Page 93 of Rhapsody of Ruin
Elowyn tipped her chin a fraction. Her lips were a color the palace calls elegant and I was honest enough to name bruised. It was not the mask that made lying possible that failed me now; it was the memory of how quickly my hands forgive her for refusing to forgive me. I had told her, quietly, when there was no one to annotate my courage, that I would stand and hate her for it. I had meant it. I still did. The hate lived in a chamber of my chest and beat not with my heart but against it. Every time she chose secrecy, it knocked.
She lifted one hand and set it flat on her own balustrade. The gesture was small. It felt like a sentence.
Something shifted behind me. Torian’s tread is light enough to make a king forget he wears a crown when he hears it. He stopped at the threshold instead of crossing it, which is one of the reasons we still drag ourselves back from the places grief likes to nest and call it duty.
“Maelith has accepted neutral ground,” he said softly, voice pitched so the door would catch it and take most of it away. “Tomorrow. Third hour. The Hall of Keys.”
I grunted. I knew what neutral meant here. It meant Maelith believed he had tilted the floor enough that it could call itself even. It meant my favor token had gone to buy a stage on which the law would enjoy making me learn how to improvise in front of a crowd.
“And Iriel?” I asked. I tried to make his name weigh the same amount as anyone else’s. It did not. My tongue added lead.
“In mourning,” Torian said. “Which is to say, in meetings.”
He did not have to make the rest of the sentence; I could write it with my own hand. Iriel would not show his teeth tonight. He had men called counselors to do that for him. He would show a mask that made grief fashionable and let the law believe it had been given the dignity it thinks it requires to be cruel without irony. He would keep his hands clean in front of an audience and wash them in private with the ink of what he had taken.
“I will walk the east galleries,” Torian went on. “Let them see me working. Let them assume I worry the trade lines more than the law. It makes them comfortable. Comfortable men sign papers they haven’t read.” His pause had weight. “Do you need me to fetch you?”
I did not take my eyes off Elowyn. “No.”
“Then I will fail to be at your shoulder at precisely the important moment,” he said. I heard him bow without turning. I heard him leave.
I stood at the rail and watched the thing I was not free enough to cross. Elowyn’s gaze had not shied, had not hardened, had not softened. It kept its own counsel. That is one of the things I loved about her before I admitted that is what it was. She does not let anyone do her believing for her. It taught me to respect her and taught me to hate her in the same moment. I have not found a way to untie that rope without hanging myself.
Below, a pocket of courtiers performed discretion badly, the kind that makes them believe their masks are soundproof. A lady in pearl (I learned to know her voice even when it’s my visor she’s complimenting) said something ugly about dragons that would have earned her a broken jaw in a yard where plain men eat. Brenn’s laugh cut it in half before she could finish the sentence and turned the ragged ends into something useless with a joke. He looked up later and saw me at the rail and made a face likewe are not done but we can do this without killing anyone yet. I love him for it.
Somewhere in the west arcade, Korrath’s cane beat a quick triplet. Draven’s answer, an easy drawl, followed; I didn’t catch the words, but I caught the shift in the air. A rumor about a veiled lady and a knight changed corridors. Good. Let it run in a circle until it tires itself and sleeps.
I looked back at Elowyn and forgot the court again.
I did not know what she was thinking. I have known the shape of her breath, the sounds she makes in a locked room, the heat at the base of her throat. I have not known the thought that lives behind her eyes since I discovered she could lie better than the law does. It humbled me that there was anything left that could surprise me. It angered me that I wanted to be allowed intothat chamber of her skull and could not find the door she would tolerate my hand on.
Something, anger, pride, grief’s pet trickster, made me do the unwise thing. I lifted my chin a fraction more and let the dragon in my chest breathe. Not a blaze. Not even a flare. A thread, thin as a ribbon, of heat and light. It slid between my teeth and drifted into the air, curls dissolving before they learned to bite. It smelled like iron and pine resin and that intimate scent dragonfire has when it is allowed to be domestic.
On the facing balcony, Elowyn’s hand tightened on the rail. I watched it. I watched the tendons move under skin. I watched the moon chain she hadn’t put on press its crescents into her palm. The half of her mouth that wasn’t lacquered lifted, not a smile, not a baring of teeth, something older. The part of me that follows maps of battlefields recognized surrender. The part of me that loves her recognized it as a different word entirely:permission.
If the palace had not been full of eyes, I would have crossed it. I would have found my way in through any door, any window, any seam in the Shroud. I would have knocked her mask off with my mouth and made her breath sayyesin syllables the law does not know how to punish. But the palace was not empty; it was a stage that eats the actors and applauds itself. We stood where we were. We looked. We learned the shape of not touching for a long, long beat.
I turned away first.
It was not strategy. It was not pride. It was mercy I did not know how to give any other way. If I loved her, and I do; I can finally write that without apologizing to the part of me that was raised to believe love is a luxury for men who like to die pretty, then I would not make her choose to hold a gaze she needed to break only when the city was watching. I put both hands hard on therail and let the stone bite my palms. I bent. I pulled a breath up from where the fire waits under my ribs and let a little of it out across my knuckles. The heat took the sting out of my hands. The stone took the heat and kept it, a little warmer than it wanted to be, a small betrayal of its own indifference. I left finger-lengths of black on the rail, soot marks that would be gone after the next rain and would live on my skin until I washed them away myself.
Below, a bell pealed once and then again, Shroud’s hour, not the council’s. The palace shifted. The nobles remembered they had other rooms in which to pretend to be necessary. The masks tilted in unison like sunflowers passing light along. I felt the council’s weather changing. I felt Maelith thinking. I felt Iriel deciding what posture grief should take when it needs to teach other people how to cry without mussing anything important.
I let my hands go slack and rested my weight on the railing for a breath. Then I straightened and made the decision the day had been asking me to make since I woke to the taste of iron under the idea of incense.
Keep her alive.
Keep Drakaryn alive.
Whatever it costs.
Notand. Not a prudential gentleman’sif possible.Whatever it costs.If the price is the last favor token and all the ones I don’t have. If the price is the boasts the court likes to carve into the backs of men who choose love in public. If the price is being called a prince who bends law until it breaks and then calls the noise it makes music. If the price is kneeling to a god my blood has never bent for because her safety lives in the language ofpleasethis time. If the price is her hating me forever while she breathes. If the price is dying in a room full of people who will say my name only when it suits their evening.
Whatever it costs.
I wanted to say it aloud. I did not. Vows belong to quiet, or they don’t belong at all. Dragons write theirs on the inside of their chest and let them burn there until they mean something. I let mine take root and decided I would feed it.
Across the way, Elowyn still watched. She was as far away as a woman can be and still make a man feel as if he recognizes the shape of his own name. She did not lift a hand. She did not lower her head. She stood in her storm-gray gown with the moon chain in her fist and looked at me until the beat turned to pain. Then, as if the palace had taught her too well how to turn love into something that doesn’t rot, she lifted her mask with her free hand and set it fully on.
