Page 37 of Rhapsody of Ruin
“A way-house,” I said. “Or a shrine.”
“Or a barricade,” Rhydor said. He crouched, brushed his gloved hand over the mortar, and brought it to his nose. “Bone-lime, not stone.”
“Your people use it for graves,” I said quietly.
“We used it when the dead had to be reminded not to get back up,” he said, and did not look away when he said it. “Necromancers aren’t a story where I come from.”
“No,” I said. “Nor here, even if we carve our laws to call them ones.”
He grunted, acknowledgment without conversation, and tapped the edge of the stones where the mortar oozed into the earth likethe last breath of a thing that does not know it is dying. “See this seam?” he asked.
I knelt beside him, let my hand hover a hairsbreadth from the line, and did what Varcoran stone had taught me the day before: I listened with my palm. The thread of bone-lime held a different temperature than the rock, warmer somehow, inert and stubborn. The seam thinned at one corner, barely, then thickened, then jumped the gap as if something had sliced it clean and pasted it back when it was already dry.
“I do,” I said. “A break.”
“Not a natural one,” he said. “Not weather. The lime would flake proper if it were old wind. This is neat. Newer than the rest. Someone cut this open with a knife when they needed to pull out a line of ward and swing it back into place without letting the rest sing about the cut.”
“Like the knot you and Torian found in the archive,” I said, and the cold under my palm bit another finger’s width.
He nodded once. “Once you learn to love lies that act like order, you’ll always pick the neatest cut.”
I tasted the air. It didn’t taste back. We left the foundation and worked the arc of the ring clockwise, stopping here and there the way you stop when the hair at the back of your neck pulls at you. At the midpoint, the soil blurred into a rough oval where nothing grew and the frost lay thicker by a shade. We found the first of the symbols there, half-buried under the powder. Not the neat, legal sigils etched into palace floors, but long, sweeping lines slashed into the earth with a sure hand, now softened and filled with ash and fine grit. A circle, then another, then a lopsided, jagged shape that kissed the edge of the first two circles and pushed against them as if it hated the idea of being bound.
I crouched at the perimeter and brushed one of the curves clean. The line widened into a series of cups and rises where a tool with a rough edge had cut too fast to keep smooth and the earth had grabbed at it. My hand tracked the groove the way a tongue tracks a scar inside a lip. The old stories crowded my throat.
“We call this one the Queen’s Bite,” I said. “It isn’t on any tablet. It lives in whispered songs and in the way old women mark their bread before it goes into the oven on the winter of the thinnest year. A curve that pretends to be a circle, and refuses. Break it once and everything you put inside it belongs to you again.”
“Glamour can eat that story alive,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “But the earth doesn’t lie for us. It only suffers our lies for a while. And then it puts back what belongs.”
“Has it,” he asked softly, “put back what belongs here?”
I looked up at the ring of black trees. They leaned inward, their branches clawing at a twilight that did not cut. The space beneath them wore no underbrush, not even the pale, hair-thin grass that manages to live in palace courtyards starved of sun. The foundations sat. The symbols lay. Nothing moved, not even the idea of movement, except the small tremor at the edge of my vision where the light refused to hold rock as rock and called it something else until I stopped staring.
“No,” I said. “It hasn’t.”
We took rubbings.
I had brought paper cut thin enough to take detail, and a stick of charcoal wrapped in cloth so my fingers wouldn’t smear the line. Rhydor held the edges steady while I worked, his hands sure, his breath a steady warmth I tried not to think about. We made three rubbings from the three cleanest cuts, two working circles, one of the jagged not-circle, and then another from a pair of rune-letters peeking from beneath a fresher gouge of dirt.When I shook the paper clean, ash flurried up and caught on his knuckles; for an instant he looked as if he had been dusted in a forge. He brushed them off, then seemed to stop himself and let the grey settle.
“Translate them?” he asked.
“I can read the shapes,” I said, “but the oldest grammar weaves story into itself. If I guess wrong, the wrong story answers. I’ll need the Whitewood’s old calques and the marginalia the Queen had copied for her, ” I stopped and bit my tongue. “, for my father,” I finished. The quiet tired sound that came from me did not shame me; we had earned one between the two of us.
“Then we’ll exchange notes,” he said. “Your calques, my field numbers. If our scales lie, at least they’ll lie toward the middle.”
“Fair,” I said.
By the time the light had thinned to the peculiar, leaden dimness that passes for evening here, we had five rubbings, two pages of notations neither of us would let an assistant carry, and three theories we agreed not to speak aloud under the trees. The ring had tried nothing more serious than silence, and still I felt the need to shake frost from my shoulders the way a bird shakes water from its feathers when it remembers air.
“Before night,” Rhydor said, without needing to convince me.
We found the horses where we had left them. The outrider nearest them stood with arms folded, face out, trying not to flinch at the way the silence sat on him. When he saw us, he tried to look as if he had been at ease all along. He will get it right if he lives long enough to be bored by punishment; the palace schools that in as diligently as it schools diction.
I put my foot in the stirrup, swung up, and let the mare turn herself toward the ridge. The first half-dozen strides were too loud to be safe; the ground had grown used to our stillnessand decided to call attention to us for leaving. Rhydor’s horse snorted once and then settled back into long, quiet steps, as if he had remembered that being prey isn’t the same as being a coward.
We rode in silence at first because it was a good idea and then because the quiet between us felt less like caution and more like the first draft of something that might one day deserve a better name. The dead wind trailed us in a slow, sulky way for a dozen breaths, then gave up trying to herd us back and slunk away to sit under the trees.
