Page 52 of Rhapsody of Ruin
She did not flinch when the shadow of my wings crossed her face. She lifted a gloved hand instead and rested it against the arch for balance while she stepped clear of the lantern’s reach. “Well?” she asked without moving her mouth, a shape more than a sound.
I stooped and made a cradle of my forearms, broad and scaled, and she stepped into it like a woman who knew how to trust the thing she feared. Her fingers hooked themselves into the leather straps Torian had stitched along one forelimb; her cloak snapped once in the breeze of my breath. “Ready,” she said, and though the word was small it had iron in it.
We went straight up, because oblique paths invite questions. The ward-candles along the east tower guttered as if a draft had offended their dignity. A patrol of Masks on the inner wall looked left when they should have looked right. The kitchen yard, hot with bread and onion and the ash-sweet scent of a long day’s work, fell away into a dark page with only one line written across it: the Serathis, silver as a knife on a table, the city pretending it had tamed it by naming it.
Lunareth spread itself like a map no one trusted. The rooftops were lambent with ward-light, thin threads of law stitched so neatly the court mistook shining for strength. From this height I saw the habits of the place, the bends where glamour liked to pool; the spots where the stone remembered an old use and refused to lie flat; the seam where Shadowspire’s polished face met the older masonry of the northern wards and let the crack show for a breath before charm plastered it again. Far beyond, the black shoulder of the mountains pressed its weight against the sky and the Vale of Withering sat where the light goes to forget itself.
I banked high over the east wall and the orchard that fed the queen’s table. Three flights below the upper parapet a watchman leaned his spear against the stone and rubbed the bridge of his nose as if the twilight made it ache. He would tell a nice story tomorrow about a trick of the mist. The hall would prefer that to an honest one.
Elowyn lay still in my arms. A human body learns, if it is both brave and intelligent, how to speak with weight instead of words. She settled against the brace of my forelimb when the wind shifted; she kept her throat tucked against the curve of scaled wrist when the air thinned. When we cleared the last ridge above the city and the first raw teeth of stone took the sky back from the ward-line, I felt the tightness around her ribs ease by a breath.
We landed on a ledge I knew from another life. The mountain keeps three such shelves in that run, one for goats with less sense than luck, one for smugglers with more greed than patience, and one for men who need a place to tell the truth without being overheard. I picked the last and came in low, wings tight, so the downdraft wouldn’t fetch either of us off the edge.
Elowyn stepped clear and put both hands on the rock. She does that, makes her palms learn a place before her eyes decide what to tell her. The ledge faced west. Below, the city looked almost unwilling to be beautiful: too many sharp lines, too much silver in the places where stone preferred shadow. Above, the sky remembered the honest dark that the Shroud tries to mimic and doesn’t quite.
I let the dragon go in the breath I’d promised it and stood human again, skin cold, lungs learning the weight of air the way they always do when I hand them back to a body that spends too many hours pretending to be a diplomat. Torian’s satchel leaned against a stone stack where he’d left it. I pulled on shirt, dark leathers, a wool cloak that still smelled like the forge-house at Emberhold, and the familiarity of it steadied the part of me that would always hate these halls.
We set a brazier in the lee of a thigh-high boulder, fed it the shavings and the twig-bundle Torian had left, and coaxed a stealthy flame. The mountain hates spectacle. It prefers heatthat works. Sparks lifted and fell like tiny confessions. I set a small kettle on the iron bar and left it empty, just to let the noise of it pretend we were drinking something other than cold air.
We spread the notes.
My handwriting and hers, two different disciplines that had learned to love the same line for different reasons. The hymn with its spare call; the gloss with its blunt italics (willing,vow,no iron at threshold); the ledger line with its fussy hand and the quiet margin a cautious scholar had left herself to return to the right place without losing face. The rubbings from the Vale’s symbols, two working circles and the jagged refusal that old women call the Queen’s Bite. The draft of the trade request that Torian had bullied out of me two days ago: numbers that bled if you had eyes for arithmetic, grain tallies that used to be laughable and now had teeth; wagon counts; the month-by-month drop of flour into a city that pretends bread appears when a courtier wants another slice.
Elowyn weighed a paperweight in her palm the way a soldier weighs a stone. Quartz. Drakaryn likes it, breaks clean, holds light without making a fuss about it. She set it on the hymn, and the basalt under our boots reflected flame back in dull, useful sparks.
“Say it,” she said, not because she liked my voice, but because the mountain trusted people who say things clean.
“Drakaryn needs food,” I said. “Not next winter. Not in a story. Now.” The cold let words sit where they were set without sweating. “I can keep the ration wheels turning for another three weeks without breaking the pride of the smiths who make them. After that, pride becomes a luxury. If I barter iron for wheat, I empty the stores I need for spring repairs. If I tax the minor houses, the majors will call it theft and make a hill out of it. IfI pretend my people can keep pretending, men who have been brave enough will learn to be angry instead.”
She didn’t flinch from the ugliness. I had not expected her to. “Lunareth needs time,” she said. “The Shroud is failing in three places, quietly, but not quietly enough for the keepers to keep trusting their secrecy more than their honesty. If I feed our people a Masking every other day for a month, the court will call me merciful and forget to ask why law suddenly hungers. If I use hymn and gloss to call for what the rite requires, they will call me cruel while they remember that consent is a key and a blade. I need two weeks to teach the room its grammar, and the Whitewood time to sign the things my mother taught them to sing about and not touch.”
“Two weeks,” I said. “I can buy you ten days without trading the floor out from under my smiths. The last four days will cost us both.”
She set the second paperweight, obsidian this time, a neat square cut from a pour that had learned to respect itself, on the gloss. “Food for truth,” she said. “We said it yesterday. I’m saying it again so we don’t forget what bargain we’re actually making when we talk about alliances in rooms that applaud themselves. You bring me your numbers. I bring you my keys. I will not hang your charity around my neck like a necklace and pretend it is a crown.”
“Good,” I said. “I make poor jewelry.”
That almost smile again, only the corner of her mouth, the part of a woman’s face the court teaches her to keep still so she doesn’t frighten a room that wants to be the bravest thing in it. She turned from the papers and leaned her elbows on the rock, looking down at the city. “There is a risk,” she said. “We were careful tonight, and tomorrow we will not be allowed to be. If we are seen, if your people see me as the mouth that took theirbread; if mine see you as the hand that forced their grammar, the rumor will move faster than any mule Torian can send.”
“I know,” I said. “Rumor sleeps in the stables and eats better than princes.”
“We fly,” she said, and the way she said it made the moment quieter than talking about flying should be. “After the council. Above the city and out of reach of masks. We ask what we can’t ask in a room full of ritual. We do it not because we like the wind, but because we can’t afford the doors.”
“I’ll carry you again,” I said, and though the words meant nothing in court they meant more than they should have here.
We went back to the notes so our faces wouldn’t confuse the air. She pulled the rubbings from the Vale, the two circles, the jagged refusal, and laid them beside the hymn. The mountain burned a stick of juniper someone had left in the brazier’s basket, and the smoke climbed the edge of the stone instead of the sky, as if it had been taught the manners of this place and didn’t intend to show off.
“Willing,” she said, touching the italic with a gloved finger. “If the vote in the room goes the way I expect, we can force the Whitewood to read it into the ledger. Then the law has to learn to hear itself before it performs. You can use that window. Mercy you buy with shame can feed a thousand people longer than mercy you purchase with applause.”
“And if the room refuses grammar,” I said.
“Then we make the floor speak,” she said. “Varcoran. The north. The part of the mountain that isn’t impressed with the way we plate light over its old teeth. You give me the seal; I give you the hymn. If the lectern lies, the stone tells the truth. Even a court that has learned to applaud its own rituals knows better than to argue with rock.”
We sat in a quiet that wasn’t silence. The flare and settle of the brazier cut the hour into workable pieces. From time to time a gust found us and tried to press the notes against our palms. I set a hand on one corner; she on the other. We kept our gloves because the night bit, but the heat in my hands came from somewhere closer than the brazier. The mistake, if that’s what you wanted to call it, happened then, or the choice. It’s hard to tell which in a place like this, and it probably doesn’t matter.
I moved my fingers the width of a pen-stroke. She didn’t move hers. The slow thrum in my wrist answered her pulse through layers of leather and air. We looked down like thieves refusing to meet each other’s eyes so they wouldn’t have to admit they’d already agreed about the door.
“Say it,” she said, the way she had two nights ago when the boy in the garden shook and I wanted to call my brother a child for how badly he used his power.
