Page 29 of Rhapsody of Ruin
I palmed the Varcoran disc and weighed it. House Varcoran’s crest, tower, mist, broken key, caught a lantern and threw it back as if the moon lived in the bone. The right token, dropped at the right moment, could tilt the floor of the council just enough to send a petition sliding off the table. I had three uses in mind and a fourth I hoped not to need.
“Keep one eye on Maelith when you play it,” Torian said. “He will care less about what you spend it on than how you spend it.”
“He’ll call the legality, not the justice,” I said.
“Exactly.”
Sir Thalen approached again, slower this time. He had shed his helm for a simple ribbon at the back of his neck, and without it he looked very young. His gaze cut to my hand. “Varcoran doesn’t like to lose favors,” he said. “They make you pay twice.”
“Then they won’t enjoy tonight,” I said.
He hesitated. “You could have embarrassed them. You didn’t.”
“I prefer debt to blood,” I said. “Debts last longer.”
He digested that, nodded, and then did something that made three nobles tsk behind their fans: he bowed with honest respect. Not the courtly dip that could be sarcasm or spite, but a soldier’s measure, simple and clean. “If you require a knight who can recite Shroud protocol without asking Maelith to bless it first,” he said, “I remember more than most.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why you’re still standing near my men instead of near the Queen’s steward.”
His mouth tugged upward, then flattened again, embarrassed by its own impulse. “Good night, Prince.”
The hall began to thin, nobles slipping away toward mischief or marriages they called politics. Brenn reappeared at my elbowwith a wicked grin and told me three new jokes he couldn’t possibly tell in front of anyone else. Draven escorted two masks to opposite doors with the same courtly bow and watched as they realized they had been waiting for the other to speak first for ten minutes. Tharos gave one last long look to a dealer whose hands had started trembling again and left him to consider whether trembling around dragons was wise. Korrath tapped his cane thrice, a signal that the room had given all it would tonight.
I took one last pass by the table where I had sat. The lady with the hammered silver mask kept her eyes on her fan. The fox did not look at me. The stag-dealer shuffled with a care that suggested his fingers would not twitch again for several days.
On my way to the arch I let my knuckles brush the shadowglass wall and felt the cool hum of the wards answer. The castle listened. It always did. I imagined, for half a breath, lifting my palm against the glass and feeling a second hand match it, slim and warm on the other side, fingers splayed to mirror mine. I let the thought go before my face could betray it and stepped back into the corridor, into air that smelled less of clove and more of stone.
Torian matched my stride. “Two nights,” he said. “The rules are posted at moon’s first rise. We have tomorrow to decide which answers to hold and which to let her claim.”
“She’ll hold more than she lets,” I said. “So will I.”
“And when they try to turn your table into a hunt?”
“Then we make the hunt a table.”
He huffed once, approval, not amusement. “Drakaryn never loved riddles.”
“Drakaryn loves winning,” I said. “We’ll learn to love whatever gets us there.”
We turned down the colonnade and the ward-light moved with us, breathing in slow silver pulses across the floor. I weighed the Varcoran disc a final time and tucked it away beneath the leather of my belt where no quick fingers could find it. The council chamber would feel different under my boots when I walked in with that bone in my pocket. Not because the token itself had magic, but because House Varcoran hated to see its crest attached to someone else’s will.
A page waited at the last bend before the stairs, slate tucked under his arm. He bowed and held up the board. The new rule was already written there in neat hand: no glamour within the competing circle during the question and the answer; judges by the Whitewood; three questions each; ten breaths to answer; tie-breaker at the judge’s discretion. A cluster of nobles had gathered ten steps behind him, pretending not to read it while reading it, their mouths already pulling the rule apart for places to slip knives.
I looked at the page. “Tell the steward: Ash commend the clarity.”
His eyes widened as if he hadn’t expected the dragon to pronouncecommendcorrectly. “Yes, my lord.”
I climbed the last steps with Torian a half pace behind me and my men folding into the corridor like shadows. The hall exhaled us into twilight that never lifted, and I realized I had not thought of home for the better part of an hour. Not for lack of love. For lack of space to hold it alongside the work of surviving this place.
I imagined Emberhold briefly, the red glow of the forges at night, the smell of smoke and stone, the taste of rain that didn’t carry resin in it, and then I let the picture dissolve, replaced by the chessboard we had set into motion tonight. A truce had been named. A token banked. A rule written. I had lost the first hand and won the room I needed to play the real game.
At the door to our wing, Korrath tapped the wood and listened to the wards hum back. Safe enough.
I paused with my hand on the latch and let one last thought burn through, hot and unhelpful. In two nights, she would stand across a table from me under a dozen lanterns while the court tried to decide if it wanted to laugh at us or kneel.
I didn’t know which thought I liked better.
I opened the door and went in to sharpen the answers I would not give them and the questions I would.
