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Amaranth cups Iriset’s face in warm hands. Her mirané-brown eyes study Iriset, steady falling force pulling Iriset in. “Beremé said your name to me, before I’d ever known it. It’s her fault I claimed you. Her suggestion, even. But that doesn’t make you beholden to her in the slightest.”

“I wouldn’t,” Iriset says, allowing herself to enjoy Amaranth’s touch. She wants to stay here, under Amaranth’s undivided attention. She wants Amaranth to kiss her. Iriset rubs her fingers against her thighs, scratching up some ecstatic friction to help her center herself.

“Good.” Amaranth lets go, sitting back on her heels. “But I do want you at the dinner tonight. A handful of the groom’s family from the Ecstatic Steeple Shadow precinct will be there, and they might like talking to someone from outside the palace.”

“Even the Little Cat’s daughter?”

“Especially,” snaps Sidoné, prickly as ever in the remains of Beremé’s presence.

“Did you wager?” Iriset asks.

Amaranth smiles only on one side of her face. She glances at her body-twin. “I would never give Beremé the satisfaction.”

Her Glory sends Iriset off to find Nielle in her workshop with a peering sort of expression Iriset can’t parse. But even not knowing what Nielle makes, Iriset cannot resist the siren song of a workshop and goes eagerly.

The answer is better than Iriset had imagined: Nielle creates masks.

In a small section of the handmaiden’s bedchamber, walled off by a lacquered screen much like Iriset’s, Nielle has a long table and carefully labeled shelves covered in sketches and material, sewing tools, glue, knives and styli and scissors.

Every imaginable mask base, from ceramic and silk to leather and glass. It’s magnificent.

Ziyan is already there, the two of them bent over the low table as Nielle cuts a strip of black leather with a razor Iriset could use to shave silicate.

“It’s you,” Ziyan says.

Iriset ignores her and kneels across from them. “Her Glory sent me. I’m joining you all for the dinner tonight,” she says, unable to tear her eyes from the various tools.

“Oh, good,” Nielle says with satisfaction, leaning up. “We’ll find something perfect.”

As Iriset listens to Nielle carry on about her favorite sorts of masks—the ones that accentuate something unique about the wearer, or draw out different things upon different faces, which Iriset suspects is the mark of a genius artist—it occurs to Iriset that the peering look of Amaranth’s means this is a test, too.

Could the Moon-Eater’s Mistress suspect how Iriset feels about a workshop like this?

The pull to apostasy that isn’t relegated to Silk. That Silk…

Amaranth never asks directly when she could scheme instead.

Iriset swallows unease and accidentally knocks over a shallow bowl of bone and shell beads.

During her protestations that she’s just not used to this sort of situation, as Nielle assures her the beads get spilled and lost in cracks in the tiles all the time, Ziyan curls her lip and helps pick up a single bead at a time.

Nielle notices and rolls her eyes. “Ziyan, just tell Iriset why you don’t like her.”

Iriset laughs once in surprise. She’s come to appreciate Nielle.

She wishes she could be herself with the other woman.

Not hide her laugh behind a demure hand.

But even in the Little Cat’s court, nobody treated her—either Silk or Isidor’s daughter—so freely.

Not even Bittor, unless she had her fingers up his ass.

“Nielle,” Ziyan chides.

“I don’t mind,” Iriset says, looking directly at Ziyan.

The woman is perfectly mirané colored, reddish-brown skin and matching irises, her black hair undertoned like the red rock of the crater.

Her eyes are wide apart over narrow cheeks, and she has a sharp jaw that points toward an elegantly curved mouth and long neck, but without the broader, more handsome bone structure of the oldest mirané families.

Iriset watches as Ziyan smiles tiny and sharp, ready to lay it out.

“You act like you deserve everything,” she says in her lovely voice. “You’re quiet, yes, and pretend to be modest, but you have no shame for your background, for your father’s crimes.”

“Oh.” Iriset taps her lips with her first two fingers.

“Everyone knows what the Little Cat does. He’s practically a rebel. Murder, gambling, thievery, apostasy . And I know Amaranth forgives you or doesn’t believe you’re responsible. You could at least act like it.”

Iriset lowers her hand. People only think they know her father.

He always broke up talk about rebellion, despite Silk’s rampant human architecture.

It was a tool to the Little Cat, not a belief system.

(Once, over ecstatic wine, Dalal idly shared stories she’d heard from her grandmother of a group in the Morning Market precinct who’d rebelled against the Vertex Seal in their great-grandparents’ generation, singing verses of glory and hope and longing.

Iriset had asked what they were rebelling for, and Bittor said, “You rebel against something, not for something. Their songs are about hope.” And Dalal, who was older, told Iriset the rebels had simply wanted to marry who they wished, regardless of Safiyah the Bloody’s reformations.

The Little Cat had appeared, looking for his escape artist, and instantly dismissed the whole conversation.

He said, “All the rebels died in their futile war, and nobody got married to anybody. They should have cheated, lied, or left.”)

To Ziyan, Iriset says, “You want me to be grateful.”

“You should be.”

“Grateful my father will die, my friends and family jailed or fled? My life shattered. And as for shame, what has Dad done that’s worse than the last quad of Vertex Seals?

” Iriset leans toward Ziyan and keeps her voice low.

“I am grateful Her Glory plucked me out of the apostate prison. But I didn’t belong there in the first place.

Amaranth told me she wants extraordinary handmaidens, so I don’t see that I’m doing anything wrong.

I embrace who I am. Who are you, Ziyan? Why do you belong at Her Glory’s side? ”

A dark flush spreads up Ziyan’s long mirané neck.

Nielle slaps a hand onto her worktable. Both Iriset and Ziyan startle.

“This is why I do like Iriset so much! I have an idea.” She waits until both the others tear their gazes away from each other.

Then Nielle grins so big it pulls her features even more asymmetrical. “I’m going to make Iriset a cat mask.”

Ziyan scoffs.

Iriset, though, really wants to wear a little cat mask to the party. Too bad she does know her place and instead says, “I’m not sure that’s the kind of attention Amaranth wants tonight.”

“I’m the one marrying the small king,” Nielle says in a singsong voice. “These are my future relatives. We’re doing it. Ziyan, you can be a pretty bird.”

“No,” Ziyan says slowly. She narrows her eyes at Iriset, then says, “I’ll be a cat, too. Then it’s not quite so overt.”

As Nielle hums, considering, Iriset nods at Ziyan. “I love it.”

The engagement dinner, Iriset discovers only when they’re on their way, is taking place in the private dining room of Diaa of Moonshadow.

Thirty-one years before Silk was captured, Diaa gave up her familial name when she married the Vertex Seal.

She declared that her family was all of the empire, and none should think to compel loyalty from her based on who she had been before.

The devotion to her husband and her children-to-be had won her many followers, especially those just as devoted to Silence.

She bred that simple devotion into both her son and daughter: one of whom was destined to be the next (last) Vertex Seal; one of whom would be the most infamous Moon-Eater’s Mistress ever to serve (aside from Safiyah the Bloody, who had been both Mistress and Seal in her time).

Both children were steadfast in their belief in the strength of their thread in the Holy Design of the world, though both preferred the other’s thread to their own: Lyric wished to have been born second, and thus the devoted Mistress; Amaranth wished to rule.

Diaa never minded, for their gentle rivalry presents itself only as a slight distance between them.

If her son wishes he’d been born a farmer or such so he could swear himself into a Silent monastery, and if her daughter dreams of being an enthroned spider in the center of an empire’s web, at least they can push at each other’s ambition and strengthen the empire by it.

The lady is fifty-four years old now and drifts throughout the palace complex however she likes.

She takes coffee and mint cakes with Amaranth on a whim, asks how the Moon-Eater fared that morning, and offers an amusing verse she learned from her lover’s cousin who recites poetry under the shade of the Ecstatic Steeple on market days.

Then the next afternoon she appears with candied rose petals for the handmaidens and directs her daughter toward an insightful critique of some mirané prince or other’s proposal for stripping an annexed people of one of their rights, so that Amaranth can either use the critique herself or pass it along to Garnet or another, thereby maintaining the illusion that Diaa herself never engages in politics.