Page 91 of The Mercy Makers
The accompanying wink suggests the gift is sexual in nature, and Shahd smiles like a knowing auntie despite her age.
“Thank you.” Iriset accepts it. To be polite, she asks, “In which garden does Her Glory relax this afternoon?”
“She is bathing in the Lapis River Pool during the heat of the day, but will retire to the Color Can Be Loud Garden for visitors. You would be welcome, I am sure.”
Iriset doesn’t want to see Amaranth now. “Thank you,” she says again.
Anis nearly speaks further, but in the end bows respectfully, briefly touching her eyelids, and departs.
Shahd looks at the cloisonné box expectantly, but Iriset cradles it to her chest. “Alone,” she murmurs, and flees back upstairs.
Inside the box is a small gray coin of smoky quartz. When Iriset holds it between her thumb and forefinger, a soothing drag of falling force teases at her fingers.
It’s an echo coin.
Iriset’s heart clenches and she presses it to her lips. This is an echo of her father’s falling force. Not truly a piece of him but a memory of it, a memento she can carry always.
Her Glory fetched it somehow from the priests on the Mercy Pavilion, by bribe or simple request, Iriset has no idea, and now it’s hers.
Sometimes there are no words to express an emotion exactly, and as Iriset holds the coin, she wishes she could understand the complicated glow of admiration and anger, resentment, need, and simple attraction Amaranth mé Esmail Her Glory, the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, causes her to feel.
We pay for what we do
Along time ago the Little Cat waited for Iriset to walk into a room before cutting a man’s throat. Blood splashed her face and she twitched away. It was one of the only times she saw him kill. He didn’t do it often, finding little use for murder unless it served some other scheme or purpose. But he wanted his daughter to see it, to feel it. Isidor asked her if she understood why.
She didn’t, and guessed perhaps it was for shock value or to drive her away from the court, maybe because of the way the forces play together in blood differently when it’s outside the body. Other guesses, she can’t remember. Finally, Isidor told her it was because everyone pays for what they do. Even her, even the Little Cat. Even the Vertex Seal. Maybe even Aharté (if Aharté exists at all).
When Iriset wakes in a world in which her dad is dead, she keeps her eyes shut against the vague morning light, trying not to think as her husband touches her shoulder and rises. She reaches for a pillow to bury her face in.
The Little Cat told his daughter to make him proud. She wonders what his last words for his apostate would have been.
(They would have been the same.)
Her father is dead, and Iriset is not surprised to find she doesn’t want revenge. Not against Lyric, or Amaranth. If she wanted revenge she’d have to include herself as a target. She didn’t save him. She could have, she knows it. But that isn’t what the Little Cat chose the last time she spoke to him.
“Make me proud,” Iriset mouths silently into the pillow. “Do something. Make a mark.”
That’s what he said.
Do something with this position in which you have found yourself. Make a mark, or change something. Anything. The whole empire. If anyone can, you can. I’ve seen what you are capable of doing when you decide.
Make a mark.
When she agreed to this scheme, when she replaced Singix, Iriset did it because Amaranth insisted. She did it for pride, for her own gleeful glory.
The greatest apostasy the Holy Empire has ever seen, and it’s a secret.
Now Iriset is awake, clarified, and she knows what to do. What tochange. She’s already designed an array to distract, simple and easy for a genius like her, tied into the design security of the palace complex.
Now Iriset understands it shouldn’t be an array to distract, but to destroy.
What Iriset wants is to show the Vertex Seal, show everyone, they’re wrong. Their power and beliefs are built on a faulty foundation. Flawed. Ungodly. Silence has a core flaw.
That’s why her father is dead. Why Singix is dead and Irisetis transformed and married to the brutal king of this Silent, boring world. Unable to be what she is.
Silk is Syr, Bittor’s graffiti declared.
That’s good. She can answer that.Bethe flaw.
