Page 89 of The Mercy Makers
Around her the Seal guards shift closer, into a combat-design pattern, but she can see Bittor’s face, see those cat-eyes locked over her shoulder. He’s focused on the Vertex Seal. His hand curls around something small. A crystal blade jutting between his thumb and index knuckle—she knows it. She made it. It will slice through the force-shield.
Bittor flings it with perfect aim, and Iriset sidesteps in front of Lyric. She snaps her fingers and charges the thick Ceres chest piece with ecstatic-flow shock. Lyric grabs her as the tiny dart slices through the stage’s energy shield, hits her chest piece, and falls away.
It would have cut Lyric to the heart. Her ears are ringing as she stares at Bittor with Lyric’s hands gripping her arms. She didn’t eventhink.
Bittor skids to a halt, sinking—motion is what keeps the force-soles active, in this experimental form. Iriset stares at him as his twisted expression plummets to shock, and she mouths, “Bittor.”
It’s a soft, wounded word, his name on the perfectly symmetrical lips of Singix Es Sun. Bittor pauses, staring.
He hesitates with another dart in hand.
The Seal guards grab him.
They drag him down below the royal stage, but Iriset can’t see. She’s jerked away in the arms of her husband, who holds her too tightly. “Singix,” Lyric says, sounding like he’s begging. “What are you doing?”
“I—” Iriset twists her neck to look back for Bittor. She sees flashes of force-blades, hears the roaring of the crowd. “I couldn’t…” She closes her eyes and leans her cheek into Lyric’s hand before she says something incriminating in her shock. Iriset was not made for emergencies. She should be kept in a locked room with design tools and left alone.She saved him.
Garnet says to the Seal guards, “Take him to the executionplatform.” There’s scuffling and commands snapped out, and Iriset tries to tug free, to look for Bittor, but Lyric grabs her face. He’s wearing a plain mirané-red death mask with sharp, squared cheeks and a hundred tiny holes as a screen over his eyes, but he tears it off and studies her like he’s never seen her. For a moment Iriset almost hopes he knows who he’s staring at. Iriset mé Isidor, daughter of the Little Cat.
“Singix,” Amaranth says, crowding them. “You’re mad. You shouldn’t have, even with Iriset mé Isidor’s design armor.”
Iriset resents Amaranth trying to help her, but even more so her own name behind it, used as a layered threat. She shakes her head, holding Lyric’s red-flecked eyes. “I had to,” she murmurs.
Lyric melts toward her and touches his forehead to hers. “It was reckless to protect me like that,” he says for her alone.
“I had to,” she repeats. She touches his jaw tenderly. Her hand is shaking. Bittor didn’t try to rescue the Little Cat, he tried toassassinate the Vertex Seal. Why?
“Unbelievable,” Amaranth says.
Both Iriset and Lyric slide the Moon-Eater’s Mistress different looks and she backs away, lips pressed in a disapproving line.
Lyric steps to the fore of the platform. A guard offers him a small coin, and Lyric presses it to the hollow of his throat. His voice is amplified across the quartz yards. “Tell me his name,” he commands.
The Seal guards are shoving Bittor up onto the execution pavilion, and the crowd is almost silent, trapped in place by the danger and drama. There are no more fireworks. Any accomplices Bittor had from the Little Cat’s court have faded back and slipped away. The griffon queen grips her trellis, her wings flared to shade her children. All her feathers fluff and tighten, up and down in agitation.
The answer to Lyric’s command comes from a priest, standing upon the execution pavilion. “Bittor méra Tesmose, of the Saltbath precinct.” The name rings across the sky.
The guards force Bittor down. Iriset chokes a protest and tucks her mouth against Lyric’s bare shoulder. She peers over Lyric at the prisoners.
Bittor’s face is aimed right back at the royal platform. At her.
Behind him, the Little Cat is staring, too.
Force-blades angle against Bittor’s throat, pinning him on his knees. He’s going to die, not unraveled but decapitated like an animal for eating. He came with fireworks and heretical words.Silk is Syr. Yesterday rebellion dropped from the moon, but today…
Iriset turns sharply to her husband and clutches his arm. “Mercy,” she whispers.
Surprise lights Lyric’s eyes and touches his fingers to her cheek. Iriset hardly knows what shows in her false-dark-brown gaze, but she is abjectly desperate. She caused Bittor to falter. He made a choice to aim for the Vertex Seal instead of the Little Cat, and she stopped him.
“The name has already been selected,” Lyric murmurs. “This young man chose to die this way, at his master’s side.”
“Show him you are a better master. If he dies now, everything he wrote in the sky stands.” Iriset is careful to modulate her words as best she can. “We have martyrs in Ceres. Do you have them here?”
Lyric studies her for what seems an age, again, but can only have been a handful of paired, rapid breaths. He glances past her, at Amaranth, then at one or two other people gathered around them. Iriset can’t even imagine what they answer with their expressions; none speak.
Finally Lyric takes his death mask back from Garnet andreplaces it. He touches the coin to his throat. “Mercy is given to Bittor méra Tesmose, by the fair will of Singix Es Sun. Release him, pardoned of his crimes against the empire.”
Though she doesn’t know if she should, Iriset grabs his shoulder and lifts herself up to kiss his masked cheek before everyone.
