Page 71

The lie of love

S ingix, do you think you might be pregnant?” Lyric asks her with exceeding gentleness two mornings later.

They’re curled in bed, before dawn, and his hand splays over her naked belly.

Iriset was entirely asleep until he said her stolen name, and groggily hums a meaningless tune, snuggling her bottom back against him and turning her face down to kiss the arm that pillows her head. The words he spoke do not sink in.

He says them again. “Singix, do you think you might be pregnant?”

Iriset squeezes her eyes closed and groans as cutely as possible.

As if she doesn’t have enough problems. She can’t believe her husband is listening to rumors.

Or so confident in his own virility. Though, they do have an awful lot of sex.

Keeping him to herself for those last Days of Mercy really stirred up the hopes and expectations of his court.

But none of them know Iriset can’t get pregnant.

Lyric slides his hand from her belly up between her breasts, skimming his palm over a nipple, until he carefully cups her throat.

She shivers as he strokes her jaw with his thumb, pressing gently until she looks around at him.

When she does, he lowers his lashes bashfully.

“We have been married for three quads and you have not bled.”

“Oh,” she whispers. Right. She wouldn’t.

“I…” Lyric licks his lips. “I would be glad.”

It’s Iriset’s turn to lower her eyes as warmth spreads from his hand throughout her face and down her neck. “I… My cycle is irregular, and sometimes change can delay such things. Change and stress.”

“You have been under tremendous stress, for which I am so sorry.”

She tilts her chin to kiss him. “Stop apologizing. I will speak with your sister and perhaps consult a doctor, and… maybe.”

“I mentioned the possibility to my mother. If you would like to also speak with her.”

Iriset thanks him for the consideration, and doesn’t say she’s fairly sure she’d rather eat the scales off a lattice snake than discuss pregnancy with Diaa of Moonshadow.

She kisses Lyric on his jaw, then lingers at his neck.

She breathes deeply of his early-morning sex-sweat-pillow smell.

Six years ago she used a specially designed force-web to essentially hold her reproductive system in stasis unless the surgery is reversed.

It took weeks of planning and exploration, and then hours to physically accomplish.

Iriset is uncertain she could loosen the threads without being discovered performing human architecture even if she wanted to.

But she’s equally uncertain it would fool anyone if she fakes a period.

Amaranth shuts herself up in the Moon-Eater’s Temple for the two most intense days of her cycle, but Iriset doesn’t know enough about Ceres traditions or cultural taboos to know what Singix would do. She can hardly ask .

She only needs to distract him, and everyone apparently, for thirteen more days.

Amaranth has invited Iriset to join her for the morning at the Moon-Eater’s Temple, in a cheeky version of an apology—“I know you enjoyed yourself when you felt him come,” she said with a bold wink. Because Iriset is Singix, she has no excuse not to be persuaded.

While Her Glory awakens her god, Iriset waits with Sidoné behind the partition screen.

The lattice in the screen is designed with a constant labyrinthine pattern to allow the gaze to trace it slowly, carefully, for meditation, and Iriset sends her eyes along the path.

She parts her lips to taste the rollicking tangle of forces with which Amaranth engages.

The force-knot Amaranth draws pulls tighter and tighter and Iriset perches on her stool, sinking inside herself to feel the weave of her inner design, of the marriage knot and its strictures.

She prods at them, plucking at them with pops of breath and ecstatic snaps.

If Lyric notices through the knot, she has an excellent excuse in Amaranth’s worship.

When the ripples of the Moon-Eater’s release hit her gently, she follows them through her inner design, from the marriage knot to the quietly nauseated feeling in her guts, wondering if a version of this ritual could undo the connections linking her inner design to Lyric’s.

Unbind the knot without his consent. The Moon-Eater’s awakening shakes her in her core, like a deep resonance.

Like auditory, emotional friction, ecstatic pulled out like taffy.

Not coincidentally, perhaps, Iriset used resonance to affix the design web over her uterus all those years ago, meshing the frequencies of eight crystal coins placed around her belly.

It’s not unlike the unraveling, which also involves…

Iriset sits up straight.

The web is gone from her reproductive system.

There’s nothing woven through her inner design except the marriage knot.

Panic drains Iriset of heat and sense, and she just sits there for a moment in a nauseating twist of dual realizations: first that if the resonance of the design eggs coming together was so powerful as to undo her own excellent inner work as a mere side effect , then resonance must be the key to undoing their marriage bond without consent or death; second, she might actually be pregnant.

“Do you believe in the Moon-Eater?” Sidoné whispers.

Startled from her thinking, Iriset nearly falls off the stool. Sidoné grasps her wrist to steady her and Iriset manages to say, “What’s to believe in, or not? There is something here.”

The body-twin presses her lips together and nods, as if reassured. “I want you out of this, too. The entire situation is a bad one.”

Iriset raises both eyebrows as high as they go. The body-twin not fully on Amaranth’s side?

Sidoné meets Iriset’s gaze. “I am privy to Amaranth’s thoughts and motivations, but in this, she has no pure motivation.

She has always been precise in her political schemes, in every plan and movement.

The web she wove to arrange this marriage was breathtaking.

But Amaranth herself”—Sidoné lowers her voice again, and Iriset leans nearer until her breath ruffles the fine hairs beside Iriset’s ear—“does not know why she is doing this , pushing you, demanding we continue this charade. She claims it will be good to have you with us, with Lyric, because you’re powerful as an ally.

She’s placing a weapon where she can wield you at will.

But she’s ignoring the personal cost of betraying him, and I think the real reason she risks so much with you is the Moon-Eater’s influence.

She feels something in here with him that cannot be replicated elsewhere.

The intensity of it. She seeks danger, seeks to achieve new heights, to prove that her life outside this temple matters, too. ”

“Why are you telling me this?”

The body-twin squeezes Iriset’s wrist, fingers digging into the flesh. “Because I see it on your face. You feel him. Whatever she touches in there, you touch it too, and I do not. If there comes a time when I cannot follow her, you must. Do you understand, Iriset mé Isidor? You must.”

There’s something wild in Sidoné’s vivid brown eyes.

Just then Amaranth appears, a hand pushing the lattice neatly aside. “What are you whispering about, my loves?” Her mouth looks bitten, her head tilts languorously, and her other hand holds her robe closed between her breasts.

“You,” Sidoné says, though Iriset would have lied.

Amaranth’s smile is triumphant. She likes attention—any kind of it.

Leaning down, she kisses Sidoné at the corner of her mouth, dropping open her robe.

Iriset glances at her luscious hanging breasts, and beyond them at Her Glory’s belly, the soft folds of mirané-brown flesh.

Iriset’s mouth nearly waters as she imagines putting her mouth all over that body.

Does pregnancy make one even hornier than usual? Fuck.

Fluttering her lashes at Iriset, Her Glory bends from a standing position to press her palms to the cool tile floor, seeming to melt a bit, still in the throes of her comedown.

Slowly, she stretches up onto her toes, with her hands still on the floor, groaning a little.

Then Amaranth stands, arching her back with her hands reaching overhead, fingers splayed.

“Tell me,” she commands, still mostly naked.

Her voice trembles deep in her chest, more of an invocation.

Iriset shakes her head slowly. She has no intention of telling Amaranth or Sidoné. If she’s pregnant, she’ll just take care of it. Add it to the list! “I have to go.”

Before either says anything, Iriset rushes out of the temple to where Shahd awaits—and nearly runs into Diaa of Moonshadow. Seal Commander Iumeri Selk is at her side in full white uniform and armor, his white mask a brilliant contrast to his dark brown skin.

“Ah, daughter-in-Silence,” Diaa calls, “is Amaranth still inside? We’re looking for her. Well”—the older miran smiles with exactly the appropriate amount of flirting at Iumeri—“this one here is looking for the body-twin, more like.”

“Yes,” Iriset murmurs. “They’re both on their way out. I’m feeling slightly nauseated, if you’ll excuse me.”

Diaa sends her a truly alarmed look, and Iriset recalls that Lyric said he spoke to his mother about her potential pregnancy. “My Silence, you should sit down. Iumeri, get this child some water, would you?”

“It’s not terrible,” Iriset insists, “but I should rest.”

Amaranth appears with Sidoné just as Shahd is taking Iriset’s elbow to lead her away.

“Mother, what can I do for you? Take care, hiha,” Amaranth says kindly to Iriset, and though he glances longingly at Sidoné, the Seal Commander offers to escort Iriset. But Shahd quietly gets in his way and they make their escape.