Page 86 of The Shape of Monsters
“Beti,” Garnet says, getting to his feet as well.
The griffon queen drops forward to all her paws, bright gaze on him as she stalks forward. Her head is level with Garnet’s navel, but he remembers when she towered over him. He hadn’t been allowed to bring Lyric here when they were small—it wasn’t until Lyric was the Vertex Seal that his command countermanded the rules his father set when the son of the griffon-keeper was named Lyric’s body-twin.
Garnet holds his hand out, fingers gently curled in not quite a fist. Beti stares and casually licks her rough tongue at Garnet’s fingers. With a sliding glance toward him, she turns away, hips and shoulders shifting under all that lovely, sleek fur as the queen saunters off.
In Beti’s wake Cinnamon moves closer to Garnet again, but both their attentions are pulled to the scuffle of two fledglings bounding along the gravel path from the direction of the birthing lair. It’s Beti’s newest kits, one with so many black markings she might as well be all shadow, except the primary feathers just now growing in are rusty-red mirané, as if the tips were dipped in blood. The other is mottled like her queen mother.
Garnet doesn’t smile at them, it isn’t his style, and besides, baring teeth at griffons isn’t a good idea even when they’re only knee-height.
Both of them hop around him, growling playfully at each other and ruffling their feathers, wings spread. They want to prove to him which is more dominant, because they haven’t seen much of Garnet yet.
“It’s Shadow,” his mother Bež calls, and Garnet crouches so they’re more easily able to make eye contact. He breathes carefully, and when Wind’s growl transforms into ecstatic purring, he reaches out and easily knocks her off her gangly feet. She stays on her back, wiggling, stretching. Her soft belly fur is spotted like wind scattering multicolored leaves, and Garnet gives in to the trap. Just as his fingerbrushes against the pale belly fur, he snaps his arm back: The fledgling grabs at him with her curved claws, growling, and flops onto her side. Shadow, dominant, vibrates and preens. Garnet pushes up his sleeve to reveal several tiny scars hooking the back of his wrist and shows Shadow. “See? I know your baby tricks.”
“You’re here late,” Garnet’s mother says, arriving with the scent of raw meat.
Garnet stands again, and faces her.
Bež mé Harth, the royal griffon-keeper, is past fifty, her brow scarred with thin darker brown lines that pull up her scalp, ruining her hairline. She wears a lightweight binding jacket and trousers tucked into thick boots, no robe, nothing that flows away from her body. Leather gloves are tucked into her belt, along with a small force-knife and an inactive force-ribbon. Bež isn’t frowning, but a scar across her lips makes it seem as though she always is. “Why are you alone?”
He shakes his head, unable to tell her. Nobody knows Lyric disappeared, died, vaporized, something, except himself, Amaranth, Anis, Raia mér Omorose, and five Seal guards Garnet personally swore to secrecy. Nobodycanknow.
Bež steps closer, takes his face in both roughened hands. Since he was seven years old he’s spent very little time with his mother, all of it dedicated to Lyric’s body and self and family. Because of this, when they do have time together, both Garnet and Bež learned to make the most of it. No avoiding truths, no small talk, no hedging. “You loved Diaa of Moonshadow like a mother,” Bež says.
Garnet catches his breath. He didn’t think that was it, but it can’t be irrelevant. Except for the hours Garnet trained in weapons and defense and poison identification and combat-design, he spent every moment with Lyric before he was the Vertex Seal and after. When Diaa gave Lyric advice or gifts, she gave them to Garnet, too. When Diaa pressed cool kisses to Lyric’s bruises, she ruffled Garnet’s hair,and when she listened to Lyric reciteWord of Aharté, she smeared soothing balms onto Garnet’s sore knuckles and aching shoulders. It’s Diaa’s memorial service today, and her son, Garnet’sbrother, his best friend, is missing, but Garnet isn’t able to mourn or act the proper way for a body-twin because nobody can know.
Nobody can know Garnet failed. He did not protect Lyric, he isn’t the one vanished or dead, and that means he failed. Garnet is here, caught in the machinations of the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, grieving a second mother, grieving a sister by law, grieving betrayal and lies, and all he can think of is a quad previous when he, Lyric, Anis, Amaranth, and Singix spent the night laughing and making fun in the big alliraptor bed. His family, hisfamily, and he’d let Anis weave their fingers together after Singix and Lyric fell asleep, and Amaranth sprawled across Garnet’s and Anis’s laps, her big hips weighing his legs down and her ribs, her breasts curled against Anis’s stomach. Anis and Garnet had petted her and leaned into each other, and spent the most quiet moments of the night awake and alive and together.
Even then, in those precious moments, Anis and Amaranth had known. Singix was a lie, the worst lie imaginable, and of course Amaranth kept that secret, of course she would. It’s not forgivable but it’s understandable. Anis, though—Garnet trusted Anis, loved her, knew her, even though she’d been late, hadn’t been the first body-twin Amaranth brought into their family. Garnet and Anis were supposed to be the same, and Anis didn’t tell him there was danger slipping into Lyric’s cavernous heart.
“Oh, baby,” Bež murmurs, pulling his face down so his forehead knocks against hers. That’s when Garnet realizes a tear has tipped over his waterline, and he’s shaking just a little.
“And Singix,” he whispers, to give his mother more of the truth, as much as he can afford. He aches to tell her, wants to betray everything because it isn’t like Amaranth and Anis didn’t betray him first.Lyric is gone, maybe dead, I didn’t keep him safe, I let Lyric’s worst enemy into our lives, and worst, Mom, worst, I liked her. She was good for him, for us, I liked who he was becoming.
Maybe that’s the worst betrayal of all.
Garnet deserves to die.
Bež’s thumbs rub under his eyes over and over, slow and steady. “You’ll get through this, my love. With your brother.”
He nods, the bone of his forehead rolling hard against hers, almost painful. His mother won’t mind, she knows the use of pain, she’s the griffon-keeper, and scarred from so much of their specific love.
“Remember, Garnet, I gave you a broken-hearted name to remember what I loved, not to memorialize suffering.”
“I know, Mom,” Garnet murmurs, and he does. That is what Lyric would say, too, if he were here.
The queen griffon, Beti, sweeps overhead suddenly, her great shadow darkening the air around them. Garnet pulls back to look up at her. She swoops down again, close enough to flip her tail against his palm before snapping her wings out. They carry her in a wide swoop toward the pinnacle of the cliff platform. He sees his mother smile, eyes crinkling. “Go do your work, Garnet,” she says.
Garnet nods. He lifts a hand to Beti as she lands with all four paws extended, claws digging into the adobe. Beti cries out, a bone-jarring, high-pitched roar that echoes throughout the menagerie garden.
As Garnet climbs the stairs to the suite of the Vertex Seal, he thinks about the body-twin who belonged to Esmail méra Niyah, His Glory before Lyric.
Garnet is the one who stayed with the body-twin for the final moments of his life. After Esmail His Glory died, the body-twindied, too. His name was Orish méra Elenri, and he looked like Esmail, walked like him, glowered and sneered and very occasionally laughed like him. The way body-twins traditionally did.
“Does it seem old-fashioned and barbaric to you, young one?” Orish asked Garnet that evening, seven years ago.
“No,” Garnet said, feeling no obligation or desire to elaborate. His relationship with his role as body-twin was his own to know. The feelings of this failure were unimportant. Garnet has rarely been arrogant, but in that moment he disregarded any possibility of learning or growth at the death of his predecessor. He remembers thinking that it would never come to this for him, but if it did, he would not be so dramatic. He would not drink poison; he would stab his own force-blade into his neck. It should be violent; it should be his own hand, the blade that failed to keep Lyric alive.
Nobody was making Orish do this. The mirané princes did find it old-fashioned and barbaric. Lyric himself had told Orish it was unnecessary. That there were many more ways to serve the empire. Suicide is not something Aharté approves. Only she creates life, only she dictates death as part of her Holy Design.
