Page 15 of The Mercy Makers
The familiarity the handmaidens share with one another strikes Iriset, for always they’re touching: to redirect conversation, to comfort, to flirt. Iriset is bad at joining in, forcing herself to reach out and brush her hand to Anis’s elbow or pat Ziyan when she’s sad to miss a canceled concert. It never becomes second nature to her. Even with her grandparents Iriset was unlikely to initiate casual contact. (And oh merciful Silence, her grandparents! Could she get a message to them?) Never one to shy away from critical self-analysis, Iriset suspects her distaste for casual intimacy has to do with how carefully she worked to hold Silk and Iriset separate, despite Silk being her more true self.
Iriset can hardly bring herself to touch Amaranth at all, given the strength of her attraction, though the handmaidens do so, frequently, causing Iriset to wonder if they’re all her lovers. TheMoon-Eater’s Mistress is not supposed to take pleasure outside of the god’s temple, but who would deny Amaranth? And nothing in the mirané laws forbid women from each other. It’s congress between men and women that is closely regulated, for a man and a woman might weave the pattern for a child in their lust. Giving life belongs only to Aharté and should not be done without her approval.
(Once Iriset said to Bittor, “If Aharté did not approve of a man’s desire outside of her marriage knot, she’d not have designed your unmarried parts to harden so nicely for me.” “Mypartsdo not know the difference between married and not married, or between masculine- and feminine-forward,” he responded, exasperated. Iriset thought he liked her academic seduction. “I want to know all there is to know about design, and you will let me study you,” she said the first time. Bittor laughed at that, and distracted her so well she forgot to catalog the patterns of force his body wove as he came. Oh well, they had to try again.)
Her Glory encourages her handmaidens to educate themselves, and the options are plenty: lectures on government, philosophy, history, and religion offered by various tutors through the palace libraries, attended mostly by the children of miran and palace workers, though some soldiers join, too; one might simply drift into the library shelves and read any book or scroll or comic pamphlet in the unrestricted sections of the libraries; physical arts are practiced in the broad gymnasium, in groups separated by gender as the miran prefer; and four small galleries provide different sorts of fine arts both for viewing and pursuit.
The Little Cat gave Iriset a basic education, but once she displayed her proficiency in design and disinterest in, well, everything else, Isidor narrowed her tutors to a variety of well-bribed architects. The options available to Iriset now are nearly overwhelming.
So Iriset chooses based on that which she thinks will suit her cause best. First of all she doesn’t wish to be separate from Her Glory too often; not only does that defeat the purpose of befriending Amaranth, but it would be suspicious to seem reluctant. So when Amaranth daily dances in the gymnasium with silk ropes, spinning and stretching, so does Iriset. When Amaranth joins a lecture on the conquest of Saria, so does Iriset. At a point every day the handmaidens are dismissed while Amaranth attends the Hall of Princes for Seal business, or if she has private luncheons with various mirané ladies or goes into the city for an afternoon garden party with a small king. During those hours, Iriset finds a regular art class in the Gallery of Shades, for if Iriset practices drawing and sculpture, it’s not suspicious for her to have vellum, charcoal, and even graphite knives in her chamber. The crab pick she stole needs to be shattered into a finer point if she’s to use it on the jade cuff, and for that she’ll need some clay to fashion a finger handle at the end or risk slicing her skin. Where better to acquire it than an art class?
When she doesn’t have a class but can’t be with Amaranth, Iriset spends time in her chamber, ostensibly napping, but in truth carefully peeling back the palace architecture one strand at a time in order to read the security. With no more than the crab pick and a thread pulled from the hem of a silk robe, she sets an alarm across the hall beyond her door to alert her if a servant comes so she’ll have just enough time to hide her business.
It takes a square of days to feel she’s got a strong grasp of the basic security, and she sets off alone to explore between lectures and dinner with Her Glory, in order to mentally map everything.
The palace complex is designed like a garden. In the center the palace itself consists of eight bright domes lifting higher and higher, surrounded by curving petal-wings and sleek spiral towerslike it’s a living, crawling bramble of flowering lowland cacti. Four force-steeples surround it in exactly the cardinal directions, their shapes fitting the force associated, and direct threads of power connect them to the city’s Great Steeples, giving Moonshadow its anchoring spokes. The Moon-Eater’s Temple is a dark blue, squat dome between the Flow and Falling Steeples, and the Silent Chapel a gleaming white four-point star of columns between the Ecstatic and Rising Steeples. Around the palace, outer corridors slip toward and around various amphitheaters and courtyards, tiled in every shade of blue and green, white and pink, giving them names such as the Blue Between Sea and Sky Courtyard or the Winter Sunset Courtyard. Fountains trickle in most corners, between rows of pillars that snake with gold-inlaid script describing the Silence and Aharté’s promises for design and the spiraling patterns of the world. Clear, quiet pools mark meditation gardens tucked in every corner of free space.
The tall, airy gazebos are capped with honeycomb arches so perfectly made, Iriset finds herself standing with her face tilted worshipfully up until her neck aches. Inner walls burst with geometric mosaics, and outer walls of stucco are painted like the skies and oceans, or encrusted with quartz shards—or opals or saltrock especially suited to Design.
Most archways mark her jade bracelet as she passes beneath them, though Iriset suspects the other handmaidens can’t feel it. The effect is nearly instantaneous, and Iriset confuses two palace servants by walking in and out of one doorway again and again to see if any delay accumulates.
At first, Iriset doesn’t visit many of the inner chambers, where the miran live, nor the men’s petal hall. She doesn’t see the Hall of Princes where the Vertex Seal rules from a chair settled over a square of blood-red moon rock.
But in the Color Can Be Loud Garden, Iriset discovers flowers that turn their delicate faces to the strongest thread of design, and to her that is more beautiful and awful than any famous throne or the words carved there by the hand of a god.
There are three people besides Amaranth and her women who Iriset sees every day: The first is Shahd, a sixteen-year-old mirané girl who works in Her Glory’s women’s petal. On the fourth day of Iriset’s life at the palace, she asks Shahd’s name and recognizes it as an old Sarian god name. It surprises her, because most assimilated tribes and families, especially those as prominent as Sarians, refuse to name their children with given names from outside of Silence.
Shahd is clearly mirané, and nothing but her name suggests otherwise. Iriset stares so long, searching for bone markers or stance or the shape of an ear or how her eyes fold at the corners, that Shahd not only lowers her gaze, but kneels upon the floor in submission.
“Oh,” Iriset says, falling to her knees as well. She takes Shahd’s hands—as dry as her own, though ministrations with oils here in the women’s hall are slowly recovering Iriset’s skin from her prison days—and tries to smile. “I mean no offense, Shahd. I only know your name is a marker of the holy pilgrimage site at the center of Saria’s old city, and did not expect it in such a perfect miran.” Then Iriset adds, in a whisper of an old Sarian war dialect she grew up with in the Saltbath precinct, that sometimes is an undermarket code: “We live and we die.”
The girl nods, and her fingers curl harder around Iriset’s. She whispers the rest of the message, “We weave vital threads to their knots.”
Iriset immediately makes her first request of Amaranth, that Shahd be assigned to her permanently. Her Glory agrees with an air of disinterest so bland it must be a facade. So Iriset waits a few days before giving Shahd a note to hide in one of the Little Cat’s city drops, in hopes that someone is checking them. She asks if Shahd will visit her grandparents, and when the girl hesitates, Iriset asks simply that she look. Iriset only needs to know they’re all right.
The second person is the Architect of the Seal. Every morning, she shows up in Amaranth’s rooms to paint Amaranth’s and Sidoné’s faces in matching geometry. She brings, along with her box of paint and styli and brushes, entertaining gossip. As she paints, she teases apart the tangles of mirané relationships, and updates Amaranth on any changes to the current politics among the design schools—who jockeys for which position, and where any rumors have arisen about human architecture, or non-Silent cults.
From distant observation only, Iriset finds Menna to be extremely competent, if unimaginative in her design. Such makes sense for an architect in her high position, especially under a Vertex Seal known for his strict faith. Iriset expects no help will come from that arena. Especially as Menna treats Iriset with cool distance, as if she smells ever so slightly of something distasteful.
It’s a strange sensation to allow someone who clearly dislikes her near enough to paint thin lines of complex patterns against Iriset’s cheek or forehead. Iriset offers to paint herself, and does it so flawlessly in a mirror, Anis (the elegant one) and Nielle (the ugly one) applaud. Menna sniffs, eyeing Iriset’s work. The Architect of the Seal says, “It’s too bad,” with a little shrug of indifference.
“Too bad I’m the daughter of the Little Cat?” Iriset asks with every thread of gentleness she can dredge up.
But Menna scoffs and gathers her things to leave without further comment.
Amaranth tugs at Sidoné’s wrist and the two of them go with Anis to dress Her Glory for the day. Nielle leans toward Iriset and pops a slice of cactus pear into Iriset’s surprised mouth. “It’s nothing personal,” the handmaiden says. “She doesn’t like Istof, either.”
Iriset crunches the pear and thinks it through. Honestly, it takes her longer than it should to get it: “Because we’re not miran?” she says incredulously.
“Several of the princes on the mirané council feel the same way.”
“Anarchitectshould be beyond such things.”
“Some will always be miran before they’re anything else,” Nielle says, as if that justifies anything at all.
Nielle is also the one who explains to Iriset about Garnet—the third person Iriset sees every day.
His full name is, rather dramatically, The Garnet That Blooms in the Broken Heart. Every son born to mirané parents the year of his birth was given an elaborate line of prayer for a name, and Garnet’s is such a sad one because his father died just beforehand, and his mother, Bež, was truly heartbroken. But her son had his father’s will and his father’s way of making Bež laugh like none other but her griffons could do. Garnet was raised in a nest of griffons, nursed while his mother cradled him in one arm and flung chunks of meat with the other. Critics suggested Bež unnecessarily risked her son’s life, but she ignored them except to say it was a testament to her relationship with the queens of the sky that her son survived.
