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It’s exactly as Her Glory said before, but nevertheless blood drains from Iriset’s skull, the drag of falling force, and she reaches out to grasp the shallow bowl of rose wine. Tasteless as it is in her mouth, it scours her tongue with its sharp delicacy. Now she knows her timeline, at least.

“Tell us about him,” Nielle demands. “Why shouldn’t he be killed?”

Iriset bites the tip of her tongue. Any stories might reveal her own true nature, so she must be cautious. She tells them about her father by telling them about her mother.

Amakis was her name, a solid Lapis Osahar name, though Isidor had only called her Kiss.

The handmaidens swoon, and Amaranth smiles. Sidoné presses her lips in a line that might be stifled amusement or disapproval.

Their courtship was smooth and lingering, Iriset says, for Isidor busied himself with building his court and Amakis was the daughter of a mechanic in the Saltbath precinct: dark, lovely, and in no hurry to leave her mother’s house.

Nothing dramatic occurred, there were no enemies nor rivals.

The two people simply wove their lives together.

A perfect pattern. Eventually they’d braided so fully into each other’s lives there was nothing to do but tie it off with a marriage knot.

And so they did. Iriset had been the second knot in their shared life.

“Did she not care that her husband was a criminal?” asks Ziyan, the singer.

“What was there to care about? He was good at it.”

Sidoné laughs once, without humor. “Being good at something is not justification itself.”

Nielle says, “If he was good enough, he wouldn’t have been caught.”

Iriset stops feeling bad about thinking of Nielle as the ugly one.

“It wasn’t the Little Cat’s mistake that caught him,” Amaranth says before Iriset can snap back. “Silk left tracks.”

A spark of ecstatic force bursts coldly in Iriset’s vision and she breathes too deeply, shoving air at her unbalanced stomach. “Silk had no tracks.”

“Ask the architect who found her,” Sidoné says, a dare in her cool tone. “The one Menna mentioned, Raia mér Omorose.”

“We were betrayed,” Iriset says. “And not by Silk.” She tries to remain calm, to smooth over the raw falling force.

At her side, Anis mé Ario has been quiet for most of the conversation.

Now she reaches with sympathy, putting her fingers against Iriset’s wrist bone.

Iriset meets Anis’s dark brown gaze. To distract herself, she stares at the handmaiden with Silk’s practiced eyes.

Short lashes, thin lips, a pleasing symmetry between eyes and mouth and chin, her shoulders broader than the narrow rectangle of her mirané-brown face would suggest. White and black interlocking squares painted her jaw, tiny and delicate, but beneath it…

she needs to shave. Iriset lets her eyes slide down Anis’s arm to the hand that touches her: heavy knuckles, but with a grace in fingers.

Those fingers freeze in their comforting stroke, and Anis pulls away.

She’s hiding something, too. A discord presents itself to Silk: two patterns overlaid not quite in alignment.

Anis’s design is masculine-forward. She’s not like Raia mér Omorose, who claims an old gender from before Aharté’s reign, unsettled between masculine and feminine.

Anis hides her design under all the trappings of femininity she can because while the goddess of Silence merely discourages the older genders, to claim her Holy Design is wrong is heresy.

Iriset has met such people before, done work for them through the undermarket—wonderful, apostatical human architecture to give them bodies that better reflect their gender—but she had not expected anyone like this in the palace itself.

“What happened to your mother, Iriset?” Anis asks by way of distraction.

“Apostatical cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

Amaranth says, “Iriset, did you witness Silk perform human architecture?”

Shocked at the change in direction of the inquiry, Iriset tears her eyes off Anis and to Her Glory.

“Allow me to pose a hypothetical,” Amaranth continues.

“Your Glory.” Iriset touches her eyelids.

“When a friend of mine was born, their body’s external design by all appearances was that of a man, yet this person’s inner design, that none may know but the person themself and She Who Loves Silence, was that of a woman. What do you think that would be like?”

“It would be difficult,” Iriset says, not glancing at Anis. “A difficult way to live. Trapped with only two options.”

“But are they a man or a woman? Which is more important, outer design or inner design?”

Iriset feels trapped herself. What does Amaranth want?

This is the test. Not leaving her alone all those hours this afternoon, but this.

She should say Aharté does not make mistakes.

The external design of men and women is perfect, balanced.

She should say, in teaching with the empire’s laws, that only Aharté can know which is more important, outer or inner design.

That they must trust Silence, trust Aharté’s designs, and if there is such disagreement between a person’s outer and inner design, then She Who Loves Silence intended that disagreement to exist, and so the person must live with the disagreement.

But Iriset doesn’t believe it is so simple.

She has examined human bodies in great detail, and the more details she explored, the more certain she became that dividing everyone into merely two was one of the stupider things the miran had done.

No stool with but two legs can stand. The most stable designs require four points, four forces.

Rising, falling, ecstatic, flow. In the mirané calendar there are four days in a quarter, four quarters in a quad, four great forces.

With that in mind, how odd it is that Aharté’s Holy Design and her mirané language do not account for at least four genders.

The empire sometimes acts against its own internal design in order to oppress what it cannot control.

But that is not what Iriset was asked.

“Aharté does not make mistakes,” Iriset says slowly, maneuvering through respect for the laws and what she knows to be true.

Without referencing Silk’s heretical writings.

Amaranth said she collects exceptional handmaidens, and so Iriset ought to behave exceptionally.

“But we make mistakes. Life, and the Holy Design, are immensely more complex than we understand, Your Glory. Perhaps what we expect when we ask either-or is our mistake, not a mistake in her Design. There are more than two forces in the world, and maybe more than two options for a person’s design. ”

“Apostasy,” Amaranth says, rather blithely.

“To be expected from the daughter of the Little Cat,” Istof says dismissively.

“No.” Iriset’s hands curl into fists. “It is not apostasy to say we are less skilled architects than Aharté herself, it is only apostasy if we consider the alternative.”

The smile that breaks across Her Glory’s mouth melts Iriset’s anxiety and confusion into rising relief.

“Aharté designed you as she intended to, of course ,” Iriset says to Anis, suddenly ferocious. “There is only one conflict, and that is who you are versus what you are allowed to do about it.”

Anis studies Iriset for a moment. Then murmurs, “Very well, Amaranth. We can keep her.”

Amaranth laughs—as do Nielle and Ziyan, in delight and relief, respectively—and takes back the reins.

“It is apostasy, though, Iriset: Once, before Aharté, there were at least four genders we lived with in our crater city, and the Sarians named them ahz, ahzran, friahz, and frian. You likely have not studied the language, but that prefix, fri , can only be translated rather complicatedly as weighted toward balance . Is that not charming? You might say friahz means weighted toward woman or toward woman and that if we were apostates or spoke Sarenpet, perhaps someone like my hypothetical friend could be called such a person. Friahz. But that is my hypothetical friend. Anis is a woman. Do you understand?”

Iriset nods, thinking that she does. “Anything balanced serves Aharté.”

Her Glory snorts. “Your mistress Silk, who you claim taught you design, is a proven apostate. We have heard of her terrible work. Would she have been able to redesign my hypothetical friend a face and body that better mirrored their inner design?”

Suddenly angry, Iriset says, “If that is what your friend actually wanted, and if the Little Cat was paid well enough for it.”

Silence cuts through the chamber. None of the handmaidens move or even breathe. Then Sidoné turns her head to Amaranth as if to claim the winnings of a bet.

But Amaranth only says, “Careful, kitten.”

Iriset freezes. Her father called her that. What is Amaranth trying to say?

She lets Her Glory stare at her for a moment before rising, shaky with the adrenaline of fear and anger. She moves around the oval table to kneel at the foot of Her Glory’s low sofa.

“I am your servant,” she says, and hides her eyes against the floor lest she give herself away.