Page 53 of Rhapsody of Ruin
“Drakaryn is starving,” I said, and let the word hold its simple weight with no embroidery to make the court feel brave for hearing it.
“The Shroud is failing,” she answered, and the honesty in it made me want to breathe easier and didn’t.
We stood too close for comfort and not close enough for what the hour wanted. I kept my eyes on the notes because looking at her face would have turned truth into something pretty I couldn’t afford to carry back down the mountain. The wind softened. The brazier spoke quietly to its own coals. The kettle we hadn’t filled clicked inside itself as if boiling absence were enough to count as tea.
“We present a united ask,” I said to the papers. “Two numbers, one mouth. You speak for food; I speak for time. Then we trade weapons. You teach me which plank to break under the lectern to force the floor to confess; I teach you the shape of a petitionthat looks like fairness and costs them more than their pride to refuse.”
She nodded; I didn’t need to see it. “After the council,” she said, “we go back under the city. The archive. Tier Three. We pry the gloss out of the Whitewood’s ledger and make Maelith hold it with both hands so he remembers it has weight.”
“We hold back tonight,” I said, without knowing I meant desire until my mouth made the shape of the words.
“Until sunrise,” she said.
Heat rose between us, as if agreeing with that grammar made the air bolder. I didn’t step into it. She didn’t step away. We let the hour sit where it sat and did none of the things a man who has been cold this long might have earned and was not yet allowed.
For the length of five breaths neither of us tried to let the mountain decide for us. Then she drew her hand back from the paper slowly enough that the air didn’t complain. She set her palms on the parapet, the way she always does, as if making a place learn her skin lets her learn its name, and looked at the city with an expression I had learned not to hate and not to love, a look men call resolve when they mean to sayI can’t believe I have to do this again and I’m going to anyway.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
We folded the notes into their oilskin, tight and neat. I killed the brazier with a flick of cold dirt; the flame regretted leaving, but it went. The ledge took our footprints and made them small. The air caught whatever we didn’t say and put it on a shelf somewhere the court doesn’t get to count.
“Ready?” I asked, already stepping away from myself into wing and wind.
She looked toward the arch of sky where the last honest dark balanced on the rim of the valley like a cup. “Yes,” she said, and her mouth didn’t try to make it braver.
I took her up. The city opened for us like a book in a language nobody bothers to teach courtiers. The ward-lines hissed in irritation at the rush of our passage; the Serathis flashed a pale blade under the bridge where we had argued three nights ago about whether delaying was the same as refusing. It isn’t. It never will be, not if you remember to bring the debt with you when you pay.
We crossed the wall low. The Masks on the inner patrol leaned the other way again. Thalen’s scout raised his lantern and lowered it once. The kitchen yard breathed the heavy, human noises of a place that keeps people alive whether they deserve it or not. I came in over the alley. She slid out of my arms into the dark the way a woman does when she’s done being caught and means to go back to being who she is without needing anyone to hand her name back to her.
“Tomorrow,” she said again, and the third time lived in my chest like a coal.
“Tomorrow,” I answered.
I could have put my hand on her wrist then and it would have been true. I didn’t. She could have reached for my jaw and found the line that has always been too tender on winter nights. She didn’t. We gave the hour the gift of restraint and let the city keep it.
She went one way, silent, the little moons at her throat obedient and apolitical; I went the other, wrapped back in a man’s body and the hackles it grows for protection. Torian waited in the dark court with the mule and the satchel and a face that had counted through a longer night than mine. He handed me the shirt Ihadn’t already pulled on and one of those looks that saysyou don’t have to tell me anything, but I see what you aren’t saying.
“Numbers,” he said, because he knows how to keep me honest.
“On your table by dawn,” I answered. “With a list of which houses will pretend to be offended and which will be and what it will cost to make them stop.”
He inclined his head. “And the hymn?”
“In her sleeve,” I said. “In mine, the gloss.”
He blew out a breath and tilted his head toward the east, where the mountains keep their own clock. “You’ll sleep?”
“When the river remembers to,” I said.
He didn’t argue. He hadn’t slept either. We walked side by side across the yard that pretended to be nobody’s, and when the wind came in from the north it carried with it a taste that didn’t belong to this palace, iron and the honest smoke of a fire that remembers it knows how to work.
Above us the Shroud held steady for a breath too long. When it let go, the run of light across the palace roof caught on a seam and stuttered.
“Did you see, ” Torian began.
“I did,” I said. I felt it in the old scars, the ones no silk touches. “Crack.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, and this time it sounded nothing like mercy.
