Page 28 of Rhapsody of Ruin
The word made three faces flinch. I tucked it away, folded carefully with the bone disc in the pocket at my hip. The crowd at the table shifted from sneer to assessing. The difference was small. It mattered.
I could have pressed then. I could have ridden the tremor in the dealer’s hands and the crack in the lady’s fan, could have leveraged the fox’s tell until he flung his mask at the wall and snarled. That wasn’t why I had sat here. I hadn’t come to break a few nobles and leave them too angry to be useful later. I’d come to make the hall understand I could play without fire, and to remind it that I would not forget when it cheated.
I bowed my head a fraction. “A good game.” I made sure my voice didn’t carry triumph. It carried sardonic respect instead. I stacked my remaining tokens into a tidy tower and pushed them toward the center. “You may have these back. I have what I came for.”
“What’s that?” the fox asked before he could stop himself.
“A seat,” I said, because he didn’t deserve better, and the noblewoman snorted behind her fan and then remembered she didn’t laugh at dragons and masked it with a cough.
The hum around us loosened. The hall allowed me to withdraw. That was a victory more valuable than pressing until someone bled.
I turned, cloak catching a lantern and throwing a shiver of light across marble, and found Thalen standing exactly where he had been, now with his helm tucked behind him as if he needed both hands free to hold back whatever impulse had made him speak to defend me. He flushed when I looked at him and covered it with a quick incline of his head.
“You declined to crush them once you had them,” he said, too softly for all but the three most attentive courtiers to hear. “It’s… unusual.”
“I’ve crushed enough things I couldn’t use afterward,” I said, because it was true.
“You didn’t need fire.”
“Not tonight.”
Something like relief flickered over his face, and then he remembered where he was and straightened. “My lord,” he said, “if you intend to play again, the tables on the east wall use riddle-cards with embedded illusions. They’ll try to pull your eyes where they want them.”
“Then I’ll keep them on the hands,” I said. “Yours, as well as theirs. You’re good with rules. Watch the room.”
His surprise lasted the space of one breath. “Yes, Prince.”
Torian’s weight settled at my shoulder. “We have what we wanted,” he said under the hum. “Faces who respected that you didn’t gloat. A Varcoran token. A little space.”
“And enemies who resent being denied spectacle,” I said. “I’ll dream sweetly of their displeasure.”
Brenn, irrepressible as ever, slid in at my other side with two cups of something the Fae claimed was wine and my people would have called witchwater. He offered one to me; I waved it away; he knocked his back in two swallows and grinned at the way three masks tilted to watch him. Draven materialized beside Sylara halfway across the hall and leaned down to murmur at her until she laughed too loud and snapped her fan shut on his fingers. He kissed the back of the fan and bowed until she had no choice but to smile again. Tharos shadowed a dealer whose hands had begun to twitch anew; the dealer’s hands steadied.
Korrath tapped his cane twice. “Listen,” he said, the word so soft only our ring heard it.
I listened.
At the far end of the hall, a herald in moon-white livery lifted a slate. “By order of the Queen,” he intoned, “the rules for the Princess’s Games will be posted at moon’s first rise in the lower arcade. All houses in good standing may name a pair to compete. Glamour will be disallowed within the competing circle for the duration of the question and the answer. Judges to be named by the Whitewood keepers.”
A murmur ran through the gamblers. No glamour. You could feel the way that rule offended and intrigued them in equal measure. I felt the hair along my arms lift under my sleeves andtold myself the reaction was only anticipation of a fight I knew how to win.
A noble with a fish mask leaned toward his neighbor. “She thinks she can strip us of our toys and we will thank her for it.”
“She thinks she can strip us of nothing,” the neighbor replied. “She thinks she can teach herself to win where we cannot cheat. Then she’ll set the cheating on fire.”
I looked at Torian and saw the same calculation in his face that must have lived in mine. “She set the field,” he said.
“We learned it before she did,” I said, and didn’t add that the thought warmed something under my ribs in a way I hadn’t been ready for. She had forced me to stand with her yesterday. Today I had stood alone and taught myself to breathe without flame. In two nights we would do both in front of everyone who would like to watch us drown.
A man in a moon-mask drifted close, tilting his head, trying to decide if I would answer if he spoke. He smiled the barbed smile they practice as boys when they learn the world will always give them an audience. “Prince,” he said, “how does one play a game where glamour gives no help? Does Ash bring riddles to the table, or does it merely bring appetite?”
“Appetite wins wars,” I said. “It wins games when it learns which bones to spit back in the host’s face.”
He laughed, then looked at my eyes, shivered, and moved away.
We circled the hall once more, slow as if we had all the hours in the world and none. I let my men peel off and peel back, one by one they disappeared into alcoves and reappeared with names, with tells, with whispered scraps of who had borrowed what from whom ten years ago and which debt could make a man fold. The air grew thicker the way it always does before a storm, and for the first time in days I felt something like ease.
Not comfort. Never call this place comfort. But the recognition that breathing here did not always have to taste like defeat.
