Page 25 of Rhapsody of Ruin
I bowed and stepped back, feeling Iriel’s stare graze my shoulder as sharply as any blade. The steward whispered to Maelith, and Maelith’s ledger swallowed another line of law.
As the court began to file out, Rhydor and I reached the arch at the same time. The passage between columns narrowed there; I could smell iron and smoke under his skin, the scent of him cutting through the resin like clean air in a closed room. His cloak brushed my sleeve. We did not touch. We did not look. The heat under my ribs noticed him anyway.
In the colonnade outside, noise roughened. Sycophants made for the winners. Predators sought the next throat. I let my serene smile take the lead and allowed myself to be waylaid exactly once.
Sylara Veythiel blocked the corridor with a graceful, practiced lack of grace, the feathers of her fan catching the ward-light and turning it into whetted edges. “Princess,” she breathed, swallowing the title with sugar. “What a charming idea. Riddles. How instructive.” The last word turned sweet into rot.
“Charm,” I said, moving neither faster nor slower than the law required, “rarely troubles the mind.”
“Yours,” she said, and I heard the little barb at the end of the word, “seems very troubled indeed. Perhaps these… games will calm it.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps they will teach it to hunt.”
Her eyes narrowed a fraction behind her amethyst-studded mask. She stepped aside on a rustle of silk, and I passed. Behind me, I heard the fan snap closed like a lizard’s jaw.
Nyssa found me three turns later and slipped a folded sheet into my palm. “From the steward,” she murmured. “He wants the precise shape. If you mean to outlaw glamour in the hall for the duration, the law tablet must know exactly how to sleep.”
I broke the seal and scanned the neat hand. The steward asked for lists: categories, timing, adjudication, precedent. It was always precedent here, as if an empire that wore twilight like a crown feared to see what daylight would show.
“We will write it,” I said. “No illusions during the question or the answer. No glamour on the competing pairs or their immediate circle. Observers may keep their masks, but they must not cast. Three questions each, then a tie-break. Ten breaths to answer, and if you pass, the question belongs to the opponent. Sages from the Whitewood will judge, not noble houses.”
Nyssa’s eyes glinted. “They will hate it.”
“Only at first,” I said. “Then they will settle their bets.”
We detoured to the steward’s antechamber, where the air smelled of ink and beeswax and the stewed apples his clerk always had cooling on the sill because his grandchildren liked the scent. The steward rose, bowed, and waited. I handed him the sheet as if I were giving him a ribbon to tie to a gift and not a set of manacles for the court’s favorite weapon. He skimmed, nodded, and sat to copy it in that neat, unerringly precise hand that made law into something the floor could hold.
“Two nights,” he said. “I will post the rules by moon’s first rise.”
“Thank you,” I said, and his mouth did that thing it sometimes did when he wanted to smile and remembered the room. It flattened itself back into obedience.
On the way back to my own rooms we passed the alcove where Torian stood with Sir Thalen, both of them pretending to discuss ward-resets while very clearly discussing the way the last two days had bent the hall. Torian inclined his head to me the way men incline to storms. Thalen gave a small, stiff bow that had more sincerity in it than grace.
“Sir,” I said, without stopping.
“Princess.”
“Did you enjoy the hunt?” I asked, because he had not.
“Less than I was meant to,” he said, and the answer bought him more from me than any pledge would have.
When we reached my door, Nyssa set her hand against it, felt the Shroud signatures thrumming beneath the wood, and nodded. Safe enough. I let the serenity crack, just a hair. It felt like letting the top lace of a corset loose.
“Now the part no one sees,” I said.
“What part?” Nyssa asked, though she already knew.
“The part where you practice smiling until your jaw aches so the people who want to kill you forget you have teeth,” I said. “The part where you pick jewelry to signal compliance to your mother and shoes that will not slip on a mirrored floor when the world does. The part where you write three talking points that can charm a nest of vipers back into their holes.”
She handed me a ribbon from the dressing table. I tied back my hair and let the tightness in my shoulders carry my anger further from my face. We chose the moons at my throat again, the pretty chain that made my mother think I was soft. I put it on the way soldiers put on armor.
When the bell tolled for the evening audience, I stepped back into the world the court insists is the only real one: lanterns and lies.
The small chamber had reset itself. The room always did, the wards smoothing footprints from the floor as if nothing weighty had ever happened there. The chairs had been arranged again in their quiet half-moon and the law tablets breathed evenly and Maelith had a new clean page to ruin. The room smelled fresher, like the resin had been skimmed from the surface of a pool and replaced. It would take only minutes to thicken again.
I opened with nothing. Praise for the oil, nod to the musicians, thanks for the ward. They let the yarn of it wind around them again, soothing and dull. Then the tests began, as they always did.
A lord in a leaf mask asked loudly whether our games would include a demonstration of the dragon’s roar. An older woman in a simple silver veil wondered if perhaps illusions might be permitted if confined to the floor. A younger noble with not enough sense to hide his house asked why a Namyr boy had been allowed to keep his face.
