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Despite the disapproving hum from one of her own guards, Iriset moves nearer. “Do you like the sun?” she asks it.

The numen tilts its ugly head in a shrug.

“Have you had a picnic? Shahd, will you give me some of the grapes in your basket, and a flagon of rose wine?” Iriset holds her gaze on the numen, watching its blank expression for any sign of—well, anything.

Nothing. But it doesn’t look away from her.

Ecstatic pops in her chest as she wonders what it sees.

She’s in one of the thin leather masks she designed herself.

It braces against her forehead in undulating black and ties into her hair, then hundreds of silk strands dyed green, blue, and black fall down over her eyes, parting over her nose to be swept aside like perfectly arcing cheekbones.

When she moves, the silk shivers like iridescent butterfly wings. It occludes her vision rather a lot.

Shahd makes to walk around Iriset and bravely offers the refreshment to the numen, but Iriset stops her and takes the cold flagon in her own hand, and the cup of dark grapes. She steps forward again. “Numen,” she says, “do you have a name?”

“Stop, Princess,” it says in a broken-glass voice.

Startled, she does, without thinking.

One of the Seal guards moves to Iriset and touches his painted eyelids. “The creature is correct, Your Glory. Allow me to bring your gift to it.”

Singix has no reason to disregard the Seal guard and so Iriset submits.

But when he takes the grapes and wine, Iriset pushes her mask up into her hair so that the dripping waves of silk brush her forehead and let her eyes free.

She watches as the numen accepts the food and drink, carefully not allowing its skin to touch the Seal guard’s mirané-brown hands.

It plucks a grape and opens its thin lips to bite the dark flesh with alliraptor-like teeth.

Shahd shudders beside Iriset.

Without saying more, Iriset leaves, her small entourage hurrying after. When she arrives at Amaranth’s side, she tells the small group, “The numen was loose in the Winter Sunset Courtyard, free of its collar.”

A mirané prince, Elit mé Orsir, who is in her sixth decade and staunchly pro-Silence, waves a hand from the low sofa upon which she lounges beside Amaranth. “Free of its collar, but not loose. They lay a null wire into the garden gravel, and so it is as trapped as always within that circle.”

Iriset’s body seizes tight. A null wire in the garden gravel.

Stop, Princess , the numen said just before she stepped into the nulled circle. She’d have lost her craftmask, the crawling design that changed her skin and hair, and been stripped bare back to her own apostatical face.

It had saved her.

Iriset barely hears the conversation next for the ringing in her ears. Shahd directs her to a cushion, arranges her gown and mask, and by then a shallow stone bowl of chilled wine is in her hand, and Amaranth is introducing her to a familiar Silent priest.

“Here is Holy Brother Seth, Princess,” Amaranth says, touching her fingertips to his wrist. “Just appointed as the new Silent voice on the privilege council, perhaps soon to sacrifice even his name.”

Iriset nods, careful not to bow or touch her eyelids as a woman of lesser position might.

The priest is mirané, typical in hair and eyes and shape of his face, but real humor shows in his charming smile.

Oh! Iriset hides her recognition, but this is the more pleasant of the two priests she met with Amaranth and the Holy Peace the night Her Glory debuted her scarf-dress.

Amaranth had won. She’d gotten the priest she wanted appointed to Lyric’s council. No wonder Elit mé Orsir is here, too.

“Are you well, Princess?” the priest asks.

“Shaken by her encounter with the numen, I imagine,” says Elit.

“I am,” Iriset murmurs, and carefully sips her wine.

“You should join my son and me for meditation soon,” the older miran says. “If you balance yourself in Silence, such creatures cannot harm you.”

“Thank you, prince,” Iriset says demurely. “I meditate with my husband.”

Elit hums in pleased approval.

Holy Brother Seth says, “The numen never seems anything but at peace to me. I do wonder if it has come to an understanding of Silence in its long confinement.”

“Everything returns to Silence,” Elit says, as if agreeing with him. It is a line from an old mirané prayer poem. When she says it, Elit looks at Iriset, who viscerally recalls Singix is a heathen, of course.

“Why do they bring it out?” Iriset asks Amaranth. She can’t bring herself to assure the old mirané prince that Lyric’s children will be raised to Aharté alone.

“I could tell you they do it because everything living deserves the sun sometimes,” Her Glory says, “but it’s in order for the Architect of the Seal to refresh the designs of its prison.”

“How often? I wouldn’t like to run into it again.”

“At least every quarter of the year, unless something is damaged.”

Maybe Iriset can trigger the need, hide a lock disruption inside something else.

Conversation rolls around her, ranging from the upcoming celebration of one of the empire’s conquest anniversaries to fashion—during which Iriset’s mask is greatly complimented and she manages to speak a little bit about its construction.

Her mention of Nielle sets off several miran on gossiping about an affair between two different small kings, and they bring up the most recent Silk graffiti, but it’s nothing Iriset hasn’t heard before, except for a rumor the Vertex Seal is considering a temporary moratorium on advertising graffiti in general.

She tells them he hasn’t mentioned it to her, but it’s a good idea.

The whole time, Iriset spirals, lightheaded thinking about what would have happened had she stepped over the null wire.

She envisions a Seal guard reacting on instinct, cutting her down with their force-blade on the assumption she’s an assassin.

Or she’s hauled before Lyric, stripped of her design, face burning with reaction to the violence of disruption, her skin streaked pearl pale and peach-brown as the crawling design struggles in tatters.

His face, his pain, transforming into brutality. Oh, that she does not doubt.

Her mouth waters sickly, hotly. That isn’t the way she needs it to happen. It needs to be her choice. Her intention.

Beside and behind her, Shahd says, “Your Glory, I think my princess is ill.”

“Perhaps she is already with child,” says the old mirané prince approvingly.

Iriset lifts her hand and waves it, but can’t speak, for if she parts her lips she’ll vomit.

She imagines the hole in the apostate tower she had to crawl through to reach her father, and standing on the Mercy Pavilion herself, bound to a pillar and the collar of unraveling settled heavy on her shoulders.

Without proving anything or establishing her legacy.

Without showing Lyric how wrong he is. Without changing a thing.

Except she killed Erxan and stole Singix’s life.

The things she’s changed here already are terrible.

Singix should be mourned, not turned into this facade.

Iriset’s legacy will be nothing more than using Singix.

Amaranth claims to be hot and starving herself—as gossip always makes her ravenous, she laughs to her fellow miran as she leads Iriset away.

“What is wrong, hiha?” Amaranth asks when it’s only the two of them and Sidoné. They press near to Iriset’s shoulders on either side. Seal guards and two quiet attendants, including Shahd, trail them far enough they’ll not overhear the soft talk.

“Are you sick?” Sidoné asks kindly.

“ Are you pregnant?” Amaranth asks unkindly.

Shaking her head a little too frantically, she takes a struggling breath through her nose, wishing there was cool air somewhere. That would be good for her stomach, too. “I nearly lost my craftmask.”

Amaranth scoffs. “You should just stay away from the numen.”

Iriset pulls her mask down to shade her eyes and cover her upset. She hates null wires, hates everything about them, and when the army put them against her skin they were so cold, and she was made into nothing.

She’s shaking, every deep breath atremble.

Sidoné frowns and puts her fist upon the butt of her force-blade’s handle where it hooks against her hip. The body-twin says, “How did you nearly lose your mask? What is happening? Does it deteriorate? Do you need to make a new one?”

Iriset presses her lips together to hold back a laugh.

She takes another deep breath, then calmly—not really—says, “It is not deteriorating. But nothing can survive a null wire, and I nearly stepped over one. It was unmarked; there was no way for me to see it. Only luck saved me today—saved all of us today! Luck will not serve forever.”

“I thought you were too much a genius mind to rely on luck,” Amaranth says sharply.

Oh well, Iriset supposes now is the time. She steps even closer, tilting her face up to glare into Amaranth’s eyes. “Two people have caught me already. Two. ”

Sidoné sucks in a shocked breath, but Amaranth narrows her eyes.

Iriset continues, “It was my genius mind that alleviated the situation, both times.”

“Ambassador Erxan,” Sidoné says, plainly enough that they must have already suspected.

“And?” Amaranth demands through clenched teeth. Iriset can feel the ecstatic anger rising off her, lifting Her Glory’s natural falling force into conflict with itself. Iriset is careful not to glance Shahd’s way.

“It’s taken care of,” she says. “This charade is strong, and I am good at it, but it will break eventually. No matter your threats to my family. It will happen and wouldn’t it be better to choose when?”

“My choice, sister,” Amaranth says quietly.