Page 42 of Rhapsody of Ruin
The Masks filed out, the prisoner with them, in one piece, head lifted, lips pressed together in a line no law could pry apart. I watched until the lacquer was only shadow and the shadow was only darkness and the darkness was only the shape the room takes when it has eaten and is pretending it is not still hungry.
Then I pushed off the wall and went to sharpen a rule into a blade.
Chapter 20
Elowyn
A corridor of simple stone led down to the cloistered archive. No mirrored floors, no floating lanterns, only ward-candles guttering in iron brackets and the smell of wax and old leather. The further we went the colder the air became, not the theatrical chill the court loved to pour over people for effect, but the deep-bone cool of kept things. Wards ran beneath the flagstones like veins, their light a steady thread at the edge of sight. Somewhere above us the palace sang its song of spectacle; here, the stones would only hum if I asked them to.
Sir Thalen paced three steps ahead of us, helm tucked under his arm, posture clipped to regulation even in a hallway with no witnesses to admire it. He had not asked why we came; he had not told us we should not. He had only shown us which door would let us pretend the palace liked us enough to open quickly.
The sealed stacks waited beyond an archway of shadowglass rimmed with poured silver. An oaken door the color of old smoke sat inside the frame, unadorned but for three sigils stamped low where a hand could find them without looking. Someone had carved the symbols centuries ago, and centuries of palms had polished them smooth: the crescent for the Shroud; the tower for Varcoran’s custody; the little, simple key, the mark for those who had earned entry by being entrusted to forget what they learned after they closed the door.
A scribe I did not recognize stood before the threshold with his hands nevertheless spread as if he could hold the door shut by desire alone. He wore the palace’s livery, grey shot with silver, and a mask too large for his face. No steward’s chain, noarchivist’s tattoo at the wrist. I did not like the way he watched my mouth rather than my eyes.
“Highness,” he said, and the honorific did not make it to his throat. “The sealed stacks are at present restricted.”
“They are always restricted,” I said. “That is why we seal them.”
He swallowed and arranged his hands again, spreading them wider, as if I were a shaft of sunlight he could dim. “Authorizations for the lower levels are… misplaced.”
“Misplaced,” I repeated.
“The official authorization scrolls are being re-inked,” he clarified, as if that would help. “The wick ran. The letters bled. We couldn’t read the names without a scrying glass and, ”
“And you think the Shroud cares if ink behaves,” Rhydor said mildly, from behind my shoulder. He had not shed the morning’s dust; a fine smear still shadowed the line of his jaw, and it made him look less like a prince and more like a man I had forgotten how to trust on sight. His voice filled the stone without raising itself. “The law listens to the right names in the right order, not the neatness of your pen.”
The scribe flinched as if he’d been struck across the back of his knees. “Prince.”
Sir Thalen cleared his throat once, the little sound I had learned to interpret as the beginning of an inventory. “The Princess of Lunareth,” he said in the tone with which one instructs a very clever child to sit, “carries permanent access to Tier Two and derivative access to Tier Three under the Sign Manual of the Queen. Tier Three requires a second witness. I am the witness.”
The scribe’s eyes flicked to the sigils and back. “We… we could wait for Maelith.”
Rhydor took a single step forward, not enough to be rude, more than enough to register. “If you would like the court to wondertonight why you put a prince and a princess in a corridor with candles and regulation as their only company, by all means, wait.” He smiled the kind of smile a forge makes when it’s cooling. “I will entertain them.”
I did not show my relief. It would have been unnecessary and unkind. I lifted my palm instead and placed it over the three sigils, Shroud, tower, key. Cold slid into my hand like a memory. I let the breath move through my chest as the old words came, the ones that walked past the law without being its enemy. “By right of blood and burden, open.” My voice was not much louder than the rasp of a page turning. The silver in the arch hummed once, the sound too low to call sound, and the door unlaced itself.
The scribe’s hands fell. “Forgive me,” he said, for himself, for the palace, for the mistake of thinking paper makes law when it only keeps score. He shrank himself a degree and went very still to learn how not to be in the way.
Inside, the archive breathed.
Lanterns hung in a long nave, their flames blue where the wards fed them. Rows of shelves marched in orderly, stubborn lines, heavy with ledgers and scrolls bound in leather the color of winter. Dust lay on the topmost spines like frost; the lower rows were clean, their polish the work of careful fingers and careful minds. On the far wall a panel of shadowglass held the slow glitter of embossed sigils: Thalassa, Varcoran, the Shroud, and the little old key that meant the room had learned how to keep secrets by refusing to be impressed with itself.
Sir Thalen kept to the threshold, as etiquette demanded. The veterans did not cross; their shadows remained at our backs, an honesty I have learned to count as luxury. Rhydor and I walked between the stacks toward the sealed section where the indexes lived. Most of the court thinks an archive hides things by buryingthem; archives hide things by telling you where they are in a language you are not patient enough to learn.
Tier Three’s catalog sat on a waist-high pedestal with a slate and chalk ready to hand. When I brushed the cover, powder bloomed up the way breath does against the cold. I opened to the index of all Volumes Held In Trust and found the column I had lived with since I was fifteen and understood that being my mother’s daughter meant learning to read the ledger as if it were the only story you would be allowed to tell.
“Tombs,” I said softly.
Rhydor came to the far side of the pedestal. We did not touch. We read together.
The ledger of tomb references did not pretend to drama. It listed sites and curators, dates of last inspection, small notations indicating ritual condition. On some lines a cautious hand had penciled marginalia, little circles to draw a reader’s eye to a particular rune set, a textbook curl around a term of art.
My finger stopped three entries down from where it had last stopped three years ago. A mark I did not recognize italicized itself along the edge of an otherwise tidy note.
willing blood.
I felt the cold of the room find a new place in me.
