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Miran cry out, some flinging hands to shade their eyes as they stare back at the griffon.

There’s a moment of echoing silence, then Amaranth gasps and Seal guards leap into action.

But Lyric stares at the same thing Iriset sees: Arcing across the sky to the southeast are filaments of light like fireworks.

They burst in the air, reaching for one another, forming sky graffiti that spells out a prayer in the sacred calligraphy of Silence:

Silk is Syr

Heir of Aharté

As the filaments fall, rippling toward the crowd, they twist and flip, sparkling with black and gold ecstatic charges. Then a voice rings out across the space via design amplification:

“Yesterday rebellion dropped from the moon, but today it rises from beneath our feet!”

It’s Bittor’s voice.

Iriset stops breathing.

On the Mercy Pavilion, the Little Cat struggles against the pillar, shaking his head, mouth moving but she can’t hear.

Another burst of light, but instead of graffiti, it’s only fireworks, ecstatic color spiraling in every direction: beautiful and harmless. Distraction.

It’s all a distraction. Bittor made his own. Iriset almost laughs in sheer relief.

Sudden movement and the shifting of the crowd draws Iriset’s attention in the other direction: A man has leapt high, and he’s running over the crowd’s ambient forces like dashing over the surface of a lake. He couldn’t use the map to rescue the Little Cat quietly, so he’s making a spectacle.

Gasps, shock, shrieks, and the vibration of force-blades ping against Iriset’s attention, but she can’t look away.

It’s Bittor; she knows his shape and motion.

She knows how he’s performing this trick: tension soles, a boot-net she played with alongside Dalal, for escaping over water.

Its purpose is reacting against the power imbued in the force-threads, in ambient forces, not infiltrating them! Genius!

Nobody can stop Bittor as he runs his jagged path.

They can’t shoot him without aiming into the crowd.

She leans forward, eager. Someone grasps her elbow.

The miran stare up, pointing and shying away from the ripples of force shocking out from his every step.

It’s their own security Bittor is bouncing off, and overhead more fireworks explode.

But Bittor suddenly veers away from the Mercy Pavilion. Away from the Little Cat. Running directly at Iriset instead.

Around her the Seal guards shift closer, into a combat-design pattern, but she can see Bittor’s face, see those cat-eyes locked over her shoulder.

He’s focused on the Vertex Seal. His hand curls around something small.

A crystal blade jutting between his thumb and index knuckle—she knows it.

She made it. It will slice through the force-shield.

Bittor flings it with perfect aim, and Iriset sidesteps in front of Lyric. She snaps her fingers and charges the thick Ceres chest piece with ecstatic-flow shock. Lyric grabs her as the tiny dart slices through the stage’s energy shield, hits her chest piece, and falls away.

It would have cut Lyric to the heart. Her ears are ringing as she stares at Bittor with Lyric’s hands gripping her arms. She didn’t even think .

Bittor skids to a halt, sinking—motion is what keeps the force-soles active, in this experimental form. Iriset stares at him as his twisted expression plummets to shock, and she mouths, “Bittor.”

It’s a soft, wounded word, his name on the perfectly symmetrical lips of Singix Es Sun. Bittor pauses, staring.

He hesitates with another dart in hand.

The Seal guards grab him.

They drag him down below the royal stage, but Iriset can’t see. She’s jerked away in the arms of her husband, who holds her too tightly. “Singix,” Lyric says, sounding like he’s begging. “What are you doing?”

“I—” Iriset twists her neck to look back for Bittor.

She sees flashes of force-blades, hears the roaring of the crowd.

“I couldn’t…” She closes her eyes and leans her cheek into Lyric’s hand before she says something incriminating in her shock.

Iriset was not made for emergencies. She should be kept in a locked room with design tools and left alone. She saved him.

Garnet says to the Seal guards, “Take him to the execution platform.” There’s scuffling and commands snapped out, and Iriset tries to tug free, to look for Bittor, but Lyric grabs her face.

He’s wearing a plain mirané-red death mask with sharp, squared cheeks and a hundred tiny holes as a screen over his eyes, but he tears it off and studies her like he’s never seen her.

For a moment Iriset almost hopes he knows who he’s staring at.

Iriset mé Isidor, daughter of the Little Cat.

“Singix,” Amaranth says, crowding them. “You’re mad. You shouldn’t have, even with Iriset mé Isidor’s design armor.”

Iriset resents Amaranth trying to help her, but even more so her own name behind it, used as a layered threat. She shakes her head, holding Lyric’s red-flecked eyes. “I had to,” she murmurs.

Lyric melts toward her and touches his forehead to hers. “It was reckless to protect me like that,” he says for her alone.

“I had to,” she repeats. She touches his jaw tenderly. Her hand is shaking. Bittor didn’t try to rescue the Little Cat, he tried to assassinate the Vertex Seal . Why?

“Unbelievable,” Amaranth says.

Both Iriset and Lyric slide the Moon-Eater’s Mistress different looks and she backs away, lips pressed in a disapproving line.

Lyric steps to the fore of the platform. A guard offers him a small coin, and Lyric presses it to the hollow of his throat. His voice is amplified across the quartz yards. “Tell me his name,” he commands.

The Seal guards are shoving Bittor up onto the execution pavilion, and the crowd is almost silent, trapped in place by the danger and drama.

There are no more fireworks. Any accomplices Bittor had from the Little Cat’s court have faded back and slipped away.

The griffon queen grips her trellis, her wings flared to shade her children.

All her feathers fluff and tighten, up and down in agitation.

The answer to Lyric’s command comes from a priest, standing upon the execution pavilion. “Bittor méra Tesmose, of the Saltbath precinct.” The name rings across the sky.

The guards force Bittor down. Iriset chokes a protest and tucks her mouth against Lyric’s bare shoulder. She peers over Lyric at the prisoners.

Bittor’s face is aimed right back at the royal platform. At her.

Behind him, the Little Cat is staring, too.

Force-blades angle against Bittor’s throat, pinning him on his knees. He’s going to die, not unraveled but decapitated like an animal for eating. He came with fireworks and heretical words. Silk is Syr. Yesterday rebellion dropped from the moon, but today…

Iriset turns sharply to her husband and clutches his arm. “Mercy,” she whispers.

Surprise lights Lyric’s eyes and touches his fingers to her cheek. Iriset hardly knows what shows in her false-dark-brown gaze, but she is abjectly desperate. She caused Bittor to falter. He made a choice to aim for the Vertex Seal instead of the Little Cat, and she stopped him.

“The name has already been selected,” Lyric murmurs. “This young man chose to die this way, at his master’s side.”

“Show him you are a better master. If he dies now, everything he wrote in the sky stands.” Iriset is careful to modulate her words as best she can. “We have martyrs in Ceres. Do you have them here?”

Lyric studies her for what seems an age, again, but can only have been a handful of paired, rapid breaths. He glances past her, at Amaranth, then at one or two other people gathered around them. Iriset can’t even imagine what they answer with their expressions; none speak.

Finally Lyric takes his death mask back from Garnet and replaces it. He touches the coin to his throat. “Mercy is given to Bittor méra Tesmose, by the fair will of Singix Es Sun. Release him, pardoned of his crimes against the empire.”

Though she doesn’t know if she should, Iriset grabs his shoulder and lifts herself up to kiss his masked cheek before everyone.

Bittor is untied and shoved off the stage into the crowd.

He stands and lifts one hand up to the stage and flicks his fingers in a sign of mercy—as if he grants it to the Vertex Seal in return.

Then he’s gone, somehow, vanished into the shocked, admiring miran. Iriset lets out a long, careful breath, feeling her entire body tremble with its release.

She wants to go home. Home to the old tower, her shielded study. Her spinners. Sit down. Give in to her weak knees and sink to the floor of the stage. Lean against Lyric’s leg like a child or a dog.

The execution will not wait for her recovery.

Lyric calls out, “Proceed. We have had our final mercy, and four is the holiest number.”

Behind her, Beremé hisses, and Garnet says, slightly appalled, “Lyric.”

Amaranth snorts softly, as if entirely unsurprised.

Iriset’s lips part in horror. Actual, cold horror. She and Bittor cost one of those other prisoners their own mercy.

No shade to brutality , she thinks, in layering dismay.

The shifting light flares as the sun fits almost entirely behind the moon at the eclipse crescendo. Rays of vibrant silver, too glaring to look at, are flung from the crown of the moon, and a sliver of the sun itself winks at Iriset’s watery eyes.

On the Mercy Pavilion, the priests move into place, and Iriset remembers to stare out at her father.

He looks back at her. Even at this distance, she can tell. His face is a cold moon, and she imagines the chipped gray of his eyes. She grips the rail with both hands and does not know how to breathe.

The priests speak, mouths moving, and though the elaborate design Bittor shattered has not been replaced, the Glorious Unraveling commences.

Isidor the Little Cat’s shoulders heave, the only sign of distress, and tears fill her vision with clear fire, but she doesn’t blink. He keeps his chin high and his eyes on the stage—on her, but surely nobody else suspects he stares at anything but the Vertex Seal, or maybe the griffons.

Tears spill down her cheeks with heavy, hot trails. Dad , she thinks, her entire body aches to say, to call to him. But she already fucked up today. He wouldn’t forgive her if she dies with him now. Even if it would feel right, righteous, rebellious, afterward she’d be dead.

Make me proud, Iriset.

Forces flare: cracking ecstatic, wavering flow, smoky rising, and sleek falling lines like rain.

They aim at each prisoner, surrounding them in an orderly cocoon, pressing nearer, and the echo coins of the prisoners’ collars flash, the force-ropes direct all the power, and just as it happened with the disguised body of Singix Es Sun, the Little Cat of Moonshadow unravels: flesh, blood, bone, and spirit.

The collars fall to the pavilion, empty now.

It’s over.

Iriset cannot breathe: Her father is gone.

Not only dead, but unraveled to his very core.

Iriset begs leave to return to bed, being weary and emotionally compromised. It’s a dreadful thing to witness, she murmurs to her husband, and she’d like to be alone.

She makes it calmly to their rooms, then allows Shahd to unwind her hair and help her into a simpler day gown. The young attendant brings a lunch sampling shortly after that, and a small cup of harsh root liquor she recommends Iriset knock back medicinally.

So it is done.

Then Iriset crawls into bed. She clutches pillows against her breast and buries her face in the silk sheets, grimacing and baring her teeth, all to keep from crying again. Her tears dried on the rail of the royal stage, and she’ll give the empire no more today.

A lovely chime wakes her. It’s designed into the walls to allow someone in the greeting room to alert someone upstairs that a visitor has arrived.

Iriset wants only to remain in bed, but she’s Singix, and so forces herself up. Down the spiral corridor she goes, barefoot and quiet, to where Shahd waits patiently alongside Anis mé Ario.

Iriset’s heart pinches as she stops herself from sighing with relief just in time. Anis is not Singix’s friend. “Handmaiden,” she says.

Anis’s tall, lanky body looks lovely in the layered robe she wears and her face is dotted with white and black like freckles.

Her jade cuff hangs heavily against her bony wrist. “Your Glory,” Anis says, holding out a cloisonné box that fits in the palm of her hand.

“Her Glory sent this for you, a gift she thinks you should open when you are alone.”

The accompanying wink suggests the gift is sexual in nature, and Shahd smiles like a knowing auntie despite her age.

“Thank you.” Iriset accepts it. To be polite, she asks, “In which garden does Her Glory relax this afternoon?”

“She is bathing in the Lapis River Pool during the heat of the day, but will retire to the Color Can Be Loud Garden for visitors. You would be welcome, I am sure.”

Iriset doesn’t want to see Amaranth now. “Thank you,” she says again.

Anis nearly speaks further, but in the end bows respectfully, briefly touching her eyelids, and departs.

Shahd looks at the cloisonné box expectantly, but Iriset cradles it to her chest. “Alone,” she murmurs, and flees back upstairs.

Inside the box is a small gray coin of smoky quartz. When Iriset holds it between her thumb and forefinger, a soothing drag of falling force teases at her fingers.

It’s an echo coin.

Iriset’s heart clenches and she presses it to her lips. This is an echo of her father’s falling force. Not truly a piece of him but a memory of it, a memento she can carry always.

Her Glory fetched it somehow from the priests on the Mercy Pavilion, by bribe or simple request, Iriset has no idea, and now it’s hers.

Sometimes there are no words to express an emotion exactly, and as Iriset holds the coin, she wishes she could understand the complicated glow of admiration and anger, resentment, need, and simple attraction Amaranth mé Esmail Her Glory, the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, causes her to feel.