Page 36 of Rhapsody of Ruin
“Dawn.” Elowyn’s certainty wasn’t arrogance. It was the same cadence as the ledger room, the same choice to stop lying to a floor and call it a map. “We leave by the kitchens. No heralds. Boots that can forgive their owner for being alive.”
I nodded. “Bring the notes you think you are not allowed to believe. I’ll bring chalk.”
We might have made a mistake then. We might have let a gesture pretend to be comfort. We didn’t. The restraint was not pain. It was attention. It was the choice to hold a thing steady until it tells you how to touch it without teaching it to lie about you later.
We mounted. The outriders took their places. Master Cor did not wave. Varcoran stone doesn’t pretend. It sees you leave and lets the wind decide whether to carry your name down the road once your horses’ hooves have stopped being polite.
On the second switchback, Elowyn reined in to look back at the slit that had taught her nothing in a way that made me respect it. I drew even. The wind tried our faces and left them; the road tried our horses and learned nothing it did not already know.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Tomorrow,” I agreed.
We did not ride together. We rode side by side without speaking and let the north do what it has always done when two people learn a piece of its truth: it held the air between us taut, fine as gold wire, strong enough to cut and still too thin for a court to name.
Behind us, the keepyard swallowed the echo of our leaving. Ahead, the road folded itself in halves until the hold dropped out of sight and the smell of Shadowspire began its long attempt to drown the iron from our mouths.
I did not taste it yet. I kept the cliff in my teeth and the chalk dust on my palm and the feel of her silence at my shoulder where comfort would have made a lie. I told myself that a man could carry three truths at once if he chose to: that stone does not need your worship to keep you from falling; that a ledger can be a door if you notice where it refuses to balance; and that a woman can stand her ground in a place where the law taught her to kneel and ask you to look with her, not for her.
At the third turn the wind rose and carried something like a voice along the cut. It might have been the Hold remembering the name Master Cor had just given it. It might have been the way land speaks when the oldest pour refuses to be fooled by a clever knot.
It sounded like a promise either way.
Chapter 18
Elowyn
The Vale of Withering did not begin so much as it refused to end. The land thinned as we approached, the twilight pressed flatter, and the sound of our horses’ hooves changed from a clean strike on frost-hardened ground to a hollow thud that made my teeth ache. The wind died three turns before the first marker stone, a dead wind, the kind that meant the air remembered moving and had decided it would not again. Ahead, a ring of trees leaned toward each other like conspirators around a secret fire that had gone cold. Their trunks corkscrewed out of the soil, black and slick where bark should have been, and the leaves, what few clung stubbornly to the topmost branches, were the color of old bruises.
We brought only a minimal escort, just as I had ordered at the kitchens while the bakers dragged hot pans from the ovens and clouds of sweet steam fogged the windows. Two palace outriders peeled off at the second milestone and made a visible show of waiting out of earshot. A single Varcoran scout ghosted us from the rear; a sensible precaution, and one the Hold would not call indulgence. Rhydor nodded once at the arrangement and said nothing. He wore road leathers cut clean for riding and had removed every piece of ornament from his person that could flash at the wrong moment. It was the most courtly thing he had done for me all week.
We topped the last ridge before the vale, where the soil dried to powder beneath the grass and the world fell away into a shallow basin of ash-colored earth hedged by that crown of twisted trees. The vale proper looked deceptively gentle, a held breath of land, but every instinct in my body treated it the way a body treats adream of falling: stiffening, bracing, trying not to wake the thing that waited.
Rhydor reined in beside me. He did not speak. He simply closed his eyes and inhaled.
“Smells like home,” he said after a moment, and the words were so soft they surprised me.
Not the sentiment, I had begun to understand that anything which touched the bone of Drakaryn shook him, but the tenderness with which he said it. The ache in it. I had heard that same sound in my own throat, once, standing in the Whitewood stacks with a ledger in my hands, reading a line that proved a truth I had been forbidden to name.
“What does home smell like?” I asked before I could decide not to.
He kept his eyes on the vale. “Stone after rain. Iron. The last coal dying in a forge you’ve held on to for warmth when you shouldn’t have. The good kind of smoke.”
“And here?”
“Stone. Iron. Smoke.” His mouth crooked, not a smile. “But nothing to set it alight.”
We let the silence name itself and did not force speech on it. One of the outriders shifted in his saddle a hundred paces behind us; the little noise scraped up the slope and stopped at the ring of trees as if the trunks had very small ears. My horse tossed her head once, not in fear but in warning; even the best-trained animals have an honesty my court has never learned.
“We do not cross the ring,” I said, and kept my voice even so he would hear the decision, not the fear. “Not today. The old stories will have their due.”
He looked at me then, just once, the way a man looks down a road he knows he cannot take today and files it in the ledger he uses to keep promises he may regret.
“We won’t,” he said. “Show me where your stories keep their teeth.”
We left the horses at a marker stone carved with Varcoran sigils, tower, mist, broken key, dull with age and with the grease of too many hands making ward-signs as they passed. The ground sounded wrong under boot; the thin crust of frost over powder cracked with a papery sigh and stuck to the edge of my sole. No scent rose, not even the clean, sharp smell of cold. The dead wind made the hair along my forearms prick.
We stopped at the first of the foundations, an old line of stone half-swallowed by the soil, set thirty strides inside the ring in a horseshoe shape facing the vale. The stones had been mortared with something that wasn’t just lime; the seams held a shiver in them like the memory of a bowed string. Someone had built here, long ago and with intention, and then had tried to erase the building with everything but time.
