Page 30 of Rhapsody of Ruin
Chapter 16
Elowyn
Veythiel Hall liked to pretend it was a forest carved into a palace, a lie so exquisite it almost felt like a confession. Columns rose like white trees, their trunks wrapped in climbing silver ivy that was not ivy at all but glass threaded with glamour. Lanterns glowed in the high vaults, not as points of flame, but as drifting moons that swam lazy circles through perfumed air. The floor was a mirror disguised as marble; one misstep and a mask would swear she was falling into a lake of stars. Music spilled from galleries veiled in silk so fine you could see the shadows of the musicians’ hands without ever seeing their faces. Everything shimmered with the peculiar luxury of Lunareth, beauty sharpened until it could cut a throat.
I wore a mask like a crescent of night. It hugged my cheekbones and left my mouth bare for smiling and lying. Around my throat, the chain of silver moons lay obedient and bright, the one necklace my mother never objected to. I’d chosen a gown the color of twilight just before a storm, its skirts pooling like bruise-blue clouds around my feet when I stood still, and breaking like waves when I moved.
I moved. That was my first duty at any masquerade: to circulate until the court felt I had touched every corner with approval, until its knives dulled, for an hour at least, against the crease of my smile. So I moved and listened, the way one listens to a river to hear where the undertow lives.
Rhydor’s presence changed the room’s weather. He stood in the ring between the columns instead of taking the chair offered to him, which maddened half the masks and made the other half too curious to blink. He’d shed the heavier pieces of armorfor dark formal leathers, but nothing in him looked soft. He carried himself like a man trying not to show he would rather be anywhere else, and somehow that dignity turned the court toward him like flowers toward a cold sun.
I tracked who approached him first: a Varcoran cousin with a voice like honey over ice who asked whether dragons ever learned to dance in places that didn’t burn; a minor Thalassa nephew who wanted to know how many swords a prince could throw before the hour turned; two women of House Rell with masks carved into vines whose laughter snagged when they realized his eyes didn’t slide toward them like other men’s did. They came as petitioners dressed in flirtation, found the answers too plain for sport, and drifted away with little wounds they hid with feigned delight.
Kyssa kept to the near edge of his orbit with the proud stiffness of a woman who had decided she would rather be mocked than coddled. She watched the musicians, the chandeliers, the old portraits of Veythiels who had built the hall out of rumor and taxes, but her attention flicked back to Rhydor as steady as breath. When a pair of Fae noblemen in fox and fern masks drifted to her side, they kept their voices pitched just above the music.
“Spare brides should be grateful,” fox murmured. “They could have done worse than to be kept close to the fire.”
“Spare brides,” fern said, tasting the phrase as if it were a sugared fruit, “burn first when the hearthwood’s low.”
Kyssa’s fingers tightened against the stem of her glass. Her jaw did that small tremor I had seen in the throne hall, anger caught and settled before it became a visible flaw.
Draven appeared, not so much walking as unfolding out of an alcove with effortless grace, and set himself gently between Kyssa and the men, as if he had been draped there by anartist with an amused eye. “Lady,” he said, bowing with the kind of courtesy that looks like irreverence when done correctly. “Forgive me, but you promised me the next measure and I refuse to let anyone else end the night legally.” He didn’t look at the men when he spoke. He didn’t need to. His presence was a dismissal disguised as banter. Fern blinked. Fox lifted his mask with two fingers as though it itched. They drifted away on the excuse, and Draven turned the full warmth of a smile on Kyssa that would have melted glass.
“You are being ridiculous,” she said, but the edge had gone from her voice, and the rose under her cheekbone deepened a shade. He offered his arm. She took it. He escorted her toward the gallery where the shadows hid a little laughter and the scent of mulled wine steeped in clove and cinnamon, and for a blessed heartbeat the court’s teeth dulled.
I made another loop, past the table laid with sugared fruits that bled pale nectar when bitten, past a knot of ladies comparing their new masks by tapping them together like birds testing shells, past a trio of men who were pretending to talk politics and in truth were tallying lovers’ debts. As I traced that long oval route, masks kept stopping me in the old ritual ways, compliments wrapped around tests, gentle slights sugar-dusted, but I answered with nothing my mother would rebuke and nothing my brother could twist. The hall warmed to the idea that I was behaving.
“And why wouldn’t you?” Sylara breathed into my ear as she fell in beside me like smoke. She wore amethyst tonight, an entire twilight sky fastened to her body with determination. Her fan flicked in lazy half-circles. “You have the whole court to perform for, and your beast to tame.”
“My husband is no beast,” I said, sincerely enough that it rang truer than defiance. “He’s a prince who learned war where our people learned sport. Finding that dull must be exhausting.”
She laughed, appreciatively. “Oh, Elowyn. If you learned to use that blade as well as you polish it, you might cut something worth bleeding.”
“I was told knives were unfashionable,” I said. “This season, everyone is wielding ‘charm.’”
“Charm,” she said, lowering her voice until only the drummer under the balcony could have heard her, “wounds deeper.”
We reached the room’s throat, the place where the columns narrowed and the music gathered before it spilled like water into the rest of the hall. The Master of Veythiel, Sylara’s uncle, a man whose spine had elegantly fused with his chair, lifted his goblet in the old, theatrical manner and clanged it against a bowl of hammered silver. The music fell away mid-turn with precision. Lanterns dimmed a degree. The room inhaled.
“Friends,” the Master said, voice old and smooth enough to have been varnished. “We have, at the request of our Princess, a song for you tonight. A very old song, rarely sung, whose edges cut as clean now as they did when the ink was wet.” His glance brushed me without landing; a courtesy to let me compose my face. “The Ballad of Aelvorne.”
Every mask stilled. The name itself had a ritual gravity. Even those who didn’t care for history pricked up, because the hall loved a story that promised to cost someone something.
The players shifted behind their veils. Lute, breath flute, a soft hand drum. The singer stepped forward, a woman I didn’t know, veil drawn down to the mouth, mask shaped like the crescent of a broken moon. When she sang, the sound was older than the room.
Moonblade gleamed where shadows fell,
A vow of love, a vow of war.
He struck the queen he swore to guard,
And bound her heart forevermore.
The words sank like stones through perfume. I felt the old ache stir, the one built of all the truths the palace had taught me and the ones it had hidden until I learned to pry them from its walls at my own cost. You don’t spend your life wearing someone else’s story without developing a nose for the places the tellers lied.
Rhydor had stilled. He listened without closing his eyes, the way a soldier learns to rest upright in a saddle while scouting a battlefield. He was reading the room even as the room read the song.
Born of a northern house of night,
