Page 47

Iriset grasps at her robe, ready to beg.

Sidoné leans in very closely, just as more guards enter, with a handful of attendants.

There’s noise and abrupt movement to hide Sidoné’s next words: “After this, it is a risk not worth taking. Do you have any idea how thin a thread it is we’re dancing along right now? ”

“Yes, I do,” Iriset whispers back, hands curling into fists against Sidoné’s chest. “Thin as silk.”

They both breathe too hard, staring rudely, their faces close enough Iriset can’t quite focus. She lowers her gaze to Sidoné’s angry mouth.

“That expression doesn’t belong on Singix’s face,” Sidoné says, voice shaking. “Especially not before she enters the temple for the marriage rituals. Get rid of it and go to Amaranth.”

“This is even more reason for me not to go through with the marriage.”

Sidoné’s frown is very grim. “I agree. But what matters is Amaranth. Go ahead and convince her.”

The Moon-Eater’s Mistress holds relaxed court in an alcove cut into the curved wall of the Hall of Shades, across from the magnificent Summer Sea Fountain that churns and spills water in arcs of green and blue like waves of flow and rising force.

Amaranth lounges in a wide, low chair of carved wood, in the center of the rose-and-orange-tiled alcove.

Long teal cushions line the edges where some of her handmaidens rest, sipping iced wine and leaning sadly against one another.

Amaranth reads beautiful religious poetry from a volume by Sarah of Heaven, one hand holding her place, the other stroking the opal scales of a lattice snake splayed in heavy coils across her thighs.

Her Glory pauses when Iriset and a Seal guard approach.

Her handmaidens—all three, Anis, Ziyan, and Istof—rise to their knees to greet Princess Singix.

Six miran lounge about, men and women, all older than Her Glory, and one is missing an eye.

Iriset would have remembered meeting her, for sure.

Three of the others she’s spoken with before.

“We are glad to see you have emerged,” Amaranth says. “It is good you could join us, as these are people who share our misery about Iriset mé Isidor.”

Iriset nods and looks back at the miran gathered.

There’s Hehet méra Davith, who unsettled Iriset in the mirané hall.

She’d asked Sidoné about him eventually, and the body-twin made her promise to keep her distance, because he leads the biggest mirané faction opposing Beremé’s appointment as the chief prince, and therefore is Amaranth’s political enemy.

Iriset can’t avoid him if he’s right next to Her Glory.

And beside him is the gossip he pointed out, Dove méra Curro, and the daughter of…

Iriset can’t remember her name, but she was a contender for Lyric’s marriage.

Did Singix meet any of them? Iriset can’t recall. This seems like a contentious group.

When nobody says anything further and Iriset only stares, Amaranth says, “Leave us, everyone.”

One of the miran protests: “But this yard offers such a unique view of the eclipse!”

Amaranth does nothing, remains quiet and still until the miran would have had to say something to excuse their behavior. They choose to leave.

When they’re alone, Iriset kneels near Amaranth and tries to decide where to begin. She shoves away thoughts of her father, and swallows demands. The Summer Sea Fountain fills the silence with trickling and a soothing pulse of flow.

Iriset stares at the lattice snake in Amaranth’s lap. “Ambassador Erxan is dead,” she says quietly in Singix’s accent, eyes on her hands folded against her knees.

Amaranth sits up straight in a slow, continuous movement. “What happened?” she asks with equally quiet calm. “Poison?”

“I don’t know,” Iriset lies. “It might have been a heart attack. I’m fine.”

“I was hoping for more time to focus only on the first murder before another death muddled things,” Amaranth says with a strange kind of distance.

Iriset, feeling distant herself—no, untethered—looks up to find Her Glory staring past her, up at the hot blue sky.

White and black circles dot Amaranth’s chin in a narrow line, and her lips are black.

Green shadows her eyes, with blue streaks across her temples.

All the colors of Design. A silk mask is pinned into the braids crowning her head.

Iriset wants one. She misses the comfort of it fluttering at her cheek, ready to be drawn across the eyes.

“Sidoné is with him. His body. And the people investigating. She’ll come here when she knows more. Who are your suspects?”

“You need to be focused on other things right now,” Amaranth says dismissively.

Iriset opens her mouth to argue but stops. It’s true, after all. “Sidoné won’t let me see my father.”

“Oh, I heard about that, you fool.” Amaranth snorts. “Or my brother is the fool for agreeing in the first place. It’s better this way.”

Seething, Iriset bows her face. From a distance, she’ll seem soft, demure. Singix. “He’s going to hear that I’m dead.”

“That can’t be helped.”

“Amaranth,” she grinds out, barely keeping herself still.

Her Glory’s hand brushes Iriset’s hair. “This is too plain for Singix, you know. This braid.”

“Amaranth,” Iriset repeats, twisting her fingers up in Singix’s thick skirts. “At least let me send my father a message. Please. ”

Amaranth sighs. “Then you’ll go to the temple, peacefully, and give yourself over to marriage preparations?”

Iriset shudders. There are so many reasons to say no.

Apostasy goes against Aharté’s most basic tenets, but to lie like this at the joining ceremony will make a mockery of the Holy Design itself, of the entire tradition of the marriage knots.

Iriset might wonder which Lyric would judge more harshly, but then, he’s already told her, hasn’t he?

There is no shade to brutality.

None to apostasy, either.

That’s the reason to agree. The only one Iriset ultimately needs. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? From the moment Amaranth said her true name.

If Iriset, as Singix, marries Lyric, she won’t only have performed the greatest act of apostasy imaginable, but will do it from the bed of the Vertex Seal.

“I will,” Iriset says, condemning herself to glory.

Amaranth nods as if she expected nothing less. “Will your work hold up? The design egg is said to be made of inner design, and the priests make it by seeing through all pretense and lies.”

“Do you doubt me now?” Iriset snaps, offended.

“No small amount of my reputation and power is on the line here, as well as your life, Singix .”

Iriset grits her teeth. “I will manage.”

Her Glory studies her.

In a sort of counterstrike, Iriset says, “Are you prepared to do this to your brother?”

“It is necessary,” Amaranth answers immediately, which means she’s already thought about it. “Not only for the pursuit of justice, but to preserve the alliance between the empire and the Ceres Remnants. If the murder was an attempt to interrupt it, we can only win by seeing it through.”

“Would your brother agree?”

“Do you truly care about that? About his consent?”

Iriset pauses. She does care but isn’t sure she wants Amaranth to see it too clearly.

Because it isn’t principle that makes her want Lyric’s consent, or even fear for her own life.

It’s that she cares what he thinks of her.

She wishes otherwise—wishes she could slice out this treacherous, caring piece of her inner design.

She herself—Iriset—is dead to him, his murdered royal arguer, and Lyric wouldn’t even consider granting her father mercy. Why should she give any to him?

Iriset lowers her eyes to the pulsing lattice snake. Its scales ripple and it opens its small mouth to reveal teeth like tiny ferns—harmless and soft, ruffling in the pops of ecstatic force shimmering off Iriset.

“I thought so,” the Moon-Eater’s Mistress says. “Now stop distracting yourself before what will be the greatest test of your skills. And write your note for the Little Cat. I will see he gets it. Only, make sure it doesn’t implicate anyone, all right?”

“Yes. And—”

“There’s more?” Amaranth drawls.

“I want Shahd for my attendant. I need someone I trust even if she doesn’t know it.”

“Fine,” Her Glory says easily. “Now come here.” She draws Iriset nearer. The snake shuffles deeper into Amaranth’s layers. “What you’ve done here is truly magnificent, you know. Your beauty would distract anyone.” Before Iriset responds, Amaranth kisses her on the mouth.

Ecstatic force tingles inside her, as it nearly always does when she’s touched with desire.

Iriset chooses not to fight it, but let the tenderness comfort her, let this kiss mark her.

It very well could be the last kiss she’ll have from someone who knows her name, for possibly the rest of her extremely short life.

As if hearing her thoughts, Amaranth smiles against Iriset’s mouth before withdrawing. “I wanted to taste one thing before my brother,” Amaranth confesses.

Iriset remembers the smell of bathwater and her similar betraying thoughts. What a place this is, to make love into such a game.

The note she sends back to Amaranth with Anis mé Ario reads:

Your eyes, Amakis, your eyes and the clouds in the sky. You will see me again, if you look.

It’s part of a Cloud King song her father used to recite, and her mother’s name, and a promise she thinks only the Little Cat will understand.

The cleansing and purification rituals for marriage are grueling for someone with nothing at all to hide.

Iriset has plenty. Though a regular person could relax and meditate, Iriset is required, over nearly twenty-four entire hours, to constantly spool out the priests’ designs and thin them enough to fool them into reading what she needs them to read of her true inner design without ruining either her craftmask or her crawling design.

It is exhausting.

It is thrilling .

There is no more space for fear or regret, anger or hope. For grief. There is only what is essential.

Iriset has never known herself as completely as she does in those hours. She bathes, she kneels, she repeats mirané chants meant to encourage the designs of the Silent priests, she does not sleep or waver. She puts on the appearance of devotion, and she bends it to her own use.

Just after dawn, when the Silent priest who accompanied her through the afternoon and night draws the tiny egg from Iriset’s tongue, Iriset feels like a god herself.

The priest cups the egg in her mirané-brown palm and smiles. “Very good, Princess. We are finished.”

Iriset sags, sweat tingling the small of her back.

She’s in a dark womb-like room in the Silent Chapel, beneath the ground and carved with force application into the glassy earth.

The old red moon, when it fell, caused such heat and pressure upon impact that it fused the earth into glass in some places.

This tiny chapel is made of it. An ablution pool in the shape of a four-point star in the center of the chapel is filled with black water. It smells salty, almost like blood.

“What do I do now?” she murmurs.

“It is just past dawn, child, and there are people waiting for you, that they may prepare your body for the noontime ritual. But never fear.” The priest smiles, her dark eyes crinkling.

“Relax, drink, eat, and feel your body. Feel the balance and maintain it if you can. But if nerves prevail, do your deep breathing and remember this space. The echo of—” She snaps.

The sound snaps back three times. “The echo of Aharté.”

The priest gives her a small box of sandglass, only the size of her thumbnail. The egg is inside. Iriset curls her fingers around it and presses it to her chest.

On shaky legs she leaves the small room, climbing narrow stairs cut directly into the earth. She holds on to the egg, a little awed by it. So tiny and yet so full of the essence of who she is! It’s perfect, she thinks, giddy, until she remembers her father’s words. Nothing is perfect.

Still. Whatever else, nobody can ever top this game.

As mirané attendants from Amaranth undress her and bathe her in sweet-smelling water and scrub her with rare sugars, Iriset relaxes.

They rub her scalp with oil, never finding the seam of her craftmask.

They slide fingers through her hair, pulling it straight, caressing her.

Two of the girls sing pretty songs, teasing rounds about marriage and laughter.

Iriset smiles and hums along sometimes, making the girls laugh and pinch her gently—encouragingly.

The other girls ready her wedding shift and the mask she’ll wear.

She’s fed the airiest cheese and wafers flavored with mountain sage, and they share candied mirané fennel seeds—a wedding treat, because of the resemblance to the egg.

Many foods at the feast later will have fennel seed baked, ground, and boiled in.

There will be garlands of feathery fennel leaves decorating the low tables, and a sharp fennel-brewed liquor that numbs the tongue.

(Centuries ago, this plant was brought to the desert from one of the conquered lands and it thrived.

In the red earth of the mirané desert, the fennel flowered red, and so it was renamed.

They do so like to name things after themselves.)

When Iriset has eaten enough not to grow lightheaded, she stands in a warm breeze as they dry her and rub creamy lotions into her skin.

She’s not painted with any geometry or design, for she’s to meet her husband as simply as possible.

Her hair is combed and left loose, hanging in heavy black layers past her waist. The wedding shift hangs from her shoulders, shapelessly, skimming her breasts and belly, bottom and knees, all the way to brush the tops of her feet.

The mirané handmaidens collar her neck with a silk necklace, knotted in tiny patterns of white, black, sea green, and sky blue. A cradle is woven into it, and there they place the sandglass box holding her egg.

No rings nor jewels, no lip paint nor eyeliner. Nothing in her hair but a crown of bright fennel flowers that look like fireworks. For a beauty like Singix, none of that is necessary anyway. (Iriset hopes the princess would forgive her.)

The wedding mask is a thin ceramic oval in plain mirané brown. Where it lies over her eyes, a hundred tiny, nearly invisible holes allow her a hazy vision. Its ties are skillfully laced through her hair, and with a single correct tug, the mask will easily fall away.

Iriset is made ready.

Her hands are cold.