Page 15 of Rhapsody of Ruin
It didn’t matter. The court found a sacrifice without waiting for our eyes to meet.
A girl tripped on the grass. The tray she carried bucked; opal wine spilled like liquid light across the ground. She fell to her knees and froze there, lips moving with apologies no one had time to hear.
The fox-masked lord who loved the word Masking too much snapped his fan. “Disobedience,” he sang. “Shall we teach obedience?”
The chant took like tinder. Mask her. Mask her. Mask her.
I felt my breath go cold even as the rest of me burned.
Elowyn didn’t look at me when she stepped forward. She didn’t need to.
“The steward sent her,” she said, and her voice cut so cleanly through the song that it took a heartbeat for the court to remember it had been singing. “She obeyed. If you Mask anyone, Mask the one who gave the second order.”
A silence that wasn’t silence followed. It was the intake before a bite lands.
I took the step she left open to me. “The princess is correct.” I could taste iron behind my teeth. “Your law names the higher rank accountable. Your steward bears it.”
The steward blanched. Vaeloria turned her head and the veil stirred and the steward started to kneel in fear all on his own. Iriel’s smile did not move. Sylara’s fan did.
The chant died.
The girl was allowed to go.
I breathed again without meaning to. So did Elowyn. The sound of two lungs remembering air at the same moment might have been funny if I hadn’t wanted to put my hand over her heart and feel proof that it still beat.
By the time the tables had been reset and the servants had stopped shaking, the courtiers had found a new subject for their sharp teeth: us. Dragon and Fae princess standing within an arm’s length on the grass. The weight of our accidental alliance settled over the lawn like humidity before a storm.
We stood there until we had to stand nearer. The shadows shifted at our feet. The murmur of the fountain covered words meant for no one else.
“Even suspicious,” she said without moving her mouth, “you followed my lead.”
“Even calculating,” I said without looking at her, “you left me the only answer.”
I felt more than saw her smile. It moved the air between us. “And it worked.”
“It did.”
I could hear the rest of the sentence we both didn’t speak: It will cost us.
When the music swelled again, I stepped back. She did, too. The cord that ran between us did not slacken.
By nightfall I would tell myself a dozen more times that I didn’t trust her. That the court was weaving us toward something sharp and pretty it would love to watch us bleed on. That I had made a mistake letting my mouth learn the taste of her.
By nightfall I would still feel the phantom of her pulse against my thumb.
The gardens breathed; the court laughed; the queen watched; the heir smiled his thin smile. Somewhere, a mask of a fox learned a new trick with its fan.
And I stood in sunlight-that-wasn’t and shadow-that-never-moved and told myself that a man could hold two truths at once: that a cage could be a battlefield, and that a woman could be a weapon and a salvation in the same breath.
Tomorrow they would test us harder.
Tonight I would sharpen the blade.
And if Elowyn set it in my hand and held it there, I did not know whether I would use it to cut the locks off this palace or the hinge on my own heart.
Either way, the court would watch.
Either way, something would bleed.
