“And, whatever strikes you.”
He’s quiet for long enough Iriset has to look at him. Lyric’s steady sun-and-rock gaze is both strange and familiar, and Iriset feels that old urge to distract him with a kiss. Change the subject even though there isn’t one.
“While I’m gone,” Lyric says gently, “I want you to be careful.”
Standing, Iriset rolls her eyes. “Careful is boring,” she says, not because she believes it—she actually is very careful about a lot of things.
“You have the ear of the powerful here, the most powerful,” he says. “And I think very mischievous and fickle. You changed me with words in my ear and lips on my skin. But I am predictable, aren’t I? The result of generations of Holy Silence, brutal teachings. The Moon-Eater…” Lyric sighs softly. “I know what you’re like when you believe in something, even willing to argue against an enemy with all the power over you.”
“The Moon-Eater isn’t my enemy.”
“Good. I don’t want this eye to be the only part of you left in the world.”
The soft, earnest words ping through her like ecstatic-charged dandelion puffs. Teasing, soft, full of wishes. She looks up and there it is, her eye, in Lyric’s face.
Iriset grabs that face in both hands, suddenly cursed with intense dread. “Lyric méra Esmail, don’tyoudie.”
Something in his face makes it seem like he won’t promise, and that dread builds in Iriset, because what could possibly keep him from this sort of normal, easy promise? People say this kind of thing all the time. But before she can dig her nails in or make demands, he smiles. “I won’t die while I’m away from you.”
Iriset kisses him, because she can, because a part of her is inside him forever.
Lyric allows it, opening to her but barely responding, and it hurts because Iriset can’t help but feel like it’s that eye, that part of her inside him, that holds this distance between them. Apostasy, always the same barrier dividing priest and liar, husband and wife, Vertex Seal and Silk. Even if Lyric says he understands, says it’s holy.
Holiness can be a monster, too.
Keep me from doing it
When Iriset returns to her suite, the numen is sprawled on her bed. It actually seems to be floating several fingers above the blanket. She shakes her head with a smile. So strange, and yet so understandable. If Iriset were a numen, she’d do things like that all the time, too.
“Never,” she says, wondering where it’s been.
It grunts. Its eyes are shut, its silvery hair wavers like long strips of grass in a slow wind.
Iriset gently rubs at the skin around the opal eye, walking toward the design counter beside her bed.
She kneels and picks up the stylus she keeps in a nook of the stand and taps a few points around her eye socket. Ecstatic flows reverse in a well design she learned from Eliri to momentarily numb the pain. She uses the stylus to nudge the opal, and the tiny frame she’s improving every day pushes it out with a surprisingly dry pop. There’s a softer prosthetic Eliri suggested that promotes healing while everything is still tender. Eventually Iriset won’t need it, but stress isn’t helping the intricate process of integration.
“Why are you sad?” the numen asks.
“Lyric is leaving.”
“Good.”
With a sigh, Iriset stretches to her feet, thinks of Lyric stretching, thinks of him walking through the crater tunnel south along the banks of the Lapis River, where it widens into a delta. She sits on the bed and pokes the numen in the ribs. It doesn’t even flinch. Disappointing. “Are you ever ticklish?”
It rolls black-diamond eyes. “Why should I be?”
“It’s fun.”
“Shade is the one who wants to be human.”
“Ah, yes, you are wind,” she says, glancing at the moving hair. She tangles fingers in the ends and tugs a bit.
Its eyes bore into her, glowing for sure, in tiny firework bursts of pink. “Why were you so concerned about the eclipse?”
“It’s when the mirané people were made, during an eclipse. Lyric wants me to do it. He’s setting up all the pieces so it will be easier for me to simply give in and knock them down.”
“Could you? Make the miran?”
