Chapter 25 #3
“Your power is immense here, because of who you are, because of what you can do,” Lyric says. “Because the Moon-Eater is a monster, not a leader.”
Iriset shoves him. “Leaders can be monsters, too, Lyric Your Glory, and monsters leaders.”
“Yes, both,” Lyric murmurs. “But here I don’t have power like I used to. I can’t hurt people in the same ways. I can only try to build what I know is good.” He says it so simply.
“But you want to find Maimeri and see the miran created and start your terrible empire, like you understand nothing of what I’ve told you!”
“No.” Lyric turns fully toward her on the bench, one knee bent, his shin against her knee.
“I want to find Maimeri because I think az is like me: mirané and lost. I want to tell people about balance, about Aharté’s Silence, because it’s so loud here.
And I do want the miran born, because I want to be born.
” He laughs a little. “Don’t I get to want to be born?
And for my sister to be born?” Then Lyric catches her gaze with his, mirané brown and sandglass, and his eyes burn hotter than ever because of it.
“But mostly I want to go home because I don’t deserve to be at peace.
I would love to live my life here in the past like the priest I always wanted to be, gardening, meditating, teaching, maybe even loving my wife.
But I don’t deserve to. I shouldn’t get to do that without earning it.
Without work. I can’t do that at the start of the Holy Empire.
I have to go home because the end is the only place I can fix anything.
The only time I can change what needs to change, even if that means destroying it. ”
“Oh,” Iriset says rather stupidly. He sounds so sure, so harsh, and also as vulnerable as if she had her hand inside his chest. She wants to touch him, wrap her hand around his throat maybe, to feel his words vibrate on her palm, his ecstatic pulse under her thumb.
“But I can only start by looking for Maimeri.” Lyric finally frees her by glancing away. “Az must be here, or everything I know about the end of the Apostate Age is meaningless.”
She touches his knees. “You’ll find ahz.”
They sit there quietly, their breathing unmatched, no knot between them, but Iriset feels calmer about it, perhaps a little suspended from herself.
She really needs to think about what he said.
It wasn’t even an argument, really, but for the first time since she’s known him, Iriset thinks maybe she lost.
Lyric takes a breath, clearly intending to speak, but stops.
“What is it?” she asks, sliding her hands back into her own lap. Wind sings high above them but doesn’t touch them, and there must be a design apparatus to keep the wind from disturbing this sandy garden.
He hesitates, shakes his head a little, and Iriset can’t help being disappointed, except there are things she won’t tell him, too.
Finally, Lyric says, in a totally different tone, “Will you show me how to make balanced force-anchors?”
Iriset grabs the chance to be the expert.
She explains he only needs four matching buttons of some kind.
Stones, gems, shells, ceramic coins, anything that is as similar in nature as possible, or better yet cut from the same thing.
With a stylus, does he have one of those, good, just draw the sigils—here Iriset takes his hand and draws on his palm each of the four core force-sigils.
“When you draw them, imbue them with threads of the force itself. Now practice.” Iriset holds out her own palm.
It only takes a few tries before Iriset is satisfied with his work: He’s familiar with the sigils after all.
“What are you making?”
“A meditation tool, and perhaps something for my pillow while I’m traveling to help me sleep. And I suspect if I can manage a balanced force-net, Maimeri will appreciate it, too.”
“Already working to seduce the Moon-Eater’s child to your Silent ways?” she teases.
“Do you think it will work?” Lyric clearly tries to smirk.
It wouldn’t fit on any iteration of his face, though the starkness of his shaved head and the bolder lines of his broad cheeks and nose and scarred forehead make it worse than with the softer hair and freckles of the Vertex Seal she married.
Iriset laughs. Lyric smiles back at her, genuinely.
Instead of leaving her happy, the shared smile triggers a little waterfall of grief. She looks down. “Ah, Lyric, you might be gone for quads. Seasons.” Forever, she thinks.
“Come with me.”
“Camping?” Iriset wrinkles her face. “I have grown too used to the great luxuries of various palaces in the past few quads.”
He smiles again, with a little head shake.
“Elaborate plumbing—those inlaid bathtubs! Silk sheets, feasts delivered, libraries and workshops, new clothes.” She nudges her knees against his. “I’m spoiled, and happy to be.”
“I’m glad you’re happy. It makes you radiant,” he says, and there’s no way for Iriset to disbelieve him. It makes her want to cry. It makes her want to bury him in the sand here, make him stay. It makes her want to push him away as hard as possible.
“Are you leaving immediately?” she asks almost breathlessly.
“In the morning, to get ahead of the cold if I can.”
Iriset touches his hand. “Stay with me tonight.”
“I’m not supposed to do anything vigorous for another quad or so.”
Iriset frowns. “What? But you can walk halfway across the continent?”
He purses his lips. “Iriset—”
“Oh!” She gets it, and pinches his thigh. He jerks back and she says, “That sounds like trash advice to me. Besides, I think I can manage something slow and gentle.”
Lyric looks at her in the too-bright light, something indescribable on his face. Maybe fondness, maybe incredulity, maybe just sweetness or he’s making fun of her a little. “I should go.”
A sick feeling in her stomach makes her look away. The pink sand glitters like little diamonds. “Even if you don’t make it to the sea, you should write things down for me.”
“What type of things?”
“I don’t know. Building descriptions, maybe, or what the people look like. How does design work outside the city? There aren’t steeples regulating everything, so it’s probably all chaos like it is here.”
“All right.”
“And, whatever strikes you.”
He’s quiet for long enough Iriset has to look at him. Lyric’s steady sun-and-rock gaze is both strange and familiar, and Iriset feels that old urge to distract him with a kiss. Change the subject even though there isn’t one.
“While I’m gone,” Lyric says gently, “I want you to be careful.”
Standing, Iriset rolls her eyes. “Careful is boring,” she says, not because she believes it—she actually is very careful about a lot of things.
“You have the ear of the powerful here, the most powerful,” he says.
“And I think very mischievous and fickle. You changed me with words in my ear and lips on my skin. But I am predictable, aren’t I?
The result of generations of Holy Silence, brutal teachings.
The Moon-Eater…” Lyric sighs softly. “I know what you’re like when you believe in something, even willing to argue against an enemy with all the power over you. ”
“The Moon-Eater isn’t my enemy.”
“Good. I don’t want this eye to be the only part of you left in the world.”
The soft, earnest words ping through her like ecstatic-charged dandelion puffs. Teasing, soft, full of wishes. She looks up and there it is, her eye, in Lyric’s face.
Iriset grabs that face in both hands, suddenly cursed with intense dread. “Lyric méra Esmail, don’t you die.”
Something in his face makes it seem like he won’t promise, and that dread builds in Iriset, because what could possibly keep him from this sort of normal, easy promise?
People say this kind of thing all the time.
But before she can dig her nails in or make demands, he smiles. “I won’t die while I’m away from you.”
Iriset kisses him, because she can, because a part of her is inside him forever.
Lyric allows it, opening to her but barely responding, and it hurts because Iriset can’t help but feel like it’s that eye, that part of her inside him, that holds this distance between them.
Apostasy, always the same barrier dividing priest and liar, husband and wife, Vertex Seal and Silk.
Even if Lyric says he understands, says it’s holy.
Holiness can be a monster, too.