Page 47 of Rhapsody of Ruin
He pushed off the pillar and bowed with exactness, the performance choreography perfect enough to earn applause ifthere had been etiquette to clap. “Then by all means,” he murmured. “Perform.”
He turned, and the space he left behind cooled. Maelith had already vanished into his ledgers, as he does, blackness withdrawing from daylight. The hall emptied around us without ever looking like it emptied; Shadowspire practices denouement the way other cities practice prayer.
We stepped into the antechamber. Noise swelled, then softened. People pressed, then parted. Draven materialized at the elbow of a cousin of Varcoran who had kept very quiet during the proceedings and now looked as if silence had been a meal he remembered tasting. Brenn collected three names and two shrugs in a span of breaths that said he had also collected opinions that would mean more by sundown. Korrath tapped his cane twice and began to drift, listening for the corridor where the echo would carry the gossip whose phrasing would matter most. Tharos did what he always does: he moved toward the door with the unhurried insistence of a man people learn to stop asking to move aside.
Elowyn lifted her chin a fraction, the way a woman does when she adds a brick to a wall she’ll rest her back against later. She took one step, then another. She was not smiling. She was not stately. She was something rarer in here: dignified.
I fell into place at her left without being told. We have learned not to leave one another’s flanks hanging in this hall. My veterans closed around us with manners perfect enough to convince the room they hadn’t closed at all. We moved like a single thought: simple, unbroken, uninterested in being improved by applause.
“Be useful,” she said under her breath.
“I intend to cause an allergic reaction to your brother’s smile,” I said.
“That would be useful.”
We did not laugh. We did not look at one another. Between us heat moved, and we pretended it was the press of the room.
At the threshold Sir Thalen appeared long enough to make himself visible to me and invisible to everyone else. His bow was neat; his eyes, grateful. “Two days,” he said softly. “The Hall of Keys has posted the hearing first. The steward wants to make a point.”
“He will,” I said. “So will I.”
“And I,” Elowyn said, and the quiet in her voice made me think about knives that aren’t cold until they’re already in the wound.
We crossed the doors’ line and the hall’s breath changed. The corridor outside smelled less of resin, more of wax and stone. The sound followed us like a rumor, fading, sharpening, flicking like a fish turned suddenly toward a new current. We passed under a panel of shadowglass that held the embossed sigils of the Shroud and House Varcoran, and I let my hand brush the silver rim. It answered with a hum the way a blade answers a forge when you set it in the right place.
At the base of the stairs that would take her toward the Moonveil gallery and me toward the side passage I liked because I trusted its exits, we stopped. Not facing each other. Not staged. Simply a pause, as if a door needed oil and we had both reached for the same vial.
“Two days,” she said.
“Two days,” I confirmed.
“Bring the answer you refused to give them today,” she said. She didn’t mean words. She meant the weight behind them, the thing law hears when men use its name to dress their appetites.
“I delayed,” I said. “I didn’t refuse.”
“Then bring the debt,” she said.
We did not touch. We did not promise. We acknowledged.
She stepped away first, because we had learned to be careful with who does what under this roof. The veterans went with me. Torian fell in at my shoulder. He drew a slow breath like a man learning a lung again after a long illness.
“You realize,” he said, not bothering to make it a question, “that you have painted a target over your crest.”
“She did the same over hers,” I said. “If the hall wants archery, it can count arrows. We’ll learn to duck.”
He didn’t smile. He doesn’t when he’s counting. “We’ll need witnesses we didn’t think we could have. We’ll need the Whitewood to admit ink knows more than etiquette. We’ll need Varcoran to lend a seal and not charge us twice.”
“We have two days,” I said.
“We have two days,” he echoed, as if trying to make the number mean time rather than danger.
We let the palace’s corridors take us. The walls glimmered with glamours trying to coax truth into forgetting daylight had its own rules. The ward-veins in the floor hummed their set notes and pretended they had always sung them. The air changed from law to performance in a handful of turns. My hand held a heat down I had no business naming now. It would be useful later; everything worth surviving becomes fuel.
At the landing before my preferred stair, Korrath’s cane clicked once, signal of a rumor worth something. He stepped into my path without looking like he had. “Varcoran has teeth,” he murmured. “They disliked watching their seal leave Maelith’s hand. They disliked more seeing it stop a Mask.”
“They’ll charge us twice,” I said, more to feel the shape of it than because I needed the warning.
“They’ll charge us once now,” Draven said from nowhere on my left, “and once when the queen’s mask changes faces. They prefer their debts like their maps, neat.”
