Page 23 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

In the small ledger room beyond the archive, the air warmed two degrees.

The lamps burned a fraction brighter; the glass in the window was thicker here, warped into faint waves that made the cliff beyond look like water under stone.

Elowyn set the ledgers on the table and slit the string with a thumbnail.

The paper yielded with the sigh paper makes when it has put its life’s work under your hand and knows you’ll either read it or pretend you did.

We read it.

We didn’t skim. Torian has never skimmed anything in his life that carried numbers in a column. I can skim a field and a man’s eyes and a line of hungry soldiers and know when to feed them from my stores or his pride. I do not skim books and call it war. We took the time the ledgers demanded.

Four entries from the month before the “missing” binding was logged as received had a cartilage in common anybody else would have called boredom.

The tally of barley sold to a mill the Varcoran kitchens did not source.

A fine paid by a cousin for bringing three rams over the pass after the first thaw.

A note that the team that delivered the rams had taken a pair of empty crates up the back stair to a clerk who never signed for anything heavier than ink and then returned with those crates carrying less than a mouthful of air.

And a flour account closed with a sum that did not match the number of zeros recorded in the petty theft column three days earlier.

“You will stop enjoying this look,” Elowyn said to Torian without heat when his mouth did that thing that made men tell him they had loved numbers since they were boys. “If you don’t, I will have to borrow it and my face will crack.”

“You were right,” he said, and ran his thumb along the crooked line in the margin. “He practiced by practicing. He made the absence small where people are trained to see absence only when it drags a feast off a table.”

“He wore the glove our mother cut and then hid his fingers under it,” she said.

“And used Varcoran house habit to teach the floor not to complain,” I said.

Master Cor stood in the door while we mapped my chalk circle onto three more lines he pretended his house hadn’t noticed.

He said nothing. When we were done, and when the ledgers lay open in their shame with the neatness of a wound stitched badly by a man who loves his own hands too much, he bowed not to me and not to Elowyn and not to the work but to the room.

“Highness,” he said softly, “if the Hold listens, it is because the mountain taught it the names of the dead. It has learned one new one today.”

Elowyn’s jaw went hard and then broke and then held again. “Master Cor,” she said, and the steadiness earned him as much respect as any man has earned in my presence with only three words.

We left the ledgers where he could rebury them and carried nothing but breath. The old steward lit the corridor ahead with a lantern he did not need to walk these halls; he did it because he had learned to honor the feet of the living when they went looking for the dead.

Outside, the Hold’s courtyard caught echo and light and gave it back with the indifference of a cliff.

The outriders watched a stable-boy teach a horse to hate him less; the horse was winning.

The sky refused to act like day or night, the way it always did in Wonder.

The northwind had pulled its teeth in an inch while we worked; it still bit.

I didn’t mind. I have always preferred a wind that tells you what it means to do.

Elowyn stopped at the lip where the yard fell back into the road.

She did not lift her hand to her throat the way she had in Shadowspire when she was deciding whether to let a woman on a balcony call her mercy weakness.

She let both hands hang open a fraction from her sides, as if she were telling the Hold she would not beg it to hold her up should it decide not to.

“Thank you,” she said to me then. The words were ordinary.

They carried weight like a pack you do not put on someone’s shoulders unless you have learned where it belongs.

“There is a way to look at a wall that teaches it the shape of your stubborn. I do not know if I have appreciated stubborn in a man who burned it before.”

“I do not know if I have appreciated hearing a ledger breathe,” I said. “It’s an ugly music.”

“It is,” she said. Her mouth almost made a smile and didn’t. “But if you listen long enough to ugly music, sometimes it shows you the door you need and then leaves you alone while you walk through it.”

Torian coughed. He does this when he wants to give privacy to the doe and the wolf and still stay close enough to keep the longer peace.

“We will need the steward’s good pen and the Whitewood’s bad grace,” he said.

“We will need to keep the council from swallowing the ledger whole before it knows it has teeth in its throat.”

“We will need to get there first,” I said.

“Dawn.” Elowyn’s certainty wasn’t arrogance. It was the same cadence as the ledger room, the same choice to stop lying to a floor and call it a map. “We leave by the kitchens. No heralds. Boots that can forgive their owner for being alive.”

I nodded. “Bring the notes you think you are not allowed to believe. I’ll bring chalk.”

We might have made a mistake then. We might have let a gesture pretend to be comfort. We didn’t. The restraint was not pain. It was attention. It was the choice to hold a thing steady until it tells you how to touch it without teaching it to lie about you later.

We mounted. The outriders took their places. Master Cor did not wave. Varcoran stone doesn’t pretend. It sees you leave and lets the wind decide whether to carry your name down the road once your horses’ hooves have stopped being polite.

On the second switchback, Elowyn reined in to look back at the slit that had taught her nothing in a way that made me respect it. I drew even. The wind tried our faces and left them; the road tried our horses and learned nothing it did not already know.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow,” I agreed.

We did not ride together. We rode side by side without speaking and let the north do what it has always done when two people learn a piece of its truth: it held the air between us taut, fine as gold wire, strong enough to cut and still too thin for a court to name.

Behind us, the keepyard swallowed the echo of our leaving. Ahead, the road folded itself in halves until the hold dropped out of sight and the smell of Shadowspire began its long attempt to drown the iron from our mouths.

I did not taste it yet. I kept the cliff in my teeth and the chalk dust on my palm and the feel of her silence at my shoulder where comfort would have made a lie.

I told myself that a man could carry three truths at once if he chose to: that stone does not need your worship to keep you from falling; that a ledger can be a door if you notice where it refuses to balance; and that a woman can stand her ground in a place where the law taught her to kneel and ask you to look with her, not for her.

At the third turn the wind rose and carried something like a voice along the cut. It might have been the Hold remembering the name Master Cor had just given it. It might have been the way land speaks when the oldest pour refuses to be fooled by a clever knot.

It sounded like a promise either way.