Page 18 of Rhapsody of Ruin
The heat in my cheeks was pure reflex. I did not give him more.
“End the hunt,” I said, before he could turn the line into a lance. “Or run it true.”
He held my gaze a heartbeat that bent toward violence and then away. He lifted his hand and snapped his fingers. The remaining beasts, glamoured and leashed, shivered into view and then out again, their false hides sloughing off like wet silk. The courtiers sighed, some disappointed, some bored, some craving a new cruelty.
“Your wish, sister,” he said. “Let us all be fair.”
I let the slow breath leave me now, where some could see it and think I had merely sighed at the end of a scene. Nyssa ghosted to my shoulder, her presence a stilling hand where mine wanted to shake.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said under her breath. “Not like that. Not out loud.”
“If not out loud,” I said, “they don’t hear.”
She didn’t argue. “Thalen is watching you differently,” she murmured. “So is half the garden.”
“So is he,” I said, and could not help the way my eyes found Rhydor across the grass, the iron line of him softer by a hair, the set of his mouth looser, the charge in the space between us loud enough to drown the music.
He looked at me like he had never seen me before. Like I was not a pawn or a temptress but a choice he did not trust and could not stop himself from making. My chest tightened so fast I had to swallow once to make breath possible again.
I turned before the court could read my face and walked back toward the marbled walk, pace measured, spine straight. We had bled enough for a single afternoon. The next cut would be theirs.
Behind me, the nobles began to chatter again, a hive reanimating, but the note underneath had shifted like a key change a tuneless player might not notice and a musician would suddenly be shaken by. Fair had entered the conversation, and once spoken aloud the word sticks in throats.
By the edge of the hedge, Sir Thalen had not moved. He held his helm like a penitent still and stared after Rhydor the way men look at a fire they want to warm their hands on and fear would take their whole arm.
“Sir,” I said, without stopping.
He blinked. “Princess.”
“Tell the men who spun that stag it was sloppy work. If they must write a spell into a living line, make it beautiful. Make it convincing. Or better, tell them to lose.”
His mouth parted. “Lose?” If he repeated the word to the queen later, he would pitch it like a joke to keep his tongue.
“Yes,” I said. “Once in a while. It will surprise them. And surprise keeps realms from dying.”
I left him to think about it. Nyssa trod softly at my heels, the glide of her steps the only sound in a corridor meant to swallow every noise.
“You defied him,” she said when we had put three turns and a veil of ivy between us and the garden. It wasn’t a rebuke. It wasn’t approval. It was a line written into the ledger of what had happened. She knew better than anyone that what happened and what people believed happened were rarely twins.
“I did,” I said. “And I will again.”
“For him?” she asked, meaning the prince with the iron in his spine and the heat in his palms.
“For me,” I said. It was mostly true. It would do.
We turned the last corner and the Moonveil arcade opened ahead, its shadow-lit glass catching our reflections and sending them back to us a dozen at a time. I slowed and pressed my fingers to the cold pane. For a breath the glass felt like skin and the castle felt like a sleeping thing I could wake in my favor if I only knew which word to use.
“Next time,” Nyssa said, “he will not snap his fingers and let it end.”
“I know,” I said. The light smeared my face and gave it back to me as someone braver. “Next time, we will end it another way.”
“Princess,” she said carefully, “you should tell your husband that before the next time.”
I thought of Rhydor’s hand hauling Tharos up with no ceremony at all. I thought of how the illusion had broken under his grip as if his body were a law glamour could not write past. I thought of how he had looked at me, not like a man measuring a chess piece but like a soldier weighing whether to take a hill.
“I will,” I said. I would. Tomorrow, after the court finished screaming fair like a slur.
For now, I lifted my hand from the glass and walked on. The air felt different against my skin. The castle’s breath had changed again.
