Page 38 of Rhapsody of Ruin
Halfway up the long slope to the ridge, the ground shifted under my mare’s front hoof the way a fish shifts in a net, it was still and then it wasn’t.
I reined her in. “Did you feel that?”
“Yes,” Rhydor said behind me. “Not earth. Light.”
I turned in the saddle. The vale lay below us like a silvered bowl set on a table we could not see. The ring of trees hunched like a row of old shoulders around a small, bone-colored moon. For an instant, and only an instant, something whiter than the twilight rose in a thin breath from the center of the bowl and tried to be a pillar. It failed. It died. The light shivered and lay down flat as slate across the basin again.
He had called it smell before. I knew better by then. The ache in my sternum answered even without my heart to carry it. The Shroud had tried to sing. The note had thinned and cracked.
We watched long enough to be honest and short enough to be wise. “Tomorrow,” I said, because if I saidtonightwe would die of stubbornness and be no help to anyone.
“Tomorrow,” Rhydor said, and his voice had that grim steadiness to it I had learned to measure by. It wasn’t anger. Itwasn’t defiance. It was a promise to show up and keep showing, even if his feet bled.
The last of the climb took our breath. We gave it willingly to the wind. At the top of the ridge the air remembered how to move again and grew kind as far as wind is capable of kindness. We took the higher track that would arc us away from the vale’s lip and back toward the path through Varcoran’s outer holdings. For a while the only sounds were leather, breath, and the creak of saddle.
Something eased.
It wasn’t the land. The land didn’t care about easing. It was us. The stiffness that had first made every small noise feel like a test softened into a rhythm our bodies recognized. We had walked the edge of a lie and not fallen into it by accident. That counts as friendship in Wonder if you learn to be grateful for smaller miracles than your grandparents thought were your due.
Rhydor touched his mare’s neck. “I didn’t think I’d ever say this,” he said, not trying to make it clever, “but I am grateful to be going back to Shadowspire.”
I snorted. “Write it down,” I said. “Sign it. Seal it. I will read it aloud at court and whitewash my sins with your humility.”
He huffed in a way that might have been a laugh. “You don’t need my humility to wash anything in that hall. You need a wall to put your back against and a rule to throw at just the right throat.”
“I have both,” I said. “At least until my mother asks for them back.”
We crested the last, smaller hump and the line of the palace’s highest spires took shape against the unending twilight, Shadowspire’s knives honed so long they had learned to stand without trembling. Smoke rose from the kitchens in a thin,grey ribbon. Somewhere, musicians scraped at their strings to warm them before Veythiel’s evening rehearsal. The world tilted toward the part of the day where I had to behave.
“You’ll write your notes tonight,” Rhydor said. It sounded like a question. It wasn’t one.
“I will,” I said. “You’ll number the rubbings and make sense of the way your basket of bones calls circles circles even when our lexicon thinks it’s being clever.” I felt his horse draw even with mine and did not look over. “We’ll exchange them. You will pretend you hate the way my marginalia smell like resin, and I will pretend I hate the way you make a list before you march.”
“And, ” he started, then did not finish.
“And?” I asked, because a boy raised among knives is obliged to stab until the people who love him remind him he can frame a picture with his hand instead.
“And,” he said, and I heard right then the shape of the midpoints we hadn’t reached yet, “when you are done with the parts you promised to the hall, and I am done with the parts I promised to my brother, you will find the line your father wrote that someone taught the ledger to forget. We will see whether the floor can be made to sing again.”
“To what end?” I asked, softly, because the end might demand a cost one of us wasn’t willing to pay yet, and honesty buys better bargains when it is named before you fall in love with your rhetoric.
“To know what kind of knife is being held at your throats,” he said, “and who thinks he is clever for hiding his hand in a glove your queen was proud to wear.”
A small, treacherous warmth rested its head against the inside of my ribs then and refused to move when I ordered it to.Youcalled her your queen,it said, in Rhydor’s rough voice, and I told it to let me be.
The lower path widened enough to make riding shoulder to shoulder easier than taking turns. The outriders coasted back into our orbit like moths finding the only light they respected. The Varcoran scout revealed himself in the fork of two young pines and then disappeared again as if apologizing for being made of flesh where the hold preferred to remember it was stone.
We did not speak again until the kitchens’ smoke had worked itself under our cloaks and made my stomach remember I had not eaten since before dawn. Even then, the words we chose were the kind that could live in a corridor without making the walls breathe more heavily.
“Your mare needs a new shoe,” Rhydor said. “Front left. I’ll send Tharos the iron he likes if the palace smith doesn’t keep it.”
“I will tell the smith your man puts better shoes on princes than court grooms do,” I said, because a good groom will forget himself for flattery where he will sharpen a grudge for gold.
We dismounted in the outer yard and handed the reins to a stable-boy who blinked as if we had brought back wind and he didn’t know whether that meant promotion or blame. The courtyards thrummed with the polite noise of a place that feeds a thousand mouths: knives against boards, buckets swinging on hooks, water lapping porcelain where a kitchen maid washed lantern chimneys whose smoke the queen’s steward liked to pretend was a natural fragrance the walls made by virtue of being beautiful.
We paused where we had parted ways in the morning, at the first bend before the door that led to the private corridor my mother had given me and the side stair Rhydor had claimed for himselfbecause it connected blind to a street he trusted more than he trusted my house.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
