Chapter 38
A deadline in more ways than one
The math holds, to Iriset’s deep chagrin.
There are already sixteen places in the heart of the array she’s building that are intensely susceptible to the blowback.
Because of the work the people stationed at each of those nodes will be doing to activate the array when Iriset unravels the Moon-Eater, it’s easy to express that sixteen into sixty-four.
If they can find sixty-four people who are skilled enough at design to activate their node in exacting order and with exact timing, who are willing to transform into the ruling class of the future.
Unless it all goes wrong and they’re shredded to tiny pieces.
It makes Iriset nauseated.
She supposes she could give the mirané princes puke-yellow skin instead of moon-red, or try to give them all a useless sixth finger or something to make herself feel a little better.
But honestly this whole thing doesn’t just make her sick, it scares her.
She hasn’t transformed a living creature.
She can make bone into quartz, yes, rain into clouds, yes, but there’s sympathy between the minerals and no danger of killing anything.
She did some healing design in the Rising Smoke precinct disaster, yes, but it was individual and messy, and during the setting of the metadesign, Iriset will be extremely busy.
Besides that, can she really trust that she understands what the miran even are to make them correctly?
They’re balanced, they never get sick, their bodies resist anything that isn’t part of the Holy Design.
Iriset doesn’t know how orgasms work, which she’s spent a lot of time thinking about, much less why brains dream when they’re sleeping or how food turns into fuel and shit.
Iriset cannot make intricate arrays for every different part of a mirané circulatory system or to understand why lungs are made of a different kind of material than stomachs.
Where does the acid come from? Why do people even breathe at all?
She’s worked herself up into several panicky tizzies in the half-quad since she passed out after patching boo-boos in Rising Smoke.
There are so many tomes and scrolls and diagrams the apostates these days have written and put together that detail plenty about human architecture.
But Iriset is on the clock! There’s too much to know so she can’t know any of it.
She has to use her instincts. She has to figure out how to find the faith in herself to just do it. Want to believe.
And maybe find a fool to experiment on.
Iriset is thinking about all these things, lying in the sun in the garden just outside her little room near Eliri’s suite, when a scream startles her, and she sits up like an agitated cat.
It sounded like a griffon. She’s not heard of any in the city these days.
Could they have been recently designed? she wonders, getting up and jogging toward the front gates.
Did the line of Vertex Seals know their royal pets were designed by apostates?
Just like that little bobcat kitten her father gave her, and she designed it ill-fitting wings.
The thought brings a smile to her face, though the memory has never made her happy before.
As if part of her knew what to expect, Iriset is still smiling as she reaches the wide fortress gates, where Lyric speaks with Rivermouth guards, convincing them to allow in a small wagon carrying at least three griffons.
One of them is a fully grown queen, the others younger, thinner, maybe adolescents. It’s the queen who screams.
Iriset slows down, taking Lyric in: He looks good, better than when he left.
His hair is shaggy, but thick and wavy around his face.
He looks too skinny, but he stands strong.
She starts picking up her pace again, needing to be near enough to see if the freckles came back or not—she guesses not, but still, there’s hope.
He turns to her and sees her. Ah, red moon, that eye! Her eye, warm and sunny in his mirané face. Iriset laughs, and bites her lip because lately she is much more of a crier than she ever has been before, and she doesn’t want to cry on him. It’s only been a season and a half.
But Lyric comes to meet her, and Iriset flings herself into his arms with all her strength.
Lyric catches her, braces against the impact with a soft oof.
Iriset wraps her arms around his head, too tight, one hand digging into his thatch of hair, the other strangling him probably.
Her nose behind his ear, ah, he smells so different.
Smoke and dirt and sweat, no trace of bergamot or sage, and Iriset feels like it’s been years, not quads.
Years and years. She squeezes with all her might.
Her whole body shudders, and it’s possible this is the first time she truly hasn’t been afraid of being stabbed in the neck since it happened.
Iriset didn’t even realize she needed him so much after dying (again).
No wonder she’s been dreaming herself into Singix.
Lyric holds her around her ribs, lifting her off her feet. “I’ve got you,” he says, slightly surprised but so soothing.
“Lyric,” she murmurs. She can’t help it, she wraps her legs around one of his, too, not quite shameless enough to wrap them around his waist in front of all these people.
He laughs tenderly and hugs her, doesn’t try to put her down.
A griffon screams again and she startles. She looks up, saying, “Where did you find them?”
Lyric half turns, but Iriset sees a mirané masculine-forward person standing uncomfortably next to the wagon, one hand inside the mouth of one of the young griffons—just sitting there, resting ahz long mirané-brown fingers against the beast’s tongue while its jaw hangs open and its teeth gleam and it stares at Iriset with round golden-red eyes. The miran is staring at her, too.
Her fingers jerk hard into Lyric’s shoulder and scalp as she notices the miran’s familiar face.
Az is young, her age maybe, thin bone structure and long straight black hair with mirané-brown highlights that catch the sun like blood.
Iriset blinks away the visceral memory of blood choking her, sticking her hair to her neck, and then she recognizes ahz.
“Hehet?” she says, soft and incredulous.
“I thought so, too,” Lyric says. He loosens his hold and Iriset reluctantly stands on her own feet. He tugs her closer to the miran who looks like az could be Hehet méra Davith’s kid. In mirané Lyric says, “Iriset, this is Maimeri, the Moon-Eater’s child. Maimeri, this is Iriset mé Isidor.”
“Little Rabbit,” Iriset says, unsure what to feel.
“Iriset,” Maimeri says back, basically glaring at her grip on Lyric. Clearly the little bunny knows what to feel.
Her own sharp humor breaks herself out of her helpless state, and she releases Lyric. She looks around to take in the whole situation. “Well, you’re back with what you went for,” she says to Lyric. “And just in time, too.”
They release the griffons as Irsu River arrives with the head-of-household attendant, and there’s a bit of chaos as everything is settled.
Iriset trails alongside Lyric at first, while they go to the quarters he used previously and are still available to him—the rock garden will suit the griffons, Maimeri says, and seems to get vocal acknowledgment from the queen that she’ll stay in the garden or yard so long as she and her kits are brought some fresh meat.
The queen doesn’t speak, exactly, but she makes a few clicking sounds and gestures almost like a regal nod.
Iriset doesn’t remember the griffons of her time being so communicative.
(Maybe people stopped talking to them first.)
She stops herself as Lyric goes to drop his few things in his room and ask for a bath.
Maimeri walks directly into the same room as if it’s going to be where az stays, too.
Iriset is cranky about that and wants to take a bath with Lyric just to prove something.
But she catches bemusement on Lyric’s face and stops herself.
She says she’ll see them at the dinner River is arranging to welcome Lyric and the Moon-Eater’s long-lost child back to the crater city.
Feeling disconcerted, Iriset returns to her own guest room and settles herself with breathing exercises.
Or tries to. She can’t stop fidgeting, frowning, wondering what Lyric is doing.
She needs to check his eye. She needs to check his eye and—she doesn’t know.
It’s been quads and Iriset feels deeply affected and changed by what the Moon-Eater and numen have done to her, by her own discoveries, nearly as much as she changed while she was married to him.
She does magic now. She would have died, should have, and it happened so suddenly Iriset never saw it coming.
With a little huff of frustration, Iriset undoes her knots, tears a comb through her hair, and reknots it. Then she slams out of her room and heads for the small king’s suite at the heart of the fortress.
The informal dining room already smells of spices and fresh bread, and River reclines on ans preferred divan in elegant blue robes.
Lyric stands beside the small king, as if he just arrived, hair wet and in very loose layered robes and skirt of starkly contrasting black and light pink.
Maimeri is clean, too, in tighter trousers and a long shirt, quietly studying Roc Aliel, seated opposite the young miran across the short table.
They turn to her when she enters. Lyric’s expression lightens subtly, and River says, “Eliri has been sent for, but waiting is unnecessary. Sit, please.”