Chapter 17
The answer to every question
When Iriset shivers, Lyric holds her closer, rubs her arms. She’s fully on top of him, like he’s a warm bed, and he’s thinking again that it’s dark up here, and probably nobody can see them. What would there be to see, anyway? A silent god and her wife fucking on—
Lyric’s entire being falls still.
“Lyric?” Iriset murmurs against his clavicle.
“It’s gone,” he says just as softly. To his ears, there’s a hollow devastation behind his voice.
Her frown tickles his skin, and Iriset kisses little pecks down toward his nipple.
“The knot.”
She stops. Stares at his sternum, eyes unfocused. “I didn’t even feel it happen,” she whispers.
“Too busy with apostasy.” He is actually trying here, but it doesn’t come out that way.
Iriset huffs in annoyance and sits up. That certainly hadn’t been his goal, but Lyric supposes it was inevitable.
They get dressed, briefly arguing who will sacrifice a loincloth to the cleanup effort. Iriset wins when she reminds him she has more layers, and then says sourly, “When I’m better at sundering, I could probably just vanish all this into the atmosphere.”
Lyric winces, thinking tenderly of the nights in their marriage suite after lovemaking when they’d slip down to the bathing room. Sometimes he’d carry her, and they’d warm up in the water, distracted from washing by touches, kisses, and the bloom of happiness. “Iriset,” he starts quietly.
“Let’s go back,” Iriset says, as if reading his mind. “That bathtub is pretty decent.”
“Could you… I am guessing you could never have been pregnant.” Lyric hasn’t thought of it, not really, not in depth, since he realized his wife was not his wife.
“No, I could have been,” she says even more softly. “But I wasn’t. And now, no, not even a little bit.”
Lyric is grateful she spares him the details.
He looks out toward the east… southeast. The probable direction of Rivermouth precinct with Irsu River’s fort.
Where Rivermouth will be in four hundred years, at least. He’ll have to ask someone on the street, or several someones.
After the midnight fires. He’s going to throw this skull siren mask into the flames even though Iriset made it for him.
Iriset makes a sound of frustration. “You want to see all of this?”
“I need to.”
She slowly reaches for his hand. He lets her, and twines their fingers together. Squeezes. Then he bends over to pick up the defense necklace. “Here,” he says, leaning in to latch it around her neck.
“What is it?” She frowns, plucking at the wire nest with its thumbprint clay. “It’s ugly.”
“Amado the Reconciler gave it to me. For defense.”
“You should keep it, then.”
“Do you know how to defend yourself?” He’s being purposefully disingenuous: He can defend with sword, club, knife, hands, but he can’t shield against percussive design or explosions.
Iriset starts to snap her answer, but stops and looks away.
Suddenly they’re both thinking about his mother. His mother, who tried more than once to kill Iriset, who succeeded in murdering the woman who was supposed to be his wife.
Iriset lets the necklace lie against her crossed robes. Lyric says, “Stay with me until the bonfires?”
“Do you have money?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She grins menacingly. “I want to taste all the different wines in this city of apostasy.”
They walk hand in hand through the wild streets, some of which are worse than before.
Others have softened with the approach of midnight.
Lyric buys Iriset whatever she wants, because it turns out Amado gave him a significant amount of funding.
She drinks, mostly spitting them out into the roots of a tree, but describes the liquors and wines to him.
Sometimes he takes a sip—once, when she says it smells like sage and tastes like persimmons, he leans in and captures some from her lips.
Iriset looks at him carefully then, searching, and he shrugs.
Lyric tries to walk away, but she presses him back against the side wall of the tavern courtyard, demanding.
He says, “You told me I don’t know who I am here, and I don’t know who you are, and so even though everything we were before had grown from rotten foundations, that’s gone.
You—you vibrated it away with your grip on the forces.
I felt that. I know what you did. So now it could be different. New.”
She peers at him, like her gaze can peel back his skin and flesh. “You’re such a philosopher, Lyric,” she says like it’s a joke between them. “It was just sex magic.”
That actually surprises a laugh out of him.
Then Iriset starts kissing Lyric sweetly whenever she takes a drink, and huddles close so that he puts his arm around her instead of knocking shoulders while they hold hands.
“I’m going to interrogate you now,” she says grandly while they meander along a canal with orange flowering trees whose weeping branches bend toward the water.
“What do you want?” she asks, and he somehow didn’t expect that.
Lyric shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“What do you want?” He turns the tables on her.
“To stay here, to learn more magic, to learn sundering! To fly, and also to teach—” She bites her lip, stopping herself. “To be who I always wanted to be, and to tell my mother,” she adds in a whisper.
“We have to go home for you to tell her anything,” he says.
“She’s gone. I don’t know where.”
“You could find her.”
Iriset slides him a look, tightens her grip on his waist. “So you can trace her and—”
“No,” he says.
“I told you I don’t want to go home, Lyric. Why would I want to go back to a place where everyone I love is dead?”
It hits him so hard, even the second time, but Iriset keeps going: “Restrictions, rebellions, lies, and that awful feeling in my gut all the time, unable to be myself.”
Lyric knows restrictions, he knows awful gut feelings, the inability to be who you want to be. But Iriset won’t want to hear that, she’d only attack him for feeling sorry for himself at the height of power. Rightly so. Lyric has never liked complaining.
“Nothing to say to that?” Iriset demands. “You used to argue back so well, the Vertex Seal certain of his moral superiority. Too bad your mother didn’t share such a thing.”
“Iriset,” he says, letting all his hurt glare through his face. “Don’t make that about something else. If she’d been arrested, she’d be just as dead.”
“You want me to believe you wouldn’t give your mother the mercy you refused my father?”
“I would not.” It’s easy to say, because Lyric knows it to be absolutely true.
“Your own mother?”
“My mother, Diaa of Moonshadow, devout enough to give up half her name to her service to the miran and Aharté’s family, went too far.
Leapt over the laws of Silence, over carefully chosen actions, and—and thought she knew better than the Holy Peace, than the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, the will of the mirané council and her Vertex Seal.
It was a personal betrayal to me, yes, but it was an insult to the entire empire.
” Lyric closes his eyes, breath shaky. This didn’t use to happen to him, this loss of control, and never in public.
Never outside the labyrinth, outside the presence of Garnet alone.
“My mother disliked arguments, and that’s why I liked you in the first place.
If I was like my mother, if I was the kind of king you think I am, I would never have welcomed you—Iriset mé Isidor, the Little Cat’s daughter!
—into my home. Into my thoughts. Welcomed you, Iriset, not just tolerated you.
I need—needed,” he corrects suddenly, and realizes they’re stopped in the middle of the street, people parting around them with a few odd glances.
Thank Silence they’re speaking mirané and wearing masks.
Iriset takes his other hand, having dropped her cup somewhere. “Then why did you take that pill? Why did you break this, here, when we only have… each other?”
“I told you. Rotten foundation. That marriage knot was wound through with so many falsehoods and lies. Besides, you don’t want to be married to me.
You want to become the greatest apostate that ever existed.
You told me so. And I’m going to find Maimeri Sarenpet and do my best to end the Apostate Age. Even if I can’t go home.”
She grimaces and starts walking again. But stops, spins back. “Why shouldn’t I want the things I want, Lyric? Why shouldn’t I crave freedom and encouragement, to be loved for who I am? Endless design! What if I don’t want to unravel the Moon-Eater? To end this? I shouldn’t be expected to.”
Lyric nods slowly. “You’re right.”
Iriset frowns, clearly not expecting agreement.
“So stay with me. It’s not so bad here, is it?
Bring Aharté here. I don’t hate Silence, Lyric.
Balance is good, and some kind of compromise could launch the design technology in amazing directions—the kind of quad designs we’re used to in Silence, but without the draconic, rigid, impossible rules.
What if we did that together? Change things here, build a different empire in our image. ”
“That’s ambitious,” he murmurs.
She laughs, and that gentian part of him that always seems to turn to her like she’s the sun expands again.
“It’s not any more ambitious than making the history we learned come to be.
Unmaking a god, resetting the design structure of an entire city?
I’m actually impressed you think you can bring about the rise of Aharté all by yourself. ”
“With Maimeri Sarenpet,” he says, taking her hand again to walk with her. They need to find a bonfire. He adds, feeling almost shy, “With my Holy Syr.”
Iriset eyes him incredulously. “It’s difficult to believe you’ll take up the role of Aharté herself.”
“The story we know is just a story, isn’t it? That’s history. To think otherwise feels like the real sacrilege.” Lyric can’t tell her he’s begun to question Aharté’s very existence.