“To stay here, to learn more magic, to learn sundering! To fly, and also to teach—” She bites her lip, stopping herself. “To be who I always wanted to be, and to tell my mother,” she adds in a whisper.
“We have to go home for you to tell her anything,” he says.
“She’s gone. I don’t know where.”
“You could find her.”
Iriset slides him a look, tightens her grip on his waist. “So you can trace her and—”
“No,” he says.
“I told you I don’t want to go home, Lyric. Why would I want to go back to a place where everyone I love is dead?”
It hits him so hard, even the second time, but Iriset keeps going: “Restrictions, rebellions, lies, and that awful feeling in my gut all the time, unable to be myself.”
Lyric knows restrictions, he knows awful gut feelings, the inability to be who you want to be. But Iriset won’t want to hear that, she’donly attack him for feeling sorry for himself at the height of power. Rightly so. Lyric has never liked complaining.
“Nothing to say to that?” Iriset demands. “You used to argue back so well, the Vertex Seal certain of his moral superiority. Too badyourmother didn’t share such a thing.”
“Iriset,” he says, letting all his hurt glare through his face. “Don’t make that about something else. If she’d been arrested, she’d be just as dead.”
“You want me to believe you wouldn’t give your mother the mercy you refused my father?”
“I would not.” It’s easy to say, because Lyric knows it to be absolutely true.
“Your own mother?”
“My mother, Diaa of Moonshadow, devout enough to give up half her name to her service to the miran and Aharté’s family, went too far. Leapt over the laws of Silence, over carefully chosen actions, and—and thought she knew better than the Holy Peace, than the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, the will of the mirané council and her Vertex Seal. It was a personal betrayal to me, yes, but it was an insult to the entire empire.” Lyric closes his eyes, breath shaky. This didn’t use to happen to him, this loss of control, and never in public. Never outside the labyrinth, outside the presence of Garnet alone. “My mother disliked arguments, and that’s why I liked you in the first place. If I was like my mother, if I was the kind of king you think I am, I would never have welcomed you—Iriset mé Isidor, the Little Cat’s daughter!—into my home. Into my thoughts. Welcomed you, Iriset, not just tolerated you. I need—needed,” he corrects suddenly, and realizes they’re stopped in the middle of the street, people parting around them with a few odd glances. Thank Silence they’re speaking mirané and wearing masks.
Iriset takes his other hand, having dropped her cup somewhere.“Then why did you take that pill? Why did you break this, here, when we only have… each other?”
“I told you. Rotten foundation. That marriage knot was wound through with so many falsehoods and lies. Besides, you don’t want to be married to me. You want to become the greatest apostate that ever existed. You told me so. And I’m going to find Maimeri Sarenpet and do my best to end the Apostate Age. Even if I can’t go home.”
She grimaces and starts walking again. But stops, spins back. “Why shouldn’t I want the things I want, Lyric? Why shouldn’t I crave freedom and encouragement, to be loved for who I am? Endless design! What if I don’t want to unravel the Moon-Eater? To end this? I shouldn’t be expected to.”
Lyric nods slowly. “You’re right.”
Iriset frowns, clearly not expecting agreement. “So stay with me. It’s not so bad here, is it? Bring Aharté here. I don’t hate Silence, Lyric. Balance is good, and some kind of compromise could launch the design technology in amazing directions—the kind of quad designs we’re used to in Silence, but without the draconic, rigid, impossible rules. What if we did that together? Change things here, build a different empire inourimage.”
“That’s ambitious,” he murmurs.
She laughs, and that gentian part of him that always seems to turn to her like she’s the sun expands again. “It’s not any more ambitious than making the history we learned come to be. Unmaking a god, resetting the design structure of an entire city? I’m actually impressed you think you can bring about the rise of Aharté all by yourself.”
“With Maimeri Sarenpet,” he says, taking her hand again to walk with her. They need to find a bonfire. He adds, feeling almost shy, “With my Holy Syr.”
Iriset eyes him incredulously. “It’s difficult to believe you’ll take up the role of Aharté herself.”
“The story we know is just a story, isn’t it? That’s history. To think otherwise feels like the real sacrilege.” Lyric can’t tell her he’s begun to question Aharté’s very existence.
“I like it.” She knocks their shoulders together again. “It really makes me wonder how time works, you know? Like, can we change anything? Or, if we change anything, willwechange? Or is there another path to take and another us, another me and you and Amaranth and Sidoné and the Little Cat and—and Singix? Maybe we make a world where everything we want is real. The people we love alive, the way we want. But how can we know? Is it a circle or a spiral? Is it spiraling toward entropy or implosion?” Iriset laughs, shakes her head. “I really don’t know how we got here, Lyric.”
“If you tried, you could discover it,” he says with very simple devotion.
“Ugh,” she groans. “You’re so earnest sometimes! This is a theory session! At a midnight festival of monsters. Be less serious.”
Lyric struggles for a moment, then sticks his tongue out at her.
Irisettsks, then sighs. “At the very core, what is Silence to you, Lyric Aharté? What is it, if it’s only a philosophy? A political guideline? Not about a goddess who may or may not exist? What truly matters?”
