Page 16 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

Sylara Veythiel blocked the corridor with a graceful, practiced lack of grace, the feathers of her fan catching the ward-light and turning it into whetted edges.

“Princess,” she breathed, swallowing the title with sugar.

“What a charming idea. Riddles. How instructive.” The last word turned sweet into rot.

“Charm,” I said, moving neither faster nor slower than the law required, “rarely troubles the mind.”

“Yours,” she said, and I heard the little barb at the end of the word, “seems very troubled indeed. Perhaps these… games will calm it.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps they will teach it to hunt.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction behind her amethyst-studded mask. She stepped aside on a rustle of silk, and I passed. Behind me, I heard the fan snap closed like a lizard’s jaw.

Nyssa found me three turns later and slipped a folded sheet into my palm. “From the steward,” she murmured. “He wants the precise shape. If you mean to outlaw glamour in the hall for the duration, the law tablet must know exactly how to sleep.”

I broke the seal and scanned the neat hand. The steward asked for lists: categories, timing, adjudication, precedent. It was always precedent here, as if an empire that wore twilight like a crown feared to see what daylight would show.

“We will write it,” I said. “No illusions during the question or the answer. No glamour on the competing pairs or their immediate circle. Observers may keep their masks, but they must not cast. Three questions each, then a tie-break. Ten breaths to answer, and if you pass, the question belongs to the opponent. Sages from the Whitewood will judge, not noble houses.”

Nyssa’s eyes glinted. “They will hate it.”

“Only at first,” I said. “Then they will settle their bets.”

We detoured to the steward’s antechamber, where the air smelled of ink and beeswax and the stewed apples his clerk always had cooling on the sill because his grandchildren liked the scent.

The steward rose, bowed, and waited. I handed him the sheet as if I were giving him a ribbon to tie to a gift and not a set of manacles for the court’s favorite weapon.

He skimmed, nodded, and sat to copy it in that neat, unerringly precise hand that made law into something the floor could hold.

“Two nights,” he said. “I will post the rules by moon’s first rise.”

“Thank you,” I said, and his mouth did that thing it sometimes did when he wanted to smile and remembered the room. It flattened itself back into obedience.

On the way back to my own rooms we passed the alcove where Torian stood with Sir Thalen, both of them pretending to discuss ward-resets while very clearly discussing the way the last two days had bent the hall.

Torian inclined his head to me the way men incline to storms. Thalen gave a small, stiff bow that had more sincerity in it than grace.

“Sir,” I said, without stopping.

“Princess.”

“Did you enjoy the hunt?” I asked, because he had not.

“Less than I was meant to,” he said, and the answer bought him more from me than any pledge would have.

When we reached my door, Nyssa set her hand against it, felt the Shroud signatures thrumming beneath the wood, and nodded. Safe enough. I let the serenity crack, just a hair. It felt like letting the top lace of a corset loose.

“Now the part no one sees,” I said.

“What part?” Nyssa asked, though she already knew.

“The part where you practice smiling until your jaw aches so the people who want to kill you forget you have teeth,” I said.

“The part where you pick jewelry to signal compliance to your mother and shoes that will not slip on a mirrored floor when the world does. The part where you write three talking points that can charm a nest of vipers back into their holes.”

She handed me a ribbon from the dressing table. I tied back my hair and let the tightness in my shoulders carry my anger further from my face. We chose the moons at my throat again, the pretty chain that made my mother think I was soft. I put it on the way soldiers put on armor.

When the bell tolled for the evening audience, I stepped back into the world the court insists is the only real one: lanterns and lies.

The small chamber had reset itself. The room always did, the wards smoothing footprints from the floor as if nothing weighty had ever happened there.

The chairs had been arranged again in their quiet half-moon and the law tablets breathed evenly and Maelith had a new clean page to ruin.

The room smelled fresher, like the resin had been skimmed from the surface of a pool and replaced.

It would take only minutes to thicken again.

I opened with nothing. Praise for the oil, nod to the musicians, thanks for the ward. They let the yarn of it wind around them again, soothing and dull. Then the tests began, as they always did.

A lord in a leaf mask asked loudly whether our games would include a demonstration of the dragon’s roar.

An older woman in a simple silver veil wondered if perhaps illusions might be permitted if confined to the floor.

A younger noble with not enough sense to hide his house asked why a Namyr boy had been allowed to keep his face.

I answered each with the kind of patience that makes men angrier than rage.

I laughed where it made them feel flattered.

I ignored where it made them feel small.

When they tried to draw blood, I offered silk.

When they tried to suffocate me with silk, I laid down iron.

My tongue hurt by the end of it, as if it had been walking on knives.

Rhydor spoke only once. “We will win or lose with minds,” he said, and the way he said minds made five people in the front row shift their weight as if their feet had found stone instead of glass. His eyes found mine when he said it and something in my chest steadied.

By the time I closed the audience, the courtiers had made plans to bet, the steward had noted three more clauses, Maelith had filled half a page with his even hand, and Iriel had smiled enough to crack his mouth.

I left them with no room to protest. “It is settled,” I said, and I dismissed them before their mouths could form the first foot of the first word of complaint. It felt good. It felt like taking a deep breath after standing too long in my mother’s perfume.

I reached the arch at the same time as Rhydor again.

The passage narrowed exactly as before. His cloak brushed my sleeve and my skin remembered the heat of him in a way that had nothing to do with ward-lines.

We did not touch. We did not look. In the echo between columns, the missing gesture felt like a kiss withheld on purpose.

Outside, the colonnade breathed a little easier, as if the room had exhaled us both. I took one step and then another and let the gathered courtiers wash around me like a tide. Their whispers tugged at my skirts and nipped my heels. I catalogued everything and thanked no one.

Halfway to the Moonveil gallery a page intercepted me with a tray and a shallow bow.

“For the princess,” he said, and the shape of his vowels told me he had been trained in this palace and nowhere else.

On the tray lay a single pale bloom, no scent, just light, and a folded scrap no bigger than my palm.

Nyssa’s hand hovered. “Allow me.”

I took the note before she could and broke the seal with my nail. One line of careful script waited within, no flourish, no signature.

Two nights. If you outlaw glamour, prove you can win without it.

A puzzle? A taunt? A test from the wrong hands? The flower shimmered faintly in the corner of my vision, catching every lantern in a different facet of white.

I folded the note again and slid it into the sleeve at my wrist where no eye could mark it. “Tell the steward,” I said to Nyssa, softly, “we will need two judges from the Whitewood who have never played the court’s game. And tell him to choose one who dislikes me.”

Nyssa’s head snapped up. “You cannot, ”

“I can,” I said. “And I must. If we mean to outlaw glamour, we must win without the scent of it clinging to us, even in the judge’s mind. They will not give us the kindness. We must take the chance.”

Her mouth flattened and then steadied. “Yes, Highness.”

We reached my door. The corridor smelled of beeswax and silver smoke and the sharp green of the rosemary tucked into the sconce by someone who missed air.

I pressed my hand to the wood and felt the wards answer with a slow, quiet thrum.

My mother’s voice drifted down the hall behind me, silk over iron.

I did not turn. I opened my door and stepped into the room I kept as my only true place.

Only once the latch clicked did I pull the note out again and read it a second time. The words did not change.

If you outlaw glamour, prove you can win without it.

I stared at the script until the black marks blurred and steadied. Then I smiled, a real one, for no one but myself, and let it have the teeth I keep hidden in my mother’s hall.

Two nights. I would win with my mind and with his, and with the law. And if I had to crack the floor to let new roots through, I would. I would do it without glamour and without apology.

I slid the note under the rim of the mirror, the one spot in this palace the wards never quite learned, then turned to the window and watched the twilight that never ended press silver against the glass until it felt like a promise.

In the corridor, steps stopped in front of my door. A breath. A pause.

Rhydor’s shadow crossed under the threshold and disappeared again.

I did not open the door. I did not need to. The floor already knew what I would say to him the next time we stood within an arm’s length and pretended we were only pawns.

Truce, yes.

But not for long.