“No,” Iriset whispers. “I will sit, but please no more attentionfor me, Your Glory. Do what you must for the poor girl. Find who hurt her.”
The Vertex Seal nods and drops his hand. He asks Garnet to send for the proper investigators and General Bey.
Sidoné brings Iriset water, and Iriset turns her back onto the room to sip it. She leans against the wall, eyes closed, just listening and breathing. Exhaustion threatens to numb her thoughts, but she needs to chase it back: If Amaranth sells this and wins Iriset space today to be alone, she needs to continue working for several more hours before she can risk sleep. Iriset counts the remaining items on her architectural agenda, prioritizing them: body skin color, ghost letters, hair, then finessing the edges of her mask, then beginning the work to reshape a few more muscles. She’ll make a layered diagram—like a double dome that holds more weight and shape than a single—for her nose and cheeks and brow bone. The chin needs less work, but Singix’s jaw is—was—less squared. Iriset is lucky that the design could be done mostly with slight additions to her bone structure and musculature, not erasures. Those latter were more painful and Iriset has never undone them before.
General Bey arrives while Iriset contemplates the possibility of inventing a new sort of mask, one that’s semipermanent but can be stripped off at once. The focus helps her remain calm.
The older man’s presence draws her attention again. She catches herself reaching up to pull a cloth mask she doesn’t have over her eyes, and quickly tucks her hand away again.
Bey stands over Singix’s body. Someone placed a blanket over her, and Garnet now flicks it aside to show the face of Iriset mé Isidor.
A slight gasp alerts Iriset to the presence of sharp-boned Beremé mé Adora, the prince of the mirané council, and maybeAmaranth’s not-so-secret lover, who told Amaranth to bring Iriset here for some unknown reason. With her is Menna mé Garai, the chief architect of the palace, likely the most dangerous person in the room now, who might see the edges of the masks.
“It was inevitable a life such as hers would lead to such an ending,” Bey says in his gruff, judgmental way.
Iriset’s legs tremble.
“And yet who expected her death to so perfectly serve the empire?” Amaranth says.
“Gentle Aharté,” Beremé murmurs, and Menna makes a gesture with her elegant mirané-brown fingers meant to request the blessing of She Who Loves Silence.
Lyric says, “Yes. She served, in the end. The Moon-Eater’s Mistress is as skilled as always at seeing the hidden value and virtue within a person’s soul. I will personally preside at the unraveling ritual for Iriset mé Isidor.”
At that, so tenderly spoken, Iriset cannot remain upright. She bends her knees, allowing herself to sink slowly to the floor.
“Princess,” says Sidoné, moving to her side. She grips Iriset’s shoulder.
“Perhaps,” Amaranth says, “we may remove ourselves, and this body, if you have seen what you need to see?”
Giving in, Iriset allows Sidoné to escort her through the arched doorway into Singix’s bedchamber. There’s no more she can do for the scene in the sitting room. Either the ruse will work, or not. She says, “Let me sleep for two hours, no more. I need it too badly, but then I must work again, and I will need those additional things I listed. And—none of Singix’s people can come in here.”
Sidoné presses her lips together. Her eyes are faceted so darkbrown and nearly black. Iriset murmurs, “It would be very difficult to copy your eyes.”
“Good.” The glare turns somewhat fond, and Sidoné touches Iriset’s brow, drawing her calloused fingers gently down her face. “Sleep. I will wake you, either to your work or our mutual execution.”
Every kind of courage
It takes Iriset seven additional hours to complete her initial design. Three of those hours are spent on her hair alone. She has to weave single-strand silk into her hair for a framework, and activate it in stages to straighten, thicken, darken, and soften the strands. Even so, there remains a gentle wave that she decides she can claim has always been present but that Singix’s maids remove with hot irons and cream. For her skin she uses a crawling design related to her cascading distraction design, anchored in four places. The change burns but settles quickly, and Iriset’s small birthmark against her left ribs and the mole on her neck and the scars on her wrist, right hip, and at her knees remain. Singix had a birthmark above her right knee. Nobody will know the difference.
In all her years working for the Little Cat, Silk has never undertaken such a project. The nearest to this she has come was creating body redesigns to change the gender-forward appearance of two clients to their specifications, removing a distinctivebirthmark from a thief, returning about two-thirds vision to a young woman blinded in an accident, and of course investigating apostatical cancer.
Sidoné placed Seal guards with orders that the princess requested not to be disturbed by anyone, including Ambassador Erxan or any of her handmaidens. But Iriset knows no plans are foolproof, and someone might get past the Seal guards. Food is brought by Sidoné herself, along with the requested accoutrements, and an update regarding the investigation.
All evidence was removed from the front sitting room, and the box of candies traced to the mirané hall, where princes had been welcome to leave gifts. Every gift passed through an architectural web and every gift was tasted and tested to the best of the Seal guards’ ability, yet this poison had gotten through. Either the murderer is extremely lucky, or the murderer is extremely powerful. Sidoné seemed relieved and admits that while a lucky enemy could be from anywhere, a powerful enemy should be easier to isolate. It’s someone with access to the residential petals of the palace, who could slip poisoned candy into Singix’s possession after the tests and webs. That’s a narrow list.
Iriset thinks of how easily Shahd moves around the palace, leaving to put messages in the Little Cat’s drops, taking care of Iriset’s secrets, and she knows it doesn’t narrow the list very much. They’re still investigating the Ceres party themselves and making a list of everyone who disapproved of the marriage. It might have been almost anyone, and they’re still out there.
Nauseated from intense focus and anxiety, Iriset eats little of what Sidoné brings. But she needs the fuel. If she faints, someone will discover her. If she stops working, she’ll vomit from the stress of thinking what her father will go through, and Bittor, when they hear of her death. Her grandparents.
Despite her years of practice, nerves put a tremor she cannot afford into her hands. To counter it, she spends too long balancing her inner forces, and has barely finished applying the patches drawn in careful imitation of ghost writing to her hands when the outer door of her chambers opens and her name is gently called.
It’s the voice of the Vertex Seal.
Of course he can command his way past the Seal guard or Sidoné.
“Wait, please,” she begs, thrusting her tools and scraps under the low-hanging bed. She pulls on a heavy robe over her naked body and walks barefoot to the bedchamber door and opens it.
Lyric waits in the center of the sitting room, holding a tray covered in food and a squat carafe. Unlike this morning, he’s fully dressed in the usual dark red priest-like robe, with his hair combed into soft curls. Still he wears no face paint or mask at all. Iriset is dead, and he holds to her recommendation.
