Iriset nods jaggedly and swallows more wine. She knows little of the camps, beyond rumors and the threats made against her by Bey méra Matsimet. Prisons in the empire are only for holding people until their trial. If not executed or released, the only third option is such a camp. They are said to be everywhere in the empire, filled with all sorts of criminals punished to build roads and lay ribbon or blast the bedrock for steeple foundations or mine toxic minerals in eastern quarries. All of which might very well kill them anyway if they’re under a worse warden. A slow death, of exposure or starvation, or a quick one from a gang’s knife.
(Sometimes escapes are made, but there are no rumors about it, as witnesses are put out of their misery. Once, a successful camp rebellion was later put down by the army and called a boil plague in the news graffiti.)
“And my father? Has he been sentenced?”
“The Little Cat will die on the Day of Final Mercy.”
It’s exactly as Her Glory said before, but nevertheless blood drains from Iriset’s skull, the drag of falling force, and she reaches out to grasp the shallow bowl of rose wine. Tasteless as it is in her mouth, it scours her tongue with its sharp delicacy. Now she knows her timeline, at least.
“Tell us about him,” Nielle demands. “Why shouldn’t he be killed?”
Iriset bites the tip of her tongue. Any stories might reveal her own true nature, so she must be cautious. She tells them about her father by telling them about her mother.
Amakis was her name, a solid Lapis Osahar name, though Isidor had only called her Kiss.
The handmaidens swoon, and Amaranth smiles. Sidoné presses her lips in a line that might be stifled amusement or disapproval.
Their courtship was smooth and lingering, Iriset says, for Isidor busied himself with building his court and Amakis was the daughter of a mechanic in the Saltbath precinct: dark, lovely, and in no hurry to leave her mother’s house. Nothing dramatic occurred, there were no enemies nor rivals. The two people simply wove their lives together. A perfect pattern. Eventually they’d braided so fully into each other’s lives there was nothing to do but tie it off with a marriage knot. And so they did. Iriset had been the second knot in their shared life.
“Did she not care that her husband was a criminal?” asks Ziyan, the singer.
“What was there to care about? He was good at it.”
Sidoné laughs once, without humor. “Being good at something is not justification itself.”
Nielle says, “If he was good enough, he wouldn’t have been caught.”
Iriset stops feeling bad about thinking of Nielle as the ugly one.
“It wasn’t the Little Cat’s mistake that caught him,” Amaranth says before Iriset can snap back. “Silk left tracks.”
A spark of ecstatic force bursts coldly in Iriset’s vision and she breathes too deeply, shoving air at her unbalanced stomach. “Silk had no tracks.”
“Ask the architect who found her,” Sidoné says, a dare in her cool tone. “The one Menna mentioned, Raia mér Omorose.”
“We were betrayed,” Iriset says. “And not by Silk.” She tries to remain calm, to smooth over the raw falling force.
At her side, Anis mé Ario has been quiet for most of theconversation. Now she reaches with sympathy, putting her fingers against Iriset’s wrist bone. Iriset meets Anis’s dark brown gaze. To distract herself, she stares at the handmaiden with Silk’s practiced eyes. Short lashes, thin lips, a pleasing symmetry between eyes and mouth and chin, her shoulders broader than the narrow rectangle of her mirané-brown face would suggest. White and black interlocking squares painted her jaw, tiny and delicate, but beneath it… she needs to shave. Iriset lets her eyes slide down Anis’s arm to the hand that touches her: heavy knuckles, but with a grace in fingers. Those fingers freeze in their comforting stroke, and Anis pulls away.
She’s hiding something, too. A discord presents itself to Silk: two patterns overlaid not quite in alignment.
Anis’s design is masculine-forward. She’s not like Raia mér Omorose, who claims an old gender from before Aharté’s reign, unsettled between masculine and feminine. Anis hides her design under all the trappings of femininity she can because while the goddess of Silence merely discourages the older genders, to claim her Holy Design is wrong is heresy. Iriset has met such people before, done work for them through the undermarket—wonderful, apostatical human architecture to give them bodies that better reflect their gender—but she had not expected anyone like this in the palace itself.
“What happened to your mother, Iriset?” Anis asks by way of distraction.
“Apostatical cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
Amaranth says, “Iriset, did you witness Silk perform human architecture?”
Shocked at the change in direction of the inquiry, Iriset tears her eyes off Anis and to Her Glory.
“Allow me to pose a hypothetical,” Amaranth continues.
“Your Glory.” Iriset touches her eyelids.
“When a friend of mine was born, their body’s external design by all appearances was that of a man, yet this person’s inner design, that none may know but the person themself and She Who Loves Silence, was that of a woman. What do you think that would be like?”
