Page 24 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)
Elowyn
The Vale of Withering did not begin so much as it refused to end.
The land thinned as we approached, the twilight pressed flatter, and the sound of our horses’ hooves changed from a clean strike on frost-hardened ground to a hollow thud that made my teeth ache.
The wind died three turns before the first marker stone, a dead wind, the kind that meant the air remembered moving and had decided it would not again.
Ahead, a ring of trees leaned toward each other like conspirators around a secret fire that had gone cold.
Their trunks corkscrewed out of the soil, black and slick where bark should have been, and the leaves, what few clung stubbornly to the topmost branches, were the color of old bruises.
We brought only a minimal escort, just as I had ordered at the kitchens while the bakers dragged hot pans from the ovens and clouds of sweet steam fogged the windows.
Two palace outriders peeled off at the second milestone and made a visible show of waiting out of earshot.
A single Varcoran scout ghosted us from the rear; a sensible precaution, and one the Hold would not call indulgence.
Rhydor nodded once at the arrangement and said nothing.
He wore road leathers cut clean for riding and had removed every piece of ornament from his person that could flash at the wrong moment.
It was the most courtly thing he had done for me all week.
We topped the last ridge before the vale, where the soil dried to powder beneath the grass and the world fell away into a shallow basin of ash-colored earth hedged by that crown of twisted trees.
The vale proper looked deceptively gentle, a held breath of land, but every instinct in my body treated it the way a body treats a dream of falling: stiffening, bracing, trying not to wake the thing that waited.
Rhydor reined in beside me. He did not speak. He simply closed his eyes and inhaled.
“Smells like home,” he said after a moment, and the words were so soft they surprised me.
Not the sentiment, I had begun to understand that anything which touched the bone of Drakaryn shook him, but the tenderness with which he said it.
The ache in it. I had heard that same sound in my own throat, once, standing in the Whitewood stacks with a ledger in my hands, reading a line that proved a truth I had been forbidden to name.
“What does home smell like?” I asked before I could decide not to.
He kept his eyes on the vale. “Stone after rain. Iron. The last coal dying in a forge you’ve held on to for warmth when you shouldn’t have. The good kind of smoke.”
“And here?”
“Stone. Iron. Smoke.” His mouth crooked, not a smile. “But nothing to set it alight.”
We let the silence name itself and did not force speech on it.
One of the outriders shifted in his saddle a hundred paces behind us; the little noise scraped up the slope and stopped at the ring of trees as if the trunks had very small ears.
My horse tossed her head once, not in fear but in warning; even the best-trained animals have an honesty my court has never learned.
“We do not cross the ring,” I said, and kept my voice even so he would hear the decision, not the fear. “Not today. The old stories will have their due.”
He looked at me then, just once, the way a man looks down a road he knows he cannot take today and files it in the ledger he uses to keep promises he may regret.
“We won’t,” he said. “Show me where your stories keep their teeth.”
We left the horses at a marker stone carved with Varcoran sigils, tower, mist, broken key, dull with age and with the grease of too many hands making ward-signs as they passed.
The ground sounded wrong under boot; the thin crust of frost over powder cracked with a papery sigh and stuck to the edge of my sole.
No scent rose, not even the clean, sharp smell of cold.
The dead wind made the hair along my forearms prick.
We stopped at the first of the foundations, an old line of stone half-swallowed by the soil, set thirty strides inside the ring in a horseshoe shape facing the vale.
The stones had been mortared with something that wasn’t just lime; the seams held a shiver in them like the memory of a bowed string.
Someone had built here, long ago and with intention, and then had tried to erase the building with everything but time.
“A way-house,” I said. “Or a shrine.”
“Or a barricade,” Rhydor said. He crouched, brushed his gloved hand over the mortar, and brought it to his nose. “Bone-lime, not stone.”
“Your people use it for graves,” I said quietly.
“We used it when the dead had to be reminded not to get back up,” he said, and did not look away when he said it. “Necromancers aren’t a story where I come from.”
“No,” I said. “Nor here, even if we carve our laws to call them ones.”
He grunted, acknowledgment without conversation, and tapped the edge of the stones where the mortar oozed into the earth like the last breath of a thing that does not know it is dying. “See this seam?” he asked.
I knelt beside him, let my hand hover a hairsbreadth from the line, and did what Varcoran stone had taught me the day before: I listened with my palm.
The thread of bone-lime held a different temperature than the rock, warmer somehow, inert and stubborn.
The seam thinned at one corner, barely, then thickened, then jumped the gap as if something had sliced it clean and pasted it back when it was already dry.
“I do,” I said. “A break.”
“Not a natural one,” he said. “Not weather. The lime would flake proper if it were old wind. This is neat. Newer than the rest. Someone cut this open with a knife when they needed to pull out a line of ward and swing it back into place without letting the rest sing about the cut.”
“Like the knot you and Torian found in the archive,” I said, and the cold under my palm bit another finger’s width.
He nodded once. “Once you learn to love lies that act like order, you’ll always pick the neatest cut.”
I tasted the air. It didn’t taste back. We left the foundation and worked the arc of the ring clockwise, stopping here and there the way you stop when the hair at the back of your neck pulls at you.
At the midpoint, the soil blurred into a rough oval where nothing grew and the frost lay thicker by a shade.
We found the first of the symbols there, half-buried under the powder.
Not the neat, legal sigils etched into palace floors, but long, sweeping lines slashed into the earth with a sure hand, now softened and filled with ash and fine grit.
A circle, then another, then a lopsided, jagged shape that kissed the edge of the first two circles and pushed against them as if it hated the idea of being bound.
I crouched at the perimeter and brushed one of the curves clean.
The line widened into a series of cups and rises where a tool with a rough edge had cut too fast to keep smooth and the earth had grabbed at it.
My hand tracked the groove the way a tongue tracks a scar inside a lip. The old stories crowded my throat.
“We call this one the Queen’s Bite,” I said.
“It isn’t on any tablet. It lives in whispered songs and in the way old women mark their bread before it goes into the oven on the winter of the thinnest year.
A curve that pretends to be a circle, and refuses.
Break it once and everything you put inside it belongs to you again. ”
“Glamour can eat that story alive,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “But the earth doesn’t lie for us. It only suffers our lies for a while. And then it puts back what belongs.”
“Has it,” he asked softly, “put back what belongs here?”
I looked up at the ring of black trees. They leaned inward, their branches clawing at a twilight that did not cut.
The space beneath them wore no underbrush, not even the pale, hair-thin grass that manages to live in palace courtyards starved of sun.
The foundations sat. The symbols lay. Nothing moved, not even the idea of movement, except the small tremor at the edge of my vision where the light refused to hold rock as rock and called it something else until I stopped staring.
“No,” I said. “It hasn’t.”
We took rubbings.
I had brought paper cut thin enough to take detail, and a stick of charcoal wrapped in cloth so my fingers wouldn’t smear the line.
Rhydor held the edges steady while I worked, his hands sure, his breath a steady warmth I tried not to think about.
We made three rubbings from the three cleanest cuts, two working circles, one of the jagged not-circle, and then another from a pair of rune-letters peeking from beneath a fresher gouge of dirt.
When I shook the paper clean, ash flurried up and caught on his knuckles; for an instant he looked as if he had been dusted in a forge.
He brushed them off, then seemed to stop himself and let the grey settle.
“Translate them?” he asked.
“I can read the shapes,” I said, “but the oldest grammar weaves story into itself. If I guess wrong, the wrong story answers. I’ll need the Whitewood’s old calques and the marginalia the Queen had copied for her, ” I stopped and bit my tongue.
“, for my father,” I finished. The quiet tired sound that came from me did not shame me; we had earned one between the two of us.
“Then we’ll exchange notes,” he said. “Your calques, my field numbers. If our scales lie, at least they’ll lie toward the middle.”
“Fair,” I said.