Page 31 of Rhapsody of Ruin
He rose to keep the veil from storm.
He won the crown’s most guarded place,
And warmed the queen who should be warm.
A kiss cut into a conquest. A vow cut into a weapon. The singer gave the court each image like a blade wrapped in silk and let them cut it for themselves.
Sylara leaned close enough for her fan to brush my wrist. “A favorite of mine,” she murmured. “We do so love a man who betrays beautifully.”
“One must, to see him,” I said. “The ugly betrayer hides in daylight. The beautiful one hides in mirrors.”
She laughed, delighted. A handful of masks near her stole the line to repeat later as their own and felt clever doing it.
The second verse slid into the third. The familiar turn, the battle beneath a fortress like a throat, an oath turned back on itself, abinding that folded a queen into the twilight and a lover into a legend, arrived with the weight of a stone pushed downhill. The hall watched me the way one watches a flame reach tinder it will inevitably take.
I felt the watch and refused it. I let my breath slide past the bone-deep hurt of the things my mother had taught me to call myths and the whispers I had found in the archives that said they were not. If I had a face for this song, it did not belong to the court.
When the final chord hung on the air and bled into silence, the hall remembered how to be a room; someone sighed; someone else dropped a ring too softly to pretend it had been accident; the Master lifted his goblet again. “To the complicate heart,” he said, because the Veythiel line loved contradiction enough to toast it.
“To the complicate heart,” the hall murmured back.
Sylara slid away like smoke seeking a new crack in a door. The crowd broke into petals of conversation again, soft, watchful. My brother materialized at my left shoulder the way he had when we were small and he wanted to make me flinch. “Sister,” Iriel murmured, not moving his mask, “you must teach me how to choose theatrics as well as you choose jewels. That went over as silk.”
“Music was your choice tonight,” I said, “not mine.”
“Don’t take all the credit,” he returned, almost bored. “You’ll strain your back.” He let his gaze slide past me and settle on Rhydor. “Did you enjoy the fable of a warrior who thought the bed was a throne?”
I turned enough to suggest courtesy. “If a throne were a bed,” I told him, “we would have fewer kings.” I left before his smile could sharpen. He would file the exchange away as carefully as a hunter files the shape of a snare, but he would not forget thatI had turned away first, choosing not to be bait. He never forgot the people who denied him.
The court started the next game exactly on cue. Veythiels loved a toss of the knife between masks so smooth no one saw the wrist move until the blade struck. “A toast,” Sylara sang out brightly, and something in me smiled even as the rest of me braced. “To our guest prince, who learned restraint so perfectly today, ” She let the pause do the cutting. “, after yesterday’s charming… display.”
Soft laughter. A clinking of glass. The echo of a jeer hiding in silk.
Rhydor’s chin lifted a fraction. He did not flush. I have to give him that; he does not flush easily, and what court calls shame he has learned to call weather.
They watched me then. The whole room. There is a point where a court becomes an animal. Its attention moves like a single head. It turned to me with that head now, waiting to see if I would defend, knowing how much they wanted me to stay quiet. They can forgive cruelty if it keeps them amused; they never forgive grace that exposes them as small.
I lifted my goblet. “To restraint,” I said, and my voice carried to the walls because I meant it to. “Our hunts are prettier when no one has to bleed to show off how sharp they are.”
It landed as lightly as a flower on a blade, and then cut. Half the room exhaled through laughter they would later call elegant. The other half cooled a degree behind their masks. Sylara’s fan slowed and then resumed with a beat that could have been applause or warning. The Master laughed out loud, which bought me three minutes of safety and two enemies I had already owned.
Rhydor’s eyes found mine over the rim of his cup and the tiny muscle in his cheek flickered, a private acknowledgement, gonebefore anyone could decide what it meant. I felt it anyway, like a warm coin dropped into a cold palm. It wasn’t gratitude. It wasn’t alliance. It was the recognition that we stood nearer each other’s fire than either of us expected to, close enough to keep hands warm and still swear we hadn’t meant to.
The music rose again, new measure, new dance. Couples drifted toward the long oval of the floor. Draven reappeared with Kyssa on his arm and twirled her into the first turn so deftly that she had no choice but to laugh; the sound brushed the underside of my ribs as if reminding me people are sometimes allowed to be alive for reasons that have nothing to do with politics. I watched him dig her out of a fresh snare three minutes later, a pair of women playing at kindness with the soft efficiency of professional cruelty, and did not miss the way Kyssa watched him walk away, as if she had only just realized the map of his face didn’t belong solely to charm.
By then I had to move again; the court hates to be ignored when it believes it has built a trap. I crossed the floor on a slow arc, slicing conversations that pretended to be important and were, in truth, only nervous. Rhydor had shifted to the lee of a column, offering his profile to the room in a way that warned those with sense not to approach from his blind side. When I reached him, the lantern above us dipped in a flaw of its orbit and sent cold light sliding down his cheekbone like the memory of a blade. It flattered nothing and put everything in such relief my breath stumbled. He turned it into something I couldn’t hate by not looking caught.
“Princess,” he said, and the word sat between us like a stone on a riverbed we could both see.
“Prince,” I returned, because we had not yet earned each other’s names in public. “You weathered that well.”
“I’ve survived worse storms than a woman with a fan,” he said, mouth almost quirked. “Though I confess the fan worries me more. I know what to do with storms.”
“You plant your feet and wait,” I said. “And sometimes you fly into the center and come out with your feathers in place to scare the children.”
He glanced up toward the musicians, then past them, toward the far wall. “The song,” he said. “Aelvorne. He was real?”
The breath I took next was not as steady as I would have liked. “Real enough,” I said. “Real in the way that costs more when you begin to count.”
