Page 24 of Rhapsody of Ruin
There is a particular sound courtiers make when they hear something they did not expect and do not yet know how to destroy. It is a breath turned sideways. I heard it now, a collective intake that smelled faintly of resin and fear, mixed with the sharper scent of ward-smoke as the floor’s runes pulsed once beneath my slippers.
My mother’s steward glanced up from his position at her left and nodded once, almost imperceptibly, before lowering his head again. He would translate my suggestion into an entry the law tablets could tolerate. Maelith, posted like a shadow against the far pillar, bent over his ledger and scratched the words down, dark head inclined, mouth expressionless. On the dais, Iriel’s mouth tightened behind his gleaming mask. A crack, but a beautiful one, like a flaw in glass that will spiderweb if pressed in the right place.
I let a heartbeat pass. Then I turned toward Rhydor.
He stepped forward without being invited and bowed, brief and deliberate, nothing wasted. “Ash accepts,” he said, and the iron in his voice made the air vibrate. For a moment I felt the hum of it in my ribs. His eyes found mine. The look lasted no longer than a breath, and the room was full of people who hated both of us, but in that scrape of a heartbeat something settled. Truce.
The murmur rose then, the sound of masks turning, fans snapping open and shut, whispers darting to find purchase. I heard the derision try to form and saw it falter around the edges. The word fair has a way of getting under the skin even here. Sylara Veythiel’s fan stuttered and then snapped too sharply, a tiny crack in one bone bright in the lanternlight. I put a mark beside her name in the ledger I keep entirely in my head. Displeased. Predictable. Useful.
“The format will be plain,” I continued, letting steadiness do the work. “Questions posed, answers required in turn. Quick thought and true memory will be the judges, not glamour. We will honor our scholars and sages. The first match will be held in two nights.”
Two nights gave them no time to poison it completely.
A young lord tried to translate his impatience into wit. “Princess, do we mean to teach the dragon his letters?”
“Only if you will sit in the front row to learn your own,” I said in the same mild tone, and without looking toward the dais I felt the faintest ripple of amusement from someone who shouldn’t have found it funny. It could have been Maelith. It could have been my mother. It could have been the law tablets themselves humming in their sleep. The room shifted, the sharpest edges blunted by small laughter.
Iriel moved then, small enough that only those of us who watch for tremors and not just earthquakes would have noticed. He leaned forward and let his voice slide like oil onto water. “Sister, if we do this, we should do it in the manner of our ancestors. Riddles woven into illusion. Glamour that glides with the question and reveals the answer. Let the hall be… entertained.”
He smiled at me when he said entertained. It never reached his eyes.
“No,” I said, not loud enough to sound like defiance, not soft enough to sound like assent. “Not this time. Illusion distracts from the mind. And minds are what we mean to honor.”
“Are you sure honor is why we’re all here?” someone murmured from the second row. The laughter that followed tasted brittle.
I did not look away from my brother. “You can wrap a knife in velvet, Iriel. It will still cut.”
“And you can call a cage a chamber,” he returned sweetly, “and the bird still sings until it dies.”
“Then we will open a window,” I said.
His smile cooled. “How magnanimous.”
Maelith looked between us and made another neat note in his ledger, as if he were recording not only the words but the angle of the air they moved through. On the dais, my mother did not twitch. I could feel her patience stretching like a wire.
Sylara flicked her fan in a pattern my grandmother would have recognized, a discrete signal to three different houses. I watched the little flicks of feathers and placed those nobles on the opposite side of the board. The room rustled with the sound of people shifting their loyalties by increments.
“Very well,” I said, before the tide could gather. “It is settled.”
There is power in the sound of a decision spoken as if it had already been made before anyone else entered the room. It stealsthe breath for argument. The court felt it now, even the ones who wanted to complain. The steward dipped his quill again. The ward-lines underfoot warmed a fraction beneath the soles of my slippers, as if the Shroud itself catalogued the law I had just written with my mouth.
“Two nights,” I repeated. “At moon’s second rise.”
I dismissed the audience with a flick of my hand. The almost-applause that followed was startled and short-lived, as if their palms were not yet sure whether to meet each other. Good. Leave them off-balance.
We rose as one creature made of silk and steel. The nobles bowed; some too deeply, some not enough. I watched their masks and the way their shoulders carried the bow and added my marks to the ledger. Backers. Fence-sitters. Wolves. I set Sylara in her own column. She was always a column by herself.
Vaeloria’s veil lifted the slightest fraction, my signal to approach. I did so slowly, not because I hesitated, but because everything here required the speed of honey if you meant to survive it.
“You innovate,” she said, softly, with the politeness one uses for a servant who had learned to polish silver to her preference. “Entertain them. Keep them moving. A still court rots.”
“As you taught me,” I returned, and only someone who had known me since childhood would have heard the thread of steel under the silk.
Her hand hovered for a heartbeat over mine and then withdrew before warmth could come of it. “Do not confuse the pleasure of applause with the safety of favor,” she said. “Hearts are not prizes to be won. They are weapons to be turned.”
“I do not want their hearts,” I said. “Only their attention.”
“Attention,” she said, the veil whispering as she inclined her head a fraction, “is more dangerous.”
