizzy. They hop from branch to branch of the force-aviary webbed against the dome of the greeting chamber.
Two Seal guards not of her own complement stand at the arch opening into the study.
Fear pops ecstatic charges up her back. All her tools are hidden in there.
