Chapter 18 #2
Her eye looks back at her, almost alive in the flickering firelight.
Before it totally dies—the tissues, the strings dangling off it (veins, she thinks), and smaller, more important threads of life and sensation (she doesn’t know what time she has)—Iriset leans over Lyric and thumbs open the tatter of his left eyelid.
She plops her eye in, and that she hears: a squelch, a slick sound of wet flesh, pulpy chewy tongue spit-swallowing sound, and oh boy is that going to haunt her later.
Iriset sucks in a breath, her pulse throbbing in her raw, empty eye socket.
Blood drips from her onto Lyric, blood becoming blood becoming blood, a smear within an ocean of blood on his cheek.
The framework has his bones where they belong, snapped into place, but they’re still fractured, little pieces missing, and Iriset can’t wait, even though the skin isn’t quite right along the lower rim of the socket.
She holds the tip of clay over her eye in his skull and sends pings of ecstatic down through the orb, followed by humming flow, and in her mind’s eye, it merges with him, it knows what to do, the nerves and connections, warm and soothing as lips on a neck, fingers brushing a spine, there there, be yourself, be good, and Iriset hates how imprecise it feels, the metaphor, the imagining of it, but that’s what the numen said again and again: A sunderer has an instinct, and Iriset knows how it all works.
She gets design on a fundamental level, and always has.
Just keep practicing, the numen said. Let it all come apart and put it back together.
Like the unraveling and redesign every morning in the Moon-Eater’s Temple, that fifth force, Iriset knows it, she trusts it—she must.
This is faith in herself, in her instinctual knowledge and her education brought together.
She puts a hand on his forehead, because it helps her not only feel, but know she’s working.
It’s working. Iriset pricks tiny instructions into his hot skin, flow here, falling there, make connections, bring it all together, stitch, stitch, ecstatic, and keep breathing that rising force, Lyric, keep breathing.
She is so hot, her face aflame, still throbbing, weird, raw, and the world is flatter in her single eye.
But her eye is inside him. Part of Iriset mé Isidor inside him, like her fingers in his mouth, like the design seed that blossomed into a marriage knot—Lyric’s inner design wants hers, knows hers, and love is design, love is the sundering force.
Iriset plucks her own hair, and with the tip of the clay shard and quick, charging ecstatic pants, she begins to sew.
By the time she’s found, Iriset has gently wrapped Lyric’s face with strips of cloth from her outer robe. Not too much pressure, while his bones knit and heal, but only to protect. She’s done all she can, and maybe he’ll see through her eye one day soon.
He might not want it.
She’ll have to make sure she’s not around when he finds out.
After releasing the buttons holding her lashes open, she reverses one to gently stick her eyelid closed.
It feels odd. She wishes she had a patch, and supposes she’ll be able to find one or make one with relative ease.
Iriset leans back against half a wall, pulls Lyric’s head into her lap, and cups his face.
She breathes in an eight-count, slow and steady.
Her own face hurts, an ache that fluctuates between acute and tender.
“What have you done?”
Iriset looks up, then winces instantly because it hurts to move her wound, but all the muscles still obey and try to move with her working right eye. Clapping a hand over the itchy, bloody mess, she peers up at the numen.
It’s standing several feet away, too tall and salamander white, with hair moving in every direction like tentacles. Not a drop of blood or a scrape, no dirt. The drifting ashes float past it in eddies without touching. “Numen?” she murmurs. “How did you find me?”
“We’ve been looking for hours. The attack was just past midnight. It’s nearly dawn.”
That explains why there’s no screaming anymore, why the fires are dim—oh, and Iriset can see spotlights now, lanterns moving as people assess damage and hunt up survivors. “Attack?”
“Something triggered old spider mines,” says the Moon-Eater, pushing past the numen to kneel before Iriset. “My Lyric Aharté,” he says, sounding gutted. The Moon-Eater is mirané brown and bland tonight, except for thick, long, black hair in that same high tail falling past his waist.
“He’s alive,” she whispers.
The numen kneels beside the Moon-Eater but grabs Iriset’s chin, lifting it. It pokes at the edges of her wound and she winces. “It’s disgusting what you do for him,” the numen says.
“Ah, Never,” murmurs the Moon-Eater, hands hovering over Lyric’s face and chest. “The heart wants what the heart wants.”
The numen sneers. “This is a mess. Did you dig it out with your fingers?”
“Wire forceps and this broken clay,” she says, knowing she should be offended, but instead she’s drifting.
She feels like her whole being is merely a tiny spot in her chest. A singular core, like a candle flame, housing all that she is, while the rest of her cavernous body is just an empty room. Iriset giggles.
“You are mad,” the Moon-Eater says, voice hushed with awe. Then he bursts into laughter.
The numen’s body shifts, slithering under and around her, picking her up effortlessly. The Moon-Eater lifts Lyric. “You should hold together to your own things,” the numen grumbles. “Your eye!”
“His now. Ours?” she murmurs.
Distantly, she can tell the Moon-Eater is still laughing, but softly, fondly.
It’s strange to think of him as being fond of anything.
She remembers feeling him in the Moon-Eater’s Temple with Amaranth, the first time she witnessed the Mistress’s ritual and felt the expansion of forces, the splitting, the wave of power.
She feels it now, and her whole body is shaking with fine tremors, and maybe she’ll just shake apart, turn into resonance and forces, spread and spread until she’s nothing but whispering flow-falling-rising-ecstatic pops.
“Iriset!” the numen snaps. “Hold yourself together. We’ll get you settled again.”
“Rivermouth,” she manages, falling away. “Lyric wants to go to Rivermouth.”