Page 29 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

Not a ledger. A small volume of ritual collation, the scriptorium’s hand would have copied that one for my father to compare to Varcoran’s folk text, before the Queen’s hand took the research from him and told the room he was resting.

It lay open to a page of paired readings.

On one side, hymn stanza. On the other, a gloss.

The hymn used the word opening . The gloss had circled it and written, in neat downstrokes, willing .

I looked up at Rhydor, and knew from the set of his shoulders he had read my face.

“Found another,” he said. He did not ask whether he should come to me or I to him.

He simply lifted the book he held and showed me a page where a meticulous hand had underlined bind a sovereign with a vow , then drawn a faint line from that to the scribe’s note in the outer margin: no binding holds beyond the vow’s breath without cost .

I closed my eyes. “Why were these in Tier Three,” I asked the room.

“Because the palace wants them to be hard to get to,” he said. “Not impossible.” He waited a breath, then added, softer: “You are good at hard.”

“Hard,” I said, “is easier than impossible.”

He stepped closer so I could see the ink rather than the line of his mouth and set the book beside mine.

Our shoulders did not touch. The air moved enough between them that I could distinguish the iron-smoke of him from the ash-leather of the spines.

The Trim of the Dais called that scent danger .

I decided to call it breath for five beats and return to the ritual afterward.

“Compare,” I said, and our heads bent.

The hymn made a call to night that was older than the throne; the gloss made its own call to a requirement the court found inconvenient to say aloud. Willing. The echo of it found my ribs and stayed.

“The margin that wrote willing ,” he said, “is the same hand that wrote no iron at threshold . If the scribe is right and this is a key, it matches our symbol from the vale. No iron. No forcing . Key doesn’t turn unless you choose to set it in the lock.”

“It also matches the shapeless part of our trouble,” I said, and let myself taste the words before I spent them.

“If you want your binding to be strong enough to hold a queen in the dark, it makes a certain kind of heartless ritual sense to make that binding depend on the kind of consent you can only extract with a particular kind of cruelty. If you want your unlocking to be strong enough to break the wrong queen free of the wrong prison, you will need a vow that costs in the proper direction.”

I thought of Iriel then, or refused to think of him and called it thinking. A picture flickered of him gloved in our father’s face, kneeling to my mother when she was at her weakest, and I wiped the image away before it could make more of itself than speculation.

“Two versus nine,” Rhydor murmured, and ran his thumb along the hymn’s line, then the gloss, counting the stressed beats. “Feels like a law written to disgust decent people enough to keep them from noticing when it is being evaded.”

“We wrote most of our laws that way,” I said. “Your country composes yours like a riddle with only one answer and then smiles when someone dies choosing the wrong word.”

His grin was already there, a low heat under his mouth. He fought it and lost. “Fair.”

We copied more. We made rubbings in the places where ink had faded in the exact shape that meant a clerk’s hand had formed letters too lightly on a day his master’s patience was thinner than the pen demanded.

We flagged three entries that used terms only the Whitewood would have kept without filing under myth .

We worked like people who had decided to be useful instead of afraid, which is a different kind of courage than the court croons over and one no one writes songs for.

The small scribe who had tried to keep the door closed returned once with two cups of water and a tremor he did not attempt to hide when Rhydor thanked him.

He set the cups down as if they might bite; when he left, the soft skid of his forced silence made me want to burn the rule that taught him it was virtuous not to breathe near a princess and a prince.

I did not burn it. I drew another margin.

I felt the shift in the room before I heard the door.

Tier Three remembered who walked inside it with the same stubborn care it devoted to keeping a rebel stanza under its thumb the moment every other hand forgot it existed.

Sir Thalen’s step did not belong to this place; Tier Three did not dislike him, but it had not been built to love what he called duty.

He stopped a respectful distance into the room and lifted two fingers, the signal for correspondence rather than weapon.

“Forgive the interruption, Highness,” he said.

“Prince.” He had not once stumbled over the titles since the hunt, and I marked that down alongside ten other small things he had done as if he wanted his name to show up with honor when we made the list of who had helped and who had watched.

“The steward sent me. The council will reconvene in two days. The petition on Masking will be first on the docket.”

Rhydor’s mouth went to stone. The heat under my sternum looked up and bared its teeth. “They want their spectacle back,” I said.

“They want their narrative back,” Rhydor corrected quietly. “They want to decide which of us looks harmless in public and spend the afternoon proving themselves right.”

I lifted the page with the hymn and slid the copy beneath it; my hand did not shake.

“Then we bring them a narrative of our own,” I said.

“We bring a witness the steward cannot own and a rule the tablet must recognize, and we make them choose which thing they want to pretend not to understand. We present the hymn to the Whitewood’s keepers and ask for a gloss they will be ashamed to withhold.

We call for the steward’s oath to be rewritten out loud on the floor and then call for the second witness to place his hand on the same words two minutes later.

We, ” I looked at Rhydor. “, load your delay with the guilt it deserved and turn it into a blade.”

“And ever so politely,” Rhydor said, mouth bending.

“Of course,” I said. “We will be very decorous.”

He made a small, low sound that I could have called a laugh if the stone had not been listening.

He reached for the book I held without taking it from me; his knuckles brushed my thumb, the new scar along his index catching a fraction of my skin.

Nothing in the room changed but the way it felt to breathe.

The wards underfoot hummed once, very faintly, like a throat clearing.

I enjoyed nothing more dangerous than the thought of enjoying it and set the copy beside my notes.

Sir Thalen looked anywhere but at our hands.

One does not spend a life in a palace without learning when to pretend to be worse at seeing than one is.

“If I might suggest,” he said carefully, “we use the steward’s own neatness.

Ask him to read the rule aloud. Ask him to read it again.

Ask him to reconcile the disgraced oath with the inscription right here in the Princess’s own hand.

He will do it to prove his perfection. And then the masks will make their mistake. ”

“What mistake,” Rhydor asked.

“The only one they still allow themselves in public,” Thalen said.

“They will try to look bored while trying not to look afraid.” His eyes flicked sideways just enough to read my face.

“People in my profession learn to love that moment because it means the next line doesn’t belong to the mask. It belongs to the law.”

I had not expected to like Sir Thalen Morwyn.

The hall liked me enough to make such a thing difficult, usually.

I found the slow, careful way his mouth tucked itself out of the way of his duty a more honest pleasure than the song at Veythiel had been, and I let him see it for the breath a good servant deserves.

“We will want the Whitewood’s signatures on the hymn copy tonight,” I said. “And we will want one copy of the ledger entry stamped with Varcoran’s seal.” I looked at Rhydor. “Draven can find the seal at a party if we let him bring a bottle. Torian can find a sober Varcoran caretaker.”

“Torian will prefer to bring the bottle and Draven the caretaker,” Rhydor said. “But I will give them orders.”

“Good,” I said. “I will go charm the scriptorium and frighten the keepers, in that order.”

He lifted a brow. “You admit their fear.”

“I admit they are more comfortable with me when I am doing my mother’s smile than when I am doing my own,” I said. “Fear is simply the name they’ve learned to give for the moment when they realize I know the difference.”

The archive gave a small shudder. Not a sound. A sense. As if something in the door had remembered a name it had not been allowed to say aloud. Sir Thalen turned his head toward the threshold. “Do we need to be done,” he asked.

“We need to look as if we were done before anyone else decided to arrive,” I said. “Which is not the same thing.”

Rhydor slipped his pen into the fold of his notes and capped his inkwell with an efficiency that would have delighted any quartermaster.

I wrapped my copies in plain paper and sealed them with wax pressed by the little stamp I wore for correspondence I did not want my mother’s steward to declare ceremonial.

Sir Thalen moved to the door and stood with one hand just touching the silver inlay, the posture of a man listening for footsteps with his skin.

The scribe who had tried to keep the door closed wilted sideways into view; he held himself like a candle near a window: upright, flickering.

“What,” Rhydor asked, not unkindly.

The scribe’s swallow convulsed his whole throat. “Forgive me,” he said. “It is nothing.”

“Nothing never makes you look like that,” I said gently. “Tell us.”

“The Sign Manual,” he said. “It is on the Steward’s wall. But there is a second hand alongside it today.” He forced himself up to full height, which was not very high, and set his chin. “I do not think the chamberlain would have dared to hang it without… permission.”

My mother’s private sign was her mask in ink. I did not like the picture that painted for me. I liked even less the picture of a second signature beside it, fresh enough to make a clerk panic at the thought that the law had just grown new teeth while he wasn’t looking.

“Whose hand,” Rhydor asked. His voice made the scribe answer, something it is never wise to underestimate.

“The Prince,” the scribe whispered. His eyes cut to the place on the door where the little key lived and then away again, as if he were afraid the symbol would accuse him of treason for having said it out loud. “Iriel.”

Steel moved under my skin. It was not courage. Courage uses breath, and mine had gone still enough that I had to name what moved as anger.

“Then we have two days,” I said, not trusting myself with longer words. I slid the wrapped notes into my sleeve and smoothed the silk over them as if I could erase the shiver from my hand. “And no hours to waste.”

Sir Thalen stepped back, hand off the silver, door open.

The corridor’s wax-scent washed in. The scribe pressed himself flatter than the wall, as if he thought if he became the wall it could keep him from danger.

Rhydor paused with one hand on the arch and looked down at the sigils. Shroud. Tower. Key.

When he spoke, it was too low for the doorway to count it as law. “You have the key,” he said. “Use it.”

I walked out into the grey and promised the stone I would.