Page 16 of Rhapsody of Ruin
Chapter 10
Elowyn
The hunting grounds lay where Shadowspire’s gardens surrendered to the first ranks of the enchanted wood, twilight caught in the trees like spun glass, silver dew trembling on every blade of grass. Lanterns hung from living branches, tethered by glamour so fine the flames never wavered, and the air smelled of wet leaves, crushed mint, and the sweet metallic bite of ward-smoke. It was the place our court liked best to pretend cruelty was sport.
Courtiers assembled by the score, masks glittering, capes dragged just far enough through the dew to catch the light. Pages carried trays of opal wine; stewards circulated with chalk-slates to keep wagers neat: how long a stag would run, how quickly a boar would fall, which beast would bolt when the horns sounded. The gambling was part tradition, part confession. Everyone knew the hunt would be rigged; the game was guessing how.
I stood where the last marble walk gave way to turf, a half step ahead of the cluster of nobles who had attached themselves to me since the wedding, sycophants who pretended loyalty when the winds blew steady and watched for the first sign of storm to sell me cheap. Nyssa murmured the order of events at my shoulder, voice low behind her healer’s mask. On the opposite edge of the gathering, the dragons arranged themselves like a wall: Rhydor in front with Torian half a pace behind, veterans fanning to either side in a formation that read as nonthreatening only if you didn’t know how to look.
Brenn’s hair flared like a coal among silver, Draven’s blond gleam a careless sunbeam against armor; Korrath was all anglesand listening, his cane tucked beneath his arm, and Tharos, the iron-handed one, stood as if the ground couldn’t move him even if the forest tried. I shouldn’t have noticed how the ward-light mapped itself over their faces. I did. I shouldn’t have noticed how Rhydor’s shadow fell longer than everyone else’s. I did that too.
Iriel made us wait. He liked arrival as theater, a late entrance, a murmur, a pause long enough to feel like a draw of breath before a plunge. When he sauntered out from under the witchwillows, he wore a mask that left his smile in full view and a hunting jacket embroidered with silver fern. He flung one arm wide as if the woods belonged to him. Perhaps they did. He had spent a lifetime in their shadows turning law into spectacle.
“Welcome,” he said, voice pitched to carry. “To the first sport of our new union.”
The word sport turned in my mouth like sour fruit. Behind me, Sylara breathed a laugh into her fan; the Lady of Veythiel enjoyed a good display the way crows enjoyed bright eyes. To my left, one of Varcoran’s junior lords spoke without moving his lips. “Ten marks the first stag falls under a minute.” His companion scratched it onto the slate and added five on “dragon misses.”
I did not turn my head. “Put your coin somewhere it needs help more than your pride,” I said, smiling like silk. The lord choked on his own breath; Nyssa tipped the slate in my direction, eyes glinting amusement above her mask.
Iriel raised the hunt horn and let its silver note pour through the clearing. Glamour crooned in the wake of the sound, subtle as breath. Vines curled back from a fenced run and a stag stepped into view, all slender grace and velvet antlers.
Every mask tilted forward at once.
The stag raised its head to sniff the air, the movement so perfectly executed it might have been choreographed, and likely was. It stamped the turf and the grass shivered around its hooves, then tossed its head and bolted for the line of ash trees that marked the far edge of the run.
Brenn whooped as one of the dragonborn sprang forward after it. Draven let out an elegant, entirely unhelpful whistle and said something to Thalen, the young Fae knight whose gaze had fixed on the soldiers since midday yesterday; Korrath’s cane tapped once. Tharos rolled his shoulder so his iron caught the light and jogged forward with a runner’s economy.
Rhydor did not move. He watched with that immovable stillness I had learned to recognize, heat banked into something you could call patience if you wanted.
“What do you think,” Sylara murmured, her voice muffled by feathers, “how long until it remembers to fall down? Or will they let it gore one of them first to see if the beast bleeds?”
“My brother’s humor grows more tedious by the day,” I said.
Her fan snapped open and shut, the tilt of her head suggesting a curtsey she would never make. “But his taste is impeccable.”
The stag’s neat arc toward the trees broke mid-stride. It lurched, antlers shuddering as if a silent hand had yanked them. A glamour line, invisible to anyone who’d never watched Vaeloria’s private ritualists at work, dragged the animal’s path a finger’s breadth to the right. Not enough to see. Enough to matter.
The first veteran reached it and grabbed for the antlers. The stag twisted, and the twist went wrong: too much torque, too much mass. The stag folded in on itself and then unfolded as something else, a horror of curved bone and slick shadow that should not have fit inside a deer. Claws where hooves had been,a mouth too wide and full of teeth sharpened by magic. Illusion, every terrible inch of it, but illusion rigged with impact, as solid as a thrown plate. It raked the man’s chest and sent him tumbling.
The courtiers cheered.
I did not think. “Stop it,” I said to no one in particular and to everyone at once; however quiet my voice, it cut. Glamour wavered, a single heartbeat’s stutter. It is difficult to direct a spell when someone tugs the thread of your attention and tells you to do something else. I had been doing it to my mother since I was six.
Iriel smiled at me as if I had lifted a cup to my lips wrong. “Sister,” he said with pleasant astonishment. “We play.”
The beast lunged again, claws out. The veteran, Draven? No. The other. The laughing one was ten paces behind, the blond one three to the left. It was Tharos who was closest, pulling the iron weight of his hand up and across in a motion both brutal and elegant, catching the creature’s strike mid-leap. It hit with a sound like a hammer thrown into a drum. He grunted; the metal screamed; the false flesh buckled to the glamour woven around it and held.
A visible edge of panic crept into the ranks behind me, then turned in an instant to delight. “Glorious,” someone breathed. “Make it gore him,” someone else said. I did not look at them. I looked at my brother.
“Call it off,” I said.
“I called it on,” he said. “What would you have me do, little dove? Sing it to sleep?”
I did not let him see me flinch at the old, private name he had turned into a blade. I kept my eyes on his mouth and my voiceeven. “I would have you play games where other people aren’t the pieces when you lose.”
His smile cut. “Then never come to a hunt.”
The beast swept Tharos’s legs. He went down in a crash of iron and muscle and breath driven from lungs. The illusion scissored its mouth for a killing bite that would draw no blood and still hurt like sin when it landed.
