Page 56 of The Mercy Makers
“That is so sad, Your Glory.”
“Yes.”
“If you assume the worst in other people, how can you choose to do good yourself?”
He lets go his breath in a soft stream, a release of tension.
Iriset pushes. “Does Aharté’s Holy Design merely maintain this world as it is, as if this is the best we can be, or are we supposed to strive for more? To change ourselves and the world in the direction of peace and thriving?”
“That is the thinking that made the Moon-Eater’s apostates destroy their bodies with experimenting and mangled the threads of Aharté’s web. Pushing too far, too fast—with so much ambition in their sights they forgot whatalreadyis good in humanity.”
“And so we must not even try, because it has gone badly before, because it so easily could again? Never even try, for fear of failure.”
Lyric smiles at her. “Catastrophic failure. The end of civilization.”
She smiles back, only a little. “At least your name would be remembered, if you ended the empire in a blaze of glory.”
“I don’t seek to be remembered. I am no Safiyah. I only seek to hold as many of my people safe as possible. To pass on wisdom to my children and give them a future. A home.”
“No ambition in a Vertex Seal!” Iriset pretends at shock, that smile still pinning up the corners of her mouth.
“Or is it overly ambitious to think I can keep anyone safe?” he replies.
“Hmm.”
They fall into quiet again. Iriset notices that Lyric’s design shifts gently within the confines of balance. He’s maintained it without her, through this strange conversation.
“I like you, Iriset mé Isidor,” the last Vertex Seal says gently. “Take the Glorious Vow, remain in our service. I will give you a title: the Royal Arguer. In honoring you, I will honor your father’s design and make certain you are allowed to mourn him in accordance with Aharté’s Silence.”
Pain grips her: a terrible mingling of gladness, grief, anger, and desire.
“I would rather he live,” she whispers.
Lyric stands, taking Safiyah’s book with him. Iriset shoots to her feet, ending up too near him. She still feels the warmth of his rising force. He’s not so much taller than her.
“That I will not do,” he says, specific in his words.Will, notcan.
A brutal distinction.
The cult does turn over their leadership within Moonshadow, and their enclave is spared decimation, though the town itself is burned to the hard earth. Those who fight are captured and sent to work camps, their children given to families who practice perfect Silence. So the cycle of rebellion and assimilation continues.
The woman whose pregnancy began it all lives, and so does her baby. On the first Day of Mercy, her name is called by Lyric méra Esmail His Glory, whose name will be well remembered, indeed, for being the last Vertex Seal, and she is granted pardon.
Girls’ night
Twice a year in the summer, the path of the sun takes it directly behind the pink-silver of the moon. The sky does not go dark, but the quality of light shifts into twilit purple, an eerie, shadeless existence that fades colors into equality.
If you’ve never seen an eclipse, then can you even imagine the strange twist of shadows that occurs as the sun slips behind the moon? The shadow of a leaf, a pointed oval quite exactly the shape of its actual form, will tighten and bend into a crescent: the shape of the distant sun. Dagger-edged cuts of light and shadow, crescent on crescent on crescent.
In Moonshadow, the hour of eclipse is marked with an elaborate ritual of balance honoring the four forces.
The Vertex Seal leads the rites himself from the Heavenly Courtyard. The ritual weaves color, breathing exercises, a variety of singing prayers, and rhythmic drumming and soothing physicality designed to bring every participant from Lyric himself to the edge of the audience into energetic alignment. Lyric leads with a simple strength, it is said, calm and certain of his purpose—of his position as the highest point in the arc of society.
Iriset sleeps through it.
She was so alive and awake with hurt and rage following her conversation with Lyric in the Color Can Be Loud Garden, she went back to her room and drew his face furiously, again and again.
Iriset drew the angle of his jaw, the sparkling brown-red of his irises, the fold at the outer edges of his uptilted eyes, and those uneven black freckles. So what if only Aharté can design asymmetrical perfection? So what if Iriset has said again and again architects rely on symmetry? She is Silk, a prodigy and genius, and if anyone can design a perfect craftmask of the most important man in the empire, it’s her.
