Page 107 of The Mercy Makers
She turns, and before she’s gone more than a few paces, to her surprise Shahd slips her hand into Iriset’s, squeezes, and leads her away.
“What does that mean?” Shahd asks later, while she combs oil into the ends of Iriset’s stolen hair. “Even the red moon fell from the sky?”
“What do you think?” Iriset returns the question, eyes closed, doing her best to luxuriate in the lavender flower steam from her too-hot bath. The skin of her fingers and toes is wrinkled.
“Anyone can fall?”
“That’s right.” With her eyes once more drifting shut, Iriset says, “All design degrades over time if it isn’t supported. The water clock must be refilled, the arc of rising adjusted to the season’s wind or the shift of the earth due to yearly floods. Ribbons sewn up from ice damage. Everything in this world must be maintained. And everything dies. It’s possible the old red moon’s fix in the sky simply eroded over time thanks to a bad maintenance plan.” Then Iriset smiles rather slyly, glad to feel such things again after the day she’s had. “But it’s more efficient if someone makes it happen.”
The lie of love
Singix, do you think you might be pregnant?” Lyric asks her with exceeding gentleness two mornings later.
They’re curled in bed, before dawn, and his hand splays over her naked belly. Iriset was entirely asleep until he said her stolen name, and groggily hums a meaningless tune, snuggling her bottom back against him and turning her face down to kiss the arm that pillows her head. The words he spoke do not sink in.
He says them again. “Singix, do you think you might be pregnant?”
Iriset squeezes her eyes closed and groans as cutely as possible. As if she doesn’t have enough problems. She can’t believe her husband is listening to rumors. Or so confident in his own virility. Though, they do have an awful lot of sex. Keeping him to herself for those last Days of Mercy really stirred up the hopes and expectations of his court. But none of them know Iriset can’t get pregnant.
Lyric slides his hand from her belly up between her breasts, skimming his palm over a nipple, until he carefully cups her throat. She shivers as he strokes her jaw with his thumb, pressinggently until she looks around at him. When she does, he lowers his lashes bashfully. “We have been married for three quads and you have not bled.”
“Oh,” she whispers. Right. She wouldn’t.
“I…” Lyric licks his lips. “I would be glad.”
It’s Iriset’s turn to lower her eyes as warmth spreads from his hand throughout her face and down her neck. “I… My cycle is irregular, and sometimes change can delay such things. Change and stress.”
“You have been under tremendous stress, for which I am so sorry.”
She tilts her chin to kiss him. “Stop apologizing. I will speak with your sister and perhaps consult a doctor, and… maybe.”
“I mentioned the possibility to my mother. If you would like to also speak with her.”
Iriset thanks him for the consideration, and doesn’t say she’s fairly sure she’d rather eat the scales off a lattice snake than discuss pregnancy with Diaa of Moonshadow.
She kisses Lyric on his jaw, then lingers at his neck. She breathes deeply of his early-morning sex-sweat-pillow smell. Six years ago she used a specially designed force-web to essentially hold her reproductive system in stasis unless the surgery is reversed. It took weeks of planning and exploration, and then hours to physically accomplish. Iriset is uncertain she could loosen the threads without being discovered performing human architecture even if she wanted to. But she’s equally uncertain it would fool anyone if she fakes a period. Amaranth shuts herself up in the Moon-Eater’s Temple for the two most intense days of her cycle, but Iriset doesn’t know enough about Ceres traditions or cultural taboos to know what Singix would do. She can hardlyask.
She only needs to distract him, and everyone apparently, for thirteen more days.
Amaranth has invited Iriset to join her for the morning at the Moon-Eater’s Temple, in a cheeky version of an apology—“I know you enjoyed yourself when you felt him come,” she said with a bold wink. Because Iriset is Singix, she has no excuse not to be persuaded.
While Her Glory awakens her god, Iriset waits with Sidoné behind the partition screen. The lattice in the screen is designed with a constant labyrinthine pattern to allow the gaze to trace it slowly, carefully, for meditation, and Iriset sends her eyes along the path. She parts her lips to taste the rollicking tangle of forces with which Amaranth engages.
The force-knot Amaranth draws pulls tighter and tighter and Iriset perches on her stool, sinking inside herself to feel the weave of her inner design, of the marriage knot and its strictures. She prods at them, plucking at them with pops of breath and ecstatic snaps. If Lyric notices through the knot, she has an excellent excuse in Amaranth’s worship. When the ripples of the Moon-Eater’s release hit her gently, she follows them through her inner design, from the marriage knot to the quietly nauseated feeling in her guts, wondering if a version of this ritual could undo the connections linking her inner design to Lyric’s. Unbind the knot without his consent. The Moon-Eater’s awakening shakes her in her core, like a deep resonance. Like auditory, emotional friction, ecstatic pulled out like taffy. Not coincidentally, perhaps, Iriset used resonance to affix the design web over her uterus all those years ago, meshing the frequencies of eight crystal coins placed around her belly. It’s not unlike the unraveling, which also involves…
Iriset sits up straight.
The web is gone from her reproductive system.
There’s nothing woven through her inner design except the marriage knot.
Panic drains Iriset of heat and sense, and she just sits there for a moment in a nauseating twist of dual realizations: first that if the resonance of the design eggs coming together was so powerful as to undo her own excellent inner work as a mereside effect, then resonancemustbe the key to undoing their marriage bond without consent or death; second, she might actually be pregnant.
“Do you believe in the Moon-Eater?” Sidoné whispers.
Startled from her thinking, Iriset nearly falls off the stool. Sidoné grasps her wrist to steady her and Iriset manages to say, “What’s to believe in, or not? There is something here.”
The body-twin presses her lips together and nods, as if reassured. “I want you out of this, too. The entire situation is a bad one.”
