Iriset laughs once. “Can’t make a big impression? Do you remember who I am?”
Lyric snaps his mouth shut.
She snorts in less pretty amusement, “Changing history is fine with me. I don’t like your empire, Lyric. And I want to know more about apostasy, about the Moon-Eater! I want to know what sundering really is and why I can do it, apparently, and I want to learn how.”
“That’s your plan?”
Iriset looks him right in the eye again, and says meanly, “Planning has never beenmyjob.”
Lyric stares back until Iriset fidgets, her expressions changing fluidly between stubborn to irritated, sad maybe, and back to frustration. He wonders how she ever lied so well for so long. He doesn’t ask. He suspects it has to do with sex. Most of their conversations ended that way, as if to distract. He understands why: Distraction sounds nice right now.
Her sandglass eyes flick from him to the water and back, to the wardrobe, to him, to the faucets, and they stick there for a moment. Her jaw is square, balanced beautifully by lips fuller than Singix’s. There’s a dusky peach blush across her warm Osahar cheeks, probably from the heat. Water slides down her neck and collects in the dip between her clavicles, and the tops of her breasts shift slightly, weightless. Lyric realizes that though he’s seen her body so much, touched it, made love with it, it was never exactly this, despite knowing that she didn’t change very much aside from skin and texture. This is not his wife’s body, the body of that impossible hybrid Singix Es Sun and Silk the Apostate. This is just Iriset.
She leans back and looks at him again, catching his stare. “I suppose my plan will start with this damn marriage knot.”
He looks down at his hands, their edges wavering underwater.“You don’t think your Moon-Eater could undo it with a snap of his fingers?”
“I said I would do it myself,” she says tightly. “You sure have recovered your ability to verbalize.”
Lyric ignores the fact that she could read his earlier discomfort so precisely. “I’m going to find Maimeri Sarenpet, because the future cannot happen without him. And the alliraptor chimera. And some mirané people. They have to exist somewhere.”
Iriset leans back until her lips are at the surface of the water. She blows a few splashy bubbles. Through the wavering water, it looks like she’s hugging her middle.
“Is your wound still hurting?” Lyric asks.
She shakes her head. “Have you considered that you’re Maimeri? He’s the one who leads the terrible new world. He’s the father of the first Vertex Seal. Maybe it’s your place in the Holy Design never to go home, but to stay here and have babies. Make the miran yourself, Lyric Aharté.”
“With my wife, the Holy Syr?” he murmurs. Longing, and angry.
For that, Iriset splashes him.
Surprise makes him take it full in the face, sputtering.
By the time he wipes water from his stinging eyes, Iriset is glancing away—but not fast enough to hide the pressed little smile.
He gets out and goes to the dressing table to pick up the thin echo coin. “This was in your clothes.”
She looks back, and something precious slides across her expression before she shutters it. “Thank you.”
Lyric nods, replaces it on the table, and goes.
The heart force
In the morning Iriset wakes after restless dreams of shattered arrays and a cracked moon like a broken egg with thousands of baby spinners pouring out, leaving trails of silk behind. It’s Lyric’s fault for talking about history and timelines and duties to the future and whatever. She groans, flops her arms out.
The bed is empty, and Iriset hates it. She hates even more that she wishes otherwise.
Shortly after Iriset has dragged herself to eat some of the breakfast brought by the duo of attendants, Eliri arrives. “Before heading to the workshop,” Iriset asks, “will Eliri show the way to the advent crater?”
Eliri studies her for a moment, and Iriset smiles her most businesslike but charming smile.
The crater is to the northeast of the fortress proper, in the center of a wide rock garden with obsidian flagstone paths and tall weird cacti with arms that curve and coil generally toward the sky but messily, without straight lines. Iriset feels like there’s no straight lines in this whole place. Certainly not the four forces. They’re tangled and bunched, cloudy, strange, unbalanced. She wonders if the cacti in herMoonshadow City are so perpendicular because Holy Design makes them grow that way.
What a disgusting thought. That even the nature of trees could be so changed. Sweet Silence, what do roses look like here? Or snail shells? Iriset can’t wait to see Eliri’s workshop, or the hinted-at library the Moon-Eater keeps.
Iriset is distracted from her whirling thoughts by a gate of some kind at the edge of the small crater. It’s built of white-painted wood, with two posts capped by an arched lintel, and within the frame float small glass balls, suspended like design graffiti on invisible threads of force. They glow blue and lightning-white with tiny inner flames, captured and sustained without obvious fuel. They’re beautiful.
“Prayers,” Eliri says.
