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But on the floor of a royal architect’s study, the words sound to Iriset more like a rallying cry. A rebellion.

It’s not illegal to criticize the Vertex Seal, but Iriset’s position is too precarious for harsh opinions. She takes a deep, shaking breath. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “Her Glory said they will execute him during the Days of Mercy.”

“So…” Raia pauses and begins again. “So I have heard as well. But, Iriset, there is nothing you can do against the will of Aharté.”

She clenches her fist around the silk scrap, crushing it.

“You mean this all is the Holy Design,” she says, and doesn’t hint at the bitterness she feels.

The words remind her of her mother: Many people say apostatical cancer is part of Aharté’s pattern, too.

Iriset hated nothing worse than that excuse when her mother was dying.

Raia says, “You understand design, and the foundations of architecture. The Little Cat eventually would need to be balanced, somehow. And, Iriset, I am sorry for your suffering.”

It doesn’t matter if Iriset believes an—she pretends to.

“Teach me,” she says, as if it will convince her to forgive an.

“You wanted my knowledge, from Silk, in prison. And now I don’t need you to free me, but I would work with you as you suggested: give what I know of Silk’s methods in return for your instruction. ”

She glances up. Ans eyes seem darker with concern, or responsibility, as an promises, “I will ask that you be allowed to work with me some days.”

“Will you tell me why you’re designing a triangle?” She glances at the project an’d pinned down as she arrived.

“I am experimenting with forms of stability that do not require all four forces to hold. It would be a strong grounding form that did not include rising force, but ecstatic kept flow alive, with falling holding it in shape.”

Iriset smiles slightly. “You surmised that from the silk. She used ecstatic to create a connection between the mask and the face of the wearer.”

Raia nods, and begins to point out the exact weave of ans design.

That evening, Shahd brings Iriset a small dish of mint ice, and as she moves around picking up and straightening, she says, “All the notes you have asked me to place remain untouched.”

None of the Little Cat’s court is checking the drops. If Bittor could, certainly he would. Certainly.

Iriset clutches her spoon, determined to move faster.

“But your grandparents seem well,” Shahd continues in her wispy voice. “Or free, at least, when I walked past. There was no graffiti implicating them at their home or your grandmother’s mechanics shop.”

“Thank you,” Iriset manages.

The girl says nothing else, drawing Iriset to the bed, where she unknots Iriset’s hair and finger-combs it, rubbing sweet oil into the ends.

It feels so familiar, familial. Her grandfather was the first person besides her mother to do this.

Iriset clenches her jaw and breathes so carefully.

She can’t worry about them, but can only focus on her father, and where she is right now.

Once Iriset’s hair is combed and oiled, Shahd touches Iriset’s wrist briefly. Then she departs without another word.

Get out of here , Iriset wants to say. Go to your family and don’t return. Stop helping me before it’s too late. I’ll use you if you let me.

Or she wants to tug Shahd back and return the favor of combing out her hair.

Like a big sister. Or like a lover. Undress Shahd, find out what makes her rising force rush or the taste of her clavicle.

If Shahd were willing, it would be allowed here.

It isn’t as though Iriset hasn’t heard soft lovemaking through the walls and moon-cut floors.

But if Iriset gave in, her lovemaking wouldn’t be soft. Someone would scream. Probably herself.

She watches Shahd leave and flattens out onto her stomach, refusing to touch anything.

Permission is granted for Iriset to study with Raia.

The arrangement is informal, at both Menna’s and Amaranth’s insistence.

Iriset is not apprentice or design school material, after all: She is the Little Cat’s daughter and now Her Glory’s handmaiden, thus can be bound to none other for service or learning.

That suits her. When Raia allows, she joins an in ans office during her free hours, though she doesn’t give up drawing class.

(The Ceres ambassador returned to class, by the way, claiming that he’d considered it and decided that, yes, one might truly understand a thing even if one is not good or skilled at it.

Perhaps, he suggested slyly, one who merely studies but does not perform might even understand some things better than those with mastery.

Iriset scoffed, and their argument spiraled and meandered throughout their encounters that summer.

She firmly intends that if she and her father are forced to flee Moonshadow, she’s carving out a refuge in the Ceres Remnants.)

Iriset behaves with Raia, though she struggles to maintain the illusion of apprenticeship and ignorance of the finer details of Silk’s work and genius.

It’s difficult to step herself back from the ease with which she’s truly capable of designing in order to go through the process on a basic level.

Once, she automatically pinches falling and rising together in a shortcut and has to ruin the entire design they constructed together before Raia notices.

Mostly, instead of beginner lectures or patronizing questions, an shows her the things an is considering, ans theoretical experiments and practical ones.

They talk through the ideas, describing potential outcomes and which are more likely than others.

An sometimes asks her specific questions about Silk, or one of her recovered tools.

Iriset partners an in some delicate balancing structures, when an would need an assistant anyway, and Raia seems relieved to have her—an relaxes with her as an does not if others are present.

Raia asks her one day about the spiders.

“What spiders?” She frowns, eyes wide to hide the dip in her mood.

She still misses her spinners and can find none in the palace outside a cool, shadowed corner of the Color Can Be Loud Garden.

An old Osahar tradition claims orb spinners are a sign of healthy design, because with their eight legs and eyes and perfect webs, they’re avatars of Silence. Clearly, the Vertex Seal disagrees.

“I’ve been going through one of Silk’s sketchbooks”—an pauses and glances wryly at her—“once the investigator-designer blacked out the notes on human design.” Raia pauses again but doesn’t ask directly about Silk’s apostasy, nor does Iriset offer.

The architect sighs in small defeat. “She drew huge numbers of webs, and spiders, and there are notes about spiders being inherent architects themselves. She even wonders if they’re lost children of Aharté, just like the miran. ”

Iriset laughs, surprising herself. Her laughter rarely appears these days.

“It isn’t quite heresy,” Raia says, bending ans lips into a bow as an fights off an answering smile.

“She’s interested in flight,” Iriset says.

“Flight? Spiders don’t fly.”

“Some do, when they are tiny, newborn. They throw up strands of their silk and float away. It’s flying. It’s beautiful, if you’ve never seen it.”

Raia nods slowly, eyes distant. “Why? Why flight? To help thieves easier slip into upper levels of rich houses?”

Iriset presses her hands flat together. “Her patron was the son of Cloud Kings, and my father wanted to know if their ways could be reinterpreted here. But besides that, understanding tensile flight might lead to better bridges, or even raised force-ribbons. What if our carriages and skiffs could fly from here to the edge of the empire instead of dragging along the ribbons? What if we could capture the wind itself to lift us? Find a way to travel as the Cloud Kings do? Could we fly so high as the moon? Visit Aharté, or merely look down upon the glory of our city? Have you never dreamed of flying? It is a worthy—”

She stops suddenly, afraid she’s given herself away.

But Raia reaches out to her hands. An puts ans around hers, and curls long fingers around her wrists. “I feel it, Iriset. I hear you. You’re his daughter, and you wanted your heritage, too.”

In these days the Cloud Kings cannot visit Moonshadow—the Holy Design Steeples disrupt their massive sky castles.

The Rising School of Architecture offers a regular prize to any designer who discovers a way to harness the Cloud King design within the constraints of Aharté’s Silence.

Iriset would have liked to win it. Pulling away, Iriset says, “Silk began studying them for flight, but the spiders gave her the silk.”

Raia’s brow wrinkles. “But she changed to worm silk.”

“Not for everything, though worm silk is easier to source.” Iriset barrels on so she doesn’t start thinking down those lines again: “Spiderwebs don’t seem strong to us because we so easily sweep through them, but the tensile strength of a single strand of spider silk is incredible.

Spider silk is flexible, adhesive, with extensibility.

Also organic, and sometimes spiders eat their own webs.

Silk invented her silk to be all of those things.

She had rope of it stronger and thinner than any other, and even suspension wires for moving between windows, and I—once, we spoke of possible application for jewelry.

Not to mention the healing potential we’ve already discussed.

Blood patches and casts for broken bones.

Neither of which is human architecture.”

An stares at her, and Iriset cuts off. She looks away. “I only mean you should not dismiss spiders. Their architecture is perfect.”

“You hide a vast faith in Aharté, Iriset,” Raia murmurs.

Iriset thinks that is hilarious.

But it’s nice having a designer to talk with, though Iriset can’t ask the questions she most wishes to ask: about the threshold security in the palace, the rumors she heard all her life that alarms are carved into the rocks of the quartz yards, or about the rhythm of the force hum she only feels when curled upon her sleeping pillows at night—it’s no four-mark pulse, but rather with a cadence like breathing.

The palace design seems alive. But that, surely, cannot be true.

Ah, well.

When Raia asks her to fetch something, she makes sure to mistake which cabinet an means each time until an thinks her spatial awareness and memory appallingly slow for such an attentive student.

But it allows her to map where an keeps ans tools and notes, the various resonant and disruptive materials, the styli and vellum and miniature bricks.

She finds the tourmaline quickly, and slips some into the tiny pocket she cut into her sleeve when she’s briefly alone. More easily she steals a striker, which she hides in her knotted hair, and design-grade vellum. Too bad she can’t take her silk.

Before long Iriset has what she needs.

In her room during the night, Iriset works by the gentle light of a force-lamp, placing chips of tourmaline carefully into tiny pinched wire.

It requires perfect balance, and each chip is charged to a different force.

Most beginner designers hold their breath for such delicate work, but Iriset knows to slowly, carefully breathe in an eight-count. It keeps her steady.

The Little Cat taught her the breathing.

When she was young and prone to anxiety after her mother’s illness, Isidor held her in his lap, arms tight around hers, legs wide around hers, effectively cocooning her with his body.

He hummed a gentle melody with the eight-count, just hugging and humming, until Iriset hummed, too, and eventually relaxed.

Later, he taught her the methodology behind it, that it was his favorite of the old meditation techniques the first worshippers of Aharté developed to align with her Holy Design.

It could be broken down into a force-meditation, balancing flow, falling, rising, and ecstatic into perfect alignment.

Perfect Silence. The Cloud Kings had a version, but Isidor liked this better.

He took her out with him beginning when she was twelve.

In the night he taught her to scale a wall or find the best shadow, and they kept up the breathing exercises.

Iriset did not care for the skills of thieves, and never got very good at such things.

But she learned how to feel her way along in the darkness by listening to and tasting the threads of force in the air.

She learned to detect certain identities based on their dominant forces and unique rhythms cutting against her own.

And eventually Iriset designed slippers and skin-tight hoods that dampened such identifiable patterns of design and allowed her father and the cousins of his court to slide right through a lot of basic security.

Iriset rarely loses herself in panic or mania anymore, other than when she was detained alone in the apostate prison, because the breathing is second nature, a gift from her father.

When she huddles over her shield cap, breathing carefully as she places the final chip of tourmaline that will allow her to move about the palace complex undetected, it feels like she’s not alone:

Her father holds her tightly, humming the soothing rhythm in her ear.