Page 33 of Rhapsody of Ruin
The road knifed upward in narrow switchbacks carved into the face of the cliff. Hooves rang on old marks; frost held in the seams where sunlight never learned the path. The sea lay somewhere beyond the next range if the maps told the truth, but nothing smelled of it; the north here carried only stone and the peat-sour scent of ancient fire. I had the sense that if you scraped a finger along these walls, the dust under your nail would be older than the lies in a dozen courts.
We dismounted in a courtyard cut like a well out of the rock. Varcoran sigils crouched above the entry arch, tower, mist,broken key, chiseled so deeply the grooves still trapped shadow even in silver light. Elowyn lifted her chin at the sight of them. The gesture wasn’t pride. It wasn’t even defiance. It was recognition: a house that had taught itself to be a lock and never asked who would keep the key.
“Thank you, Master Cor,” she said to the steward. “We will require the lower archive and the northern passage.”
“We have prepared as you wrote, Highness,” he answered, voice dry as old parchment. “The lanterns are lit. The cold will remain.”
“Cold is cleaner than warmth where books have learned the wrong hands,” she said.
He bowed slightly and stepped aside. A pair of ironbound doors protested their own history when we pushed them open; the sound went down my spine and settled there. We left the horses in the keep-yard with one of the outriders and a stable-hand who didn’t bother masking his boredom; then we went in.
Varcoran corridors carried sound like a throat carries a stain. Voices hit and skidded, doubled back on themselves and dissolved into the stone. My boots bit at the grit on the floor, leather catching at the roughness that Shadowspire would have polished to a reflect. Wards ran underfoot here too, no place in Wonder forgot its law, but the runes inlaid into this obsidian didn’t pulse with the same languid assurance the court preferred. Their light held steady as a held breath. The patterns were older. Stricter. Less concerned with how a thing looked once it worked.
“Do you know this place?” I asked, not because it mattered but because I wanted the sound of her voice to choose against the cold.
“I know what the palace wants to remember about it,” Elowyn said. “That House Varcoran learned to measure shadow long before the rest of us decided a veil should pass for magnificence. That their halls are rude and their manners plainer. That they keep maps instead of epigrams.” She glanced back, eyes catching the ward-light into something not quite soft. “And I know what the archivists mutter when they are tired: that the Hold’s stone hums a little differently where the north remembers.”
“Remembers what.”
“Where it puts its dead,” she said simply, as if the honesty would cost us less if it came first.
We passed beneath a low lintel, and the temperature dropped a measure. Torches sputtered. The air dried in my mouth and left the taste of iron and old ash. That was when I understood why she’d insisted on only two outriders: Varcoran halls did not like an audience. They had been cut for small things, carried truths, quiet lies, footsteps you meant only one other person to hear.
We reached the lower archive without adding our breath to more words than necessary. The door was plain oak banded with iron and etched with that broken key again, the groove of it deeper than any carver’s tool could cut. Elowyn pressed her palm to the wood, closed her eyes, and murmured something that wasn’t quite a word. The wards underfoot brightened once, just once, in acknowledgment, and the lock grunted through.
The archive ate sound. Not the way Shadowspire’s quiet devours it for theater, but the way low earth takes it and keeps it where the roots can taste. Shelves climbed to the groined ceiling in long ranks, the wood old enough to have stopped smelling like wood at all. The lanterns Master Cor had promised hung at measured intervals and bled steady flame without smoke. The place should have felt dead. It felt, it is not a word I liked to use in palaces, true.
Elowyn did not wander. She walked three aisles and a half without looking up, turned left at a row of ledgers stamped with tiny white moons, turned right at a shelf of scroll-cases bound in old bronze, and stopped in front of a long span of emptiness broken only by a single shallow groove cut into the wood like a scar that refused to heal.
Her hand hovered over the mark. “Here,” she said. “This is where my father’s notes end.”
The words landed heavier than the air. I had not asked to be present for this particular failure. She had brought me to it anyway. There is a difference between a queen asking you to witness a ritual and a woman asking you to look into the place her life has been cut open.
“What was taken?” I asked.
“Not taken,” she said. “That’s the neat story. If it had been stolen, my mother would have fed three nobles to the song about order and called it justice at midmeal.” She traced the line once, not pressing, as if her skin needed to learn the length of the problem. “This shelf was marked to hold one more set of bindings. The paper wasn’t delivered. The ledger for this wing shows the title, the day, the hour. An assistant entered ‘received’ on it in neat hand. But the binding didn’t arrive.”
“Lost in transit,” Torian said behind me, careful not to step too close lest his breath disturb whatever math Varcoran stone did to keep silence true.
“Except transit,” she said, “at Varcoran Hold is measured by a path the wards watch at every turning.” She nodded toward the floor; the silver there kept steady. “We should see scarring in the pattern. Even the smallest, if the package had passed, the floor would sing a slightly different song in this place. When we moved my father’s books into the palace’s private rooms I madethe steward log each one in the outer hall to hear how the lines changed before we let the trunks cross the threshold.”
“You move ledgers to listen to floors,” I said. “You accuse me of learning war where your people learned sport.”
“A war of paper bleeds you slower,” she said. “But you die just the same.”
I lowered to a crouch and set my palm against the cold. If you have spent enough years on a field, you learn that ground is as articulate as a general if you will shut your mouth and let it explain. The rune-work here told me three things. First, that the base lattice was older than Shadowspire, older than any piecework I’d seen in the city, cast in long pours of silver that had not been repaired by hand since their pouring. Second, that someone had added a later web, a redundant net, finer and seen only by the way it drank light closer to the veins than the original had. And third, that at the edge of the shelf where the groove ran, the fine net turned a half-finger inside itself and ended in a knot that had no business in a binding ward unless the warder meant to make removing a thing from that location invisible to the songs underfoot.
“I’ve seen this knot,” I said. The words rode up from a place behind my tongue that had carried heat too long. “Not in Wonder. Beyond our eastern marches. Necromancers use a version of it in bone-honey to trick a hearth into holding a warmth it cannot account for.”
Elowyn’s mask of calm hiccuped then, just for half a breath, quick enough that if you blinked you would have called it an illusion of light. She didn’t look at me when she spoke. “We are not in Valliere.”
“No,” I said. “But inadequately explained harm will still save itself the short way when it cheats.”
She was breathing wrong now. Only someone who had kept his own lungs from betrayal after a blow would notice. She set her hand against the shelf again, steadier, and let her fingers angle to match the cut of the wood. When she looked down this time, she wasn’t reading the archive’s ledger in her head. She was doing what the floor had taught her. She was listening.
“Show me,” she said.
I dug the chalk from my pocket, a habit that made Torian smile and courtiers sniff, and touched the floor at the edge of the knot. The fine web of the later ward-work lay millimeters beneath the surface; I could feel its geometry through the chalk the way you can feel the weave of a cloth if you know to press with your fingers instead of rub with your palm. I traced the later line as a mason would notch a seam, light, not to mar the lattice beneath. The chalk grew bright where the silver ran closest to shadowlight and died where old pour and new net misaligned. Torian crouched too without asking and tracked as I did, his scholar’s patience tempering my soldier’s need to finish.
