Page 40 of Rhapsody of Ruin
I did not raise my voice. I did not need to. The quiet that followed carried better than shouting.
The Masks turned their faces toward me. The prisoner’s head lifted. Elowyn was very still at my shoulder, the kind of still that means someone is listening hard enough to carve the words into the bone under their skin.
Maelith’s quill hovered over the ledger. “Explain.”
“The servant is Namyr,” I said. “Namyr report to the house captain, not to the steward of the Third Hall. The ranked serviceoath binds a higher to a lower across the same chain. This one reaches across chains. It’s a steward’s oath used like a captain’s. Your tablets recognize the bind only when the right chain is rung.”
“The offense remains,” a man in a fox mask called from the second tier, the easy cruelty poured into that carelessness making my teeth itch. “Whether the steward used the pretty words or not, the girl disobeyed.”
I kept my gaze off the benches. “Shroud Law doesn’t care about pretty. It cares about structure. If the wrong oath is used, the law hums off-key and the ward’s lattice shifts a hair. You can’t see it unless you put your cheek to the floor. You can hear it if you respect the rules you brag about.”
A ripple, part derision, part discomfort. The benches didn’t like being told that the songs they sang about justice were off-key.
Elowyn’s voice slid into the hall, cool and precise, the kind of voice that can make knives look like ritual implements fit to touch the altar. “And in this case, the structure doesn’t hold for a second reason,” she said. She did not look at the prisoner. She did not look at Iriel. She looked at Maelith, and he felt it; I saw it in the tick of the tendon along his jaw. “The witness named in the complaint is the steward’s man. But the records for the hour say he was attending the polishing of the silver lanterns in the Candle Gallery.” She lifted her palm; Nyssa moved like moonlight and placed a folded slip in Elowyn’s hand. She opened it and read, her voice quieter now, forcing the room to listen closer. “He signed the polishing log. He cannot have been in two places at once.”
A stir, fans shifting, heads turning, the kind of movement that meant the court wanted to keep enjoying the cruelty and would do so if given the smallest excuse but had started to worry that this one might cost more applause than it was worth to watch.
Maelith’s gaze did not leave Elowyn’s. “Produce the log.”
“Of course,” she said, and the way she said it made it sound less like a queenling’s boast and more like a stone floor noting that you had stepped on it with muddy feet. Nyssa lifted the ledger out of a satchel and placed it on the low table between us. The book had been signed so many times the leather on the spine had glossed with the oil of a hundred fingers. Maelith bent, read, smoothed a page whose crease had been sharpened by anxiety, and straightened.
“The log exists,” he said to the room, not to me. Not to her. “The steward’s witness signed another book at another hour. The oath is incorrectly sworn.”
The crowd’s murmur changed shape. Not pleasure, not yet; the hall was nimble at turning on itself, but it liked to be courted before deciding an outcome had been more entertaining than the promise of a bloodier one.
I took a step forward. The Masks shifted as one, as elegantly as birds, not to block me, just to remind me the line was theirs. I stopped where I was meant to.
“Dismiss the charge,” I said.
“The steward insists the proceeding will find further evidence, ” Maelith began.
Elowyn lifted one finger. The smallest of gestures. The room learned to hush for it. “Or,” she said, “the steward has been sloppy and the court too hungry. If we meant to humiliate and so call our hour justice, we should do a better job of pretending we did work first.”
I heard Brenn’s chuckle cut off and turn into a cough. I heard Draven murmur something toward a shadow where Sylara inevitably lurked that made her fan still for three heartbeats andthen resume like a wing. I felt Torian’s attention sharpen and slide into my shoulder like a blade waiting for a hand.
Maelith’s careful composure did not change. He could stand a lot of heat without sweating. “The court may delay a Masking when an oath is proven incorrect,” he said.
“Delay,” I said, “is the word you use when you want an audience to believe it has gone home with more than it came with.”
He did not rise to the bait. “There is precedent.”
Good. Precedent we could maneuver.
“Then I will use it,” I said, very mild, and slipped my hand into the inside pocket I had made my tailor sew behind the wrapped hilt of my ceremonial sword. The disc was small, bone, smooth, carved with a tower shrouded in mist and a broken key at its base. Varcoran’s favor had a certain kind of weight that made a table shift a fraction toward you when you set it down.
I did not set it on the table.
I flicked it once, underhand, the way you toss a coin when you decide to be theatrical about the truth. It clicked on the edge of Maelith’s lectern and spun with a clear little music that cut through the perfume and the murmur and the breath the room had been holding. It would have been petty to enjoy the way the fox-masked lord who had laughed first in the garden that day went very still.
“The court will delay the proceeding and remand the complaint for correction of oath and witness,” Maelith intoned, voice as smooth as if he had meant to say it all along. He picked up the disc, turned it once between three long fingers, and set it on his ledger. “Under Varcoran’s seal.”
I felt the veterans’ perimeter thicken behind me without turning to look. You can feel a line of soldiers holding an edge even if they never move, you taste it, like iron pulled through cloth.The Masks lowered their hands and their faceless faces turned toward the prisoner. I could have sworn something like a hitch went through the lacquer as the glamour remembered it had been woven by human hands and not by gods.
“Remove the accused to the hall of review,” Maelith said. “Without Masking. Without mark.”
There is nothing so dangerous in a room like this as a moment when the audience realizes it has been given no permission to enjoy itself. I watched that realization ripple along the benches with all the pleasure of a man watching a fire he had expected to fight think twice and lie down. The nobles who had come hoping for a more entertaining afternoon shifted in their seats as if they had been struck lightly across the mouth with a glove. The ones whose mouths had been tightening at the corners since the boy in the garden had been spared let their shoulders ease a fraction, then remembered themselves and stiffened again.
The prisoner did not move. The Masks stepped in, not roughly, not gently, their hands invisible around her wrists loosening without visible cause. The glamour unsheathed itself with a sound like silk stroking stone. I didn’t let myself speak to her. I didn’t look at her longer than any other petitioner the court had dismissed should have warranted. You do not make a spectacle of dignity and expect it to keep breathing.
