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Surprise has her throwing her arms around his neck, and her injured arm burns.

But the Vertex Seal cradles her against his chest and pushes his face against her neck.

They’ve just arrived in their private rooms; she didn’t even notice where they were.

Lyric holds her, silently, and she grips him tightly enough to bruise, aware of the pounding of his heart mirroring hers.

When the last Vertex Seal finally speaks, his words are like a ferrous pin anchoring an elaborate design into a wasteland of silicate crystal and red-moon rock:

He says, “I love you,” and Iriset starts to cry.

Absolutely wretched sobs, drawn out from the awful hollow in her chest, because he loves someone who doesn’t exist, because Shahd stayed for her, and her father is dead, and she killed Erxan with her bare hands, and and and so much, and it’s all Lyric’s fault but she loves him back!

She does, she can’t help it, and what is she supposed to do about that?

About the people in the center of this? Stick to the plan, shake the empire to its core because that’s what they deserve, that’s what everyone who pretends the laws of Holy Silence matter more than lives and healing and progress and science and hope and all those other things Iriset doesn’t believe in but must be better.

Absolute Silence is a design flaw, and if nothing else, Iriset hates a design flaw, and once she latches on she’ll never let go until she solves it or gnaws it into ugly, unanswerable pieces.

Lyric walks up the spiral stairs with her in his arms and deposits her, crying, on the bed. He vanishes and returns, pressing a cup of water to her lips, but she’s too upset not to choke, so he drinks from a different cup and kisses her with the sharp taste of honeybite on his tongue.

Then he takes off his shoes and hers, and climbs into bed, wrapping her up, and he just begins to talk.

Whatever comes into his head about what’s going on in the empire is what he tells her: There was recently a regime change in Huvar, and the new kings have sent extra taxes to prove they’re more loyal than the last city leadership, which causes its own hassle for accountants and could be a smoke screen for something yet to come.

General Lapis left Moonshadow to head back toward that territory just in case.

A food shortage far in the west of the empire in what used to be the Land of God ( Ilium Va locally, he says) caused a rift in the regional government, half of whom claim it’s Aharté-blessed drought to clear out the people for a generation or so, while the other half say it’s just bad farming because of the empire’s assimilation laws that give the native farmers who know how to cultivate the land from hundreds of years of experience very little impetus to help the homesteaders.

Several force-bridges are delayed in construction across jungle canopies in the empire-controlled Eastern Bow, probably because of their fire dragons, but also probably because of a bribery scandal that stretches from the distant construction sites all the way to the Ribbonwork precinct here.

A man was arrested outside the town of Melit on suspicion of planting a bomb on behalf of a local insurgency; he claims he was in that desolate neighborhood harvesting lightning truffles, which is so ludicrous a defense he’s being brought to the Holy City for a mirané trial.

And that barely touches on the intricate plots and issues occurring within Moonshadow itself: this so-called Silk rebellion and whether to disrupt honest graffiti artists to curtail it; the implementation of a new tax upon artisans and whether architects count as such; constant arguing over whether to lift the second-generation marriage restrictions—just to name a few of the most pressing.

Lyric keeps talking until her hitching sobs slow, and she can draw long, eight-count breaths, leaning into him and listening to his voice.

He doesn’t realize, but Iriset begins to really listen to what he’s not saying, her brilliant mind seeking patterns, and she concludes hazily that Lyric’s job is less to directly rule, and more to act exactly as his title suggests: He’s the Vertex Seal, the pinnacle of the arc of justice, and from his height his most important task is determining where the attention of the throne needs to settle from moment to moment.

He’s a focusing steeple, drawing power and law, and from him power and law spool and spiral to hold down the weft and warp of the empire.

Iriset wants to say, “You’re an architect, too,” like she said to Amaranth once.

She wants to say it, to push him into so many arguments built to make both of them better.

That’s the lie she tells herself most often: that they’re both going to be better people at the end of this, molding each other with arguments and love.

Because isn’t it love, this feeling when he comes into a room still discussing a scheduling mishap with Garnet, and makes his way to her just to absently touch her hair?

Isn’t it love when they sit across a low table during dinner with his mother and sister, and Amaranth says something outlandish, but instead of arguing with her, Lyric catches Iriset’s eye for her alone to see his amusement?

It’s warm, it’s desperate, it fills her up to bursting. Isn’t that love? It’s selfish and eager and aching with guilt, but isn’t it love all the same?

Or is love impossible if it begins with a lie?

Yet when she drinks her water and kisses him, when he doesn’t need to talk anymore because their mouths are busy, as his lips burn down her spine and he presses his teeth to the rise of her hip, when he digs his fingers deep inside her as if to plant his gentians there, Iriset forgets she’s ever lied about anything in all her life.