Page 43 of Rhapsody of Ruin
“Read it aloud,” Rhydor said.
I did. “Record Seventy-Three, vault chamber inscription, ‘the gate takes only willing blood.’”
His gaze lifted from the page to my mouth and away. “Willing.”
“The difference,” I said, and shut my mouth because my mother’s hall had taught me to call the difference between one kind of taking and another politeness.
He did not make me finish. “The difference between a wound and a gift,” he said, and did not make me pretend my face did not change.
He tapped the margin with his forefinger, very gentle. “This hand wrote three other notes in the last two pages,” he said. “There. There. And there.”
I followed the long shape of his hand the way I had followed mortar the day before in Varcoran. The same italic had:see Hymn of Dusk, line nine; and:re-confirm binding term “open by vow”; and:no iron on threshold. The kind of reminders a careful reader writes herself when she does not trust an inexpert scribe to find the thread again before dawn.
My throat went dry.Hymn of Duskwas a Whitewood scriptorium term. It did not belong to court gossip. It belonged to the binding rites that had allowed earlier queens to hem the Shroud when it thinned. My mother had never pretended otherwise; she had simply named those rites liturgy and declared that only a hand the law trusted would ever be allowed to hold the page.
“Copy it,” I said. “Before anyone learns to remove the margin.”
We set our case of paper on the narrow reading bench. I took up one of the palace’s decent pens and Rhydor used the pen he had brought from Drakaryn, the nib cut a little higher to let ink flow faster and cleaner without blotting. He wrote like a soldier who has learned the rhythm of numbers and names is another way to hold a line. I wrote like a princess who had been told by everyone who loved her that her life would depend on her pen.
We did not speak as the ink made its slow, precise paths across the page. We copied full entries. We traced marginal notes and caught our own copying in the margins of the margins to mark when we were guessing at a bad scribe’s letter. We did not break for the kind of conversation that kills a day’s work. I forgot thecold for a long hour. He forgot the court for the same hour, and I am not foolish enough to call that proof of anything, only that some rooms are honest enough to ask for your attention without rummaging through your pockets for your fear while you give it.
Two desks down, a book lay open with a silk marker tucked three fingers into its spine. I did not remember leaving it that way; I did not remember the steward telling me anyone had been here in the last six nights.Sawis a word archives teach you not to trust when you try to use it to make yourself feel better about what you have forgotten. I set my pen down a beats-length, walked over, and looked.
Not a ledger. A small volume of ritual collation, the scriptorium’s hand would have copied that one for my father to compare to Varcoran’s folk text, before the Queen’s hand took the research from him and told the room he was resting. It lay open to a page of paired readings. On one side, hymn stanza. On the other, a gloss. The hymn used the wordopening. The gloss had circled it and written, in neat downstrokes,willing.
I looked up at Rhydor, and knew from the set of his shoulders he had read my face. “Found another,” he said. He did not ask whether he should come to me or I to him. He simply lifted the book he held and showed me a page where a meticulous hand had underlinedbind a sovereign with a vow, then drawn a faint line from that to the scribe’s note in the outer margin:no binding holds beyond the vow’s breath without cost.
I closed my eyes. “Why were these in Tier Three,” I asked the room.
“Because the palace wants them to be hard to get to,” he said. “Not impossible.” He waited a breath, then added, softer: “You are good at hard.”
“Hard,” I said, “is easier than impossible.”
He stepped closer so I could see the ink rather than the line of his mouth and set the book beside mine. Our shoulders did not touch. The air moved enough between them that I could distinguish the iron-smoke of him from the ash-leather of the spines. The Trim of the Dais called that scentdanger. I decided to call itbreathfor five beats and return to the ritual afterward.
“Compare,” I said, and our heads bent.
The hymn made a call to night that was older than the throne; the gloss made its own call to a requirement the court found inconvenient to say aloud.Willing.The echo of it found my ribs and stayed.
“The margin that wrotewilling,” he said, “is the same hand that wroteno iron at threshold. If the scribe is right and this is a key, it matches our symbol from the vale. No iron. Noforcing. Key doesn’t turn unless you choose to set it in the lock.”
“It also matches the shapeless part of our trouble,” I said, and let myself taste the words before I spent them. “If you want your binding to be strong enough to hold a queen in the dark, it makes a certain kind of heartless ritual sense to make that binding depend on the kind of consent you can only extract with a particular kind of cruelty. If you want your unlocking to be strong enough to break the wrong queen free of the wrong prison, you will need a vow that costs in the proper direction.”
I thought of Iriel then, or refused to think of him and called it thinking. A picture flickered of him gloved in our father’s face, kneeling to my mother when she was at her weakest, and I wiped the image away before it could make more of itself than speculation.
“Two versus nine,” Rhydor murmured, and ran his thumb along the hymn’s line, then the gloss, counting the stressed beats. “Feels like a law written to disgust decent people enough to keep them from noticing when it is being evaded.”
“We wrote most of our laws that way,” I said. “Your country composes yours like a riddle with only one answer and then smiles when someone dies choosing the wrong word.”
His grin was already there, a low heat under his mouth. He fought it and lost. “Fair.”
We copied more. We made rubbings in the places where ink had faded in the exact shape that meant a clerk’s hand had formed letters too lightly on a day his master’s patience was thinner than the pen demanded. We flagged three entries that used terms only the Whitewood would have kept without filing undermyth. We worked like people who had decided to be useful instead of afraid, which is a different kind of courage than the court croons over and one no one writes songs for.
The small scribe who had tried to keep the door closed returned once with two cups of water and a tremor he did not attempt to hide when Rhydor thanked him. He set the cups down as if they might bite; when he left, the soft skid of his forced silence made me want to burn the rule that taught him it was virtuous not to breathe near a princess and a prince. I did not burn it. I drew another margin.
I felt the shift in the room before I heard the door. Tier Three remembered who walked inside it with the same stubborn care it devoted to keeping a rebel stanza under its thumb the moment every other hand forgot it existed. Sir Thalen’s step did not belong to this place; Tier Three did not dislike him, but it had not been built to love what he called duty.
He stopped a respectful distance into the room and lifted two fingers, the signal for correspondence rather than weapon. “Forgive the interruption, Highness,” he said. “Prince.” He had not once stumbled over the titles since the hunt, and I marked that down alongside ten other small things he had done as if he wanted his name to show up with honor when we made the listof who had helped and who had watched. “The steward sent me. The council will reconvene in two days. The petition on Masking will be first on the docket.”
