Page 51 of The Shape of Monsters
“Too busy with apostasy.” He is actually trying here, but it doesn’t come out that way.
Iriset huffs in annoyance and sits up. That certainly hadn’t been his goal, but Lyric supposes it was inevitable.
They get dressed, briefly arguing who will sacrifice a loincloth to the cleanup effort. Iriset wins when she reminds him she has more layers, and then says sourly, “When I’m better at sundering, I could probably just vanish all this into the atmosphere.”
Lyric winces, thinking tenderly of the nights in their marriage suite after lovemaking when they’d slip down to the bathing room. Sometimes he’d carry her, and they’d warm up in the water, distracted from washing by touches, kisses, and the bloom of happiness. “Iriset,” he starts quietly.
“Let’s go back,” Iriset says, as if reading his mind. “That bathtub is pretty decent.”
“Could you… I am guessing you could never have been pregnant.” Lyric hasn’t thought of it, not really, not in depth, since he realized his wife was not his wife.
“No, I could have been,” she says even more softly. “But I wasn’t. And now, no, not even a little bit.”
Lyric is grateful she spares him the details. He looks out toward the east… southeast. The probable direction of Rivermouth precinct with Irsu River’s fort. Where Rivermouth will be in four hundred years, at least. He’ll have to ask someone on the street, or several someones. After the midnight fires. He’s going to throw this skull siren mask into the flames even though Iriset made it for him.
Iriset makes a sound of frustration. “You want to see all of this?”
“I need to.”
She slowly reaches for his hand. He lets her, and twines their fingers together. Squeezes. Then he bends over to pick up the defense necklace. “Here,” he says, leaning in to latch it around her neck.
“What is it?” She frowns, plucking at the wire nest with its thumbprint clay. “It’s ugly.”
“Amado the Reconciler gave it to me. For defense.”
“You should keep it, then.”
“Do you know how to defend yourself?” He’s being purposefully disingenuous: He can defend with sword, club, knife, hands, but he can’t shield against percussive design or explosions.
Iriset starts to snap her answer, but stops and looks away.
Suddenly they’re both thinking about his mother. His mother, who tried more than once to kill Iriset, who succeeded in murdering the woman who was supposed to be his wife.
Iriset lets the necklace lie against her crossed robes. Lyric says, “Stay with me until the bonfires?”
“Do you have money?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She grins menacingly. “I want to taste all the different wines in this city of apostasy.”
They walk hand in hand through the wild streets, some of which are worse than before. Others have softened with the approach of midnight. Lyric buys Iriset whatever she wants, because it turns out Amado gave him a significant amount of funding. She drinks, mostly spitting them out into the roots of a tree, but describes the liquors and wines to him. Sometimes he takes a sip—once, when she says it smells like sage and tastes like persimmons, he leans in and captures some from her lips.
Iriset looks at him carefully then, searching, and he shrugs. Lyric tries to walk away, but she presses him back against the side wall of the tavern courtyard, demanding. He says, “You told me I don’t know who I am here, and I don’t know who you are, and so even though everything we were before had grown from rotten foundations, that’s gone. You—you vibrated it away with your grip on the forces. I felt that. I know what you did. So now it could be different. New.”
She peers at him, like her gaze can peel back his skin and flesh. “You’re such a philosopher, Lyric,” she says like it’s a joke between them. “It was just sex magic.”
That actually surprises a laugh out of him.
Then Iriset starts kissing Lyric sweetly whenever she takes a drink, and huddles close so that he puts his arm around her instead of knocking shoulders while they hold hands. “I’m going to interrogate you now,” she says grandly while they meander along a canal with orange flowering trees whose weeping branches bend toward the water.
“What do you want?” she asks, and he somehow didn’t expect that.
Lyric shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“What doyouwant?” He turns the tables on her.
