Page 26 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)
Rhydor
Shadowspire let out a certain kind of breath when it wanted blood.
You could hear it in the council antechamber before the doors opened, an anticipation that ran along the pillars like a shiver under stone, ward-candles guttering low and then steadying in a rhythm that matched the crowd’s hunger.
Lanternlight pooled on the inlaid floor and made the silver runes look wet.
Everywhere I looked I saw the quiet narrowing of eyes that meant a story was about to be told the way the court liked best: with a victim and an audience.
The Masks were already lined up when Elowyn and I stepped through the arch.
Six of them, lacquer-black, faceless, hands clasped behind their backs.
They made no sound. They never did. The council benches were packed, thick sweep of silk, glitter of gems on metal, the faint sweet tang of resin that always clung to Vaeloria’s audiences as if the room itself had been perfumed to smother what it was about to do.
I felt the veterans fan out behind me without needing to look.
Torian took my right, one half-step back, silent, measuring.
Tharos put his iron hand where a man with bad intent would want to pass and looked at no one while everyone looked at him.
Korrath’s cane tapped once against the base of a pillar; I knew that tap, the listening one, the sound he made when he wanted me to remember breathing can be a tactic.
Brenn’s flame-bright head bobbed just far enough out of line to make three Masks twitch and then settle; Draven drifted to the gallery’s shadow-line, all lazy elegance, where he could catch a signal and turn it into a rumor before it hit the floor.
At the far end of the hall Maelith stood with his ledger open on the lectern, quill poised, black staff against the step. He looked like a man carved from midnight and discipline. Even the ward-light didn’t dare settle on him for long.
Between the Masks stood the prisoner.
A Namyr woman this time, older than the boy in the garden, not yet old enough to have learned to live as if she were invisible.
She had the look of someone who had stopped sleeping a year ago and didn’t know how to begin again.
Her wrists were bound, not by rope but by glamour you could only see in the way the skin reddened under nothing.
She was very still. Some people shake when they’re afraid; some become the calmest thing in a room full of knives.
I had learned to respect the second kind.
The court’s murmur thickened as Elowyn and I reached the line where petitioners usually stopped.
Fans flicked; a steward scribbled; I felt the press of a hundred masked gazes as if they were hands pushing us toward the stage the hall had set.
A hundred more eyes watched us from carved galleries, hidden behind shadow-screen and etiquette.
The queen did not sit the throne today; her veil hung on its stand as a courtesy, the symbol of her authority enough to make the law shift its weight in our direction without having to move her hand.
Iriel lounged half in shadow near the dais with that lazy arrogance that said he’d chosen the seat because it gave him the best angle to watch me walk into whatever trap he had baited this morning. He did not bother to hide the smile.
Maelith raised his quill and the murmuring settled, as abruptly as a pond when a thrown stone finally sinks.
“The court convenes under Shroud Law,” he said, voice even, every word landing with weight of ritual.
“A proceeding will be heard against a servant of the hall, Namyr-born, charged with dereliction and false testimony.”
A sigh went through the benches, pleasure, expectation.
The hall loved a Masking because it called cruelty a sacrament and let them perform their virtue for one another while watching someone bleed on the altar of law.
They used the word judgment to mean spectacle and taught themselves to be grateful for the confusion.
I let a long breath in and a longer one out and kept my voice level. “House business first,” I said, not loud, but with the iron the room recognized because it had heard it speak the words I do not bow and learned that I meant it. “Who laid the charge?”
Maelith did not look at me. “The steward of the Third Hall.”
“What oath did he use?”
A small pause, slim as a blade. He flicked his eyes down and made a mark in the ledger. “An oath of ranked service.”
I glanced at the first line of Masks, let my gaze slide from the lacquer sheen of facelessness toward the prisoner and then out to the benches.
The law tablets in the pillars hummed very faintly under my boots, that vibration the room breathed when someone had asked the right question because everyone could feel the answer moving toward the surface even if it had not yet broken air.
“Wrong oath,” I said.
I did not raise my voice. I did not need to. The quiet that followed carried better than shouting.
The Masks turned their faces toward me. The prisoner’s head lifted. Elowyn was very still at my shoulder, the kind of still that means someone is listening hard enough to carve the words into the bone under their skin.
Maelith’s quill hovered over the ledger. “Explain.”
“The servant is Namyr,” I said. “Namyr report to the house captain, not to the steward of the Third Hall. The ranked service oath binds a higher to a lower across the same chain. This one reaches across chains. It’s a steward’s oath used like a captain’s.
Your tablets recognize the bind only when the right chain is rung. ”
“The offense remains,” a man in a fox mask called from the second tier, the easy cruelty poured into that carelessness making my teeth itch. “Whether the steward used the pretty words or not, the girl disobeyed.”
I kept my gaze off the benches. “Shroud Law doesn’t care about pretty. It cares about structure. If the wrong oath is used, the law hums off-key and the ward’s lattice shifts a hair. You can’t see it unless you put your cheek to the floor. You can hear it if you respect the rules you brag about.”
A ripple, part derision, part discomfort. The benches didn’t like being told that the songs they sang about justice were off-key.
Elowyn’s voice slid into the hall, cool and precise, the kind of voice that can make knives look like ritual implements fit to touch the altar.
“And in this case, the structure doesn’t hold for a second reason,” she said.
She did not look at the prisoner. She did not look at Iriel.
She looked at Maelith, and he felt it; I saw it in the tick of the tendon along his jaw.
“The witness named in the complaint is the steward’s man.
But the records for the hour say he was attending the polishing of the silver lanterns in the Candle Gallery.
” She lifted her palm; Nyssa moved like moonlight and placed a folded slip in Elowyn’s hand.
She opened it and read, her voice quieter now, forcing the room to listen closer.
“He signed the polishing log. He cannot have been in two places at once.”
A stir, fans shifting, heads turning, the kind of movement that meant the court wanted to keep enjoying the cruelty and would do so if given the smallest excuse but had started to worry that this one might cost more applause than it was worth to watch.
Maelith’s gaze did not leave Elowyn’s. “Produce the log.”
“Of course,” she said, and the way she said it made it sound less like a queenling’s boast and more like a stone floor noting that you had stepped on it with muddy feet.
Nyssa lifted the ledger out of a satchel and placed it on the low table between us.
The book had been signed so many times the leather on the spine had glossed with the oil of a hundred fingers.
Maelith bent, read, smoothed a page whose crease had been sharpened by anxiety, and straightened.
“The log exists,” he said to the room, not to me. Not to her. “The steward’s witness signed another book at another hour. The oath is incorrectly sworn.”
The crowd’s murmur changed shape. Not pleasure, not yet; the hall was nimble at turning on itself, but it liked to be courted before deciding an outcome had been more entertaining than the promise of a bloodier one.
I took a step forward. The Masks shifted as one, as elegantly as birds, not to block me, just to remind me the line was theirs. I stopped where I was meant to.
“Dismiss the charge,” I said.
“The steward insists the proceeding will find further evidence, ” Maelith began.
Elowyn lifted one finger. The smallest of gestures. The room learned to hush for it. “Or,” she said, “the steward has been sloppy and the court too hungry. If we meant to humiliate and so call our hour justice, we should do a better job of pretending we did work first.”
I heard Brenn’s chuckle cut off and turn into a cough.
I heard Draven murmur something toward a shadow where Sylara inevitably lurked that made her fan still for three heartbeats and then resume like a wing.
I felt Torian’s attention sharpen and slide into my shoulder like a blade waiting for a hand.
Maelith’s careful composure did not change. He could stand a lot of heat without sweating. “The court may delay a Masking when an oath is proven incorrect,” he said.
“Delay,” I said, “is the word you use when you want an audience to believe it has gone home with more than it came with.”
He did not rise to the bait. “There is precedent.”
Good. Precedent we could maneuver.
“Then I will use it,” I said, very mild, and slipped my hand into the inside pocket I had made my tailor sew behind the wrapped hilt of my ceremonial sword.
The disc was small, bone, smooth, carved with a tower shrouded in mist and a broken key at its base.
Varcoran’s favor had a certain kind of weight that made a table shift a fraction toward you when you set it down.