Page 49 of Rhapsody of Ruin
“We make them.” I felt the sharp, clean click the phrase made in my mouth and chose to let it keep its shape. “We call for the Hymn in the Whitewood hand and then for the gloss. We ask for the reading from the old tablets; we ask the keepers to answer whetherwillingcould be replaced byfalseorcoercedwithout cracking the clause.” I looked at him then, at the set of his jaw and the mark he had not covered at his throat, old scar, new line, a past he had never asked me to love and did not need me to hate to believe he survived. “We do not teach them compassion. We teach them grammar and let their shame do what it will after.”
It happened then: the not-accident. The wind shifted. He turned a fraction to keep his weight against it. I took a breath too quickly after the admission,teach them, and stepped closer to keep the paper from lifting. His hand came down on the edge of the sheet. Mine was already there.
Flesh met. Heat stiffened the air between our wrists.
Neither of us made the mistake of looking at our hands as if they were guilty. We did not snatch them apart. We also did not press. We let the contact sit and learn us, a minute’s worth, two, the heart’s shy thud against the lines the ink had drawn.
“We build a case,” he said. He was not talking about the law.
“We build a bridge,” I returned, too quick and enough true that it did not feel like a lie.
He looked over the city. “Your people like bridges,” he said.
“Yours like fire.”
“We build with what we trust.” He glanced at me sideways. “Bridges burn. Fire carries.”
“And both fail if the wrong wind decides to be honest,” I said.
We let the wind into the conversation without pretending it was invited. Far below, a cart hit a rut; the sound came up through stone like a cough. The wards sang their thin, smug, silver song for a moment and then fell back into their hum.
I slid the second paper open. “The inscription withgate takes only willing blood.” The words were clean as hunger on the page. “If this is what the lower vault says,” I said, “and if the Whitewood gives us the hymn and the gloss, then the law cannot call us sentimental when we say the court does not have the right to demand Maskings for the sake of strengthening a seal that owes its music to consent.”
His head tipped as if he had been struck with a light blow. “Consent,” he repeated, not because he did not know the word,but because Wonder had taught it to be musical when it wanted the audience to think the singer was beautiful. He put his tongue around the syllables the way Drakaryn taught boys to handle steel in winter. “Then we say it like a stone. Consent. Not a performance. A key.” He tapped the paper lightly with his knuckle. “Willingas instrument, notwillingas poem.”
“Poems kill as efficiently as instruments when we give them the wrong audience,” I said. “But yes. A key.” I set my hand next to his on the second sheet, deliberately this time. “A gate that refuses to open to anything else.”
“Makes beauty monstrous,” he said.
“Or makes the ugliness honest,” I said.
We stood too close. We were not foolish. We were only tired of pretending we had learned enough from our teachers not to want anything that cost more than we could afford to name. The cold went to work on my bare hands; the bones of my wrists prickled as if some small thing there remembered Aelvorne’s foundation stones had been laid with bone-lime and wanted to speak. I freed one hand, rubbed the ache, then reached for the third set of notes, the one whose script had bent toward argument in the margin because I had been less successful than my own mask at pretending I was past anger.
“Drakaryn,” I said, softer than before, only to the paper, or to the line where his knuckles had felt likesomethingunder my skin. “Tell me plainly.”
He did not need to be asked twice. “Starving,” he said, and the word did whatconsenthad not: it stepped into the air in front of us and did not need footnotes to keep its feet. “Not as a performance. As a count. Grain ran thin; the Hollowing took the western half; the last two winters bit the heels of men who had stopped dreaming of banners and learned the names of their children’s every cough. We have held the line with pride so longit tastes like rust. My brother thinks pride will feed the weak. It doesn’t. It only makes them die quieter.”
“My people would have written a law to make dying quieter sound like duty,” I said.
“They did,” he returned, and we let the wind grind the admission down to dullness.
I placed the three copied lines together so the seams touched, gloss beside hymn beside the ledger noting the inspection. The edges did not quite line up. Of course they didn’t; truth rarely sets itself into the groove you make for it until it has cracked a finger or two to encourage you to widen the channel.
“Drakaryn is starving,” I said. “The Shroud is failing. The court loves a Masking because it loves an altar it can applaud. We teach it to hear its law sing instead.”
He angled his body toward mine, a movement I could have called warmth if I had not learned the difference between heat and comfort. He smelled like iron again. It made me think of the first day under the mountain, the way the cliff had answered my voice when I called for a door it pretended it had never had the intention of opening.
“Teach your law the hymn,” he said. “Give me one hour and two sober Varcorans and I’ll bring you the seal on the gloss that makes Maelith pretend he had always meant to be honest in public.”
I should have told him yes and left it at that. I looked at the mist instead. It moved in long slides over the lower city; it clung to the bones of the buildings as if trying to learn their shape the way a blind woman learns a face. “There is a cost,” I said.
“Always,” he said. “Name the first one. We’ll add the second later.”
“My mother can smell humiliation the way a hawk smells blood,” I said. “If we make the court attachconsenttobindingandwitnesstooathandchaintocommand, she will think of a way to name that treachery and sell it to our guests as virtue. She will call your mercy political theater. She will call my grammar sentiment. In the interval she will cut a glove to fit some new hand and hang it so publicly that every servant in the palace learns which signature he should fear.”
He did not flinch at the shape offearin my mouth. Drakaryn pronounces it differently. “Then we get to the signature before the steward does.”
“And if we cannot?” The mist wanted to press its face against mine. The terrace was too open to be honest about comfort, and the sky was too low to be called large. “If we spend our notes and your seal and the court performs a last-minute miracle at the lectern and makes a vow out of a lie and calls itwillingbecause a gloved hand told an old woman to agree?”
