Page 76 of Rhapsody of Ruin
“Elowyn,” I said again.
She exhaled. “Yes.”
“You should have told me,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“Will you.”
“Tomorrow is not a kind place to put truth,” she answered.
The door at the end of the corridor groaned. The Black Masks were moving again, not toward us, yet, but toward the drill that lets a man believe his body is not only an instrument of someone else’s need. The captain did not turn his head. His line moved like a thought.
I stepped away from the balustrade and let my hand fall to my side. The space between us cooled. The smell of myrrh thickened, as if the corridor were trying to remind us that sanctity is always an available lie.
“Torian,” I called, not taking my eyes off the Masks.
“Yes.”
“If the law reaches for her, break its hands.”
He did not pretend to misunderstand. “With pleasure.”
I turned away from the corridor’s view of the courtyard and away from the woman I had not permitted myself to love and toward the place where men plan for hours how they will survive minutes. Torian fell in beside me; steel made a sound like a winter laugh farther down the passage as Tharos’s gauntlet closed and opened.
I did not look back. My body did. It always will. A dragon learns to live with the way his bones have longer memory than his mind. Behind me, I heard the small sound of her leaning heavily once against the stone and drawing breath like a woman asked to carry a world. The breath steadied. The mask fixed. The corridor learned nothing about either of us.
“Ready the veterans,” I told Torian, and when he nodded I added the thing that had to be said aloud to count; otherwise law will not hear it and neither will men.
“And tell them,” I said, “that no matter what she has done, we are iron. They hold the floor, even if it breaks.”
He did not sayyeswith his mouth. He said it with the way his feet found the ground.
The lantern light turned the corridor into a tube of silver; the masks behind us formed knots that made it resemble a gut full of jewels. I went down it toward the part of the day in which I would have to make my mouth do what my hands used to be allowed to: fight and call it love.
The Shroud beyond the walls trembled as if it had a voice and had chosen not to use it this hour. The law hummed, satisfied with its own weight. The woman I had married leaned her forehead against stone where no one could see her do it and taught her lungs to do what hearts sometimes forget: keep going.
I did not pray. There is no god my blood believes in. But I did decide something, and decisions are a kind of prayer if you have lived long enough to know that you will likely be asked to die for them.
When the time came, I would stand. And I would hate her. And I would not let them touch her.
Every sentence true, every one wrong, and the corridor as pleased with itself as if it were a poet.
“Let’s finish this,” I told the air, the law, my brother, and myself.
The corridor swallowed our steps and did not answer.
Chapter 35
Elowyn
The quiet in my chamber had a weight to it, as if the room had drawn a breath and held it, refusing to exhale until it knew whether I would stand or break.
Twilight pressed against the windows, a thin, restless silver that made the glass shiver. The Shroud hummed faintly in the bones of the palace, the sound you feel more than hear, like a wasp trapped under a bowl. Ward-fire burned low in the hearth, bluish along the edges as if the flame had learned to mimic moonlight to please the walls. Beeswax and cedar drifted in the air. The scent of my own skin clung to the linen at my throat, salt and silk and the ghost of myrrh the court wears when it means to hide its cruelty under perfume.
My mask sat where I had left it, onyx crescent set carefully on the writing table beside the forged temple ledger, its silver edge catching the hearthlight in a narrow smile. I couldn’t bear to wear it a moment longer and couldn’t bear to let anyone see my face without it.
I set my palms flat on the table and leaned until the cool wood pressed into my bones. My breath didn’t steady. It only grew quieter, as if silence could make itself small enough not to be noticed by the hour that hunted it.
