Page 72 of The Mercy Makers
Ecstatic force tingles inside her, as it nearly always does when she’s touched with desire. Iriset chooses not to fight it, but let the tenderness comfort her, let this kiss mark her. It very well could be the last kiss she’ll have from someone who knows her name, for possibly the rest of her extremely short life.
As if hearing her thoughts, Amaranth smiles against Iriset’s mouth before withdrawing. “I wanted to taste one thing before my brother,” Amaranth confesses.
Iriset remembers the smell of bathwater and her similar betraying thoughts. What a place this is, to make love into such a game.
The note she sends back to Amaranth with Anis mé Ario reads:
Your eyes, Amakis, your eyes and the clouds in the sky. You will see me again, if you look.
It’s part of a Cloud King song her father used to recite, and her mother’s name, and a promise she thinks only the Little Cat will understand.
The cleansing and purification rituals for marriage are grueling for someone with nothing at all to hide. Iriset has plenty. Though a regular person could relax and meditate, Iriset is required,over nearly twenty-four entire hours, to constantly spool out the priests’ designs and thin them enough to fool them into reading what she needs them to read of her true inner design without ruining either her craftmask or her crawling design.
It is exhausting.
It isthrilling.
There is no more space for fear or regret, anger or hope. For grief. There is only what is essential.
Iriset has never known herself as completely as she does in those hours. She bathes, she kneels, she repeats mirané chants meant to encourage the designs of the Silent priests, she does not sleep or waver. She puts on the appearance of devotion, and she bends it to her own use.
Just after dawn, when the Silent priest who accompanied her through the afternoon and night draws the tiny egg from Iriset’s tongue, Iriset feels like a god herself.
The priest cups the egg in her mirané-brown palm and smiles. “Very good, Princess. We are finished.”
Iriset sags, sweat tingling the small of her back. She’s in a dark womb-like room in the Silent Chapel, beneath the ground and carved with force application into the glassy earth. The old red moon, when it fell, caused such heat and pressure upon impact that it fused the earth into glass in some places. This tiny chapel is made of it. An ablution pool in the shape of a four-point star in the center of the chapel is filled with black water. It smells salty, almost like blood.
“What do I do now?” she murmurs.
“It is just past dawn, child, and there are people waiting for you, that they may prepare your body for the noontime ritual. But never fear.” The priest smiles, her dark eyes crinkling. “Relax, drink, eat, and feel your body. Feel the balanceand maintain it if you can. But if nerves prevail, do your deep breathing and remember this space. The echo of—” She snaps. The sound snaps back three times. “The echo of Aharté.”
The priest gives her a small box of sandglass, only the size of her thumbnail. The egg is inside. Iriset curls her fingers around it and presses it to her chest.
On shaky legs she leaves the small room, climbing narrow stairs cut directly into the earth. She holds on to the egg, a little awed by it. So tiny and yet so full of the essence of who she is! It’s perfect, she thinks, giddy, until she remembers her father’s words.Nothing is perfect.
Still. Whatever else, nobody can ever top this game.
As mirané attendants from Amaranth undress her and bathe her in sweet-smelling water and scrub her with rare sugars, Iriset relaxes. They rub her scalp with oil, never finding the seam of her craftmask. They slide fingers through her hair, pulling it straight, caressing her. Two of the girls sing pretty songs, teasing rounds about marriage and laughter. Iriset smiles and hums along sometimes, making the girls laugh and pinch her gently—encouragingly. The other girls ready her wedding shift and the mask she’ll wear.
She’s fed the airiest cheese and wafers flavored with mountain sage, and they share candied mirané fennel seeds—a wedding treat, because of the resemblance to the egg. Many foods at the feast later will have fennel seed baked, ground, and boiled in. There will be garlands of feathery fennel leaves decorating the low tables, and a sharp fennel-brewed liquor that numbs the tongue. (Centuries ago, this plant was brought to the desert from one of the conquered lands and it thrived. In the red earth of the mirané desert, the fennel flowered red, and so it was renamed. They do so like to name things after themselves.)
When Iriset has eaten enough not to grow lightheaded, she stands in a warm breeze as they dry her and rub creamy lotions into her skin. She’s not painted with any geometry or design, for she’s to meet her husband as simply as possible. Her hair is combed and left loose, hanging in heavy black layers past her waist. The wedding shift hangs from her shoulders, shapelessly, skimming her breasts and belly, bottom and knees, all the way to brush the tops of her feet.
The mirané handmaidens collar her neck with a silk necklace, knotted in tiny patterns of white, black, sea green, and sky blue. A cradle is woven into it, and there they place the sandglass box holding her egg.
No rings nor jewels, no lip paint nor eyeliner. Nothing in her hair but a crown of bright fennel flowers that look like fireworks. For a beauty like Singix, none of that is necessary anyway. (Iriset hopes the princess would forgive her.)
The wedding mask is a thin ceramic oval in plain mirané brown. Where it lies over her eyes, a hundred tiny, nearly invisible holes allow her a hazy vision. Its ties are skillfully laced through her hair, and with a single correct tug, the mask will easily fall away.
Iriset is made ready.
Her hands are cold.
Through with around toward
Those who attend will say that the wedding of the last Vertex Seal was magnificent.
They’ll say the air itself hung breathlessly as Lyric méra Esmail and Singix of the Beautiful Twilight began their marriage walk exactly as the sun slipped behind the moon. The light shimmered bluish and pinkish, cooling the heat of the summer, and the two walked toward each other to the beat of a force-drum. Everyone lining their path breathed to the same rhythm.
