Page 48 of Rhapsody of Ruin
“We’ll pay once,” I said. “And they’ll think they got twice.”
Brenn’s laugh flicked from somewhere behind me. “You really are your father’s fire.”
“I’m the coal he left,” I said. “Get me the air.”
They melted back into the palace, ghosts with purpose. Torian leaned and looked down the stair as if it were a road and not a shaft. “You felt it,” he said. Not the hall. Not the law. He meant the thing that burned under my ribs when Elowyn’s mouth cut the room and left it bleeding dignity.
“I did,” I said. “And I didn’t decide what to call it.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “You just have to aim it.”
I put my hand on the rail. The wood had been polished by the palms of a hundred courtiers who have never used their hands for anything else. I have learned to forgive wood for that. It cannot choose whose skin makes it shine.
“We’ll aim it,” I said. “And when the hall steps aside after all its gestures are finished, we’ll go through.”
“Two days,” he said again, and the way he said it this time made it sound like a drum.
“Two days,” I echoed, and began to descend.
Behind me the council doors closed with a sound that pretended to be final. The fortress beneath the glitter breathed, steady and stubborn. The law we had humiliated this morning began the work of learning how to pretend it had always loved the correction we forced into its mouth.
And somewhere beyond the stone, the Shroud, thin as a lie, heavy as a choice, shifted in its sleep, as if amused to learn it hadtwo fewer friends than it had counted on and two more enemies it could use.
Chapter 22
Elowyn
Twilight laid its hand over the city the way a mother hushes a child, fingers splayed, palm gentle, the weight not as soft as it pretended to be. Shadowspire’s upper terrace caught and held that light, silvering the balustrade and soaking the tiles until they looked wet and were only cold. From this height, the towers made a geometry of the mist; ward-fire burned in threads along the rooftops, faint as veins beneath the skin. Somewhere below, kitchens clanged and the palace breathed and the court rehearsed its next cruelty. Here, a wind moved that did not smell of perfume.
I waited only long enough to prove to myself that I did not have to wait at all. Then I sent the note.
I kept it plain.The terrace. The ritual notes. Come.
I wore no jewels but the moons at my throat, obedience for my mother if she looked from a high window and needed to be lied to without words. The rest of me I left unarmored. I had not eaten since the council; tea had turned to ash on my tongue, and the sweet cakes Nyssa pressed upon me had tasted like apology. I set the two folded copies of our findings on the parapet and tried not to imagine how easy it would be to slide them into the mist and pretend that, like a ledger or a body, they could be made to vanish because a hand had decided the floor would keep a secret for it.
Bootsteps sounded, one set, sure and deliberate. No escort; no parade. A man who disliked being watched at his back had chosen the stair with the fewer eyes and the worse lanterns. He came through the arch and into the open air and paused, not for me, never for me, but for the city, to require it to show him thecolor of its throat before he decided which words he meant to spend on it.
“Princess.” He did not bow. He never did outside the rooms that turned with my mother’s attention. The palace hated that about him and loved it; both emotions wore the same face here. The ward-candles along the arch guttered as if his pass had pushed something heavier than air through them.
“Prince.” I did not curtsey. The terrace had not been built to make women kneel, and disuse suits that function.
I slid my palm over the papers to remind myself which words were ours and which we had been taught. “I’m not here to perform.” I made the admission before he made the request. The city left us space for honesty when it liked us enough to keep my mother’s stewards counting elsewhere.
He stepped nearer to the parapet. Not to me. The difference mattered. “Then we’re both out of practice,” he said, in the way men make a confession sound like a joke when their throats want to do neither.
The mist lifted enough for a breath to show the river threading the low quarter, the Serathis, leashed into the city’s spine as if a name could keep it from remembering it had once devoured borders. Beyond, the Vale lay hidden; the north bared a shoulder of darkness, as if mountain and sky had brewed their own night and the Shroud had poured itself over it to tame appearances.
I laid the first paper open. It caught the light and remembered it like a lover. “The copies. Hymn. Gloss. The margin withwilling blood.”
He came to stand beside me, so close I could separate his scent from the stone’s: iron and smoke and something like the last heat a forge holds when the smith has shut the door and the coal pretends it will never be lit again. He did not reach for the paper.He did not ask me to hand it to him. He leaned and read with the kind of attention the archive had given us without pretending to make a gift of it.
The night took its time with us. Above, lanterns wheeled their old circuits. Below, the palace practiced sounding like a city; the city practiced sounding like a palace. I breathed with my mouth instead of my nose to keep the resin from waking the part of me that had been trained to be docile when it burned.
“I told myself,” he said at last, “that the word could be a metaphor. That whoever wrotewillingwanted the ritual to pretend it meant something prettier than it does. Then my own hand underlinedno iron at thresholdand I understood the scribe was not in love with illusions.”
“No.” I touched the line lightly, because sometimes a page needs to know you felt where it ached. “She wrote only what the floor would not throw back.”
He shifted, a movement you’d miss if you had spent your life talking to crowds instead of men. “We tell the courtwillingand they will clap. They applaud their own virtue when they hear the word. They will imagine the rite softening itself because a hand opened. They will not hear the cost in it.”
