Iriset mé Isidor lies in the darkness, one hand trailing off the bed to brush against the carved scales of the alliraptor’s back. Her other is pinned beneath her husband’s limp body. Though he sleeps, she can’t even close her eyes. A thick, warm breeze slithers through the lattice walls, finding her eyelashes, her toes, every exposed hair on her body.
It’s too much.
Standing carefully, Iriset leaves Lyric to pad quietly down the twist of stairs into the greeting room, and from there goes down again into their bathing room. A panel beside the entrance activates light with a touch, and the ecstatic chandelier drips in eight simple lines, filling the room with a pale glow. Iriset washes her face, then runs a warm bath in the pool sunk into the floor.
It’s many hours until dawn, and she slips in without oil or perfume or bubbles, only herself and the water, cradled in the belly of the pool. The moment the water laps at her chin, her breath shudders.
She did it. She is here. Sheisthe best.
So what?
Singix, whom sheloved, is dead and unremembered. Iriset killed afriendwith raw design.
Iriset has never bothered to pretend her work primarilyserved good—she knows what her father has been, knows her ambitions were for herself, not the progress of justice. Silk might chase flight and tensile strength and healing—all manner of things thatcouldimprove lives, but that wasn’t why she did it.
Alone in an echoing bathroom, Iriset can’t help thinking Singix would be so disappointed in her. Iriset is no better than the Vertex Seal, struggling to maintain a brutal system with equal brutality. Using her genius for this kind of design proves nothing but that she is just as willing to harm a few in order forherlegacy to stand.
Iriset grips her fists around each other, pressing them to her sternum beneath the water, where the marriage knot coils. She has to keep it together. Keep herself—everything—together.
She breathes. She trembles. Her distress (and the pulse of her pain through their marriage knot) draws Lyric to her. He kneels beside the pool in a thin robe and brushes damp hair back from her face and touches her mouth, and when she brings up her arms he drags her out onto the floor, both of them soaked.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and he hugs her tightly.
“What for?” he asks, stunned. He strokes her hair.
Iriset shakes her head and realizes his presence alone has drawn her ecstatic sobs into a gentler rhythm.
The Vertex Seal stands and lifts her into his arms. He carries her up and up the twisting corridor and back to their bed, where he kisses her cheeks and palms, where he caresses her thighs and belly, until she begs in short, hot whispering cries for his fingers to reach inside her and his tongue to press at the hollow of her throat.
Euphemisms
Attendants arrive early to begin their day. Lyric climbs quietly out of bed and brushes his fingers along Iriset’s cheek as her eyes flicker open. Together—everything for the following few days will be done together—they stretch and accept coffee and morning tonics. They’re bathed and fed a simple breakfast. Lyric asks if she’d like to exercise and Iriset says she’ll only make them both sweaty again if they’re allowed. He clearly meant would she like to walk or lift weights or join him in a combat formation, and after she makes her sexual insinuation, Iriset lowers her eyes and manages to put on the appearance of shyness with her hands against her warm cheeks. Two of the attendants hide smiles.
It’s the Day of the Crowning Sun, the turning point of the year, and Lyric is needed for an elaborate ritual that will last most of the day. Iriset will be at his side for its entirety. They are dressed in simple robes that match in style, though Iriset’s is a brighter red than the rust color of Aharté’s priests that her husband prefers. The attendant who assists her is Shahd, as she had requested, and Iriset is careful to hide her delight at afamiliar face. Shahd has no reason to stand out from the others yet. Then Garnet appears with Menna mé Garai, the Architect of the Seal, and Iriset has a moment of panic she carefully hides under a patina of polite bashfulness. Garnet tells Lyric in his low rumbling voice that his mother wishes to join them for the evening meal, and Amaranth and Sidoné as well. Sidoné will have to be content with Garnet’s company, the body-twin says, and Lyric deal alone with his mother and sister and wife. It’s said with humor and Lyric nods as if Garnet makes such choices for him all the time.
While Garnet speaks, Menna approaches with a long box of design paint. She bows and Lyric glances at Iriset. “Today will you match my face in symbol, wife?”
She agrees, and the Architect of the Seal uses a thin brush to slide lines of black and white against their cheeks. It’s a simple pattern, incorporating the basic sigils of the four forces.
The art tickles Iriset’s cheek, but Menna doesn’t notice the craftmask. Of course she doesn’t, Iriset chides herself, struggling to keep from clenching her jaw. Menna didn’t notice the craftmask three nights ago when she’d been most vulnerable; she won’t now. Not even the Silent priests noticed! Irisetisthe exquisite, soft Singix Es Sun, and nobody is looking for anything beneath her beauty.
While she’s being painted, Lyric and Garnet step aside for a quiet, private conference. The larger man looms over her husband, but with an air of protectiveness that Iriset recognizes from her father’s court: Garnet will die to keep Lyric from harm. It goes beyond friendship and brotherhood, beyond his assigned role as body-twin.
If her crimes are revealed, even if somehow she convinces Lyric to spare her, Garnet méra Bež will kill her for hurting his brother.
The moment of pinnacle eclipse, when the sun is a brilliant crescent of fire capping the moon, is the moment of communion, when everything that the empire is—every person alive and dead, every memory and hope for the future, every building and stone, every force-ribbon and reaching, hungry military front—comes together for the singular purpose of balanced Silence under the command of the Vertex Seal. It’s the holiest moment in the year.
When the sun reaches its vertex, the ruler of the empire reseals power itself into place.
Who knows if Aharté even pays attention?
For hours before the eclipse, priests lead groups of carefully curated representatives through patterns of movements and meditation, aligning massive lines of design through the human bodies. As the sun begins its pinnacle slip, everyone falls quiet, waiting for the tiny ring of a crystal to hone their voices sharper. Shadows cast by tiny obelisks and spiral pennants bend into slices, crescent upon crescent layering as the sun passes behind the moon. A hum begins at the edges of the crowd, creeping nearer and nearer to the center at a perfectly measured pace until the sun itself arrives at its peak.
Lyric waits for the precise moment beside the throne, in the Hall of Princes, where upon the carved back of the chair is etched this line:one claimed with blood and paired with hunger, always binding. His is the blood, cut from his arm and cupped into a shallow bowl. He kneels before the moon rock and, when it’s time, presses a handprint to the surface. Iriset watches as the blood is absorbed.
Impossible, but she sees it.
The hunger belongs to the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, who wakes her god during the eclipse and feeds him from her body. When the blood and the hunger meet beneath the crown of sunlight, the entire crater embracing Moonshadow City trembles from steeple to steeple.
