Behind them trail two Seal guards and two Ceres servants holding large stretched-silk fans they use to waft gentle breezes toward the princess, fluttering Singix’s loose baby hairs. Her dress is the same style as the one in which she’d arrived: formless and hanging off her shoulders to hide details of her body. The chest piece is not so heavy today, decorated with gold thread and tiny chipped garnets, but stiffened with strips of godgrass sewn across the back (Iriset knows because she asked in slow Ceres, thinking about what perfection the rest of Singix’s body must be).
Unlike Amaranth, Singix gives no hint of scheming or layered meaning to what she says—or perhaps Iriset simply can’t pick up on the nuance of Ceres, or Singix can’t put it into mirané. That’s the advantage of their hindered communication, Iriset supposes. An illusion of easy friendship. If not for the anxious excitement fluttering Iriset’s pulse with ecstatic sparks at the mere thought of seeing Bittor, she might be able to relax into the day. Drink in Singix’s mild and unflappable nature.
They eat lunch with Her Glory, reclined in an expanse of blankets and pillows on the green-grass lawn of the Sunset Visions Garden. Amaranth speaks clear mirané, and Singix holds her own calmly. She demurs rather a lot, but for that Iriset can’t blame her. It’s possible that instead of managing as a mild consort, Singix will be swallowed whole by the Moon-Eater’s Mistress and her brother, consumed and made to assimilate just like anyone the empire chooses. This is supposed to be an alliance, but Iriset wonders if it’s more likely a delaying tactic. Eventually the empire will find a way to spread Holy Design over the ocean and take the islands. The Vertex Seal is inexorable. So the Remnants give up their daughter for another generation’s worth of time. Iriset believes Amaranth wants something more like peace, or at least a different kind of conquering, but there’s no way Her Glory doesn’t have multiple reasons for supporting the marriage alliance. Some people are anxious that the Vertex Seal’s children might not be born mirané, if their mother is Ceres. Even Iriset has heard gossip calling it risky of Amaranth to assume Lyric’s mirané blood will be stronger than Singix’s beauty. If their children are not completely mirané, it will be an indictment against Lyric’s piety and Aharté’s blessing. While Lyric is clearly fanatical enough not to doubt, Iriset would not have thought the same of Amaranth.
It isn’t Iriset’s problem, though. She’s here for one reason: to rescue her father and get out. No matter what the Little Cat himself says about achieving something.
The heat and rolling conversation, cool food, and iced wine melt Iriset from the inside out. She’s tired from repeated long nights, and she lays herself down, propped on a thin pillow beside Singix. It’s allowed: Anis and Istof do the same, curling together, while Ambassador Erxan excuses himself to take hismidafternoon rest in his quarters. Singix murmurs that she prefers to remain with Her Glory and her maidens in the luxurious shade of their white umbrellas.
Iriset practices her eight-count breathing, listening to the hum of the imported grass and hard red rock of the crater just beneath. Architecture keeps the thick wet grass alive despite the brutal heat of the season, flow and ecstatic braided to pull tiny filaments of water against the equally tiny roots. Beside her, Singix’s dominant flow force is just as soothing, and Iriset finds herself imagining Singix a piece of the garden itself, a living statue of flowers twined around an elegant frame of river reeds. She falls asleep thinking of how to grow a skin from a craftmask, like these tiny water filaments, as an extension of the sort of crawling design that can change hair color or skin, but in her dream she sees the numen again, smiling with those sharp pink-ivory teeth. Iriset gasps awake.
“Iriset?” Singix says softly, putting a hand to Iriset’s shoulder.
Iriset glances up at the sun: She has an hour or so until third descent.
Immediate relief steals her voice and so she nods and smiles at the princess. Amaranth left, along with her other handmaidens. Singix sits calmly in the shade of an umbrella held by a young mirané boy. The princess’s chest piece and cape have been removed, leaving her diaphanous layers of loose dress. A small book rests on her lap. A breeze drifts across them from force-fans in the far corner of the garden.
“You may sleep still, if you like,” Singix says carefully. Her dark brown eyes are so large, perfectly wide and balanced over her cheeks. Her black lashes curl perfectly, too, and the strands of ghost writing are just like silvery grass roots reaching down her forehead for water.
Stretching as she sits, Iriset says, switching to Ceres, “No, I finished rest. What do you read?”
“What are you reading,” Singix corrects, then offers the slender book. It’s embossed with the seven-petaled flower of Ceres. “These are devotions.”
“Prayers?” Iriset asks, using the mirané word.
“Ah… meditations?” Singix suggests in the same.
The book has seven parts, each including seven small verses, written in careful characters. Twice, as she flips gently through, Iriset sees mistakes crossed out. “Did you… write the book?”
“I copied the devotions from memory, to bring here. I will make a more beautiful book for my husband.”
“It is beautiful.” Iriset knows that word, and enough of the rest to understand. “Will you read to me?”
Singix takes the book back and opens to a page decorated with many tiny leaves drawn in black ink. “‘A Devotion to Courage,’” she says, pointing to the sigils. “‘Here courage is small, a smile when the sun sinks into night. Here courage is as wide as the ocean, a smile for the demon of death.’”
First the princess reads in Ceres, then translates as best she can into mirané. It takes some arguing to explaindemonto Iriset, for there’s no equal word in mirané. Monster, perhaps, and it’s on the tip of Iriset’s tongue to suggest a translation might benumenbefore she stops herself, thinking of the black eyes and sharp teeth.
The final line of the poem is “Here courage is a daily practice, between the sun and the memory of the sun.”
Iriset doesn’t like a poem with only three parts, for it rests unbalanced in her mind, eager for a fourth. But she likes the riddle ofbetween the sun and the memory of the sun. To her, the answer is design. What is design? It is everything between the memory of the sun and the sun in actual.
She tries to explain this to Singix, who listens, and doesn’t grow suspicious that Iriset thinks of design with such subtle philosophy. Why should the princess be suspicious of the handmaiden? Even if she knew of Iriset’s history, how likely that she cares about the murdered Silk?
If only Iriset could remain by Singix’s side, lazily discussing poetry and design. If only she could be herself, dig into the design of the palace and invent again. Show the Vertex Seal what architecture is truly capable of. Singix wouldn’t mind, Iriset knows it. Singix likes her, and she likes the princess.
Her heart beats hard as she longs for everything: power, friendship, family, safety, and the truth of her real name.
Apostasy. Impossible.
Someday, Iriset promises herself, this will be nothing but the memory of a hot afternoon with a beautiful princess. She’ll think of it when she thinks of the sun.
Iriset hurries to the rising side of the palace complex, where the delivery docks spread in the shade of the quarter tower. Skiffs and small caravans line up to off-load the goods they’ve brought across the quartz yards, and an intricate system of pulleys and ribbons lets items be dispersed quickly by the dockworkers. She feels like a kite floating over her body: She’s never done this sort of thing before. The con-work of her father’s undermarket had been for the cousins, not Silk.
She hovers near the timetable, cloth mask drawn and her arms crossed over her chest to display the jade cuff. Everyone in the palace knows it means she belongs to Amaranth, and nobody bothers her.
The resin merchant arrives with three helpers, carrying a permit for delivery as she walks along the thin ribbon dragging her skiff. The skiff is egg-shaped and decorated with rows of unpolished amber and red sacra and smells like maple syrup.
Iriset studies the three helpers as they unload trays of examples, opening the lids to display a variety of resins, in low bowls or hardened enough to be chunks like the sacra and pine copal. She could identify most on sight, but knows little else, for most resins don’t hold design well and thus she has no reason to have studied them. Shifting nearer to the table, Iriset doesn’t have to feign interest.
