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Thinking of leaving, though, makes her stomach twist. Because her pulse beats in time with her husband’s. It feels as though she belongs here.

When it’s finally time to depart, she tries to maneuver herself alone with Amaranth, but Her Glory maneuvers against it, denying Iriset a private word, so she retires with her husband without the chance to interrogate Amaranth.

When they reach their greeting room, Iriset dismisses the waiting attendants. She can tend to her husband, she says quietly, and should while the binding sets. Her encouraging smile draws complicit smiles from the attendants.

“Do you mind if I work for a little while?” Lyric asks when they’re alone.

She does mind, but supposes she can’t, and nods her reassurance before drifting into the bathroom. There’s no way to sneak out alone to look at her array, so she might as well take advantage of this magnificent pool for a no-crying soak.

Unfortunately, she wakes up with water in her nose, coughing painfully from having slipped under the water as she dozed. It ends her bath on a sour note, and so Iriset is cranky when she walks into the half-circle study.

The entire north end is open to the air—but no, a force-lattice spreads from the tall shelves in the east to the tiled windcatcher column in the west. Iriset gasps in surprise and interest, feeling the tender web of flow and falling that keeps the wind from sucking anything out the open wall.

Lyric sits in the embrace of a crescent desk, vellum spread before him, and several thin books and ink styli.

He stares, unmoving, at the work. Iriset walks quietly past him to the open wall.

Without touching the energy, she gazes out at the nighttime palace complex.

Shadows shimmer over the layered domes and steeples, and overhead the stars smear together.

They’re so full and bright around the pale, fixed moon.

She can even see the squat, night-blue Moon-Eater’s Temple.

Turning to her husband, she places a hand on his bare shoulder. “What do you study so intently?”

Her eyes fall to the work: It’s an elaborate diagram of four-point stars and eight-point stars settled within one another, and words put down at every point, dotted with either white, black, green, or blue to indicate their force alignment.

It’s the city, marked up with arrows and lines of design in order to show not only the more powerful ribbons, but what’s happening in each neighborhood or district.

By the balance of areas marked more heavily with black or blue, a glance could teach you where balance itself struggles. It’s magnificent.

She thinks of the multidimensional design diagram she’d been constructing for her father the day they were imprisoned.

That design had been alive, and once installed would have changed, pulsed, breathed with Moonshadow City and all its security.

The realization that the Vertex Seal would be served as well by such a creation puts a cold rock in her stomach.

Lyric says, “I have these made regularly, that I may compare them and learn the flow of change in my city. It’s a map of forces.

Some places are inherently more one force or another—the Saltbath is very grounded in falling, and pockets of rebellion always darken these black, ecstatic streaks.

Streets where artists sell their wares tend to drift between flow and rising. ”

Iriset understands perfectly but can’t admit so.

Lyric continues, “I want to contemplate where to push or pull, not only with policy or my command to the army, but who I can forgive when they ask, what names I should consider for making mercy. There are so many reasons I cannot grant it to…” Lyric shakes his head.

“There are ways to think about the Holy Design, and individuals, so many philosophies, and I try to make choices based on all of them together.”

Iriset says, “This map is to help you understand—to feel—her Design. The view of the city from the surface of Aharté’s moon.”

The surprise in his gaze when it meets hers turns swiftly to excitement. “You… understand.”

Iriset wants to say, And if you truly understood, would you push it to be more efficient, more wild, more interesting and creative? Make it better? because that is what she said the night in the Color Can Be Loud Garden. When she was herself.

But all she says is “I learn to understand you , husband,” and takes his face in her hands.

As she leans to kiss him, she notices a scrap of vellum with very different writing on it: a scrawled note, in ink that impressed itself hard into the vellum because of the passion of the writer. It says, No ambition in the Vertex Seal!

Iriset pauses, lips parted to take her kiss, eyes locked on the note.

She said that to him. And he wrote it down like it mattered.

Her pulse speeds with the thrill of it, the knowledge that Lyric held her challenge dear enough to put it in the margin of his plans, where he cannot help but be interrupted by the thought, the urge, to be better.

“Iriset mé Isidor said that to me,” he murmurs, pulling her onto his lap. He wraps one arm around her waist and with the other reaches to touch his finger to the curling mark that negates ambition in the mirané characters, changing it to no ambition .

She sinks into his embrace, remaining quiet. Almost without thinking she aligns her breath with his—easy while his chest presses to her back.

Lyric lets his hand fall onto her knee. “I came here to think about her.”

The honesty might have gutted Singix Es Sun with betrayal, that her new husband thinks so tenderly and kindly on a dead girl, but it guts Iriset with cold clarity: No matter what he stands for as the Vertex Seal, as a man he does not give mere scraps of himself.

He only gives his whole. Because he married her, he gives every part of himself to her.

Even this kind of sincerity that could cut her as easily as it might comfort. He is breathtaking.

When he realizes the truth, it will be catastrophic.

He adds, “Tomorrow I will attend her unraveling. And the day after tomorrow, her father will die. They’ll both be gone. A criminal and—I suspect—an apostate. I cannot stop thinking of her. I’m sorry.”

Globules of sorrow drip down Iriset’s body like honey on a wire. Because she’s alive, she feels her death as such a contradiction. While his feelings are so plain.

Iriset only hesitates for a moment before speaking. “For her… why can you not grant mercy to her father? She made such an impression upon you.”

“She did.” Lyric tightens his grip around her waist. “But it is not so simple as that. If I were only a man, maybe it would be enough to let him live because she died, because she sacrificed her life for yours. But I am the Vertex Seal and my mercy is…”

Iriset waits, breathing with him.

“Complicated,” he murmurs finally. “Not my own to give.” Lyric buries his face in her hair, breathing deeply.

Closing her eyes against the betraying desire tingling her skin where his breath touches her scalp, Iriset changes the subject. “What does it mean? No ambition in the Vertex Seal?”

“She said if I did not strive to make the world better, I was wasting my power. She said it was better to push the empire toward peace and… thriving. But we do promote peace, and the empire does thrive. Only, people cannot accept what is necessary to thrive with it. Our laws are strict but necessary. We welcome people into a better way, and there must be a price for that. I cannot see how it could be otherwise. Rebels and cults could tear it all down if they were allowed to exist, and exceptions weaken the Holy Design. If I began to push in any one direction, the entire thing would be in danger of breaking.”

“You are joining with Ceres without breaking. Without conquest, without destroying my people. We are making something new.”

His arm tightens around her again. “That is what Amaranth wants. I see the power in such thinking. But I also believe Iriset mé Isidor would say our marriage maintains justice, only. Does not create it. Because do we not expect our children to be mirané? You will become one of us, not the other way. It is still conquest, even if it is peaceful.”

Bitterness tinges his voice, and Iriset still doesn’t know what to say.

“She was right,” he whispers.

Twisting in his lap, she tries to meet his gaze, to catch the mirané-brown sparks around his irises, but Lyric stares unseeing at the words scrawled upon his vellum.

He says, “I do not know how to see good in other people, how to trust in the goodness. I only let myself expect the worst. How else can I rule, how else can I bind the empire together for the benefit of the greatest number of people? People do not naturally turn toward justice.”

Iriset swallows her ecstatic force, swallows the cry she wishes to make, to shake him, slap him, bite at his lips until he breaks open and is brave.

She swallows it because this entire conversation has nothing to do with her lies, with this perfect craftmask.

What does she know about justice and bravery, anyway?

She’s a prideful apostate, and never before cared about anything but herself and her family.

Yet Lyric méra Esmail His Glory, the Vertex Seal, is haunted by that single night they argued together in the Color Can Be Loud Garden.

She haunts him.

And if she convinces him now to be brave, to strive to be better, what will happen when he learns the truth? She knows already it will be shattering. What will Lyric become when she breaks his faith?

“I’ll show you something good,” she whispers, desperate for it to be true. She stands from his lap, holding his hand. “If you come to bed.”

With a weary smile, Lyric follows.