Page 92 of The Mercy Makers
Silk is Syr, and hiding in the heart of the empire. The heart of the Vertex Seal.
How can Aharté matter when Iriset is what and where and who she is?
The laws of Silence are already broken, so now Iriset will make them shatter.
Someone sits on the bed, and her inner design squeezes as threads of the marriage knot twine pleasantly. Lyric has returned. Anxiety, grief, anger, lust spike in her guts, but Iriset quickly smooths the turmoil into longing and sorrow. Singix’s feelings. She can’t afford to show her truth now, knotted with marriage to a sensitive, priest-trained Vertex Seal.
He says gently, “I brought water for you. I can feel the disturbed nature of your heart.” If it had been a metaphor, it might have been romantic.
He helps her sit, and Iriset keeps her gaze on his mirané-red fingers curled around the little stone cup. She takes it. Lyric combs those fingers through her long, slippery hair. Singix’s hair, that barely tangles, that probably couldn’t hold the knotting style Iriset learned from her mother and grandfather. Iriset drinks and the morning light grows.
Lyric sets the cup aside and asks, “What’s wrong?”
Iriset has no idea what lie to tell, and so she says, “I was thinking about never seeing my father again.” It’s a safe excuse, as Singix’s father is far away. Iriset knows few details of their relationship, only that Singix’s mother died when Singix was a child, and her father rules alone with a council of avatars andbrokered this alliance with the Vertex Seal—or rather, with his sister. And Singix never expected to see him again.
Lyric needs no further explanation for her upset on the day after the execution of Isidor the Little Cat; he, too, holds the poor, dead Iriset mé Isidor near the surface of his mind. Besides, that rebel tried to assassinate him, and this new wife of his stood in the way. It was a rough afternoon for everyone. He climbs onto the bed behind Iriset as if she’s shielding him again, and wraps his arms around her, pulling her between his legs. His naked body folds around her, warm and smooth, and Iriset leans back the way her body wants to. Lyric gathers her hair and pushes it over one shoulder, baring her neck. With his lips against her pulse, he says, “When my father died, it took me a long time to find all the places grief hid.” His sigh trembles along her collarbone. “I’ve always practiced meditation, walking the labyrinth at the Silent Chapel, but after he died, I did it again and again, making myself think about him, as if I could compel the grief to squeeze itself all out quickly and never bother me again.”
Iriset would like to find a way to do the same. “Did it work?” she whispers, only slightly distracted by his thighs bracketing her hips and Singix’s hair falling softly against her breasts. When she looks at herself, at his skin against hers, she can’t help but wonder how those crater-red forearms would complement her own—Iriset’s—desert-peach Osahar skin, with its flushing and fine dark body hairs, the little line of them from her navel to groin. Singix’s skin is so pale, and her body hairs barely curled, so soft against Iriset’s tongue that night, and she remembers a dark pink birthmark almost like a love bite on Singix’s knee that she didn’t have time to give herself. Thinking of it, Iriset skims her fingers against the knob at Lyric’s wrist, turning herself on and still so very sad.
“No,” Lyric murmurs with humor. Iriset barely remembers what she asked. “But it did help me… put the grief somewhere. I gave it to Aharté, to Silence. Sometimes it’s hard to set foot in the chapel now, if I’m having a bad day. But most of the time, the labyrinth is a reminder that grief can… gleam. A pearl of grief, small and simple and built very carefully. Set into a little earring I can wear if I like so I know where to find it, and carry it with me most of the time, but it’s not overwhelming anymore.”
Iriset laughs softly at his overdrawn metaphor. She knows exactly where to put her grief. “Do we have to be anywhere today?”
“There are places we could go, but nowhere we must until the eclipse,” he says.
Iriset takes one of his arms that is wrapped around her waist and tugs until she has his hand. She lowers it to her belly and flattens it there, sliding his hand lower as she parts her thighs. Lyric inhales sharply and Iriset pushes his fingers past her labia. She lets her head fall back as Lyric cups his palm against her and touches a finger to the edge of her hole. Iriset raises an arm to grasp at his face and hair, arching her back to press her bottom against his inner thigh and groin, seeking the soft bulge of his cock. She hooks her leg around his knee, spreading herself against him, a wide-open offering. Lyric accepts, playing his fingers against her as Iriset hums encouragingly, pulling his thick hair and gripping his thigh with her other hand. He sucks at her neck while he dips his fingers inside again and again, drawing back out to paint wetness around in long strokes. Their bodies thrust slowly together in time with their breathing, and as he grows hard, the little movements of his tip against her spine make her gasp again and again, until she stretches her neck to kiss him open-mouthed and just as wet.
It doesn’t take very long for Iriset to come in a long, rolling ripple, and Lyric doesn’t stop touching her, gently pressing her clitoris until it’s too much and she squirms up onto her knees. Without looking back at him, Iriset tips forward, panting with ecstatic after-bursts. She lowers to her elbows and lets her head fall. Her hair slides messily over her back. “Lyric,” she whispers. She needs him to take from her, take more and more so she can excuse her desire for him, excuse the way she feels despite who he is and what he’s done—what he’s refused to do. (Who she really is and what she hasn’t done—has been too afraid to do.)
He moves, grasping her ass and spreading her cheeks to see. Iriset knows her whole body is clenching and she wiggles impatiently. Lyric gets up, hands on her waist, and reaches down around her belly to touch and position her, and she squeaks when his fingers skim oversensitive parts. With a little laugh, he gets a hold of himself and pushes inside, all at once. Iriset’s whole body jars with it, and she sighs in relief, at his rising force crashing into her. Lyric moves, and she braces herself languidly, so glad to be in rhythm like this, the push and pull, her almost-but-not-quite-smoothed-out bursts of ecstatic force fluttering upward like bubbles in ecstatic wine. Every push and every pull ties the threads of their design seeds tighter, and her nipples brush the sheets and Lyric’s mouth is at the nape of her neck, lips open, breathing hard. It’s not really a kiss, but that doesn’t matter.
Thanks to the marriage knot, she feels his orgasm gathering, feels it with a strange, wonderful peace, a flush up her spine and heat in her cheeks. By the time Lyric comes, she’s forgetting to be sad or angry or ambitious, forgetting to worry about Bittor’s force-graffiti or her father’s commands or murder or Amaranth’s schemes or how she’ll break all their hearts. Those areproblems for later. Choices for later. Now, with her inner design melting into Lyric’s, the only thing she wants to make is a little mercy for herself.
She’ll pay for that, too, one day.
During the remaining few Days of Mercy, there’s no regular schedule for the Vertex Seal or his wife, no meetings or lectures, no visits into the city—none of the things Lyric and Amaranth and their people normally do. It’s a holiday, after all, and the hottest time of the year. The only constant is the noontime eclipse ritual that Lyric always participates in. Iriset goes at his side.
The rest of the time, she fucks him. Her husband is very willing, and she can’t help remembering the afternoon when Amaranth rolled her eyes and said Lyric’s body is a temple. Oh, it is, and dedicated to worshipping the sensation of her tongue tracing lines of rising force along the underside of his cock, to the tickle-pop of ecstatic when he sucks at her ribs or hip bones, the flow flow flow of building orgasms, the falling to each other’s core as they kiss until their lips are numb and their ears ringing.
After four days Iriset barely remembers what her own mouth is supposed to taste like. In between, she asks him questions about his philosophies, under cover of a wife eager to understand her new home and her new husband. (She needs to know, after all, the intricacies of what he cares about, if she’s going to ruin him.)
Lyric tentatively shares with her the basic understanding of Aharté he was taught, that the purpose of the Holy Design is balance, and when someday true balance is achieved, there willbe neither conflict nor suffering because all creatures will be at peace in the living Silence Aharté promised them. He admits that some days he wishes he were just a priest, responsible only for his own knot in the pattern, and coaxing those around him into a more perfect alignment. Not responsible for an entire empire.
He gives her copies ofWord of AhartéandThe Writings of the Holy Syrhe personally transcribed and bound when he was fourteen, and shyly offers to read them with her. FirstWritings, he says, because he finds the Holy Syr to be more explicit and meandering in her thoughts than the plain commands of Aharté. “You like Aharté’s wife more than Aharté?” she teases. Lyric smiles the softest smile she’s ever seen, and insists he only appreciates the argumentative nature of the Holy Syr’s philosophies.
Iriset asks if he ever feels hints of a true living Silence. Lyric closes his eyes and whispers to her of perfect moments when the wind or sun, or a trilling skull siren, traps his attention and he’s aware of his entire body, his pulse and his thoughts, aware of voices around him, when he feels the pattern of what happened just before, and feels what will happen next. They are never urgent moments, but simple epiphanies of pure understanding. That, he thinks, is living Silence: understanding without urgency, deep experience without desire in any direction.
“Without desire?” she murmurs.
His smile tilts a bit wry. “Without desire forchange, without ambition, or…” He touches her lips, stroking the sensitive skin, and trails his finger along her chin to her throat. “I have felt living Silence when we are together, when—when our designs are so completely unified and I feel pleasure, satisfaction, comfort, and… things I cannot even express. It feels asthough everything in the world is focused on me—on us—but not because we matter more than everything else. It is becauseeverythingabsolutely matters. Each knot in the pattern is vital to the pattern, eachisthe focus, which is an idea almost beyond our comprehension, but not beyond Aharté.”
It is going to be so easy for Silk to take this faith away from him. Everything does matter, every piece of the design, and Iriset is an expert. Nothing about architecture is beyond her comprehension.
Iriset says, “Your sister feels that with the Moon-Eater.”
Before Lyric can protest, Iriset continues, “She does—she calls it a moment of unity, not peace. Not Silence. But it is the same thing, I think.”
Lyric kisses her again, and her heart pops ecstatically, her body arches with languid flow, she reaches for him and his design with a rise of yearning, and he sinks into her, falling, falling, falling.
