Page 55

Someone changed the design of the Crystal Desert security.

Just enough that any paths or design-pockets or keys couldn’t penetrate now, not without a new map, without the new codes.

If they changed it here, it will be changed throughout, and tomorrow when the army and investigator-designers activate their new measures for the executions, not only will the map Iriset sent Bittor be useless, there’s no way she can redesign and re-create her distraction swiftly enough.

“Your Glory!” Shahd cries softly, bending to grasp her arm. The Seal guards have formed up around her.

“I’m… well.” Iriset covers Shahd’s hand with her other and stands. It must have been after Singix was murdered. Of course they changed the security. How dare Iriset not think sooner! “I am. It is hot so early, and I have not yet been apart so distantly from my new husband.”

“We can return you to him instead, Your Glory.”

“No.” She insists her mouth smile for the attendant. “I must accustom myself. And I am. Please.”

Shahd studies her, and Iriset does her best to tamp down on the reeling anxiety eager to express itself.

Finally the mirané girl nods and holds Iriset’s elbow as they continue on around the broad side of the Gallery of Shades, through an outdoor path beneath rare wooden archways curling with tiny tea roses and raspberry vines.

Iriset uses the pace of her walking to count her breaths and lock it all down.

She’s so fucked. Bittor will be on his own, without a distraction from her.

She’s already tried talking to Lyric about granting the Little Cat mercy, and he won’t change his mind.

Should she leave tonight? Slip out while Lyric sleeps and cut her way through to her father?

Or lie in wait for the execution when they bring him out?

Can she use her hands to get past the Seal guard with bursts of power the way she killed Erxan?

Or wait until the execution and then kill someone?

Lyric himself? That would be quite the distraction.

But she’d be sacrificing herself to it, and her father would be furiously unforgiving.

Her stomach churns.

“Your Glory,” Shahd murmurs, leaning in. “I have never seen someone take to the marriage bond so strongly that it changed the way they walk.”

“Huh?” Iriset says, so confused.

“Your walk is different,” Shahd continues in her quiet way.

Iriset slows down. “My walk.”

“Yes. Your Glory.” Shahd stops and glances briefly at Iriset’s eyes. “We live and we die.”

Iriset stares, stunned, at Shahd. It doesn’t even occur to her to fake her way through this.

Instead she tugs Shahd to the shade of a massive force-fan along the path across the Blue Between Sea and Sky Courtyard.

She waves the Seal guards back. “How the fuck did you know?” she whispers so fast it’s more of a hiss. “My walk? You’re joking.”

“Your design tools were gone. The night Iriset—you—died. I thought… and then I watched and listened, and… because I was listening, your voice was…” Shahd swallows. Again. Maybe she’s going to vomit. But she says, “When Sidoné told me I was to be yours, I thought it was the reason.”

“And?”

“And what?”

Iriset makes her face hard, hoping no one passes by. “What are you going to do about it?”

Shahd drops to her knees and covers her eyes. “Your Glory,” she wails very softly.

“Ah, get up. Get up.” Iriset drags her by the forearms.

“I won’t do anything,” Shahd says. “Just what I am doing. What I have done. And you’ll keep protecting my family.”

Shaking her head, Iriset starts them walking again. “Iriset mé Isidor is dead. She can’t help you.”

Shahd nods and shifts them so that she’s once again holding Iriset’s elbow, as if escorting her.

“Then what do you want?” Iriset presses quietly.

“Being the favored attendant of the wife of the Vertex Seal is more than I thought to achieve in the palace,” she says. “And…”

“And?”

Shahd hesitates on her next step. “What you have done is…”

Iriset waits for fear, condemnation, disgust; she’s not quite sure.

“Humbling,” Shahd whispers, eyes lowered.

“Hmm.” Iriset truly has no idea what to do other than accept this revelation for the moment. Shahd can’t just have a heart attack, too. “All right. But tell me if something changes for you.”

Shahd nods. “What happened back there? Are you all right?”

“I can’t help save my father like this,” she says bitterly.

“Can I…?” Shahd looks at the path ahead of them, eyes lowered properly. Her face is shaded from the biting sun by the ruffled cloth mask on her forehead.

If Iriset could think of anything useful, she’d send Shahd out again. But there’s no time for her to rebuild her array. Or even to adjust it. What could Shahd even tell Bittor? Besides, it isn’t worth the risk. And there’s one more avenue Iriset can pursue right now.

Just before they enter the Seven Petals Are Not Enough Amphitheater, Iriset covers Shahd’s hand with her own. After a moment, Iriset says, “Thank you.”

Because it’s the Days of Mercy, no lecture is ongoing in the amphitheater.

Instead, Amaranth has taken it over. Massive paper umbrellas have been erected and force-fans spin lazily in the air, their opalescent blades moving the warm morning breezes in eddies and spirals.

Strips of linen ripple across the open roof, held in place with design and creating shade in undulating waves.

Upon the lecturing stage, a line of young men and women perform acrobatics and sensual dancing while Amaranth watches from one of the low steps, surrounded by her handmaidens and extra attendants with food and cold drinks.

A scattering of miran sprawl around, too, calling compliments to the dancers and conversing with Her Glory.

Iriset pauses before joining the opulence; she doesn’t feel prepared to sink into the abundance here, the luxury. She’s too tense, her shock too great, and her inner design tight—brittle, even.

But Istof Nefru, the non-mirané handmaiden who speaks seven languages (excluding Ceres, fortunately) and moves like a graceful river heron, notices her. “Your Glory!” she calls, lifting a long arm to wave.

Amaranth smiles. She is unpainted for the day, because of the unraveling. Her natural beauty is bold, like the sun: Everything revolves around her. “You have detached yourself from my brother, sister! Yet you wander alone with hardly any attendants! Join us.”

A pillow is vacated for Iriset, and she reclines upon it as though she’s an exquisite eggshell, easily shattered.

Unlike the others in their sleeveless robes and masks, Iriset is weighed down by the hot, colorful finery of Ceres.

“Is this”—she gestures at the dancers, the force-fans, the brunch—“how you grant yourself mercy, Your Glory?”

Though not a trace of sarcasm shows itself in her voice, Amaranth’s smile tilts wryly. “I beg mercy every day from the Moon-Eater himself, Princess. And he grants it. If there is any expert on self-mercy in the empire, it is me.”

A young miran dressed in a robe striped in council white and black laughs broadly enough to show off his fine teeth. His mask is painted with interlocking octagrams across his eyes. “Grant us all such mercy, Amaranth,” he says.

“I can only grant mercy to myself today, Yuya, but ask me next year on the Day of Charitable Mercy.”

He touches his chest as if having received a mortal wound, but still laughs.

Another miran, a woman with rich blue lip paint and bright mirané eyes, says, “I would expect self-mercy for the Moon-Eater’s Mistress to be a day free of entertaining men.”

Someone applauds her, and the gathered miran argue rapidly over the definitions of men and mercy.

Amaranth hands Iriset a cold glass of sweetened coffee.

She sips, letting their talk wash around her, trying to allow her forces to draw out in whichever direction the crowd draws, toward ecstatic laughter or the flow of debate, all of it circling around and around Her Glory’s strong falling pull.

She needs to be balanced before she makes her demands, beginning with a moment alone with her sister-in-law.

But Sidoné, lounging on a step two higher than Amaranth’s, says, “The very existence of the Days of Mercy proves that the regular state of the empire is a merciless one.”

So easy to forget, for all that many see Sidoné as a symbol of successful assimilation, her people were very recently conquered.

The gathered miran laugh .

It had not been a joke.

Iriset catches Sidoné’s eye, but the body-twin offers no sympathy. Her words were fact. A reminder to Iriset.

“Your Glory,” Iriset whispers, leaning in. “I need to speak with you, alone.”

Amaranth’s mouth presses into a line of displeasure. She tugs the silk half-mask that perches upon her voluptuous curls down over her face. Diamonds and mirané-brown garnets stripe it in perfect vertical lines. “The princess and I,” she says grandly as she stands, “are going for a walk.”

She sweeps her robe up into one hand, displaying the expanse of her thick legs, and holds her other hand to Iriset.

Together they climb up and up the steps to the wide balustrade that circles the audience area of the amphitheater, in and out of stripes of shade.

Amaranth weaves her fingers with Iriset’s.

The heat of the day slicks Iriset’s skin with sweat and Iriset spares an admiring thought for her craftmask, pliable and perfect enough to allow for such things.

Her slippers do little to keep her toes from roasting against the tiled floor.

Above, Aharté’s pink-silver moon is a pale sliver of next to nothing, washed in the brilliant summer light, but soon the burning sun will sink behind that moon again.

“What is wrong, hiha?” Amaranth asks. Without softness or sympathy, only a plain need to know. If she knows, she can fix it, her tone says.

Iriset drops her mouth open, only to close it.