Page 63

Unrest

T he security for Singix Es Sun is tight. Besides her secretary, Huya, and her personal attendant, Shahd, Garnet assigns twice as many Seal guards as usual to orchestrate Iriset’s leaving the palace to visit the home of the small king of the Ecstatic Steeple Shadow precinct.

It takes so long for it all to be arranged that Iriset assumes a little petty revenge on the part of the Moon-Eater’s Mistress.

In the meantime, she plays her role to avoid suspicion.

Since none of the design tools Sidoné sourced for her the night she became Singix made it back into her possession after the wedding, Iriset must start from scratch building or acquiring before she can get to the real work.

So Iriset allows Huya to set up meals and tea with mirané princes, accepts future invitations to visit other small kings and enjoy various high-class entertainments in the city.

She takes Shahd on long, meandering walks in between appointments as if learning the palace complex—but really remapping the security nets for herself.

Though not strictly necessary as she can’t use an the same way as before, Iriset wants to see Raia mér Omorose again, and commissions an aviary to be installed in the arched ceiling of her greeting chamber, populated by a small flock of skull sirens and bright green-and-yellow finches.

The finches are a sharp counterpoint to the cries of the sirens, and when they sing at sunset or titter with the dawn, it’s more pleasant than chimes.

Raia designs a ribbon for the birds to follow out through the lattice in the spiral stairway, for fresh air and room to spread their wings, and a net of forces to catch the birds’ droppings and whisk them away.

Though an doesn’t know they’re friends, Iriset finds comfort in Raia’s company.

It’s a struggle to keep her opinions of ans design to herself, even though they’re mostly complimentary.

When she reveals herself at the end of all this, she hopes Raia will be on her side.

When the time finally comes for Iriset to visit Nielle, Huya gives her a half-circle mask of sheer blue silk and silver wire, and too many Seal guards escort them to the royal skiff.

The skiff is designed like most, an oblong cup perched on four skids perfectly balanced between the forces, with specialized hooks in front to latch on to the force-ribbons threaded throughout the city streets and smoothly tug the skiff along.

Though many skiffs have bubble roofs of glass or flow-thinned crystal panes, this has tiny steeples to anchor a force-shield that is perfectly see-through but impervious to weather and most projectiles.

Iriset leans forward to study the prime steeple in the narrow nose as best she can with only her eyes: It’s flow force, to be expected, while the three balancing steeples in the back have rising and falling to either side and ecstatic in the rear for those occasionally necessary bursts of speed or sudden brakes.

The driver hovers in a smaller cup attached to the skiff’s nose from which they can hold and tug the force-reigns to steer and maneuver.

Iriset sits carefully on one of the cushioned benches with Shahd and Huya in front, and a Seal guard beside.

The rest of the guard company slide alongside the skiff, attached to its dynamics by individual skaters.

Iriset wants one. She folds her hands in her lap to keep from touching anything as the skiff shudders and pulls forward.

Life as her father’s daughter had seen Iriset sheltered in many ways, despite the murder and apostasy, or because of it, and she’s experienced only a fraction of what Moonshadow City has to offer.

A few times she ventured out of Saltbath wedged between her protective grandparents, who took her to the Edge Market to shop for exotic seeds in the hot greenhouses.

Once Bittor snuck her into the rafters of the layered dome of the Theater of Silent Delights to listen to a choir from Eastrass City perform at a charity event.

Though she didn’t thieve herself, sometimes she joined Dalal or Paser on jobs when they had to break into especially well-guarded buildings and the Little Cat’s designers needed Silk’s skills to pry apart their security nets herself.

In the early morning she’d wait alone for them to complete the job in one of the all-night cafés perched along the force-lines of the Cirrus Suspension Bridge, listening to the cries of skull sirens and watching the city wake up under the moon.

On the way to Nielle’s home in the Ecstatic Steeple Shadow precinct, the ribbon skiff passes through the Silent precinct with its labyrinthine streets and spiraling tower gardens, then the Lodestone precinct, which is much more perpendicular but terraced with rosette houses and shops, and Iriset has plenty to stare at, including the distant chain of island apartments hovering high off the ground in the Falling Steeple Shadow precinct.

She knows they work thanks to ingenious loops of falling force, but exclaims anyway.

Despite the heat, the layered city streets are alive with pedestrians and fellow skiffs, cafés with their doors thrown open and force-fans working hard.

Several times people pause to stare and Iriset waves back shyly, though by the time anyone realizes who she must be and begins to point, the skiff has already moved on.

The Ecstatic Steeple itself casts a massive shadow most times of the day, curving across its precinct with the passing of the sun.

Iriset appreciates the temporary shade as they drive beneath it, resenting that they can’t drop the bubble shield so that she can feel the strength of her dominant force respond to the power crackling around the steeple.

They arrive just on time at the fourth small king’s manor, set off from the wide avenue behind a garden of granite boulders in red-pink-white, and miniature juniper trees shaped into perfect spheres.

The home is built like two concentric star succulents, each with four elegant towers offset from one another.

Very conservative. Iriset suspects that Nielle hates it.

Before exiting the skiff, Iriset turns to Shahd. “We’ll be here for two hours. Is that enough time to see your mother?”

“Of course, Your Glory,” Shahd says, fingers to her eyes. The attendant climbs out and hurries off, messages for undermarket drops hidden in her sleeves.

The moment Iriset alights, Nielle is there with all her enthusiasm and a ruffled pink split-skirt dress, bare arms gleaming mirané brown, and an elaborate mask of thin orange leather strips charged into place.

It seems combed into her heavy updo of curls, and it cups over her upper face without touching the skin.

Perfect for a hot summer day to let a breeze in between mask and face.

“Your Glory!” she calls. “Welcome to Ecstatic Steeple Shadow! Come in, come in.”

Before Iriset can do more than nod, Nielle offers her arm and whisks Iriset to an inner courtyard.

This one is lush with tropical plants kept alive all year by carefully tended force-shields to trap moisture, heat, and light.

A picnic of chilled fruit and dry pear cider is already spread out, and Nielle doesn’t pause her chatter even to share the snacks.

Iriset lets herself be overwhelmed, blissfully sweating among trumpet flowers the size of her head and striped pink-and-green boe leaves.

Both have long removed their masks and Iriset lifts Nielle’s from the picnic blanket. She inspects it and tentatively asks, “Where did you get this? It seems suited to the weather.”

“Oh, well…” Nielle grins, and Iriset is struck, just as she was when first meeting the handmaiden, that enthusiasm is all Nielle ever needs to make her unbalanced face appealing. “I made it,” she confesses.

Iriset parts her lips and reverently sets the mask back down. “Amazing. How?”

“Let me show you my workshop.” Nielle leaps up from her cushion and hauls Iriset after her with a giggle.

The workshop is much larger than the half room Nielle used back in Amaranth’s petal, and absolutely dripping with supplies.

Iriset feels ecstatic in her pulse, and rising lifts her chin as she turns around, inspecting it all with excitement.

Nielle sits her down and shows her the basics, asking all sorts of questions about whether Singix can draw or is any good with colors.

Then she goes on a tangent about how different cultures actually think different colors go well together, and how she thinks that Ceres prefers bold colors all mingling together because of their tropics, but the mirané people are more strict and like to make perfect matches of only two (or four) colors, and does Singix think that’s because of Silence and the rules of design, or were the miran born that way and created their faith and art to match a natural visual preference?

“Is it visual preference, or emotional?” Iriset wonders, and Nielle hugs her, declaring that she knew they’d get along. Then they get down to business. First on the agenda is the mask Iriset brought.

Nielle breaks down its elements and complains at its lack of decoration or statement, though backtracks that naturally a person as breathtakingly gorgeous as Singix needn’t make a statement after all. Unless she wants to.

Iriset admits she likes the plain blue mask, and that the frame and cloth combination remind her of the silk squares her people use for fans and shades and hair decorations.

“If you like it, then perhaps just some trim?”