Page 8

And he sweeps out of the chamber, leaving Iriset with the echo of implied threat heavier than would have been a threat itself. At least, she thinks distantly, his mother’s work explains the smell of dead eagles hanging about him like motes of dust.

Iriset waits, breathing flow and rising and falling and ecstatic forces through her body, as she had in that plain prison. Somehow, she feels worse here, antsier so near to power and plotting, so close to opportunities to help her father. She grits her teeth and keeps to her meditations.

Finally a scratching comes at the lacquered door and she straightens her legs to standing. Another girl in palace orange covers her eyes and summons Iriset by name, then leads her to a crescent banquet chamber.

The low, oval table in the banquet chamber is set with ceramic bowls for different drinks—tea, cloud liquor, and rose wine, and the greatest delicacy: chips of flavored ice with sprigs of rosemary and flecked golden saffron frozen in their centers.

Succulents in perfect symmetry grace the center of the table, and the cushions for sitting are stitched in patterns that matched those layered, sharp leaves.

Amaranth mé Esmail reclines on a short-footed sofa, and around her several women with different appearances of femininity array themselves.

Sidoné kneels near the Moon-Eater’s Mistress in a plain black robe and jacket, her mirané-brown arms bare, and her hair roped and free of any mask.

She’s striking, raised at Amaranth’s side as a body-twin, taught the arts of war and defense that she might always be there to either protect Her Glory or die in her place.

It is an old mirané tradition, and in the past generations, the insistence upon true similarity of looks has grown lax.

Amaranth presents herself like water. There’s nothing of steel in her pose, her clothing, or body.

She’s the luscious flooding Lapis River, her baked mirané-brown skin sprinkled with shimmering glitter along cheekbones and shoulders, her eyelids blackened, and her hair tumbling in layers of rich black curls.

Red moons clip back a few strands of hair at her temples.

Sheer silk and the most delicate layers of linen drape her thick, rolling body, hugging breasts and hips and belly as if that cloth were the most blessed thing in all the world for being allowed to drift so near her flesh.

She smiles, and Iriset struggles to contain the flush of desire suddenly blossoming as if from a seed that’s always been inside her. Waiting to meet Her Glory.

Iriset wonders a bit breathlessly if this happens to everyone who encounters the Moon-Eater’s Mistress. Is it her morning ritual with the Moon-Eater that imbues her with such thick eroticism? Iriset murmurs, “Your Glory,” lifting her hands to shade her eyes.

“Iriset mé Isidor,” drawls Amaranth. When Iriset looks, Her Glory waves a hand to indicate she should join them upon one of the cushions.

She does, folding her legs carefully. Now that she’s free of the null wires, she senses a rush of ecstatic force sparking from Amaranth’s direction.

It’s tempered by a dominant core of falling, and these five other women add their own fluctuating designs to the room.

Quickly the others are introduced: Ziyan mé Tal, the mirané-brown daughter of the small king of the Ribbonwork precinct, who sings like a siren and narrows suspicious eyes at Iriset; square-jawed miran Anis mé Ario, who moves with careful elegance and keeps her eyes lowered; Istof Nefru, who traces her line back to Old Sarenpet and speaks seven languages.

Istof keeps glancing at Ziyan, as if to let Iriset know the two of them are united in their suspicion of the Little Cat’s daughter.

Beside Istof is Nielle mé Dari, a surprisingly ugly girl with vivid mirané-brown eyes too large for her narrow face and a tiny nose.

Her body is too shapeless to be called lithe and not fat enough to be plump or perfectly round as a polished apple.

Nielle grins at Iriset and says, “Ignore them until they come around.”

Amaranth snorts. “She’ll win them over herself, or she won’t.”

Each of Her Glory’s favorites wears a slender crescent mask across their foreheads that doesn’t hide their faces, but merely suggests a fashionable mask.

Iriset touches her eyelids to all of them, and murmurs, “I am here to be tamed by the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, not to win.”

A moment of shocked silence follows her words, then Anis mé Ario, with the shy elegance, laughs. Iriset allows herself a smile.

Amaranth instructs the handmaidens to woo Iriset’s good behavior by discussing their lives in the palace, and to share their favorite memories of Amaranth.

Her Glory speaks of meeting each of them, picking them from a crowd at a Days of Mercy feast, or accepting an invitation to a family concert, or in Sidoné’s case the silly tale of the first time Amaranth realized that Sidoné was not, in fact, her twin sister.

In the story, Garnet, that somber, threatening man, had teased Amaranth for quads at not understanding the differences between them. Iriset cannot imagine him as a child.

Alcohol is poured repeatedly, as is a sweet mint tea, and Iriset sips but doesn’t indulge, too aware of her precarious position to allow her tongue to slur.

They eat amazing food: flatbread as thin as a blade of grass and sprinkled with cinnamon, candied almonds and glazed salmon, a salad of cold sliced cactus pears and crisp persimmons, scattered with brilliant red and violet flowers she doesn’t know, and their feathered leaves.

The main course is cave crab, and as Iriset carefully learns to use the pick to dig free the meat, she realizes the pick is made of crystal.

When the crab is whisked away she uses a moment of laughter to tuck the pick into the tight bodice of her jacket.

Crystal makes the best design stylus.

Once, they’re interrupted by a tall woman in architect’s sleek robes.

Amaranth claps once. “Welcome, Menna. You have it?”

The architect bows, briefly touches thumb and forefinger to her eyes, and says, “I do, Your Glory.”

“This, Iriset, is Menna mé Garai, the Architect of the Seal. Stand.”

Iriset obeys, lowering her eyes cautiously. This royal architect is the highest ranked of designers, for she personally serves the Vertex Seal and his sister.

Menna drifts nearer, feeling dominantly of rising force, and Iriset realizes with a spike of anxiety that she doesn’t know how the daughter of the Little Cat should feel with regards to the forces.

She habitually, naturally balances her inner design, but would a girl who is not Silk?

Iriset touches her eyelids and waits, willing some ecstatic force to unbalance the rest. Perhaps she should claim to be extremely devoted to Silence, as such worshippers are practiced at meditation.

But it would be a difficult lie to keep up.

“Iriset mé Isidor,” Menna says, “I have heard much of you from my associate Raia méra Omorose. He was determined to put you into our grasp, had Her Glory not succeeded first.”

“Raia was very polite,” Iriset murmurs, glancing up. Menna is twice Iriset’s age, and wears a mask of paint in simple white stripes, eight of them, vertical down her mirané face. She wonders if misgendering Raia is on purpose or unintentional.

“I made this for you.” Menna holds out a small black box.

Iriset lifts the lid. Inside, upon a cushion of white, rests a jade cuff, inlaid with a golden seal of the Moon-Eater.

Amaranth says, “Put it on, Iriset.”

Swallowing, afraid of null wires, she obeys. The cuff is cool to the touch, but when she clasps it around her left wrist, the center of it, just below the inlaid seal, is warm. Iriset shivers as threads of force slip through her skin, seeking her inner design.

“Sensitive,” Menna comments.

Iriset’s gaze flies to Her Glory, who watches her with knowing eyes. Iriset protests, “I was only being taught. A little.”

The Architect of the Seal shrugs. “You will be tracked now. Through locks and barriers throughout the palace complex. Do not remove it.”

“All my girls wear one,” Amaranth says, unconcerned. “You’ll become used to it, and with it comes the privilege of my retinue.”

Iriset should have expected such a thing. If she doesn’t trick the design mechanisms of this cuff, she’ll never be free. However, when she looks, she sees similar cuffs about each of the handmaidens’ wrists.

They ask her, when she sits back down, to speak about her father.

“First, if you allow,” Iriset says, without meekness, “tell me what has become of his court.”

“Broken up by the city army,” says Istof the linguist.

Amaranth says, “The Little Cat’s court will be tried individually, for what crimes can be proved. I suspect all will be found guilty. Some will be killed, some freed for mercy’s sake, and some sent to labor camps.”

Iriset nods jaggedly and swallows more wine.

She knows little of the camps, beyond rumors and the threats made against her by Bey méra Matsimet.

Prisons in the empire are only for holding people until their trial.

If not executed or released, the only third option is such a camp.

They are said to be everywhere in the empire, filled with all sorts of criminals punished to build roads and lay ribbon or blast the bedrock for steeple foundations or mine toxic minerals in eastern quarries.

All of which might very well kill them anyway if they’re under a worse warden.

A slow death, of exposure or starvation, or a quick one from a gang’s knife.

(Sometimes escapes are made, but there are no rumors about it, as witnesses are put out of their misery. Once, a successful camp rebellion was later put down by the army and called a boil plague in the news graffiti.)

“And my father? Has he been sentenced?”

“The Little Cat will die on the Day of Final Mercy.”