Page 20

In the sanctuary, at the altar, Amaranth mé Esmail Her Glory touches herself, sliding her hands along her skin, pinching and caressing as she knows her body likes. She slowly, attentively, raises herself to pleasure.

Iriset knows this to be happening—that is the duty of the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, that is how to awaken the dead god, to draw him here.

But it’s not the only thing happening: Force pulls from every direction in thin lines as Amaranth draws force toward her own center.

Iriset’s head falls back as she gives in to the sensation, as she listens and feels with tongue and lips, as she turns open her palms to feel the tingling there.

If she were alone, she’d follow Her Glory’s lead and touch herself, too.

If she had the time, she’d invent a force-net for self-pleasure that cycles through the forces and wakes the body the way the Moon-Eater is woken. She’d call it the little eater.

The threads of force draw together, slithering and sparking past Iriset, toward the center of the temple—always toward the center.

They twist around one another, looping, braiding, tighter, tighter, then loosening like a sigh before winding up again, and finally, finally, finally they knot into a whole.

That knot traps the breath in Iriset’s throat, and she shudders. Her whole body is on the edge, only from listening, tasting the forces, from letting her mind imagine touch and heat. Sweat tingles her spine, under her breasts, and she’s wet enough to feel it.

Amaranth sighs, an airy moan.

Iriset sighs so softly, wanting to be in there, wanting hands on her, a pull at her scalp, teeth on her neck. Anything.

The forces tangled around her tighten, and Iriset’s hands curl into fists, low over her belly. She breathes rapidly.

The central knot unravels.

What releases are not balanced forces, not falling and flow and ecstatic and rising but something parallel to them, from within them… like a fifth force.

It feels different, whole unto itself, and passes through the air, through lattice and flesh and bone, out into the rest of the world. Then it is gone.

Silence—true Silence, the tension of perfect balance—hangs in the Moon-Eater’s sanctuary, and deep, deep within herself, Iriset feels a thump-thump like a heartbeat.

Maybe it’s her own heartbeat. She feels gladness, satisfaction, belonging, and—

“Iriset.”

Her name drifts low from the altar.

She opens her eyes, unmoving. Iriset is unsure she wishes to emerge, but Sidoné shoves her. She stumbles past the screen.

Her Glory is slumped on the floor, around the far side of the altar. Her mask covers her face, spilling over hair and chest. Its scalloped edges flutter against the sunset colors of her wrapped trousers.

“I’m here.” Iriset kneels, shaky.

“Did you feel him?”

“I felt something.” She doesn’t have words for what it had been. Maybe a god. Maybe only Amaranth. But it was intense, unlike anything she’s felt before. “Then it was gone.”

“He doesn’t remain awake,” Her Glory murmurs.

Iriset makes a questioning sound. The most she can manage. As she recovers herself, she grows somehow more dazed, more awed. The details of what she experienced fade, like a dream, but leave behind a wavering understanding of something impossible to know.

Amaranth says, “It isn’t that I wake him for the day—I only wake him for a moment. A moment of unity, and Aharté is with us, too. Or maybe they’re the same. Aharté and the Moon-Eater. I cannot say.” Her voice lifts, falls, drifts with rolling languor.

“All the forces moved,” Iriset says. “I have heard that Aharté unraveled him, but every time you do this, you put him back together. Only for a moment. You are an architect.”

Amaranth’s shoulders shake and she says in a deeply irreverent voice, “An architect of love ,” as if love is nothing but a dirty joke.

“But, oh, I’ve never thought of love that way,” Iriset says, awe-drunk and undeterred.

“As a force. Or a knot. But falling draws things together—that is love. Flow is always changing—that is love. Ecstatic flares, brightens, brings us genius, makes us better! Rising makes us yearn and grow. What is love but that?” With each word her voice pitches higher, thinning with thrills.

Iriset’s heart pounds, and she feels it—something—just past her eyes, just beyond hearing, barely out of reach.

And in that moment, despite all the reasons not to, Iriset begins to love Amaranth mé Esmail.

Just a little bit, a seed, but it is there.

Her Glory laughs lightly, joyfully. “I knew I should bring you here, little designer.”

It is fitting what happens next, that very afternoon.

Iriset sits on a narrow bench in the Garden for Four Winds, lazily sketching details of a briar rose growing around a small obelisk marked with gilded lines of Writings of the Holy Syr (“This life is ours: your gift, my design”).

The top edge of the sun passes just behind the bottom edge of Aharté’s moon overhead, signaling the beginning of summer, and so Amaranth and her handmaidens spread throughout the garden, enjoying one of the last lovely days before the true heat settles in.

Iriset suspects it is for her, as the languid sense of understanding has stuck to her like honey, like bobbing rainbow bees buzzing in her skull.

She’d not be good for anything more strenuous than drawing in the garden.

Maybe Amaranth is taking care of her. Maybe she does like Iriset, and can learn to trust her in time to save the Little Cat.

Maybe it’s all manipulation, and Iriset should resist. But her inner design is too strange with her morning experiences to scheme.

Tucked beneath the royal residential petals of the palace and beside the mirané dome, this garden is small and perfectly square, cornered by tall windcatcher steeples painted white for ecstatic force, blue for rising, black for flow, and green for falling.

From the four-point star-shaped fountain in the center, four long streams were dug into the earth, tiled in the deep red of the Vertex Seal like channels of blood reaching toward the towers.

The streams are narrow enough to step across and stocked with tiny blue-green minnows.

Hardy flowers like desert rose, fleshy succulents, violet-eye creepers, and needle sage are planted in perfect four-count patterns.

A gardener feeds the minnows a few paces from where Amaranth lounges in the sunlight while Anis mé Ario draws white geometry upon her hands and arms in extremely delicate lines.

Sidoné has stripped to her sleeveless shift and rolled up her trousers to her knees in order to show Istof Nefru a few grappling moves, and Ziyan mé Tal sings softly where she perches on the edge of the fountain, a harp cradled in her lap.

A Seal guard stands at each of the two arched entrances cut into the garden wall.

Occasionally a couple of miran enter, greeting Sidoné before approaching Amaranth.

Iriset focuses on her sketching, or her mind will drift higher and higher into airy philosophy or gloomy futures, and she’ll crash hard into anxiety: She recognizes the symptoms and cannot afford the results here in the palace.

The roses are her favorite to draw because they embody all the forces: rising in how they climb, reaching for the sun; flow in their creeping vines, with which they embrace the small obelisk; falling in the layered, spiraling pattern of their petals, clinging toward the central stamen; ecstatic in the sudden thorns for sticking, gripping, defense.

She wonders if she can design tiny thornlike hooks in the filaments of silk thread to make the ecstatic connection between skin and mask even better.

Or to hook the air itself perhaps? Did she have time to experiment?

She has thirty-two days to save her father.

Her hand trembles and Iriset breathes her eight-count balance.

Leaning over her bound book of vellum, she begins a new detail: the petals of this unfurling deep red rose.

Their scent, delicate and airy, surrounds her, filling her nostrils until it’s a thin layer of taste at the back of her throat.

Her eyes drift closed and she uses one hand to lift the rose head nearer her cheek, brushing it to her skin.

It is softer than silk, cool and erotic.

She touches it to her bottom lip. If she’d had this with her in the Moon-Eater’s Temple, just this slight brush of living silk on her lip might have made her come.

Could she bring herself right here, with subtle tugs of rising force, the rose petal a focus on her lip?

She has all afternoon to play. Amaranth is just as close right now as she was in the temple, undone. Surely Her Glory would notice…

A quiet sound beside Iriset startles her; she gasps and crushes her hand around the narrow stem. Tiny thorns sting her fingers.

“I am sorry,” says a man, voice low. He sits down beside her on the bench. “May I?”

He holds out a mirané-brown hand, paler on the palm. Iriset stares at his forearm, slender with muscle, the knob of his wrist she wants to dig her teeth into. (It will haunt her, someday, that first glimpse of him. She was already thinking about sex.)

Her lips part, instinctively tasting his rising force, as she lifts her gaze.