Page 77 of Rhapsody of Ruin
A soft knock, not a question but a courtesy, broke the stillness.
“Enter,” I said, and my voice remembered how to be even.
Nyssa slipped in, the door closing with a click like a secret settling into place. She carried a pitcher steaming faintly and two shallow cups. One parchment-colored tendril of hair had escaped the knot at her nape; an errant ribbon of rue thorn clung to her cuff. The basket hooked over her arm smelled of mintand bitterwood and the sharp green of crushed rosemary. She smelled like the truth: clean hands, clean fear.
She didn’t ask permission. She never has, not about small mercies. She poured water into a cup until it fogged, then pressed the back of her fingers to my throat and the inside of my wrist. Her touch was cool. The bruised ache beneath my skin recognized it and ached harder.
“Pulse is quick,” she murmured, not in judgment, in observation. “Drink.”
I took the cup. The water burned my tongue with its heat, but it softened some unloved place in me on its way down. Something climbed my throat, regret wanting words, grief wanting work, and then went quiet again because I forced it to.
Nyssa set the second cup down untouched and leaned her hip against the table, the way a woman does when she plans to take her time and knows you will let her.
“Say it,” she said.
“I lied,” I answered, because if a princess can’t speak a sentence that plain in her own rooms, there is nothing left of her but paint. “To the court. To the council. To him.”
Her eyes flicked, not surprised, simply making sure words and heartbeat matched. “And you won’t regret it.”
I glanced at the window, where the threadbare veil trembled like old silk on a line. A crack ran the length of my certainty, visible only when the light slid at a certain angle. The mountain had taught me to listen to fissures. Shadowspire taught me to admire gleam. I have never trusted the palace in that argument.
“No,” I said. The word was a clean blade. “I won’t regret saving the child.”
His name rose up and singed my mouth, Valimir, so I swallowed it. If I used it aloud in this room, the walls would learn it. Wards remember things people think stone can’t love.
Nyssa’s mouth softened at one corner. “Good,” she said, and the single syllable carried more weight than any benediction a priest would dare. She took the pitcher again, topped off my cup, and waited.
The waiting made a shape for my shame to sit in. I stared at the mask. It stared back without blinking. The ledger beside it lay open to a page lined in my hand, tidy columns of invented dues and sanctified time, ink neat enough to persuade a steward, bland enough to bore a queen. I had written the lie with such precision it could have passed for devotion.
“When I was a child,” I said, surprising myself with the urge to tell a story no one had asked to hear, “my mother told me masks kept us safe. That to be untouchable, we must never be known. I learned the curve of this one before I knew what my own smile felt like.” I turned the crescent with two fingers; the lacquer squeaked. “And now that I finally used it for something that mattered, the room calls it sin.”
Nyssa didn’t reach for me. She doesn’t fill silences with comfort unless asked; she knows some words bruise less if you let them land without hands trying to catch them.
“You did what the law forgot how to name,” she said when my mouth closed on anything useful. “It will punish you for teaching it a grammar that saves someone it called already-spent.”
I let a laugh out that didn’t belong at court. “They’re petitioning already?”
“Maelith himself,” she said. “Stitched together from gossip and signature and the sort of law that likes the sound of its ownteeth.” She studied me, the way only a person who isn’t trying to be pleased by what she sees can. “They may not spare you.”
“I know.”
Outside the window a gust of wind dragged its knuckles along the glass and set the flame in the hearth to a rougher motion. The Shroud’s hum deepened into a note that felt like warning. Somewhere below, the herald tested the staff against stone; it made a sound like ritual being rehearsed too often to mean anything but cruelty.
I set the cup down. “When they come,” I said, “bar my door.”
Nyssa’s head tilted. Not confusion. The practical assessment of a woman who wants to be sure she’s hearing a plan, not a plea.
“I don’t mean forever,” I added. “Just long enough that I have to open it myself.” My fingers found the mask’s silver edge and pressed. “There is something in me that would like to be dragged. It would feel like surrender made easier by hands. Let’s not permit that version any air.”
Nyssa’s eyes dimmed with a grief that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the world. “I can thread rue and salt along the lintel,” she said. “A stubborn binding. Not foolproof, but it will make them hesitate, and hesitation is often enough to teach courage how to get dressed.”
I made my breath obey me, in and out, even. “Do that.”
She set down the pitcher, and as she turned, the basket on her arm knocked lightly against the table. The clink of glass and ceramic, the smell of crushed mint and sun-roughened rosemary, the bitter shadow of angelica, she had brought more than water. She pulled a pouch of powdered chalk from the basket and shook it once, listening for lumps like a woman listening for truth beneath a story.
“I could warn him,” she said, quiet as a knife sliding under silk.
“I know.” My voice tore a little. “Don’t.”
