An stares at her, and Iriset cuts off. She looks away. “I only mean you should not dismiss spiders. Their architecture is perfect.”
“You hide a vast faith in Aharté, Iriset,” Raia murmurs.
Iriset thinks that is hilarious.
But it’s nice having a designer to talk with, though Iriset can’t ask the questions she most wishes to ask: about the threshold security in the palace, the rumors she heard all her life that alarms are carved into the rocks of the quartz yards, or about the rhythm of the force hum she only feels when curled upon her sleeping pillows at night—it’s no four-mark pulse, but rather with a cadence like breathing. The palace design seems alive. But that, surely, cannot be true.
Ah, well.
When Raia asks her to fetch something, she makes sure tomistake which cabinet an means each time until an thinks her spatial awareness and memory appallingly slow for such an attentive student. But it allows her to map where an keeps ans tools and notes, the various resonant and disruptive materials, the styli and vellum and miniature bricks.
She finds the tourmaline quickly, and slips some into the tiny pocket she cut into her sleeve when she’s briefly alone. More easily she steals a striker, which she hides in her knotted hair, and design-grade vellum. Too bad she can’t take her silk.
Before long Iriset has what she needs.
In her room during the night, Iriset works by the gentle light of a force-lamp, placing chips of tourmaline carefully into tiny pinched wire. It requires perfect balance, and each chip is charged to a different force. Most beginner designers hold their breath for such delicate work, but Iriset knows to slowly, carefully breathe in an eight-count. It keeps her steady.
The Little Cat taught her the breathing. When she was young and prone to anxiety after her mother’s illness, Isidor held her in his lap, arms tight around hers, legs wide around hers, effectively cocooning her with his body. He hummed a gentle melody with the eight-count, just hugging and humming, until Iriset hummed, too, and eventually relaxed.
Later, he taught her the methodology behind it, that it was his favorite of the old meditation techniques the first worshippers of Aharté developed to align with her Holy Design. It could be broken down into a force-meditation, balancing flow, falling, rising, and ecstatic into perfect alignment. Perfect Silence. The Cloud Kings had a version, but Isidor liked this better.
He took her out with him beginning when she was twelve. In the night he taught her to scale a wall or find the best shadow, and they kept up the breathing exercises. Iriset did not care for the skills of thieves, and never got very good at such things. But she learned how to feel her way along in the darkness by listening to and tasting the threads of force in the air. She learned to detect certain identities based on their dominant forces and unique rhythms cutting against her own. And eventually Iriset designed slippers and skin-tight hoods that dampened such identifiable patterns of design and allowed her father and the cousins of his court to slide right through a lot of basic security.
Iriset rarely loses herself in panic or mania anymore, other than when she was detained alone in the apostate prison, because the breathing is second nature, a gift from her father.
When she huddles over her shield cap, breathing carefully as she places the final chip of tourmaline that will allow her to move about the palace complex undetected, it feels like she’s not alone:
Her father holds her tightly, humming the soothing rhythm in her ear.
The Moon-Eater’s Mistress
Every morning, the Moon-Eater’s Mistress enters his sanctuary to wake him with her love. It’s part of the balance of the Vertex Seal, as written upon the throne:one claimed with blood and paired with hunger, always binding.
The Vertex Seal himself spills a drop of blood upon the moon-red rock beneath the seat of power every day. Amaranth, as second born, is the one paired with hunger. She belongs to the Moon-Eater, to feed his appetite.
The story that the Holy Syr and Maimeri Sarenpet unraveled the Moon-Eater until there was nothing left but his teeth is the most commonly retold version.
Priests of Silence debate the meaning ofunraveled. To some it means Aharté blessed the Holy Syr’s stylus, allowing her to physically destroy the Moon-Eater, pulling his outer design apart until the energy of his threads joined the four forces. His teeth remained as a reminder. To others it means that Aharté herself reappeared and drew the Moon-Eater’s threads up toher silver-pink moon but left his teeth below with us so that he could not eat her as he had eaten himself. Variations of both versions scatter through sects of Silence and apostatical cults.
The Vertex Seal, and the line of miran, follow the tenet that the Holy Syr had unraveled the Moon-Eater literally with her design, and yet he existed still, his inner design spread throughout the forces because he was energy, which ultimately cannot be destroyed. His will remains strong, and he longs to reweave his own design, to become a god again that he might face Aharté—though to love her or destroy her, the priests avoid saying. The Moon-Eater’s Mistress exists to distract the apostate god from said goal. To divert his attention from Aharté, to give him a piece of love without serving up She Who Loves Silence whole.
And so every morning, the Moon-Eater’s Mistress conciliates her lover.
Mistressis a mirané word, with both dominant and possessive connotations, coded feminine because mirané is a stringently bigendered language. There is only man or woman, which is hardly a stable balance. At least three points are needed for stability, and true design balance requires even numbers, so they ought to have had four gendersat minimum. There were only two because that had been the simplest solution to rampant apostasy, as well as the easiest to control, and the most reductive with nothing in between. Or else two because it most mirrored Aharté and the Moon-Eater, if one could call the goddess a woman and the young god a man at all.
Regardless, the word they will someday call Amaranth issavior, but at the time, the word did not yet exist. Or perhaps had been forgotten.
Iriset sleeps upon a pile of silk and linen cushions, beneath a curtain of sheer green that hangs from one corner of the ceiling and can be rolled up or tied aside. Most of her life she’s woken up naturally in the mornings, and it’s no different at first in the palace. Iriset’s body is so attuned to pulses of force that once Her Glory is up, and her handmaidens, subtle fluctuations in the architecture of Iriset’s chamber floor shake her out of dreams. But lately her intense night work has drained her to exhaustion, and she must be dragged awake. This morning an attendant who is not Shahd touches her shoulder and calls her name, saying she’s needed in Her Glory’s bedchamber immediately.
“Fashion emergency,” the girl says without a hint of teasing.
Iriset frowns. What does she have to do with Her Glory’s wardrobe? But she readies herself anyway and follows the attendant to Amaranth’s chamber.
In the center of the room Amaranth stands, arms raised, expression demanding with a smile. Sidoné lounges upon the low sofa to the right, beside a stack of thin books and a table loaded with breakfast cheeses, smoked fish, and cranberry corn muffins. The third and fourth feminine-forward miran in the room are both royal tailors. One, fifty and intimidating, holds a length of deep violet silk. The other, perhaps twenty-five and grinding her teeth impatiently, tugs at the end of another scarf partly wound around Amaranth’s waist.
“It will not stay without glue, Your Glory,” the young one says, in a tone of one repeating herself.
“Iriset,” Amaranth says with intense satisfaction. “The rest of you are dismissed.”
