Page 117 of The Mercy Makers
His entire body goes still. He doesn’t even breathe as he stares at their mother. Then he draws a deep breath, holds it, and releases it. Again, and again. After the fourth calming count, the entire room is fixed on him, and he says, “What happened?” in a dangerously quiet voice. “Where is my wife?”
“She’s missing,” answers Huya méra Luméri. “She said she wanted to visit her friend, the wife of—”
“Find her,” Lyric says, then he kneels at Diaa’s shoulder. He places a hand over her eyes, another over his own heart, and murmurs a prayer. When he releases their mother, he purposefully smears the painted flowers against her cheeks. He touches the paint to his own face, smearing it there, too, against his freckles. Tears glint in his lashes when he stands and turns to Amaranth. “Are you all right?”
“Hardly,” she answers humorlessly.
Lyric takes her hand, and then puts their foreheads together.Amaranth wants to let herself crumble, to press against him and weep. It’s been so long since she could be only a little sister. She wants Sidoné and Garnet to appear in the archway, then close her and her brother both up in a tight embrace. The four of them, balanced and together. Unbreakable. They can survive this together; that’s how they survived Esmail’s death.
But of course, their quartet has been harshly divided for quads by the lie Amaranth and Sidoné know. By Iriset herself.
It’s time to tell Lyric. Send the Seal guards and architects away. Tell both him and Garnet. If Iriset has done this, she will not be found. She’ll vanish into Moonshadow City, and someday Lyric will feel their marriage bond snap. They’ll have no other sign of her living or dying. Holy fuck, but Lyric is going to need his family. But he might not let Amaranth help him after this. He might hate her for a while. No, he’ll definitely hate her for a while. That, more than anything, sets her pulse racing. She must maintain her composure! She knows him. She knows how to bring them together in this.
Leaning away from her brother, though it tightens her chest with actual physical pain, she says, “Singix isn’t coming back.”
Lyric’s eyes fall shut and he flattens a hand over his heart. He looks like a corpse himself, mouth tight, eyes bruised and hollow. “She has to.”
“Not if—” Amaranth can’t help it; she stares down at their mother’s body. Oh, it hurts, and she can’t fight the reality for much longer. It’s like monsters slinking nearer and nearer in her peripheral vision. They’ll get her soon. She can’t stop it.
“Not if…” Lyric frowns at her, then at Diaa’s body. “You think Diaa did something to her? You think our mother…”
Amaranth doesn’t know what to say first. Shock chokes her. What if—
What—
Could that be why? Diaa hadn’t discovered Iriset’s secret, but Diaa hadtried to assassinate Singix.
All the pieces kaleidoscope together, slotting where they belong.
Amaranth’s breath shudders out of her.
(She hasn’t known from the beginning, after all.)
“Mother…” Amaranth says, and then hisses her frustration and pain. It makes her teeth cold. “She hated this marriage, but I thought I’d—I’d won her over. I thought… she wouldn’t do this… She…”
“I can find Singix,” Lyric says, and without giving Amaranth a chance for more confession, he shoves out of the study.
As Lyric méra Esmail His Glory is halfway across the Silent precinct on the trail of his runaway wife, the entire palace complex lights up in brilliant design.
Silk is here.
Silk lives.
Bittor
It begins with a slight shudder of rising force in the Color Can Be Loud Garden, as the delay loop Iriset placed expires with an ecstatic spark, releasing the trigger.
Swift on the heels of the shudder is another and another, from the nearest anchors in the Seven Petals Is Not Enough Amphitheater and the menagerie, then a cascade of pop-shivers spreading across the entire palace complex from the Moon-Eater’s Temple to the Silent Chapel.
Most architects notice, though they shrug it off as a hitch someone caused with some sort of update or maybe it has to do with the hundreds of extra force-cuffs. Raia mér Omorose stands in surprise: An knows the security webs very well, and this should not happen. Menna of the Seal also is aware something is wrong, though she’s less able to pinpoint that it’s the security webs.
Of course, everyone with working eyes sees it when the aforementioned security net begins to glow. Normally the net remains invisible without a specific design frame set over various sections to allow for updates and manipulations (framesSilk doesn’t need,scoff scoff, because once she marks a few linchpins, she can mentally construct the rest of the design out).
The net flares silver, in undulating pulses of flow and rising, and the ground beneath the mirané feet sparkles in long threads. People leap onto chairs as if they’ve seen a skink or they perform silly tiptoe dances to get away, or a few crouch to touch—those are either architects or children or fools. Yes, there’s already some screaming from the ones most likely to faint during the next stage.
While everybody reacts to the floor or lawn or gravel as though it’s suddenly turned to lava, little pink sparks of ecstatic travel the threads, moving too fast to catch, and they grow eight legs to wave around and suddenly the lovely silver net is a lovely silver web covered in creepy crawling spiders!
That isn’t the worst, though. Where the threads meet and crisscross, the spider-sparks shoot up bolts of rising force that crash together hundreds of paces in the air, swirling over the dome of the mirané hall. There they form a single massive, elegant mother spider.
