“Thank you.”
“There’s a stool if you’d like to come into the back.”
Iriset accepts the hospitality and the cup of rose wine. It’s cloudy, cut with rice liquor, and it sits hard on her tongue but slips down like a trickle of smooth fire. She touches her eyelids with thumb and forefinger in appreciation.
Pel sips at her own cup and studies Iriset. “You’re probably better for him dead.”
“Not personally,” Iriset answers, taking no offense. “And not if I miraculously revive. But you should go visit friends in another precinct.”
“You bringing the army behind you after all?”
“No, Bittor’s done that himself, with the assassination of Sian méra Sayar last night. I’m here to warn him. To help.”
The old woman’s crooked front teeth gleam when she grimaces, and Iriset thinks, as she often has, that there’s no need foranyone to have crooked anything. Superstition and stubbornness hold human architecture as apostasy. But this time, she thinks of Lyric, too, and his belief in Aharté’s Holy Design. His insistence that humans are already designed as intended, even when born with disabilities that apostasy could mend. There are things Iriset knows she can’t fix, but perhaps only because she’s never given it great study. (She’s never given much study to any kind of healing or developmental design beyond traumatic injury or apostatical cancers, and doesn’t realize that in three hundred years of the Apostate Age, the question of what human design could and couldn’t, or should and shouldn’t, attempt was varied, passionate, and rife with not only conflict but disaster. There are no easy answers, only individual circumstances and a whole lot of arrogance.)
Thinking of Lyric even fleetingly makes the opal pill in Iriset’s chest ache and the resonance hiccup. She has to swallow carefully and breathe obviously deep. The disintegration of the marriage knot has to be working, but she can’t focus on it too clearly or it will solidify again. Maybe. Her whole body feels like it’s recovering from sunburn.
“I don’t think Bittor killed him, hiha,” Pel says.
The endearment clenches a fist around Iriset’s throat, and all she can say is “Huh?”
Pel looks darkly amused. “The small king. I am not aware of any plans to kill him, especially since he was in the neighboring precinct. But I don’t know all that Bittor plans.”
Iriset finishes the wine in her cup in one long go. It parts strangely around the opal she swallowed. She briefly meets Pel’s gaze before politely settling her eyes on the older woman’s lips. “The Vertex Seal thinks he did.”
“Then he might as well have.”
Before Iriset can respond to that brittle pessimism, Pel continues, “You’re Isidor’s daughter, aren’t you?”
Iriset nods.
“I remember you on the street with your grandfather. You never came into my shop, though, not a good little girl like you.” Pel snorts. “Except you’re also Silk. That was well done.”
“The Little Cat was good at keeping his life compartmentalized,” she says lightly. Iriset learned the same trick from him very well.
“I was with Bittor when we heard that Iriset mé Isidor died.”
“So?” Iriset feels her cheeks flush. She’s disliking the sense of interrogation.
“So nothing in particular.”
“Will he come fast?”
“Probably.”
Iriset clenches her jaw. Her scalp itches and she wants to scratch away any of the last of Singix’s skin. Tentatively she touches her hair. The crawling design is working hard, but it’s a weird, tangled mix of sleek and rougher brown. She drops her hand into her lap and glances down. Peach-brown, maybe a little paler than usual, with rougher knuckles but her fingertips as smooth as ever.
“He’s consolidated what’s left of the Little Cat’s people as best he can, using the graffiti as a rallying cry. But not for much besides chaos.” Pel sounds frustrated.
Iriset doesn’t know how to explain that this chaosismeaning. The protest art, the protest itself, has meaning. Disruption is all that matters when ruining a design. The design breaks whether that disruption comes from a well-thought-out plan or the wrong person sneezed and spilled a bit too much ecstatic into the threads.
Someone bursts into the front of the shop, and Pel heads out to take care of it, Iriset just behind.
A man with hair tied in the Sarian way gestures wildly, saying, “A spider! Right over the ribbon hub. It’s huge graffiti, and it’s weaving something!”
The man waves and runs off, and the few customers and a pale-faced server from the patio go after. Pel glances over her shoulder at Iriset. “You?”
“Me.” Grim satisfaction presses Iriset’s mouth into a smile. “If it’s there, that means the palace array is live, too. Graffiti the likes of which you’ve never seen, a beautiful big spider right over the Silent Chapel. Silk lives.”
