Page 71 of Rhapsody of Ruin
The arcades quivered with whispers. I tasted them like bitter tea that had steeped too long:three nights absent… a knight in her shadow… dawn returning… Moonshrine? moonshine…The smell of crushed myrrh thickened until it felt like sweetness trying to conceal rot.
Sylara glided forward with her fan half-opened, a chrysalis made of jewels and poison. The smoke-light turned the stones of her gown into moving water, and each step bared a calculated length of ankle, as if she hadn’t finished deciding whether she was a witness or a seduction. She paused at the lectern’s edge and arranged her face into concern.
“I hate to speak,” she began, and the curve of her mouth called it a lie. “But devotion to crown requires it. I saw our princess cross the arcade at dawn two mornings past, veiled. Sir Thalen at her side. The household recorded three days’ absence. I do not accuse. I only wonder.We,” she moved her fan to include the room, the Shroud, the law, “only wonder if devotion to the veil was truly what it seemed.”
Laughter trickled; then someone fed it and it flashed. Masks dipped and turned, the room’s gratitude for spectacle rising like a tide. The lanterns’ glamour did something sly across lacquered faces, making their expressions beautiful even as they sharpened into cruelty.
I stood and breathed.
“You will answer,” Maelith said, not to be theatrical, but because the law enjoys hearing itself be inevitable. “Princess, will you speak?”
Rhydor didn’t move, but his name lived in the pressure of the air.Elowyn, it said; and then, lower, and mine alone,please.I could feel him without looking, the pull of him, the war in him, his body remembering every place it had found me, his anger remembering every place he had not.
I met his eyes. The heat that lived behind his ribs crossed the floor. My pulse answered like a traitor.
“I will,” I said, and my voice did the thing Vaeloria trained it to do, it slid into the places ritual made and took on their authority. “I do not confess to any breach. I do not admit to concealment. My absence is recorded because I recorded it. Moonshrine rites. Temple seclusion at Veilturn. The steward has my notice in his ledger and my seal pressed in wax. Has the steward’s table forgotten how to turn a page?”
There was a chuckle somewhere too brave. Sylara’s fan snapped shut, feather-edges like tiny teeth. Maelith did not look at her. He looked at me the way a man listens to a lie because he wants to be certain of where to set the knife.
“Temple rites are sacred,” he said mildly. “And secret. But the law must be assured that secrecy does not hide sin.”
“The law must be careful not to become sin’s excuse,” I returned, and the hush that fell wasn’t respect so much as a new sound the room didn’t recognize and so feared a little. “What do your petitioners hold, Maelith? Scent? Glimpses? Servants’ stories folded like paper cranes? Will the Shroud teach itself to makelawfrom appetite?”
Rhydor’s eyes flared, heat; approval; want. The muscle in his jaw jumped once, a pulse I had learned the rhythm of with my mouth.
Sylara’s smile deepened a notch, perhaps from the pleasure of a better fight than she expected. “Adorable,” she murmured, justloud enough for nearby masks to adopt the word and feel clever for it. “She thinks poetry can drown a rumor. Alas, rumors float.”
“I think law should not drown the innocent,” I said, and the tide of whispers pivoted, some masks glancing toward Maelith as if suddenly remembering they wear names under their paint.
He raised a hand, the small, precise movement of a man who believes he directs the wind. The herald’s staff tapped once in echo and the floor hummed its readiness to enact whatever had just been named necessity.
Before he could bid the Masks forward, Rhydor’s voice broke the room.
“Elowyn.”
The whisper of it didn’t fill the chamber, but it crossed it; and it crossed me. He hadn’t moved from his ring of iron, but his body had found a way to be nearer. Heat lived in the syllables. It remembered my night. It punished my morning.
He didn’t say my title. He said me.
A dozen images crashed through me at once: my hand on his jaw in mountain wind; the shape of his shoulder under my palm; the sound he made when the last of his restraint broke against my teeth. He wore the daylight version of himself now, steel, self, sword, but the memory of his mouth against mine stained the world.
He took a step, no more, and the veterans moved with him, cohesion caught forward like a tide that had not wanted to pretend to be a carpet in the first place.
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to.
“Come with me,” he said, quiet enough that the words were only mine; loud enough that the room would still hear they’d been spoken. “Behind the pillar, or nowhere. Tell me. End this.”
The urge to go was a fist closing on my heart. It would be so easy, for a breath, to be just the woman who had saidtogetherwhile moonlight made a conspiracy of our bodies. To tell him where I had gone. To sayGrenefordandJolieandMortaine, and trust him to reshape the room’s cruelty with fire and law and everything he knows how to wield.
But the room wasn’t empty. The Shroud watched, and the law listened for ways to make obedience cost less than truth.
I didn’t move.
“No,” I said, softly. “Not here.”
His head turned, fractionally, as if he couldn’t believe his ears had bothered to bring him that word.
“Not now,” I added, because I’m not cruel. “Not for them.”
