Page 21 of The Mercy Makers
The next afternoon, when the sun shines directly through her lattice window, Iriset uses the bright light to examine the jade bracelet. The braid of flow and falling she curls into a circle and sets the cuff into it: The design shivers into delicate stasis. It shouldn’t alert anyone that she’s meddling like a null wire might.
Once the seal is open, Iriset gently pushes at the elegant layers of threaded architecture to find the knots and braids that work the power. She feels a twinge like nausea in her wrist, but she continues to figure the best way to temporarily shield or quiet the cuff so the royal architect won’t be able to trace her paths through the palace.
Iriset triggers a thread of rising force and the entire seal chars almost instantly.
To hide her meddling, she puts all the design back together and snaps the cuff in half, making sure to crush the seal. She grits her teeth and splays her hand, then uses the stylus to drive ecstatic force through the skin of her wrist and tug at the flow of her inner design to break capillaries so that a bruise flushes in exactly the shape of the cuff. It should appear she’s hurt herself when she accidentally broke the seal.
Satisfaction curls in her chest as the bruise forms: Such delicate work takes tremendous control.
Menna is not happy with the damage, but within hours has a new seal built for Iriset.
But Iriset knows how to trick it now. She needs only four shards of tourmaline to build a balanced shield cap to mitigate the energy of the seal when she wishes not to be traced by the palace architecture.
There’s no way she can source design-grade tourmaline in an art class, and even Nielle’s mask making wouldn’t be good enough cover to ask for a high-quality force conductor. And once she’s free to move around, she’ll need specialized design supplies to make a craftmask to disguise her father.
That is what brings Iriset, nearly a quad after Amaranth rescued her from prison, to knock at the door of Raia mér Omorose’s office in the branch of the palace reserved for royal architects. (She has forty-five days to save her father.)
“Come in!” Raia calls, voice muffled.
Iriset settles her shoulders and enters, face tilted down inthe appearance of politeness. Because she’s not at Amaranth’s side, she wears a plain attendant’s cloth mask, as Garnet commanded that first afternoon. Behind the orange cloth, her eyes scan everything.
Raia’s office is octagonally shaped in smooth stucco, as many architectural offices are, to better serve balanced design. A worktable is affixed to the southernmost wall, narrow as a shelf, and the rest of the walls are covered by cabinets. No window opens the room to light, though Iriset spies the star-eye cut into the ceiling with its opposite directly below in Raia’s floor.
The designer kneels in the center of the room before a squat square table covered in vellum that curls at each corner but is held down by glass drop weights. A blue cloth mask binds ans brown hair from ans face, though much of it tumbles down ans back along with the tasseled end of the cloth. Raia designs in a long-sleeved robe, full trousers, and slippers. If she were free to be Silk, she’d tell an that ans design would immediately improve by a quarter margin if an learned to sense force resonance with ans lips and spine and the soles of ans feet.
Raia focuses on the diagram before an, using the thickest point of a quad-stylus to pin the corner of three force-lines down. Iriset moves nearer, steps silent in her palace slippers. She cranes to see, and in surprise says, “It’s a triangle.”
The designer glances up. “Oh, it’s you.”
She touches her fingers to her eyelids as an sits back on ans heels. “Raia mér Omorose,” she says politely.
“Iriset mé Isidor.”
Raia set down ans stylus and stands. “I am glad to see you, Iriset. I thought to invite you here, for a conversation, but did not know if you’d be willing. In a few quads, when you’ve settled… I would have.”
“I thank you for the consideration.”
They study each other for a moment.
“You look better,” an finally says. Ans bottom lip is flushed, and Iriset wonders if an chews it as an works.
Clasping her hands before her, which sends ans eyes to the jade cuff, she says, “It was suggested that I ask you how my father was captured. It must have been betrayal, I thought, but that is not what Sidoné mé Dalir claims.”
Raia’s shoulders jerk as an takes a fast breath, then an blows it out loudly and turns away from her. An walks across the tiled floor to one of the cabinets. With a ring on ans left forefinger, an keys open an architectural lock and reaches inside to remove something.
It’s a scrap of silk.
Her silk. So sheer and delicate ans fingers are visible through it. It frays at the diagonal where it must have been carefully cut free of the mask she’d made.
“You recognize it.”
Iriset realizes her lips have parted and she tastes ecstatic force snapping at the tip of her tongue. She closes her mouth and lowers her eyes. “I do.”
“I’ve never seen anything so fine. When it functioned, it must have clung to the face like skin.”
Glancing at an, she sees the admiration in ans face, and recalls the eager arguments an made to her in the prison, wanting her to explain what Silk taught her, wanting to work together. “Why show that to me, when I ask about betrayal.”
“It was not betrayal,” Raia says, sympathy gentling ans excitement. “I thought Silk was making her own material, from raw cocoons, and so we traced the imported worms. That’s how the army-investigators found your father’s tower.”
