Page 45 of Rhapsody of Ruin
Chapter 21
Rhydor
Shadowspire tasted different on the mornings it meant to hurt someone. Resin hung heavier in the council halls, sweet enough to turn the tongue numb, and the ward-candles guttered in their sconces as if the flame itself were thinking better of showing up. The silver veins in the floor, those pretty inlays the Fae call law, seemed shinier on days like this, polished to a mirror’s lie. When the double doors opened, the hall exhaled a little, and the sound it made was the same sound I had heard in siege tents just before the horns called the first charge.
The benches were already full. Fans glittered. Masks gleamed. The space beneath the gallery screens pulsed with the breath of spectators pretending they were only air. The Masks stood in their line, six figures lacquer-black and faceless, hands folded behind them. Between them knelt the accused, a girl with a maid’s apron and the rabbit-stillness of someone who has learned quiet as a weapon and fears she has brought the wrong blade to the wrong fight.
We entered together, Elowyn and I, because that was what the day required. My veterans fanned behind us. Torian half a pace at my right shoulder; Korrath drifting to a pillar with his cane nearly silent; Tharos planting his iron hand where an ill-bred noble might try to slip; Brenn wearing his irreverence like a grin he’d sweeten or sharpen at need; Draven sliding under the gallery’s shadow, all charm and knife.
The room’s weight shifted with our first steps. It always does, one way or the other. Today it turned as a single head, eager and skeptical in the same breath, expectation turning on appetite, appetite turning on ritual. There is a way a court looks at youwhen it’s already decided the ending and only wants you to comply with its favorite lines. This wasn’t that. This was the look a mob gives a tightrope.
Maelith stood at the lectern, black staff at his side, ledger open, quill poised. The runes underfoot hummed an octave lower near him. He did not look at us. He never does; he looks at the place the law will sit when it’s satisfied, not at the men and women pressed under its edge. Behind and left of the dais Iriel lounged with theatrical indifference, mask light and head cocked, as if he were bored by the whole ceremony and only present to learn how bored one should be. He wasn’t bored. The gleam in his eye belied the slouch, the way a cat’s tail says more than its spine admits.
“Council of the Shroud convenes,” Maelith intoned. “Charges will be read. Judgment will be swift.”
The hall liked that last word. A murmur like the rustle of dry leaves lifted and fell again, pleased to be in a room with promises it understood. I felt Elowyn still at my side. Not freeze. Not fear. Still, the way a river stills when it deepens: surface dressing a current. Our hands did not touch. The air between us felt warm as a forge and cold as a blade.
Maelith’s voice sharpened. “The servant Namyr-born is charged with defiance, dereliction, and false oath before a steward of the Third Hall, ”
There it was, steward of the Third Hall, his hands on the words as if he had chosen them from a basket of prettier ones because they fit his mouth better. My jaw stilled.
“Elowyn,” I murmured, not turning my head.
“I hear it,” she said, breath so quiet the ward-candles might have leaned in to catch it.
Maelith continued, “, and will be Masked forthwith, ”
“Hold,” I said, and the word wasn’t loud so much as heavy. It fell. The floor accepted it. The room took a breath it hadn’t meant to take.
Maelith’s eyes flicked from his ledger to my face and back, the quill hovering like a blade deciding where to land. “Prince?”
“Wrong chain,” I said. “Namyr answer to a captain, not a steward. Shroud Law recognizes oath of ranked service within a chain, not between. The oath used is a steward’s oath applied to an inferior outside his chain. It doesn’t bind. It pretends. The difference matters.”
A hundred little reactions, shifts, breaths, fan-tremors, rose like sparks off a coal. From the corner of my vision I saw a fox-mask stiffen, as if I had stepped on his foot instead of his argument. Good.
Maelith made a single crisp mark in his ledger. He knew the rule; he wanted me to say it aloud so the hall would remember it was supposed to honor the words it loved to ignore. “Cite.”
“Hall of Keys, tablets three through nine,” I said. “The line is short: Chain governs command. Oath binds only where chain leads. A steward isn’t a captain, and a servant isn’t a steward’s plaything because a steward’s mouth got bored.”
A breath of laughter, shocked, honest, ran under the benches and died quickly when masks remembered themselves. I didn’t look toward Iriel. I didn’t have to. I could feel the smile he aimed at my back like a knife.
He stood anyway, so the knife could have a voice. “We’re grateful for Drakaryn’s lesson on keeping the lines tidy,” he purred. “Perhaps Ash can teach Wonder how to tether its beasts, and we can teach Ash how to polish a chain until it shines.”
They laughed for him, because they were trained to. Even those who didn’t mean it moved their fans to simulate sound. I let it come and let it go.
Elowyn’s voice slid after the noise like the rap of a cane when a class will not sit. “And the witness named by the steward was polishing lanterns in the Candle Gallery at that hour.” She lifted a folded slip from Nyssa’s hand without looking away from Maelith and let it rest on the lectern. “He signed the log.”
Silence did what it does when it respects a woman’s voice: it listened.
Maelith read. The corner of his mouth, that small place where law is allowed to regret its own poor handwriting, creased. He closed the ledger, opened a second, made another mark. “The witness is conflicted,” he said to the room. “The oath is incorrect.”
“Dismiss,” I said.
“Delay,” Iriel countered, lazy as a lounge, and because he is who he is, the word fell with a different weight than it would have from any other mouth. “Let the steward correct his error. Surely we don’t deny a man his chance to confess he wore the wrong mask to his own party.”
The hall hummed, pleased by its prince’s cleverness, relieved by the chance to purr mercy while pocketing a spectacle for later. I had been waiting for him to say it. I had brought a coin to make the lie cost.
I slipped my hand into the inner pocket behind my peace-wrap, felt the smooth bone of Varcoran’s favor, tower, mist, broken key, and spun it once between my fingers, memory of the game hall in the turn. Then I sent it skimming to Maelith’s lectern with an easy underhand that kept the throw’s courtesy and the token’s authority.
