Page 35

Shades of brutality

T hat night, late, Iriset curls upon a low bench in the Color Can Be Loud Garden, where the ruffled lilies turn their splayed faces toward the strongest threads of design.

For hours she’s been moving throughout the inner parts of the palace in her plain attendant robes, masked and invisible to the security net thanks to the cap on her bracelet.

Except the hall of miran itself, the whole main complex is set with anchor knots: seven of them.

In the next few days, she’ll need an excuse to visit the hall, and likely have to make the central anchor while surrounded by people.

But this is a good start. She hasn’t decided if she can risk setting the trigger point in a permanent location, for stability, or if it’s better to have a looser overall design but be able to trigger the distraction from anywhere.

She’s weary, tense, and can’t quite get rid of the desire thrumming through her.

Alone here, Iriset gives in to the temptation to remove her mask and outer robe and slippers, to feel the eddies of the garden’s forces slide along her arms and neck and ankles.

She wants lips on all those places, hands on her, thinking of the stubborn elegance of Singix’s beauty, raw hunger for Amaranth, the casual nature of the handmaidens’ familiar touching.

Nielle with her broad satisfaction in her marriage.

The pull of motion when Lyric and the Seal guards moved in tandem with their dance.

They all make Iriset want more. Not just a good fuck but someone to take care of her, to work with her design, her pleasure, to strip away her worries and endless spiraling plans until she’s focused on only connection.

Someone just to touch her with mutual affection.

Not for a favor or prestige or advantage.

Just pleasure, and a little bit of love.

She could find a lover in the women’s petal. But it’s probably harder to lie with your tongue in somebody else’s holes.

She misses Bittor. He would do exactly what she commands but sometimes surprise her.

She misses her workshop, her spinners, the hum of Moonshadow City’s ribbon skiffs, the dirt and sun smell of the wind in the Saltbath precinct.

She misses wandering the corridors of their tower, murmuring calculations to herself, being herself.

Whichever self that was. She misses her father.

It’s terrible to know she’ll never get any of it back. Even if they save her father, they’ll be forced to flee.

When they save him.

Iriset breathes, reaching for balance as she did in prison. It doesn’t take long to calm herself, to find the strokes of equilibrium and tension of stillness and waiting. Silence turns gently inside her, a planet of life on a perfect axis.

In the dim glow of starlight, Iriset’s potency draws the hungry lilies. They face her, ruffled petals spilling in four directions. They’re vivid, deep orange, but night saturates all into shadows. Iriset ponders the name of this garden: Color Can Be Loud. Only under the sun, she supposes.

A sound startles her. Someone has entered through the open archway and strides across the entire garden to the far eastern deck. He’s shadowy, a glint of black hair, the flicker of robe.

The man grips the elaborate rail with one hand and leans his head back to stare up at the sky.

It’s Lyric méra Esmail His Glory.

Iriset freezes. If she doesn’t move, if she doesn’t let any spark of ecstatic force poke out, maybe he won’t notice her.

The Vertex Seal sighs heavily enough Iriset hears the heartache, and his hand clenches around the rail.

Rising force flies off him so strongly, threads of it speed away from the lilies and they shift their faces toward him.

His ache is longing, the need of rising force to grow, to be better, to reach always higher toward the sky. To burn.

Slowly, as if every muscle and bone in his body hurts, Lyric turns back to the garden. Behind him a glow resonates from the palace complex and the city. Iriset can’t see his face, but she feels the deep anxiety in his core.

She’s not supposed to witness this.

“Your Glory,” she whispers.

His eyes snap open; she sees them glint. Lyric doesn’t move, nor does Iriset.

After a tense moment, his shoulders straighten and he walks toward her, smooth and easy. “I did not see you, you’re so much a part of Silence.”

Carefully letting out a breath of unease, Iriset says, “I am sorry to interrupt you.”

“This is no private garden, I could not expect to be alone. May I join you?”

Iriset inclines her head and touches one hand across her eyelids.

The Vertex Seal sits beside her on the low bench and she remembers she wears only a thin linen shift and trousers untied at her ankles.

Her head and face are bare! Though she knotted back her hair in places, it messily tumbles around her shoulders.

This is too intimate for the Vertex Seal, especially when she’s been feeling so vulnerable and desirous.

“You also wanted to be alone,” Lyric murmurs. He holds a thin book in his mirané hands, turning it over and over. His hair is unbound, too, loose waves gently puffed around his head.

How can Iriset tell him she wishes for the exact opposite of being alone?

She envisions grabbing his face and kissing him, wonders if he would let her take them together here in this dark garden.

She bites the inside of her lip very hard and breathes thinly through her nose, barely maintaining her balanced alignment.

After a moment, Lyric offers her the book. Cloth-bound, with gilded lettering on its face and spine: The Seven Hundred Declarations of Safiyah the Bloody .

“‘There are no shades to brutality,’” Lyric says softly.

“She wrote that. ‘Brutality is only itself, never too much nor too little.’ I remind myself of that when I do something terrible. When I want to excuse myself, to say my choice is the lesser of evils, is necessary. When I remember her words, I cannot mollify my horror with excuses. Brutal is brutal, no matter what it balances.”

Iriset loses her own balance for a moment, in a surge of ecstatic force. She presses the book flat to her lap. “I’ve read it,” she says. Everyone in Moonshadow reads Safiyah’s declarations. “What did you do?”

He doesn’t glance at her but continues watching his hands.

“The Osahar cultists—they call themselves Singers of Silence, did you know?—I sent them a message. So many here in Moonshadow escaped into the undermarket, into the tunnels and secret alleys tucked inside the city design, the army could not take enough of them. We would have to devastate the entire precinct to root them all out, with much collateral damage. But there is an enclave of them across the river, one day on horse northeast. My army will raze it. If the Moonshadow Singers do not turn over their leaders, every eighth person in their enclave will be killed, by lottery, with no exceptions for age.”

“During the Days of Mercy,” she breathes. Horror liquefies in her stomach. She can barely feel the book of declarations in her suddenly cold hands.

“I hope they give me the chance to be merciful.” Lyric’s voice is so thin, taut with despair.

Iriset doesn’t know if he deserves to feel so much.

“Why?” she asks, still whispering, as if to speak any of this aloud will make it real. “Why do something that you know will hurt so badly? When it hurts you? You know it’s wrong.”

“No matter what I do, some will be hurt. I exist to ensure the empire thrives. I must make my choice based on the good of most, the survival of our ways that have served for centuries.”

“The mirané ways.”

“No,” Lyric says vehemently. It echoes in her chest and the lilies shudder away.

Then his volume falls again to a murmur: “Aharté’s way is for all the empire.

That Rising Steeple Shadow precinct has very few miran living there, and my council knew it; some argued for wider devastation.

Dig out the Singers, never mind collateral damage.

Use it—teach everyone this lesson, not only the cultists.

But there are better ways to teach lessons—I won’t murder for a lesson. Only to stop a greater massacre.”

Iriset has no idea what to say. She doesn’t know what’s better or worse.

Strategic, harsh, targeted action, or broader violence that might take a turn for more damage, more death.

In architecture, she would target any flaw, excise it for the good of the whole, rather than pull down an entire design. But people aren’t flaws.

She remembers her metaphor earlier, when she said to Amaranth that in a design so complex as the empire, removal of any aspect causes ripples to the full design that cannot always be predicted. And Her Glory said, all the better reason to destroy rebellion before it grows.

Thinking of Amaranth, Iriset says, “Are you certain those two were the only options? Targeted cruelty or extensive violence?”

Lyric says, “There are even worse options.”

“Safiyah would have razed the precinct and the settlement.”

The Vertex Seal nods, and even in profile Iriset reads the weariness in his brief smile. “But there is no shade to brutality.”

She swallows, grips the book, and then lightly brushes her fingers against the knuckles of his left hand.

They say no more for a while again, and Iriset tries not to think, tries not to elaborate on this insight into His Glory’s core. How can a man like this grant mercy to her father?

As Iriset pulls her horror back into balance, she quietly offers to show Lyric the balancing technique. “It is a simple principle, but many do not think of Silence as balanced design.”

He agrees, and she faces him on the bench, straddling it. He mirrors her.