“Just to match what Bittor and Dalal have been making?”
“Partly, but also to prove Silk does live, and not out here. If the army wants to root out apostasy, they have to do it to the palace of the Vertex Seal, too.”
“They’ll never.”
“Which will only prove their hypocrisy, prove Aharté’s Silence isn’t perfect, isn’t even sustainable. It’s so easy to disrupt, and the longer we can disrupt it, the more people will see.”
“Maybe even miran,” Pel says thoughtfully.
“Lyric méra Esmail certainly. I was supposed to be there for the array, to show myself to all of them, but I had to come here. This way at least Lyric will know there is no Silence in his life that cannot be undone because of how deeply I disrupted every aspect of it already. Fuck Aharté—Silk is the one who can redesign the whole empire.”
Someone behind them claps slowly. Iriset and Pel both spin.
“Silk is Syr,” Bittor says, standing backlit in the glow from the shop door.
“Bittor.” Iriset’s Bittor, alive and whole, those stockyshoulders corded with muscle, his forearms wrapped with knife-cuffs, his hair a mess around his square face, his scarred nose, and his mouth opening to shape her name.
“Iriset,” he says, so rough with emotion it seems to shake the room. His robe is worn green linen and hangs heavy like it’s paneled with armor on the underside. Bittor tears his cloth mask away from his face, tugging it off-kilter so the whole twisted cloth slides off his brown hair and slumps onto his shoulder. He doesn’t seem to notice, for he stares at Iriset with his glinting cat-eyes, pupils long and wide.
His hands twitch against his thighs, and Iriset flings herself into his arms.
Bittor catches her, stepping back from the strength of the embrace, and lifts her off her toes. Iriset breathes so deeply, as if she can erase her memories of the past season with his smell alone. She buries her face under his ear while Bittor’s arms tighten beyond the strength of her oversensitive body, and she’s stuck, unbreathing, for a moment. A tremor passes from him to her—ecstatic force popping between them, dominant in him just as in her. She digs her fingers into his hair. Just like hers. Thick, rough, strong enough for knotting.
“Holy moon,” he says, voice shaking, and releases her enough she slides down to her feet again. He grabs her head, cupping it, and smooths his thumbs along her cheeks. It aches, for her facial skin is the most tender. But she doesn’t stop him. His eyes flicker over her face, fast and desperate, and the smile slowly spreading across his mouth is like wildflowers blossoming across the desert. For the first time in so long, Iriset feels joy—a fleeting dart of it, childlike and familiar and uplifting. “I knew it,” he adds.
“How?” she whispers. “How did you know?”
“All the things,” he says with that soft smile. “But mostly, Singix of the Beautiful Twilight said my name, and the most incredible, the most insane reason why that could be so was because it wasn’t Singix, it wasyou.”
Iriset involuntarily laughs like a sob, feeling warm rain falling force ground her in this, in her oldest friend, in being known. Bittor knows her so well that he knows exactly what audacious, wild genius she is capable of, and not just as an if, a possibility, but he believes in it. In her. Even if she’s pretty sure he just called her crazy, too.
Then he kisses her, and she’s kissing him back, his taste hitting her like a rising-falling back draft. (She won’t think about how she doesn’t know Bittor nearly as well, not his heart; she spent all her time with him on his body and reactions, on what he was in relation to her. She never thought about who he was when she wasn’t around. Does she think of anyone outside of her own personal design?
Lyric. It’s Lyric she knows. Lyric she studied on every level and felt—feels—in her chest, bound to with a seed of immanent Silence. She had to know him to survive, and Singix, she had to learn Singix, too. In life and death, and if she ever thinks about this, it might finally occur to Iriset that it’s possible she doesn’t have the objectivity to say she’s right about anything. Even apostasy.)
The press of Bittor’s lips is gentle, more like a reminder than passion, and he kisses her sore forehead and cheek and her closed eyelids, then hugs her again.
“Are my grandparents safe?” she asks.
Bittor grimaces. “I practically had to kidnap them, but yes.”
Nodding in relief, she starts to ask more, but Pel’s daughter bursts into the wine shop, panting. “The army is already coming!”
“Everyone out, go home,” Pel commands the few remaining customers stubbornly drinking on the patio.
“We’re supposed to have two more days,” Bittor says.
Iriset leans back. “It’s because Sian mé Sayar is dead.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Bittor says with genuine shock.
Iriset stares, thoughts awhirl. She never heard anyone in the palace say Bittor did it—Lyric assumed.The murder of one of my small kings must be met with clear fury, he said. If someone else killed Nielle’s husband, there would be evidence, surely. Lyric wouldn’t raze a precinct based on a guess or a possible frame.
But Beremé would, if it suited her game. And General Bey, too, Iriset is certain, and could even have done the frame-up himself. If Lyric asked for evidence, between the two of them they could provide it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Pel says. “They believe you did.”
“Or decided you did,” Iriset adds. Iriset’s pulse rocks inside her, a hard, constant tide growing stronger and stronger. Closer and closer. As if Iriset doesn’t act, she might shake apart.
