Page 39 of Rhapsody of Ruin
“Before dawn,” he said. “Before the court thinks to be a witness.”
I nodded and turned toward my stair.
“Elowyn,” he said, and my name in his mouth did the thing it had done the night after the hunt, it smoothed something in me that I had been keeping sharp on purpose.
I looked back.
“You were right not to cross the ring,” he said. “I would have. To prove to myself that nothing can be worse than what I’ve already seen.” He shook his head, once. “You were right.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. If I thanked him, he would hear it like a curtain. If I saidof course,he would hear it like a dismissal. If I said nothing, the space would hold and we would be doing the thing we had done all day, keeping a third thing between us that neither of us named and both of us recognized.
So I did the thing the day had taught me we could do: I nodded once, small, as if to a wind that had decided it would not move today, but might tomorrow if addressed as an equal.
He watched me go. I let him. The stairwell swallowed the noise of the yard and the smell of the kitchens and the little ache the vale had left in the place behind my breastbone. Inside my rooms, the lamps flared when I touched the switch; the glass walls threw back a hundred versions of me until I chose the one with her shoulders set and her mouth not too soft.
I laid the rubbings out on the low table and set the stones I used for paperweights on their corners: a piece of obsidian cut from the first pour laid into Shadowspire’s throne room; a shard of bone turned harmless in the Whitewood’s teaching kiln; aclear chunk of quartz Rhy,the prince, had set in my hand that morning, saying,your scribes like to use them when they copy under mixed light.
I dipped my pen in ink.
The Vale would not move tonight.
But the floor might sing tomorrow.
And I would be there when it chose its note.
Chapter 19
Rhydor
Shadowspire let out a certain kind of breath when it wanted blood. You could hear it in the council antechamber before the doors opened, an anticipation that ran along the pillars like a shiver under stone, ward-candles guttering low and then steadying in a rhythm that matched the crowd’s hunger. Lanternlight pooled on the inlaid floor and made the silver runes look wet. Everywhere I looked I saw the quiet narrowing of eyes that meant a story was about to be told the way the court liked best: with a victim and an audience.
The Masks were already lined up when Elowyn and I stepped through the arch. Six of them, lacquer-black, faceless, hands clasped behind their backs. They made no sound. They never did. The council benches were packed, thick sweep of silk, glitter of gems on metal, the faint sweet tang of resin that always clung to Vaeloria’s audiences as if the room itself had been perfumed to smother what it was about to do.
I felt the veterans fan out behind me without needing to look. Torian took my right, one half-step back, silent, measuring. Tharos put his iron hand where a man with bad intent would want to pass and looked at no one while everyone looked at him. Korrath’s cane tapped once against the base of a pillar; I knew that tap, the listening one, the sound he made when he wanted me to remember breathing can be a tactic. Brenn’s flame-bright head bobbed just far enough out of line to make three Masks twitch and then settle; Draven drifted to the gallery’s shadow-line, all lazy elegance, where he could catch a signal and turn it into a rumor before it hit the floor.
At the far end of the hall Maelith stood with his ledger open on the lectern, quill poised, black staff against the step. He looked like a man carved from midnight and discipline. Even the ward-light didn’t dare settle on him for long.
Between the Masks stood the prisoner.
A Namyr woman this time, older than the boy in the garden, not yet old enough to have learned to live as if she were invisible. She had the look of someone who had stopped sleeping a year ago and didn’t know how to begin again. Her wrists were bound, not by rope but by glamour you could only see in the way the skin reddened under nothing. She was very still. Some people shake when they’re afraid; some become the calmest thing in a room full of knives. I had learned to respect the second kind.
The court’s murmur thickened as Elowyn and I reached the line where petitioners usually stopped. Fans flicked; a steward scribbled; I felt the press of a hundred masked gazes as if they were hands pushing us toward the stage the hall had set. A hundred more eyes watched us from carved galleries, hidden behind shadow-screen and etiquette. The queen did not sit the throne today; her veil hung on its stand as a courtesy, the symbol of her authority enough to make the law shift its weight in our direction without having to move her hand. Iriel lounged half in shadow near the dais with that lazy arrogance that said he’d chosen the seat because it gave him the best angle to watch me walk into whatever trap he had baited this morning. He did not bother to hide the smile.
Maelith raised his quill and the murmuring settled, as abruptly as a pond when a thrown stone finally sinks. “The court convenes under Shroud Law,” he said, voice even, every word landing with weight of ritual. “A proceeding will be heard against a servant of the hall, Namyr-born, charged with dereliction and false testimony.”
A sigh went through the benches, pleasure, expectation. The hall loved a Masking because it called cruelty a sacrament and let them perform their virtue for one another while watching someone bleed on the altar of law. They used the word judgment to mean spectacle and taught themselves to be grateful for the confusion.
I let a long breath in and a longer one out and kept my voice level. “House business first,” I said, not loud, but with the iron the room recognized because it had heard it speak the words I do not bow and learned that I meant it. “Who laid the charge?”
Maelith did not look at me. “The steward of the Third Hall.”
“What oath did he use?”
A small pause, slim as a blade. He flicked his eyes down and made a mark in the ledger. “An oath of ranked service.”
I glanced at the first line of Masks, let my gaze slide from the lacquer sheen of facelessness toward the prisoner and then out to the benches. The law tablets in the pillars hummed very faintly under my boots, that vibration the room breathed when someone had asked the right question because everyone could feel the answer moving toward the surface even if it had not yet broken air.
“Wrong oath,” I said.
