Page 22 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

I dug the chalk from my pocket, a habit that made Torian smile and courtiers sniff, and touched the floor at the edge of the knot.

The fine web of the later ward-work lay millimeters beneath the surface; I could feel its geometry through the chalk the way you can feel the weave of a cloth if you know to press with your fingers instead of rub with your palm.

I traced the later line as a mason would notch a seam, light, not to mar the lattice beneath.

The chalk grew bright where the silver ran closest to shadowlight and died where old pour and new net misaligned.

Torian crouched too without asking and tracked as I did, his scholar’s patience tempering my soldier’s need to finish.

“It loops,” I said. “Not to anchor. To blind. Whatever was supposed to sit here, someone set the fine web to believe the binding was already there and left it singing the right song after it never arrived. The older pour wouldn’t have been fooled.

But the later net is what the palace tuned its hearing to when you cut the archive to the palace’s appetite. ”

She sat back on her heels. Cold slipped under her skirts; I saw it in the gooseflesh along her wrist where the gown bared the skin between glove and cuff.

She didn’t move to pull the fabric down.

She looked at the circle of chalk the way a woman looks at the honest bottom of a well: no water.

No lie. Just a poem about truth cutting a throat.

“What does this gain?” she asked. “If you wanted the work hidden, you keep it. If you want it out, why not break the ward?”

“Because a break begs a patch,” I said. “And a patch has a ledger. And a ledger leaves a snarl in the floor you can hear with your teeth. This isn’t theft to own.

This is theft to quiet. The thing removed matters less than the court’s insistence nothing here has been cut.

You taught your palace and your people to call stasis virtue.

Someone fed your virtue back to you and made it an accomplice. ”

Her throat worked once. “My father died in service to that virtue.”

We let the quiet sit. The lamps didn’t gutter.

The cold did not reach for the bones in my forearms any harder than it had thirty breaths ago.

Nothing dramatic happened in that room at all while we wore our grief where the stone could see it.

The dignity of it was worse than being knocked to my knees by a voice from an old song. I remained upright anyway.

“He wrote the northern notes here,” she said after a time.

“He brought the rest to Shadowspire. Those… disappeared into the Queen’s rooms. This”, she touched the groove again, “was meant to go directly to the Whitewood’s sealed stacks with a copy at the palace.

It is the only piece with this particular ledger path.

The day of his last entry, the law tablets got a new stanza. ”

“What stanza.”

“In events where the Shroud shows signs of strain, the Queen’s hand may remove any material from any archive to avoid the strain’s spread.”

“Your mother wrote herself a glove and wore it,” I said.

Elowyn finally looked at me; I felt the turn of her gaze the way a man feels a hand laid to the hot part of his chest. “She wrote a glove and left the door open,” she said. “To whatever hand knew the shape of fingers.”

“You think Iriel.”

“I think we taught ourselves to applaud good theater,” she said. “I think he loves the stage as much as any man would whose mask fits like skin. I also think someone in this hold knows which shelves sing less loudly when a ledger line reads differently than a floor does.”

Torian rose. He stepped a pace and then another and then another, testing seams, tapping where even the old pour ran like river into channel.

“The knot is deliberate,” he said. “Not careless. The work sits in the liminal, someone who learned enough to be bold and not enough to respect that the oldest ward answers nothing but itself.”

“The Whitewood,” Elowyn said, half to herself. “They cut a redundant web when they remapped Varcoran to Shadowspire math and no one argued because the lights looked more elegant under the new pour.”

“Does Master Cor know?” I asked.

“If he does,” she said, “he has learned to keep the older hold’s habit silent so the queen’s habit has room in its own skin.”

I stood. My knees cracked; cold has a way of reminding you you are not immortal in the joints. Elowyn pushed up without offering her hand; I didn’t pretend to take it. The distance between us tonight had been measured by what we were willing to keep in our own bodies.

“Show me the northern passage,” I said. “The one you wrote in the letter you want the palace to forget.”

She led without waiting. There was nothing in her movement that celebrated the fact that I had agreed.

There was nothing that made me feel kept.

The moment did a strange thing in my chest anyway.

I had spent a week in Wonder being forced to make a thousand gestures for other people’s eyes; this was the first one that felt like a choice we both noticed and then carried without giving it a title.

The passage she chose had been cut later than the main spine of the hold, a narrower throat that slid northward beneath the outer wall and opened to a slit that looked down on a strip of land where the cliff folded inward on itself to make a shelf.

Cold poured through the slit like water.

Elowyn stepped into it and closed her eyes and tilted her face to the wind as if she were teaching herself to recognize how it carried a name.

“We call the shelf the Listener,” she said. “When the Shroud wore deeper earlier than we meant, the old keepers came here to hear where it sang off-key.”

“What does it sing now.”

“Nothing,” she said. “That’s the wrongness. The places near the north should hum with the weight of their own weaving. The hill below us should taste like ward-smoke in your mouth. It doesn’t. It tastes like stone and frost and nothing else.”

“Can nothing be a sign,” Torian asked.

“It can when you have listened long enough to call silence a stubborn sound,” she said.

I set my palm to the raw slit. The stone held cold without cruelty and strength without arrogance. It felt like the back of a man’s hand when he lets you see something that softens him because he knows you know how to keep it.

“If the piece missing in the archive tracked the crack,” I said, “then the crack led somewhere you were not meant to look. If your father logged the line to the palace with a note we cannot read, and your mother cut that line loose and then let the ledger wash the floor’s record clean, then we are hunting the ghost of a hand. ”

Elowyn’s mouth did the smallest thing where amusement tries to find a home and isn’t sure where to put down its bag. “You make hunting a ghost sound simple.”

“It is simple,” I said. “It is not easy. We follow the cold. We follow the places where your redundant web eats the old pour. We test for knots wherever Varcoran taught itself to swallow the palace’s appetite without letting the palace feel the bite.

” I glanced at Torian. “We can do this without raising alarm.”

“We can,” he said, and then gave me the look that meant he’d keep me honest about what we meant by can and should. “We will need the steward’s lust for neat margins. We will need to be boring.”

I grunted. “I hate that strategy.”

Elowyn looked out through the slit to where the land rung like a bowl with no hand to strike it. “I hate this place,” she said softly. “Because it listens. Because it tells me when I don’t know enough to deserve any answers.”

There are a dozen ways a man can understand a sentence like that and fewer ways to keep himself from reaching out the wrong way.

I did not touch her. I let my shoulder line up with where the wind ran the narrowest and took enough of it that it had to fold around me before it folded around her.

You learn, if you have led long enough, when to stop speaking and start remembering.

We stood there until the cold taught breath to behave.

We stood there until the feeling beneath my ribs slid from heat toward steadiness.

We stood there until the part of me that had wanted to smash a singing floor with my heel learned the shape of the song it refused to sing and realized it was as honest as any field I had loved.

Then Elowyn breathed out once, clean as a blade eased from a sheath, and stepped back.

“There is a second shelf,” she said. “Not as far. A store for ledgers no one cares about, grain routes, hire rolls, fines. If Master Cor will humor me, we can bring three of the old account books up from the year my father started logging the northern anomalies and look for subtraction that has another name in an unimportant column.”

“You believe the missing pages moved as barley to market,” Torian said, thinking where her mind had run and enjoying the way it did.

“I believe the man who loves not being seen best learned to be the kind of ledger you don’t notice signing itself,” she said. “And I think he practiced by practicing on us.”

“Your brother,” I said, so she would not have to say the name and make it true too early.

She did not nod. Not with her head. The floor felt it anyway.

We descended from the slit by another stair.

Master Cor met us at the base with two thin volumes already wrapped in brown paper and sealed only with string, as if he had anticipated her request not by reading her mind but by having known this house long enough to understand how questions find their way to the places records sleep.

He said nothing as he handed her the string; she said nothing as she took it.