Page 46 of Rhapsody of Ruin
The disc hit, spun, sang, and settled. Draven’s laugh, low, delighted, bloomed under the gallery where Sylara’s fan had gone stiff.
Maelith placed his hand over the token and the ledger at once, binding the two beneath his palm. When he spoke, the room’s temperature shifted a degree. “Under Varcoran seal, the court delays Masking and remands the complaint to the Hall of Keys for correction of oath and chain. The accused is removed to review. Not Masked. Not marked.”
The last two words landed like iron on wet clay. The hall wanted blood. The tablets wanted to be loved. Law won.
The Masks tilted their faceless faces toward one another, a movement that would have looked like grace if it were nearer to kindness. Glamour slid away from the maid’s wrists with the hiss silk makes on stone. She swayed and caught herself with a small, ferocious inhale. The Masks took her between them, neither rough nor gentle, and began to move.
They were halfway to the doors when Maelith lifted a hand, quill raised. I saw the warning in that small motion an instant before I heard the sound that had warned me of assaults at midnight in camps across a decade of bad years: the collective sucked breath of a crowd deciding to change the story. He was going to save the hall from boredom. He was going to insist on closing with a show, even if it was only a line.
“Before we dismiss,” he said, “let the record clarify, delay is not dismissal. The court is not your shield from your duty.”
The hall liked that. It heard authority and dressed it up as teeth.
I stepped forward. Elowyn did, too. Neither of us touched the lectern. Neither of us looked at the maid. You do not turn a human being into an emblem and pretend to love them. Yousave them by refusing to make them the only argument you can use.
“Let the record clarify,” I said, “that the court is bound to its own law.” I did not raise my voice. I opened my palm over the tablet set into the pillar nearest us, and the silver under my hand brightened. “When chain is wrong, oath is wrong. When oath is wrong, judgment is hunger as spectacle, not justice as music. We are not feasting.”
“And let the record clarify,” Elowyn said, calm as a winter stream, “that mercy and delay are not synonyms. Mercy is what you offer the powerful when you want them to remember your face. Delay is the price the law pays for its own laziness.”
A small startled sound escaped three masks in the nearest row. I could not tell whether it was horror or delight. Perhaps both.
Maelith’s stare did not flicker. Neither did Iriel’s smile. For a breath the room held two truths and tried, stubbornly, not to choke on either. Then the rule surrendered to the precedent under Maelith’s hand and the Masks finished their measured march toward the doors. The maid did not stumble again. When the lacquer disappeared into the dark, the hall admitted, very softly, the sound people make when they have been surprised into having nothing graceful to say.
The audience had no dress rehearsal for that noise. It reached for its familiar answers and came up with polite chatter. It does that here; when cruelty loses its chance to polish itself, charm crowds in with a dozen little sentences about the weather and the wine. The chamber began to melt around the edges, fans opening, heads turning toward exits, small eddies of gossip forming where the air pressure shifted. The masks who liked to be seen left first. The ones who liked to count stayed.
We did not leave quickly. We stayed long enough for the room to learn that we were not running from it. Then, on the samebreath, I stepped back, and she did, too, and our veterans closed like a sentence ending in the right period.
We walked down the aisle of pillars the way soldiers learn to walk the length between catapult and wall, heads up, pace measured. I do not enjoy giving a hall like this the entertainment of watching a man walk well. I enjoy making it receive the lesson that comes with the sight. When we reached the antechamber arch, the noise in the benches had risen just enough to let the court pretend it had not been trying to remember how to be decent.
“Prince,” someone said as I passed, sly and false-kind. “It must be a comfort that Shroud Law could pass for order even in Ash.”
“Law passes for order anywhere it is willing to be deaf to its own favorite lies,” I said without stopping.
“Princess,” a lord’s son in a fern mask cooed at Elowyn, “what welcome restraint, ”
“Restraint is what grown men call mercy when they cannot afford the honesty of the word,” she said, and his mouth closed around the taste of it.
I heard Iriel before I saw him: the shift of silk, the low, catlike breath that says a man has arranged his face to be seen, then moved the muscles to match. He lounged against the pillar nearest the door with one ankle crossed over the other and his mask angled to show more skin than anyone else could get away with. He brushed his knuckles against the white veins in the stone, then let his hand fall as if the movement hadn’t been a sermon.
“Sister,” he purred. “Husband.” He inclined his head the exact degree necessary to avoid the fatigue of performing respect. “What a refreshingly dull outcome.”
Elowyn didn’t look at him. She let her gaze pass through the place he stood as if it were smoke. “You’ll have time enough to arrange spectacle at your leisure,” she said, and her voice was so gentle a raven would have mistaken it for meat. “We won a hearing. You can still try for a party.”
His mouth’s corner lifted a fraction. He loves that about her, how cleanly she cuts. He hates it more.
He spoke past her to me. “Cite cleaner next time,” he said. “The Hall of Keys doesn’t like to be tutored in the language it wrote, especially by men who bring ash under their nails.”
“You’ll find the Hall of Keys has a fondness for men who can read and don’t require a steward to turn the pages,” I said. “But I admire your confidence.”
He took it as the compliment he needed for his next breath. “Confidence,” he said, “is a lighter mask to wear than shame. Ask your dragonborn. They’ve got no practice with either.” He cut a look at Brenn and let his smile go wide enough to show the edges of teeth.
Brenn grinned back like the irreverent bastard he is. “We could teach you shame,” he said cheerfully. “But then who would nourish the hedges.”
Laughter, real this time, broke like a wave under the gallery and then scattered when the wrong masks heard it and remembered themselves. Iriel’s eye narrowed behind his light. He had wanted the line and gotten a lesson. He doesn’t forget.
“Two days,” he said to Elowyn, suddenly mild. “Shall we see if the court prefers its law dressed in courage or in costume?”
“The court will take it dressed in whatever lets it pretend it always loved its oath,” she said.
