Page 50 of Rhapsody of Ruin
His hand was still half over mine. He turned his palm errant enough to slide the weight of it into the place where my thumb met my wrist, the small spot where a pulse will confess the truth you won’t. “Then we use the river.”
The sentence was so Drakaryn I could have laughed except my body wanted to learn whatrivermeant in his mouth. “The Serathis?”
“Varcoran Hold,” he said. “The way the mountain listens when you stop performing for it. The way a wall hums when the wrong web teaches the right pour to pretend it didn’t hear the theft. If the room refuses to admit grammar tomorrow, we’ll make the floor confess. It remembers.”
A wind moved across the terrace, not as cold as earlier. It tugged at the edge of my sleeve and found the seam where I had hidden the extra copy of the ledgers. I slid my palm over it and lookeddown at the line of our two hands. He did not move his. I did not either.
“Your city is failing,” he said quietly, not to the terrace, not to the paper, and not only to me. “So is mine. I don’t know yet whether we can teach them to listen fast enough to save either.”
“Neither do I,” I said. The admission felt like bitter tea that had gone cold. “I do not care whether they will love us for it.”
“Good,” he said. “I am not especially in love with being loved.”
Something in me exhaled. We had done the arithmetic. The numbers did not please the people who called themselves comfort. They pleased other ghosts. I let my shoulder angle the smallest measure toward his.
“What will you call this,” he asked, almost idly, as if we were standing in a training court rather than on a ledge with a city beneath us bending its head to hear whether we lied, “if it works. A victory. A survival. A habit.”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
The word came with more wind than it deserved. It dove off the terrace and brought back an echo from somewhere below where you could still smell the river when it was in a mood to be honest.
“We stand in front of the council with a hymn and a gloss,” I said, counting, because I had learned to trust my numbers when the court had taught me to doubt my heart. “We make the steward read it. We make him read it again. We make Maelith put his hand on the margin where the scribe wrotewillingand say aloudwillingmeanskeynotkindness. We bring the Varcoran seal for the copy and the Whitewood signature for the hymn. We call for the witness who was in two places and make him choose one. We force the bravos in fox and fern to clap for the only song that saved them from watching a girl’s face disappear.”
He moved closer still. Not enough to touch more than the skin our hands were already sharing. Enough that his warmth pressed into a strip of air between my ribs and our paper. “And once we’ve forced them,” he said, “we choose how to use the time they didn’t mean to give us.”
We both looked down, not at the page this time, but at the city. The mist swallowed and returned a breath while we watched. It did not try to be dramatic. It only did its work.
He lifted his hand. I kept mine where it was and didn’t call that a mistake. He laid his palm flat on the parapet and stared at it as if it belonged to a man he did not despise and did not have to pretend to be proud of in order to survive the hour. The scar at his throat caught the lanternlight and made the line look fresh. The wind learned it and then forgot it again.
He drew a breath and let it go as if setting down a weight he meant to take up later. “I will not let my people starve,” he said to the stone. It wasn’t a promise. It was the shape of one. Promises wear perfume here. Not this one.
“I will not let mine sing a hymn to a ritual without learning where it hurts,” I answered. Not a vow. Not yet. The wordtomorrowwarmed my mouth anyway. “And when they call you beast for that sentence, I will make them use the grammar properly.”
“They’ll call you cruel for correcting them,” he said, and smiled without looking at me.
“They have been calling me soft for years,” I said. “Let them try something new in their mouths.”
Silence again. Not the kind the court sells to itself as composure. The kind the upper terrace keeps for people who have done enough for an hour, and perhaps, with more to do, have made an agreement with air to stop bleeding on the parapet.
He turned then. Face to face. Close enough to make me aware of his mouth and honest enough to make me ashamed for noticing. I met his eyes and made no apology for what they told him. He did not make one for what they answered.
We did not kiss. We had not earned the grammar for it. We stood in the last available inch of distance and let heat lift between us without pretending it was something we did on purpose for a crowd.
“Tomorrow,” I said again. It sounded different in my throat the second time. Less rehearsal. Less threat.
He nodded once. “Tomorrow.”
We gathered the papers together. His hand did not brush mine again. He let me fold the gloss into the hymn and the ledger copy into our notes. He kept his palms flat against the parapet as if the stone might judge him for touching me and find him wanting. The thought did something that hurt and felt less like a wound than a reminder of how I had been built.
He straightened. The air cooled the strip his warmth had occupied and told my body it was foolish for noticing. He stepped back. I did not.
He bowed, not the court’s ridiculous bow, not the one he never gave me when my mother watched, but the bare tilt of a head a man offers to a river he means to cross in flood and knows he might drown in before the far bank remembers his name.
“Princess,” he said.
“Prince,” I returned.
He turned and went through the arch the way he had entered it: not softer, not louder, only with the weight of a choice he had not announced. The ward-candles shivered. The wind found my hair and did what it wanted with it, because it could.
