Page 29 of The Shape of Monsters
He breathes. No eight-counts, just carefully in, in, in, out, out, out.
By the time Iriset enters on bare feet, he doesn’t feel better, but less like he’s in danger of clawing his throat open. The water laps his collarbone. Iriset turns off the water, and he can hear her gathering things. A cold toe nudges his shoulder, and he leans away from the rim, tilting his head questioningly. But Iriset sits behind him, bare legs to either side of his shoulders. She pulls him back and dips a hand into the water. What little remains in her cupped hand she drizzles onto his hair again and again. It slowly wets, clinging to his neck. He lowers his chin, eyes closed, uncaring if water slips forward into them.
Iriset drops something cool and soft against his crown and starts scratching at his scalp, lathering the thin soap. Lyric smells sugar sage.
“They told me you did this when I was asleep,” Iriset says quietly. “Wouldn’t let them help. Bathed me, fed me, never left.”
Lyric says nothing. He’s trying to let the hot water and gentle lapping and her fingers and the muscles of her inner thighs against his shoulders ground him back in his body so that he can keep it together.
“Thank you,” Iriset says. “You could have gone anywhere. Walked away.”
“Marriage knot,” he whispers.
There’s a pause, even her hands still, and she says, “Right. Well, go ahead and rinse.”
Lyric dunks himself, rubbing fingers through his hair, helping the water do its work. It fills his ears, and he can hear his pulse like a dull roar. Lyric lets his arms drift and sinks down to sit at the bottom of the bath. The heat presses his eyelids, and he opens his mouth to let water in, just enough to sit hot on his tongue.
Unable to breathe, he listens, refuses to fight the buoyancy lifting him off the tiles.
Before he chokes, he expels the water and stands. Water streams down his head and face, his shoulders. The bathwater ripples and splashes his belly.
Iriset watches him, submerged herself now. He wants to grab her and smoosh her against him, squeeze too tight. He wants to get back underwater and maybe stay there even when he needs air. He wants none of this to have happened.
“It’s almost the end,” he manages. “Of the Apostate Age.”
“Oh?” Iriset lifts both brows and nails him with a look he’s rarely seen on her: weariness bordering on displeasure. He’s used to her passion, her reserve, her intelligence and humor, her wit, that spark of excitement when she got to argue even as Singix. He’s used to intensity. But not this. He wonders if this is Silk, if this is the apostate, if this is how she always wanted to look at him. Stupid, foolish Lyric, easily tricked, easily led.
“You’re staring,” Iriset says, displeasure melting into something sadder.
“You are, too.”
“You’re the second-most beautiful person I’ve known,” she says flippantly, but as she glances immediately away, Lyric hears the pain hiding in it, and he suddenly understands who the first was. He remembers Iriset telling him that symmetry makes design easier, when she said his freckles were a gift from Aharté. He wonders if making a mask of Singix’s face waseasier.
With a sigh, Lyric moves through the water to sit on the bench a few lengths from Iriset. “Amado the Reconciler was one of Maimeri Sarenpet’s allies during the transition, it’s been assumed, and definitely in the immediate years following the establishment of the Vertex Seal. I met him today.”
Iriset grimaces. And Lyric presses, “But he didn’t know Maimeri. And he isn’t mirané. He’s written about as if he’s one of the first sixty-four mirané princes, though it’s never explicitly stated.”
Combing her fingers through her hair, Iriset shrugs. “Maybe it’s a different Amado.”
“But called the Reconciler, too? That’s too much coincidence. I know of Irsu River as well, one of the small kings before the transition, and not after.”
“Eliri?”
“The records of the Silent Chapel and mirané wouldn’t include a chimera or an apostate,” he says, though he has always believed it to be an oversight because one cannot learn from erased history.
“Her name is in one of the books in your forbidden library,” Iriset says.
“Also.” Lyric leans forward, pushing ripples toward her. “You know the stories of how the Holy Syr arrived? I know you do because of that graffiti your lover painted. The Holy Syr arrives like a star in the sky, and with her is an alliraptor. You were”—he shies away fromdead—“unconscious, so you didn’t see it, but a chimera alliraptor helped me. Us. In the little crater. Who can do what the Holy Syr did? Unravel the Moon-Eater and set up the first array of the Holy Design of Moonshadow City? Stop the moon in its orbit?”
Lyric knows he’s too impassioned, his words spitting out faster and faster. “Silk is Syr,” he whispers, reaching out underwater to grasp her wrist.
Iriset twists her arm to wrench away. “No,” she says firmly. “I can’t—I can’t catch the fucking moon, Lyric, and even if I could I won’t. I don’t want to. I said that already.”
“You said you don’t want to gohome. But if there’s no Holy Syr, no unraveling, no Seal array, there wouldn’t be a home to go to anyway.”
“If it’s going to happen, it will happen. It happened already,” she says nonchalantly. But there’s an underlying tension. Lyricrecognizesit. He knows her, even when he thinks he couldn’t possibly.
“Will it? It hasn’t already happenednow.” Lyric tries to back down,to sound calm, too. “What if we interrupted it? We can’t make changes so big, Iriset. We can’t make too much of an impression on history.”
