Page 92 of Rhapsody of Ruin
The kiss was fire and ache, brief and consuming. His lips parted, answering with a hunger he had no right to hide. For a moment, the hall and the court and all its venom dissolved. There was only the taste of him, wine and steel, and the memory of battlefields where we had stood back to back.
Then he broke it.
His hands slid away as if scorched. His voice was low, ragged.
“You are royal, Kyssa. And I am not.”
The words struck harder than any blade.
I forced my chin high, spine stiffening against the weight of humiliation. The court would not see my shame. Not here. Not now.
Without another word, I stepped past him, gown whispering over stone, and walked from the shadow of that column as though I had never faltered. I did not look back.
The hall swallowed me again, its silver light merciless. I felt the burn of his gaze on my shoulders, but I refused it. My pride demanded nothing less.
And then, quiet as a secret, the signal reached me.
A servant brushed past, tray trembling in his hands. Folded beneath the rim of a goblet, I glimpsed it: Jolie Mortaine’s coded mark, the sign we had agreed upon.
Valimir was safe.
The breath I released carried everything, the fury, the grief, the longing. For the first time since this cursed court swallowed us, relief curled warm in my chest.
The Masks might circle. The crown might glitter on a head unworthy. My heart might be a ruin.
But the child lived.
And that, at least, was victory.
Chapter 45
Rhydor
Twilight had a taste in Shadowspire, and tonight it tasted like metal.
I stepped out onto the narrow balcony above the inner courtyard and let the evening take my face in its cold hands. Silver light pooled in the stone like water that refused to freeze. The lanterns that the Fae love, those floating spheres of ward-fire leashed to their invisible tethers, drifted in slow, smug orbits between the black ribs of the palace. Far below, the court moved like schools of scaled fish: jeweled masks sliding past lacquered masks, fans opening and closing like gills, servants darting with the soft efficiency of creatures who have taught themselves to be ignored in order to live.
Incense curled up from braziers, that old blend of myrrh and rose they pour over everything they mean to sanctify. It couldn’t hide the other scents, polished steel, beeswax, the faint copper of law heating itself for use. I gripped the balustrade. The stone was hard and cool, damp with the breath of the Shroud pressing down. I have held onto cliff faces while a storm tried to peel me off the world, and somehow this felt more precarious.
Below, in the arcade nearest the council doors, the Black Masks stood in small knots, posture relaxed by a handspan, visors angled toward idle conversation, men pretending not to be the instruments they are. The nobles had already begun to rewrite the afternoon for one another, trading versions of my line like coins:over my ashes, outrage in some mouths; poetry in others; promise in mine. Word travels strangely in this palace, quick where it should stumble, sluggish where it should race. Toriansays rumor is a kind of math here, not the sum of things but the shape of how people prefer them.
He had told me, a quarter hour ago, in that ledger voice of his that always sounds like he’s ordering grief into columns, that the petition would be rewritten overnight. Maelith would carve treason more neatly into it, sharpen the line where privilege stops and punishment begins. Tomorrow they would return with law polished to a brighter cruelty. And we would answer them again with the same weapons, delay, denial, the posture of patience, and if that failed, the old ones: bodies and iron.
I put my hands around the cold stone and let my palms learn its grain. The balustrade was pocked by years, by winters, by the quiet, steady indignity of being leaned on by men who believe it keeps them from falling. The dragon in me wanted something else to hold.
Across the courtyard, a balcony rhymed with mine in the geometry of this place. The palace is a spider, and its symmetries are its web. I knew the measure of that distance well enough to pace it with my breath: three deep inhales to cross it in memory, six if I lied to myself and took my time. I did not have to wait long to see her.
Elowyn stepped into view with the careful grace of a woman who knows the world wants her to trip. She did not come all the way to the rail at first; she hovered just behind the shallow embrace of shadow, letting the corridor light gild her cheekbones and the edge of her mask. The onyx crescent caught the last thin blade of day and threw it back as if to prove it wasn’t purely ornamental. Her cloak hung open; the gown beneath was the same storm-gray wool she had chosen to make war look like reason. She was not alone, I caught the brief silhouette of Nyssa at her shoulder, a line of chalk dust pale on the healer’s sleeve, but in the second that mattered, the healer bowed her head and stepped back.The door behind Elowyn slipped shut. She was alone with the evening and me.
We did not wave.
We did not nod.
We looked.
There are words for what happens when ice meets fire, and none of them serve. There is a sound, soft, angry, satisfied, that stone makes after metal has been held to it long enough to leave a mark. That is closer. I had been inside her mouth less than an hour ago, had swallowed a sound she hadn’t meant to give me, had learned for the second time in as many days that my body is not immune to the kind of prayer that does not require gods. Now we looked at one another from a span of cold air and stone and watched the world stand between us with the confidence of a magistrate.
People moved below, a slow eddy around the fountain and its marble basin, the water enchanted to mirror a sky that no longer belongs to the city. Even it had learned fear. The Shroud hummed like something breathing shallowly in sleep, steady now, but thinner than it was. Veins of silver ward ran inlaid along the pavement and up the columns; they pulsed on an old rhythm that has forgiven none of us our sins.
