“But who.” It’s not quite a question.
“There were so many times I wanted to argue with you.”
“But… she… would not have.”
“Eventually, in a few years, maybe. I…” Iriset doesn’t finish.
Lyric takes a deep breath and lets it hiss out slowly. He leans away, looking up at the stars. She can see his profile in her peripheral vision.Oh holy moonshe wants to touch those freckles; she knows where they are exactly, even in this spare nighttime.
Iriset keeps her eyes on the cityscape before her, on the hazy layers of shadows.
He says, “I fell in love with you the night in the garden.”
Her lips part in barely a gasp.
“Then you died,” Lyric continues. “I was… aghast at how I felt. Ruined, shocked, changed by things I had no right to feel for Iriset mé Isidor, especially when I was mourning hand in hand with my wife. I wasn’t supposed to feel changed by one night in a garden.”
She wants to beg him to stop. She doesn’t even want to breathe.Have mercy on me, Lyric méra Esmail.
“And slowly, or not so slowly, I suppose,” he murmurs, “I fell in love with you again. Do you think it means bodies don’t matter? That we fall in love with spirit and inner design?”
The pause lasts just long enough Iriset realizes he expects an answer. Ever the priest, questioning the world. She breaks up her pain by analyzing the architecture around her; he turns to philosophy. Iriset’s chest hurts. She’s quiet.
He continues, “I thought, and was relieved actually, that perhaps I hadn’t known what being in love was, I’d only felt a strong connection to Iriset, but it wasn’t love. This was love, this new relationship. It had always been my wife changing me, our inner designs forging a new bond together.” Lyric laughs then, small and sad. “I was such a fool.”
“You’re not a fool,” Iriset whispers, her voice feeling like tiny claws in her throat. She clutches at her own legs, digging fingers into her trousers. His trousers.
“It was always you,” he concludes.
She almost—almost—looks at him. “That night in the garden I knew you were no fool. I wanted to kiss you even when your mouth was shaping my father’s death.”
“Imagine if you had.”
“Maybe everything would be worse.”
They breathe in unison together, thinking and staring out at the city.
Lyric says, “That night, I decided to be ambitious.”
“I know. I saw it on your…” She stops.
But he remembers. “There is a new cast to every conversation.”
Iriset winces.
“You have to go back with me,” he says firmly.
“I don’t think so. I won’t go to prison, or to my execution. And you can’t explain my presence, Singix’s absence, without admitting the graffiti was right. Silk was in your bed all along, and now she’s resurrected. If that’s really what you want, then—”
“We have to be divorced.”
It hurts.
And he says it like a plain fact. “The ritual requires a few hours, and both of us,” he continues. “And so you must go back with me.”
“Or you could push me off this balcony,” Iriset says viciously.
“Don’t think I haven’t considered it,” he answers in the same.
