Page 79 of Rhapsody of Ruin
“That’s not fair,” I said, and lost the battle of my mouth against its smile. “You can’t be both my mother and my friend.”
“I can’t be your mother,” she said, and her hands gentled the way a woman’s do when she says something that asks the room to learn both truth and kindness at once. “I can, however, be the person who puts your hair where you want it without asking whether you are being clever.”
She wove it half up, the rest loose enough to remind me my neck belonged to me and my mask will not cover it. When she finished, she drew a line of rue along my brow, a greenish shadow that cooled the heat that grief had brought to skin.
“Look,” she said.
I faced the mirror. A woman looked back who had been carved clean of affectation and left with only what bones and breath insist on. The gown made space for nothing but the length of my spine and the shape the world had forced my mouth to take. Ilooked like a prayer and an answer and a blade, and it made me proud and tired in equal measure.
“Good,” Nyssa said, reading all that on my face. “Now the door.”
She crossed to it and traced the last of the chalk line in a curve shaped to oblige the way a hand reaches when it means to grasp. She blew across it. The powder lifted, brightened, faded. The ward clicked into the wood the way syllables click into a sentence you didn’t want to write and know still that the world is better for it existing.
“Bar my door when they come,” I said again, because repetition is a kind of charm. “No exceptions.”
“No exceptions,” she repeated. “Except, ”
“No exceptions,” I said, and the edge in my voice made itself at home. “Not him. Not anyone.”
Her mouth pressed thin; then she bowed like a servant in a temple that had offended her. “As you like, Princess.”
I went to the table one last time. The mask sat where it had been placed, a moon waiting for a face. I didn’t pick it up. I smoothed the hem of the storm-colored dress with palms that had decided to be steady. I lifted my cup and finished the water. It tasted like iron and mint and the end of something, and then like the beginning of something else.
The ward-lines in the stone under my feet hummed softly, a sound like a throat clearing before a song. Distantly, the herald’s staff tested the floor. Farther away, a child laughed and was shushed. The Shroud beyond the glass tightened and loosened, like breath. The palace is a body when it wants to be. Today it wanted to watch.
Nyssa came back to me and took both my hands. Her eyes were clear. “I will be on the other side of the door,” she said. “When they are finished trying to scare you into dying the wrong way.”
I squeezed her fingers once. “Thank you,” I said. “For herbs. For chalk. For not loving me too kindly.”
She smiled the way women do when they are about to let go of something they care about because the hour requires it. “Go,” she said. “Teach them what standing looks like.”
I nodded. Then I did the thing that has always been the only thing left to me when law dulls its teeth on rumor: I set my spine into my dress and turned toward the world.
The latch looked very small. My hand on it looked very human. The wood felt warm where Nyssa’s chalk had made it stubborn. I drew a breath and opened the door, and the cold in the corridor kissed my face like an apology from a god too embarrassed to say the words.
Outside, footsteps, voices, the scrape of a gauntlet against stone. Down the hall, a stand of Masks turned its lacquered heads toward me in perfect unison, and I saw in their approach what the hymn had warned and the gloss had named: willing blood or no blood at all.
I lifted my chin.
“Bar it,” I said over my shoulder.
Nyssa’s voice came soft and steady. “Barred.”
The door whispered shut behind me. The line of rue on my brow cooled. The ward hummed. I felt the small weight of the moon chain in my palm where I’d kept it hidden; I didn’t put it on. I folded my fingers around it instead until the crescents pressed their cool shapes into my skin and made a constellation I could carry where law couldn’t reach.
The corridor smelled of myrrh and heat and anticipation. Somewhere below, torches threw long shadows across the council floor. Far above, the Shroud’s seam flashed once andvanished. The world was a blade. I had chosen which edge to bleed on.
I began to walk.
Chapter 36
Vaeloria
The steam clung to my skin like the hands of ghosts, curling damp fingers down my throat, along my ribs, and into my lungs until every breath tasted faintly of metal and roses. The Twilight Pools chamber had always smelled of roses, petals steeped into the mineral waters by acolytes who believed beauty softened grief, but beneath it lived the harsher note of stone, salt, and ash. The Shroud’s echo. The thing I had ruled my entire life to keep from unraveling.
The pools shimmered with a pale, violet light, not from the braziers that hung on silver chains overhead, but from the veil itself. The water reflected Lunareth’s dying strength back at me, fractured, as if mocking my efforts. My body floated, weightless, the silken folds of my ceremonial gown spreading around me like a shroud stitched from the moon itself. My breath came thin, shallow. I could hear it rattle, amplified by the stone walls.
It was a queen’s chamber, but it felt like a tomb.
