Page 41 of Rhapsody of Ruin
We held our ground until the line of Masks was halfway to the door with her and then two more steps, just long enough to teach the room that the outcome was not something it had done for itself, and then, on the count I felt Elowyn’s breath take beside me, we stepped back together. The sound when we moved was louder than it should have been, boots, silk, the dry sigh of a hundred unvoiced disappointments trying to find a new throat.
The murmurs shifted again, tones I had learned to read as if they were maps:they coordinated,anddid you see the timing,and,from a mask that belonged to someone whose power did not usually rely on calling attention to itself, a simple,good.The hall takes note when two people who are meant to be cutting each other learn to hold a knife by the same handle.
Maelith closed his ledger with a neat, final sound. “The court will hear the next petition,” he said.
It didn’t. Not truly. A room that has just been thwarted remembers it has an appetite only after it has gone home and told itself a different story in the mirror.
As the benches began to drain themselves politely into the antechambers and galleries and small rooms where people go to pretend to have new ideas, I felt Elowyn shift the tiniest bit, the way a woman moves when the gown she has worn all morning finally lets go of a rib. I kept my face on the column directly ahead and spoke low enough only the pillar would judge me for it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t be grateful,” she said, so softly the ward-candles might have had to lean in. “Be useful.”
“I have a Varcoran seal,” I said. “And a grudge.”
“You have a list,” she corrected, and I heard the ghost of something like humor move through her, quick as a fish under cold water. “Make sure it has columns.”
Brenn slid to my elbow and coughed in a tone he thought sounded polite. “If you needed names,” he said, “I happened to notice who laughed hardest and who looked like they’d swallowed a tallow candle at the end.”
“I always need names,” I said. “But tonight I need a drink less likely to be poisoned than the usual.”
His grin flashed. “I know a broom closet where the bottles all wear plain clothes.”
“Later,” Draven murmured from my other side, too close for Brenn not to see him and not far enough that the court would consider it respectable. “You’re about to be invited to a celebration of mercy we did not intend to throw. Smile appropriately for three people, refuse a fourth, and speak to Sylara before she speaks to you. She hates being deprived.”
“Noted,” I said, and let my gaze slide where it had wanted to go for the last three breaths, toward Elowyn’s profile in the wardlight.
Her mask was in place. Her mouth wasn’t a line, wasn’t a curve. Her chin had that same lift it had worn when she had told me the Valewind smelled like my home and accused me of confusing the scent of smoke with fire. A lock of hair that had worked itself loose curled against the hinge of her jaw. She didn’t reach up to fix it. I didn’t lift my hand.
We turned together and stepped through the line where the Masks had stood, into the crush of the antechamber. The noise hit us like perfume, thick, sweet, suffocating, with a note of copper underneath it that the hall would not have admitted to if it had been offered the truth for free. People wanted to thank us for saving them from the entertainment they had just remembered would have shamed them later to have enjoyed. People wanted to be brave cheaply. People wanted to be seen.
We let them do what they needed to do so they could sleep tonight and forget the names they had not learned. Three paces in a circle, two nods to a house that would be useful tomorrow, a smile that did not show teeth for a woman who had never forgiven me for refusing to bleed on her rug. Elowyn took the chair by the window with the trickle of shadowlight that makes a man think he is seeing the only version of himself he likes; I took the stretch of wall that made it impossible to approach me frombehind. If the hall wanted to tell itself a story about unity, I was willing to let it learn the chorus while it was still humming.
I saw Sylara move in toward Elowyn with that combination of respect and mischief that made me wish I had the comfort of a sword in my hand. I saw the fox-masked lord find himself suddenly fascinated by the way his goblet bent lantern-glow. I saw Iriel lounging near the far pillar with his lazy smile fixed in place and his eyes as sharp as knives honed not for war but for faithlessness.
Torian touched my arm as if testing whether I were flesh. “You’re going to get yourself killed,” he said without heat.
“I’ve almost always been about to die,” I said. “Doing this makes more sense than doing nothing while someone else feels clever about breaking the law he made.”
He huffed what might have been a breath of a laugh. “You and the princess,” he said, keeping his mouth so straight I almost loved him for it, “are going to write a new manual for losing friends and making enemies feel useful.”
“If you set it nicely in leather,” I said, “the court will read it to itself and take notes.” I let my eyes skim the room one last time. They settled where they had been trying to settle since we had walked in, a woman’s hand, pale against the window sill, the veins under the skin like blue ink where you could see it. I spoke without moving my mouth, trusting the ward-light to carry the shape of the words but not the sound. “Tomorrow. The games.”
“Tomorrow,” she returned, too fast to be speaking and too slow to be mistake. “Bring the answer you refused to give tonight.”
“I didn’t refuse,” I said, and let my body remember it had been holding itself ready to strike since dawn. “I delayed.”
The corner of her mouth moved, relief, humor, pain; in this place they all wear the same mask. “Then bring the delay’s debt,”she said. “And if the law tries to pretend it wasn’t wrong today, make it tell you what name it wants to be ashamed of.”
The antechamber swelled again with polite noise, the shape a room makes when it is teaching itself how to leave. The ward-candles burned steadier. Someone near Sylara let out a laugh too sharp to be elegant. Iriel pressed his knuckles against the pillar and then took them away. Maelith closed his ledger and placed the Varcoran disc on its edge as if he meant to hand it to me and as if he might keep it.
I put my back against the wall and breathed in the resin and the sweet wine and the faint iron under it. My hand found the hilt of my ceremonial sword, wrapped in peace-cloth the way we wrapped a word in a ritual to make it feel honest. Across the room Elowyn lifted her head and looked at me without looking the way you look at a man across a battlefield when you know the next move will cost and you’ve chosen it anyway.
Battle one had begun and ended with a delay. The court thought it knew what that meant. The court liked to believe delays are mercy and mercy is weakness.
Tomorrow I would teach it what kind of weapon a delay becomes when you load it with shame and call it precedent.
And if I had to burn a song into the floor to make the hall hear how off-key it had learned to sing, I would.
