They look so guilty. “I don’t care,” Amaranth says. “I have too much to do, and you two couldn’t possibly out-scheme me. Anis is too easy to break,” she tells Sidoné, then to make up for it, to Anis she says, “And Sidoné wouldn’t even touch me with permission.”
Anis, used to her Moon-Eater’s Mistress’s ways, drifts over to take Amaranth’s hand. “We can still make everything on time if we decline the rest of the meetings and I paint you while you talk to Garnet and the Vertex Seal.”
Amaranth nods, though Sidoné frowns. “I want my audience,” the small king demands.
“You’ll get it. Come with—”
A commotion just outside the Moon-Eater’s Temple has both Anis and Sidoné tense, but Amaranth shoves them aside and marches out. Too much has threatened her and her worldview this summer. “What?” she snaps even as she winces away from the cutting sunlight.
Two Seal guards and one Moon-Eater priest are blocking someone.
The fourth person is a thin, conniving, but patient mirané prince named Hehet méra Davith. He’s the head of the opposition faction of mirané princes. And he’s never bothered to confront Amaranth about anything, much preferring to work through secondary or even tertiary sources, or if made to speak directly to power, he goes to Garnet or Beremé. That he is here, when so much has gone so wrong, gives Amaranth a sick feeling. She doesn’t have time.
But Hehet catches her eye and smiles as if there’s no care in the world. He’s forty-something, carrying his age handsomely. There is a strange eagerness to him that she’s never seen before: Normally Hehet hides himself, plays neutral better than anyone.
With a flick of a delicately boned wrist, he holds out a very old-looking scroll. Slowly his smile turns catlike and dangerous. “Your Glory. I know what’s happened to the Vertex Seal.”
An idea so good it’s bad
It hurts. There’s screaming in her ears. Something outside of her throbs, the air itself squeezing, expanding, squeezing, expanding. There’s weight on top of her, pressing her chest down, and beneath her the ground is cold and hard, also wet.
Iriset smells blood. Her face is sticky with it, and she can’t move one of her arms. She opens her eyes to blurry darkness. Bubbles of color pop at the edges of her vision.
Gasping a breath, she tastes ash and iron.
Suddenly the strangeness bursts and the whole world rushes in: An explosion, the building beside them is half blown apart, thatisscreaming, people screaming and crying for help, and an alarm shrieks through the neighborhood. Angry pops like fireworks, sudden hard rain—something is still exploding—
Iriset pushes at the weight on her chest. It’s—
“Lyric,” she says, but can’t hear her own voice even in her own skull, there’s too much screaming, a ringing through her bones. With extreme effort she manages to roll enough that he falls away from her and she sits. She pushes him over. He’s covered in blood—
The left side of his face is half gone.
He isn’t breathing.
Iriset kneels over him, the ground swaying under her, and reaches for the marriage knot.No—it’s gone, too, there’s nothing between them. She unraveled it when they fucked, pulled it apart in a long trembling orgasm. The heart force to undo a heart. She flattens her hands on Lyric’s chest and sucks in quick, shallow breaths, seeking ecstatic force. Without thinking, she drags ecstatic from every part of her own body, scours herself, and in a bright burst shoves every shred through her arms and into her palms and rocks him with it. “Lyric!” she yells, then again, and she can almost hear herself.
She slaps her hand on his chest, using the kinetic power to charge ecstatic again and again, and suddenly Lyric’s mouth falls open and he takes a ragged breath. His breath is shallow, slow; he is not going to survive this if she doesn’t fix it fast.
Iriset grabs his face. Blood trickles away from his ruined cheek, and her fingers find viscous material—not skin or muscles, no, it’s hiseye, and bits of bone poke out around the socket.
A sharp shock of ecstatic cuts at her chest, and Iriset cries out at the pain; she clasps a hand around the weird pendant on the wire necklace he gave her—that last moment flashes back. Lyric heard, or felt, or knew the explosion was coming, and he activated the defense necklace that was meant for him, that he put on her,can you defend yourself, and Iriset is fine! Fine, shaken, aching like her whole body got punched through a wall, but the force-net protected her like some kind of shield bubble. And Lyric wasn’t inside.
Her hands shake as she tears the necklace away and unwinds the wires, takes the clay pendant and snaps it with a surge of energy. It’s small but sharp and pointed on one side now, good enough.
Shucking off her outer robe, Iriset starts tearing at it. With a strip she wipes blood and worse away from Lyric’s face, careful around the delicate broken bones of his cheek and eye socket. Focused, shescoops out what’s ruined and flicks it away, carefully unthinking. Lyric shifts under her hand, but she still can’t hear if he’s whimpering, pained.Just keep breathing, Lyric, she says, but cannot hear.
Using the fine wires of the necklace, Iriset quickly twists together a rudimentary quad frame; she’d give anything for a proper stylus right now. Good thing Iriset is a genius and can snap ecstatic into one line, and sing force-notes to imbue the others with flow, falling, and rising, trusting herself even if she can’t hear the tones. Then she uses the sharp clay pendant to cut the frame into Lyric’s skin. It fits over his ruined eye socket, and when she puts a hand to either temple she lights him up with all four forces so the net flares to life and then falls into stasis.
She’s no surgeon, apostatical or otherwise, but she understands the basics of blood flow and bone structure and pulmonary rhythm and kinetic charge, the aspects of the body that correspond to each force on a basic level. Iriset squeezes her eyes closed and settles her hands against his chest again. Lyric is breathing.
For a moment her throat closes.
The blood loss is probably already substantial, and only a constant trickle now, but the injuries to his eye socket, cheek, probably tiny abrasions throughout, and whatever damage there is to the sensory… whatevers! Nerves? Tendons? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t have to know,you don’t have to know, she reminds herself. All she has to do is keep him alive. The best way is to restructure the bone here, now, and close up the wound so that it’s more structurally sound for movement. Before ash gets in or more dirt or anything to increase the likelihood of infection. The eye—
Later, a design surgeon can help, a real healer. Iriset has never tried to make anything like this. A missing piece. She does transformation, masks, reworking, redesigning. Not something brand-new. She doesn’t know how to make a new eye, but she could make somethingout of glass or opal or better yet a resin, something that might even eventually work to connect with his brain in some way, if she’s good enough, or if she could find a proper replacement, which of course Lyric would never accept—
The idea occurs to her so completely, she’s halfway started before it hits her just how terrible it is.
