Page 59

We pay for what we do

A long time ago the Little Cat waited for Iriset to walk into a room before cutting a man’s throat.

Blood splashed her face and she twitched away.

It was one of the only times she saw him kill.

He didn’t do it often, finding little use for murder unless it served some other scheme or purpose.

But he wanted his daughter to see it, to feel it. Isidor asked her if she understood why.

She didn’t, and guessed perhaps it was for shock value or to drive her away from the court, maybe because of the way the forces play together in blood differently when it’s outside the body.

Other guesses, she can’t remember. Finally, Isidor told her it was because everyone pays for what they do.

Even her, even the Little Cat. Even the Vertex Seal.

Maybe even Aharté (if Aharté exists at all).

When Iriset wakes in a world in which her dad is dead, she keeps her eyes shut against the vague morning light, trying not to think as her husband touches her shoulder and rises. She reaches for a pillow to bury her face in.

The Little Cat told his daughter to make him proud. She wonders what his last words for his apostate would have been.

(They would have been the same.)

Her father is dead, and Iriset is not surprised to find she doesn’t want revenge.

Not against Lyric, or Amaranth. If she wanted revenge she’d have to include herself as a target.

She didn’t save him. She could have, she knows it.

But that isn’t what the Little Cat chose the last time she spoke to him.

“Make me proud,” Iriset mouths silently into the pillow. “Do something. Make a mark.”

That’s what he said.

Do something with this position in which you have found yourself. Make a mark, or change something. Anything. The whole empire. If anyone can, you can. I’ve seen what you are capable of doing when you decide.

Make a mark.

When she agreed to this scheme, when she replaced Singix, Iriset did it because Amaranth insisted. She did it for pride, for her own gleeful glory.

The greatest apostasy the Holy Empire has ever seen, and it’s a secret.

Now Iriset is awake, clarified, and she knows what to do. What to change . She’s already designed an array to distract, simple and easy for a genius like her, tied into the design security of the palace complex.

Now Iriset understands it shouldn’t be an array to distract, but to destroy.

What Iriset wants is to show the Vertex Seal, show everyone, they’re wrong. Their power and beliefs are built on a faulty foundation. Flawed. Ungodly. Silence has a core flaw.

That’s why her father is dead. Why Singix is dead and Iriset is transformed and married to the brutal king of this Silent, boring world. Unable to be what she is.

Silk is Syr , Bittor’s graffiti declared.

That’s good. She can answer that. Be the flaw.

Silk is Syr, and hiding in the heart of the empire. The heart of the Vertex Seal.

How can Aharté matter when Iriset is what and where and who she is?

The laws of Silence are already broken, so now Iriset will make them shatter.

Someone sits on the bed, and her inner design squeezes as threads of the marriage knot twine pleasantly.

Lyric has returned. Anxiety, grief, anger, lust spike in her guts, but Iriset quickly smooths the turmoil into longing and sorrow.

Singix’s feelings. She can’t afford to show her truth now, knotted with marriage to a sensitive, priest-trained Vertex Seal.

He says gently, “I brought water for you. I can feel the disturbed nature of your heart.” If it had been a metaphor, it might have been romantic.

He helps her sit, and Iriset keeps her gaze on his mirané-red fingers curled around the little stone cup.

She takes it. Lyric combs those fingers through her long, slippery hair.

Singix’s hair, that barely tangles, that probably couldn’t hold the knotting style Iriset learned from her mother and grandfather.

Iriset drinks and the morning light grows.

Lyric sets the cup aside and asks, “What’s wrong?”

Iriset has no idea what lie to tell, and so she says, “I was thinking about never seeing my father again.” It’s a safe excuse, as Singix’s father is far away.

Iriset knows few details of their relationship, only that Singix’s mother died when Singix was a child, and her father rules alone with a council of avatars and brokered this alliance with the Vertex Seal—or rather, with his sister.

And Singix never expected to see him again.

Lyric needs no further explanation for her upset on the day after the execution of Isidor the Little Cat; he, too, holds the poor, dead Iriset mé Isidor near the surface of his mind.

Besides, that rebel tried to assassinate him, and this new wife of his stood in the way.

It was a rough afternoon for everyone. He climbs onto the bed behind Iriset as if she’s shielding him again, and wraps his arms around her, pulling her between his legs.

His naked body folds around her, warm and smooth, and Iriset leans back the way her body wants to.

Lyric gathers her hair and pushes it over one shoulder, baring her neck.

With his lips against her pulse, he says, “When my father died, it took me a long time to find all the places grief hid.” His sigh trembles along her collarbone.

“I’ve always practiced meditation, walking the labyrinth at the Silent Chapel, but after he died, I did it again and again, making myself think about him, as if I could compel the grief to squeeze itself all out quickly and never bother me again. ”

Iriset would like to find a way to do the same.

“Did it work?” she whispers, only slightly distracted by his thighs bracketing her hips and Singix’s hair falling softly against her breasts.

When she looks at herself, at his skin against hers, she can’t help but wonder how those crater-red forearms would complement her own—Iriset’s—desert-peach Osahar skin, with its flushing and fine dark body hairs, the little line of them from her navel to groin.

Singix’s skin is so pale, and her body hairs barely curled, so soft against Iriset’s tongue that night, and she remembers a dark pink birthmark almost like a love bite on Singix’s knee that she didn’t have time to give herself.

Thinking of it, Iriset skims her fingers against the knob at Lyric’s wrist, turning herself on and still so very sad.

“No,” Lyric murmurs with humor. Iriset barely remembers what she asked.

“But it did help me… put the grief somewhere. I gave it to Aharté, to Silence. Sometimes it’s hard to set foot in the chapel now, if I’m having a bad day.

But most of the time, the labyrinth is a reminder that grief can…

gleam. A pearl of grief, small and simple and built very carefully.

Set into a little earring I can wear if I like so I know where to find it, and carry it with me most of the time, but it’s not overwhelming anymore. ”

Iriset laughs softly at his overdrawn metaphor. She knows exactly where to put her grief. “Do we have to be anywhere today?”

“There are places we could go, but nowhere we must until the eclipse,” he says.

Iriset takes one of his arms that is wrapped around her waist and tugs until she has his hand.

She lowers it to her belly and flattens it there, sliding his hand lower as she parts her thighs.

Lyric inhales sharply and Iriset pushes his fingers past her labia.

She lets her head fall back as Lyric cups his palm against her and touches a finger to the edge of her hole.

Iriset raises an arm to grasp at his face and hair, arching her back to press her bottom against his inner thigh and groin, seeking the soft bulge of his cock.

She hooks her leg around his knee, spreading herself against him, a wide-open offering.

Lyric accepts, playing his fingers against her as Iriset hums encouragingly, pulling his thick hair and gripping his thigh with her other hand.

He sucks at her neck while he dips his fingers inside again and again, drawing back out to paint wetness around in long strokes.

Their bodies thrust slowly together in time with their breathing, and as he grows hard, the little movements of his tip against her spine make her gasp again and again, until she stretches her neck to kiss him open-mouthed and just as wet.

It doesn’t take very long for Iriset to come in a long, rolling ripple, and Lyric doesn’t stop touching her, gently pressing her clitoris until it’s too much and she squirms up onto her knees.

Without looking back at him, Iriset tips forward, panting with ecstatic after-bursts.

She lowers to her elbows and lets her head fall.

Her hair slides messily over her back. “Lyric,” she whispers.

She needs him to take from her, take more and more so she can excuse her desire for him, excuse the way she feels despite who he is and what he’s done—what he’s refused to do.

(Who she really is and what she hasn’t done—has been too afraid to do.)