Page 74 of Rhapsody of Ruin
She angled to pass.
I stepped out from the pillar and blocked the path.
The breath of the corridor changed. Courtiers slowed without looking like it. Fans slowed to half speed. A girl in pearl miscounted her steps and bumped into a lord in leaves; both laughed too loudly and retreated, eager to hear without seeming to.
“Elowyn,” I said.
Up close, the mask could not blur the fact of her. The lantern light slanted across her cheek, struck the tender skin at the base of her throat, painted the seam where shadow met bone in a way that made my hands remember what my mouth had already learned. Momentum carried the heat between us like wind carries scent. My body betrayed me so cleanly the thought cameunbidden,how easy it would be to step forward and forget the room. I did not move.
She didn’t either, except to lower her head a fraction. “My lord.”
Her voice was plain. Calm. The kind of calm that lives in a woman only when she’s in pieces and the pieces have chosen not to fall apart in public. It made my chest hurt.
“Tell me now,” I said, very softly, so the stone would not be asked to be a witness. “Or I step aside when they come.”
The words surprised me with how easily they left my mouth. I had not meant to say them. The bargain had grown quietly in me across the morning; it had taken shape while I watched the Masks move, while I watched Maelith lay his knife on the law’s altar and show the room how sharp it could be.Tell me the truth, and I will find a way to make the law coil around it instead of crush it. Refuse me, and I will refuse you, and let the tide take you as it will.
She tipped her chin, not defiance, exactly. The movement of a woman bracing to be struck and deciding the angle at which she will receive the blow.
“Moonshrine rites,” she said. “Veilturn.” She held my eyes. “I told you. I will not dress devotion in apology because a room prefers rumor to rule.”
It wasn’t just the lie that sliced me. I didn’t love her less for lying. I loved her more for having learned how to. It was the way she made law a weapon and expected me to respect that she already had two worlds to hold and did not need to add mine to her hands to make me feel as if I were helping.
In another life, I would have touched her jaw and set my thumb where the pulse beats and saidtell me anyway.In this one, the corridor held more witnesses than the law requires for execution. And my body remembered this morning in a roomwhere mercy had not lived and my mouth had taken what it needed from a woman who would not give me anything else. I didn’t know whether I forgave myself for that yet. I knew I hated the part of me that, remembering, still wanted to want.
Behind her, a clutch of noblewomen slowed, fanning themselves with the beat a room takes on when it believes it is watching a seduction or a murder and cannot decide which to applaud. One leaned to her friend, the pearl curtain of her veil trembling with eagerness:cuckold within council, wonderful. I did not break her neck against the pillar. I thought about it.
I dropped my voice to a tight whisper. “The law will come with their masks and take you apart and call it duty. If you don’t give me something to stand on, I cannot stop them without letting them cut me to get to you.” My hand wanted to lift, to press against the cold stone beside her ear to box her between rock and dragon and give the corridor its scandal so the law would think we were too busy with sin to be interesting. I didn’t move.
She blinked. Not at the threat. At the tenderness I hadn’t managed to kill in time.
“You married a Fae,” she said, too low for anyone else to hear. “What did you expect.”
There was no sneer in it. That would have undone me. There was only the quiet tiredness of a woman whose life has set a table for other people’s appetites and who has learned that the most efficient way to survive is to serve herself lies and call them what the room calls them: dessert.
I closed my eyes for a half-breath against the rush of fury that came with remembering my own cruelty. When I opened them, I did not trust my voice to be a role I wanted.
“I will stand,” I said, and the sound came rough enough to cut my throat on its way out. “And hate you for it.”
She flinched. The movement was small, and the mask ate half of it. I knew how to read the other half. Her chin lifted after, the grim little grace a person chooses in the instant before they’re bitten. Her breath came shallow; I watched it try to find a place to live and fail.
She held. Of course she did.
Silence steeped between us until the air tasted like iron. I could feel Torian thirty paces down the corridor, turning the wordhateover in his mouth and asking himself how to translate it to a plan and why plans always had to include blood if they wanted to call themselves honest.
I stepped back, not the retreat of a beaten man, but the measure a commander takes before he tells soldiers where to die.
“Torian,” I said without raising my voice, and he was there, not so quick as to look like fear but quick enough to remind the hallway that loyalty moves faster than gossip. “Ready the floor hold.”
No flicker. “Yes.”
He peeled away, carrying with him the precise choreography we had built: the inner ring braced to take a body into its shelter and move as one; the outer ring set in the doorways, shields positioned to make a corridor of iron at two breaths’ warning; watchers in the galleries to cut down anyone who mistook a noble’s tassel for safety when reaching for a woman’s skin. Brenn would become jaw and laugh again and then not; Tharos’s iron would make no sound but would discover more than one way to break a man’s hands against empty air; Korrath would make every cane stroke count as a fraction in some larger sum he never bothers to show anyone. We would be polite until asked not to be. Then we would become winter.
Elowyn didn’t speak. She didn’t move at all until the last of the masks skimmed past with the relief of people who have been promised a later murder. When the corridor thinned, she stepped away from me and put both hands on the stone balustrade and leaned, the bones of her wrists pale as frost where the silk fell back. She looked down into the inner court where lanterns swung slowly and the law’s script inlaid in the paving stones gleamed like water.
For a moment, I let myself memorize her. The arc of her back, the line where shoulder gives way to throat, the tendons alive in her hands. If there were a god for men raised in fire and instructed to scorn the ones who prayer themselves into being, this is where I would have asked to learn how to carry two worlds without destroying them both.
I stepped to stand beside her, but not close enough that the corridor could call it a reconciliation. Her perfume, faint as honest skin when you’ve stopped pretending scent will save you, brushed my mouth on an exhale. My hands did not move. My chest did.
