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He moves, grasping her ass and spreading her cheeks to see.

Iriset knows her whole body is clenching and she wiggles impatiently.

Lyric gets up, hands on her waist, and reaches down around her belly to touch and position her, and she squeaks when his fingers skim oversensitive parts.

With a little laugh, he gets a hold of himself and pushes inside, all at once.

Iriset’s whole body jars with it, and she sighs in relief, at his rising force crashing into her.

Lyric moves, and she braces herself languidly, so glad to be in rhythm like this, the push and pull, her almost-but-not-quite-smoothed-out bursts of ecstatic force fluttering upward like bubbles in ecstatic wine.

Every push and every pull ties the threads of their design seeds tighter, and her nipples brush the sheets and Lyric’s mouth is at the nape of her neck, lips open, breathing hard.

It’s not really a kiss, but that doesn’t matter.

Thanks to the marriage knot, she feels his orgasm gathering, feels it with a strange, wonderful peace, a flush up her spine and heat in her cheeks.

By the time Lyric comes, she’s forgetting to be sad or angry or ambitious, forgetting to worry about Bittor’s force-graffiti or her father’s commands or murder or Amaranth’s schemes or how she’ll break all their hearts.

Those are problems for later. Choices for later.

Now, with her inner design melting into Lyric’s, the only thing she wants to make is a little mercy for herself.

She’ll pay for that, too, one day.

During the remaining few Days of Mercy, there’s no regular schedule for the Vertex Seal or his wife, no meetings or lectures, no visits into the city—none of the things Lyric and Amaranth and their people normally do.

It’s a holiday, after all, and the hottest time of the year.

The only constant is the noontime eclipse ritual that Lyric always participates in. Iriset goes at his side.

The rest of the time, she fucks him. Her husband is very willing, and she can’t help remembering the afternoon when Amaranth rolled her eyes and said Lyric’s body is a temple.

Oh, it is, and dedicated to worshipping the sensation of her tongue tracing lines of rising force along the underside of his cock, to the tickle-pop of ecstatic when he sucks at her ribs or hip bones, the flow flow flow of building orgasms, the falling to each other’s core as they kiss until their lips are numb and their ears ringing.

After four days Iriset barely remembers what her own mouth is supposed to taste like.

In between, she asks him questions about his philosophies, under cover of a wife eager to understand her new home and her new husband.

(She needs to know, after all, the intricacies of what he cares about, if she’s going to ruin him.)

Lyric tentatively shares with her the basic understanding of Aharté he was taught, that the purpose of the Holy Design is balance, and when someday true balance is achieved, there will be neither conflict nor suffering because all creatures will be at peace in the living Silence Aharté promised them.

He admits that some days he wishes he were just a priest, responsible only for his own knot in the pattern, and coaxing those around him into a more perfect alignment. Not responsible for an entire empire.

He gives her copies of Word of Aharté and The Writings of the Holy Syr he personally transcribed and bound when he was fourteen, and shyly offers to read them with her.

First Writings , he says, because he finds the Holy Syr to be more explicit and meandering in her thoughts than the plain commands of Aharté.

“You like Aharté’s wife more than Aharté?

” she teases. Lyric smiles the softest smile she’s ever seen, and insists he only appreciates the argumentative nature of the Holy Syr’s philosophies.

Iriset asks if he ever feels hints of a true living Silence.

Lyric closes his eyes and whispers to her of perfect moments when the wind or sun, or a trilling skull siren, traps his attention and he’s aware of his entire body, his pulse and his thoughts, aware of voices around him, when he feels the pattern of what happened just before, and feels what will happen next.

They are never urgent moments, but simple epiphanies of pure understanding.

That, he thinks, is living Silence: understanding without urgency, deep experience without desire in any direction.

“Without desire?” she murmurs.

His smile tilts a bit wry. “Without desire for change , without ambition, or…” He touches her lips, stroking the sensitive skin, and trails his finger along her chin to her throat.

“I have felt living Silence when we are together, when—when our designs are so completely unified and I feel pleasure, satisfaction, comfort, and… things I cannot even express. It feels as though everything in the world is focused on me—on us—but not because we matter more than everything else. It is because everything absolutely matters. Each knot in the pattern is vital to the pattern, each is the focus, which is an idea almost beyond our comprehension, but not beyond Aharté.”

It is going to be so easy for Silk to take this faith away from him. Everything does matter, every piece of the design, and Iriset is an expert. Nothing about architecture is beyond her comprehension.

Iriset says, “Your sister feels that with the Moon-Eater.”

Before Lyric can protest, Iriset continues, “She does—she calls it a moment of unity, not peace. Not Silence. But it is the same thing, I think.”

Lyric kisses her again, and her heart pops ecstatically, her body arches with languid flow, she reaches for him and his design with a rise of yearning, and he sinks into her, falling, falling, falling.

She remembers, too, what she said to Amaranth that day in the Moon-Eater’s Temple, that every force is also love.

And then it’s over. The Days of Mercy end, and life in the empire returns to its structures.

Iriset is ready to put her designs into action.

The first morning of normal time, Lyric gets up early to drink his coffee and tend his adorable herb garden on their private balcony before dressing and putting on whatever mask he’ll wear for the day. Once Garnet arrives with his schedule, he’s off, and Iriset is alone.

It takes an appallingly long time to ready Singix Es Sun for leaving.

As Iriset selects a silk square painted with ocean waves in undulating stripes of green, she idly mentions to Shahd that although she hasn’t worn masks yet, because in Ceres it was considered a sin to hide what was gifted to her by the demon of beauty, she thinks if she makes a mask herself, then no one need take on the burden for her.

“Does that seem a thing the miran would approve of?” Iriset asks softly, affecting a bit of anxiety in her posture and voice.

Shahd hums, head tilted and smiling a little at Iriset’s Singix act, but she gamely says, “Mask making seems a very appropriate hobby, Your Glory.”

“I’ll look into it,” she agrees, and with that pin planted, she takes herself to find Amaranth with Shahd at her heels.

It is a bit strange that the Moon-Eater’s Mistress has no official office of her own, though previous Mistresses certainly have.

Amaranth prefers to take meetings in a garden or the menagerie, or travel to the homes of those she’d like to persuade or investigate or intimidate.

She’s likely to blow in and out like a summer storm, and uses that capricious reputation to overt advantage.

The only predictable part of her day is awakening the Moon-Eater.

Today Amaranth is set up in the Bright Star Obelisk Garden, according to Shahd’s sources.

On the way through the palace complex, Iriset keeps her chin up and her eyes ahead, for she is the wife of the Vertex Seal.

It allows her to see the people who dart out of her way, the ones who pause to stare, and those who touch their eyes respectfully while others merely flick fingers to lashes almost dismissively.

A pair of miran pause to bow, eyes covered, and Iriset hears one of them say, “—neglect my duties for that in my bed, too.” The other hushes her, and she snorts behind his hand.

“Even if she understands, I’m sure she’s learning to love it. ”

Iriset pauses, incensed at the insult to Singix, but before she can do more than draw an angry breath, she recalls that Singix would never respond to such words. She turns her pause into a little stumble and looks away.

Maybe it was a mistake to keep Lyric secluded, she thinks, chagrined, if it played into stereotypes the miran have assigned to the Ceres Remnants.

But Shahd speeds up enough to walk at her elbow and the girl says fiercely, “By the end of the day I’ll make sure every Seal guard knows she was rude to their new consort. ”

Rude is certainly one way to put it, Iriset thinks sourly, but only murmurs her thanks.

“Your Glory,” calls an unfortunately familiar voice as they step out from under a peristyle walkway into the vivid summer sunlight.

It’s the leader of Beremé’s rival faction. Iriset wants to curse but instead smiles blandly. She has no idea if Singix has formally met him, but surely it won’t be strange if she knows the name of a prominent mirané prince. “Hehet méra Davith.”

“Introduce me to this stunning woman,” says Hehet’s companion, whose name Iriset already knows.

The lanky Hehet bows with a hand over his eyes, and the masculine-forward miran beside him does the same, but with more of a flourish.

“Your Glory, this is The First Dove Song at Dawn méra Curro,” Hehet says, “a gossip and idler. Dove, you were at the wedding feast, you know who this is.”