Page 31 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

Maelith’s stare did not flicker. Neither did Iriel’s smile.

For a breath the room held two truths and tried, stubbornly, not to choke on either.

Then the rule surrendered to the precedent under Maelith’s hand and the Masks finished their measured march toward the doors.

The maid did not stumble again. When the lacquer disappeared into the dark, the hall admitted, very softly, the sound people make when they have been surprised into having nothing graceful to say.

The audience had no dress rehearsal for that noise.

It reached for its familiar answers and came up with polite chatter.

It does that here; when cruelty loses its chance to polish itself, charm crowds in with a dozen little sentences about the weather and the wine.

The chamber began to melt around the edges, fans opening, heads turning toward exits, small eddies of gossip forming where the air pressure shifted.

The masks who liked to be seen left first. The ones who liked to count stayed.

We did not leave quickly. We stayed long enough for the room to learn that we were not running from it. Then, on the same breath, I stepped back, and she did, too, and our veterans closed like a sentence ending in the right period.

We walked down the aisle of pillars the way soldiers learn to walk the length between catapult and wall, heads up, pace measured.

I do not enjoy giving a hall like this the entertainment of watching a man walk well.

I enjoy making it receive the lesson that comes with the sight.

When we reached the antechamber arch, the noise in the benches had risen just enough to let the court pretend it had not been trying to remember how to be decent.

“Prince,” someone said as I passed, sly and false-kind. “It must be a comfort that Shroud Law could pass for order even in Ash.”

“Law passes for order anywhere it is willing to be deaf to its own favorite lies,” I said without stopping.

“Princess,” a lord’s son in a fern mask cooed at Elowyn, “what welcome restraint, ”

“Restraint is what grown men call mercy when they cannot afford the honesty of the word,” she said, and his mouth closed around the taste of it.

I heard Iriel before I saw him: the shift of silk, the low, catlike breath that says a man has arranged his face to be seen, then moved the muscles to match.

He lounged against the pillar nearest the door with one ankle crossed over the other and his mask angled to show more skin than anyone else could get away with.

He brushed his knuckles against the white veins in the stone, then let his hand fall as if the movement hadn’t been a sermon.

“Sister,” he purred. “Husband.” He inclined his head the exact degree necessary to avoid the fatigue of performing respect. “What a refreshingly dull outcome.”

Elowyn didn’t look at him. She let her gaze pass through the place he stood as if it were smoke. “You’ll have time enough to arrange spectacle at your leisure,” she said, and her voice was so gentle a raven would have mistaken it for meat. “We won a hearing. You can still try for a party.”

His mouth’s corner lifted a fraction. He loves that about her, how cleanly she cuts. He hates it more.

He spoke past her to me. “Cite cleaner next time,” he said. “The Hall of Keys doesn’t like to be tutored in the language it wrote, especially by men who bring ash under their nails.”

“You’ll find the Hall of Keys has a fondness for men who can read and don’t require a steward to turn the pages,” I said. “But I admire your confidence.”

He took it as the compliment he needed for his next breath. “Confidence,” he said, “is a lighter mask to wear than shame. Ask your dragonborn. They’ve got no practice with either.” He cut a look at Brenn and let his smile go wide enough to show the edges of teeth.

Brenn grinned back like the irreverent bastard he is. “We could teach you shame,” he said cheerfully. “But then who would nourish the hedges.”

Laughter, real this time, broke like a wave under the gallery and then scattered when the wrong masks heard it and remembered themselves. Iriel’s eye narrowed behind his light. He had wanted the line and gotten a lesson. He doesn’t forget.

“Two days,” he said to Elowyn, suddenly mild. “Shall we see if the court prefers its law dressed in courage or in costume?”

“The court will take it dressed in whatever lets it pretend it always loved its oath,” she said.

He pushed off the pillar and bowed with exactness, the performance choreography perfect enough to earn applause if there had been etiquette to clap. “Then by all means,” he murmured. “Perform.”

He turned, and the space he left behind cooled. Maelith had already vanished into his ledgers, as he does, blackness withdrawing from daylight. The hall emptied around us without ever looking like it emptied; Shadowspire practices denouement the way other cities practice prayer.

We stepped into the antechamber. Noise swelled, then softened.

People pressed, then parted. Draven materialized at the elbow of a cousin of Varcoran who had kept very quiet during the proceedings and now looked as if silence had been a meal he remembered tasting.

Brenn collected three names and two shrugs in a span of breaths that said he had also collected opinions that would mean more by sundown.

Korrath tapped his cane twice and began to drift, listening for the corridor where the echo would carry the gossip whose phrasing would matter most. Tharos did what he always does: he moved toward the door with the unhurried insistence of a man people learn to stop asking to move aside.

Elowyn lifted her chin a fraction, the way a woman does when she adds a brick to a wall she’ll rest her back against later. She took one step, then another. She was not smiling. She was not stately. She was something rarer in here: dignified.

I fell into place at her left without being told.

We have learned not to leave one another’s flanks hanging in this hall.

My veterans closed around us with manners perfect enough to convince the room they hadn’t closed at all.

We moved like a single thought: simple, unbroken, uninterested in being improved by applause.

“Be useful,” she said under her breath.

“I intend to cause an allergic reaction to your brother’s smile,” I said.

“That would be useful.”

We did not laugh. We did not look at one another. Between us heat moved, and we pretended it was the press of the room.

At the threshold Sir Thalen appeared long enough to make himself visible to me and invisible to everyone else. His bow was neat; his eyes, grateful. “Two days,” he said softly. “The Hall of Keys has posted the hearing first. The steward wants to make a point.”

“He will,” I said. “So will I.”

“And I,” Elowyn said, and the quiet in her voice made me think about knives that aren’t cold until they’re already in the wound.

We crossed the doors’ line and the hall’s breath changed.

The corridor outside smelled less of resin, more of wax and stone.

The sound followed us like a rumor, fading, sharpening, flicking like a fish turned suddenly toward a new current.

We passed under a panel of shadowglass that held the embossed sigils of the Shroud and House Varcoran, and I let my hand brush the silver rim.

It answered with a hum the way a blade answers a forge when you set it in the right place.

At the base of the stairs that would take her toward the Moonveil gallery and me toward the side passage I liked because I trusted its exits, we stopped. Not facing each other. Not staged. Simply a pause, as if a door needed oil and we had both reached for the same vial.

“Two days,” she said.

“Two days,” I confirmed.

“Bring the answer you refused to give them today,” she said. She didn’t mean words. She meant the weight behind them, the thing law hears when men use its name to dress their appetites.

“I delayed,” I said. “I didn’t refuse.”

“Then bring the debt,” she said.

We did not touch. We did not promise. We acknowledged.

She stepped away first, because we had learned to be careful with who does what under this roof. The veterans went with me. Torian fell in at my shoulder. He drew a slow breath like a man learning a lung again after a long illness.

“You realize,” he said, not bothering to make it a question, “that you have painted a target over your crest.”

“She did the same over hers,” I said. “If the hall wants archery, it can count arrows. We’ll learn to duck.”

He didn’t smile. He doesn’t when he’s counting. “We’ll need witnesses we didn’t think we could have. We’ll need the Whitewood to admit ink knows more than etiquette. We’ll need Varcoran to lend a seal and not charge us twice.”

“We have two days,” I said.

“We have two days,” he echoed, as if trying to make the number mean time rather than danger.

We let the palace’s corridors take us. The walls glimmered with glamours trying to coax truth into forgetting daylight had its own rules.

The ward-veins in the floor hummed their set notes and pretended they had always sung them.

The air changed from law to performance in a handful of turns.

My hand held a heat down I had no business naming now.

It would be useful later; everything worth surviving becomes fuel.

At the landing before my preferred stair, Korrath’s cane clicked once, signal of a rumor worth something. He stepped into my path without looking like he had. “Varcoran has teeth,” he murmured. “They disliked watching their seal leave Maelith’s hand. They disliked more seeing it stop a Mask.”

“They’ll charge us twice,” I said, more to feel the shape of it than because I needed the warning.

“They’ll charge us once now,” Draven said from nowhere on my left, “and once when the queen’s mask changes faces. They prefer their debts like their maps, neat.”

“We’ll pay once,” I said. “And they’ll think they got twice.”

Brenn’s laugh flicked from somewhere behind me. “You really are your father’s fire.”

“I’m the coal he left,” I said. “Get me the air.”

They melted back into the palace, ghosts with purpose. Torian leaned and looked down the stair as if it were a road and not a shaft. “You felt it,” he said. Not the hall. Not the law. He meant the thing that burned under my ribs when Elowyn’s mouth cut the room and left it bleeding dignity.

“I did,” I said. “And I didn’t decide what to call it.”

“You don’t have to,” he said. “You just have to aim it.”

I put my hand on the rail. The wood had been polished by the palms of a hundred courtiers who have never used their hands for anything else. I have learned to forgive wood for that. It cannot choose whose skin makes it shine.

“We’ll aim it,” I said. “And when the hall steps aside after all its gestures are finished, we’ll go through.”

“Two days,” he said again, and the way he said it this time made it sound like a drum.

“Two days,” I echoed, and began to descend.

Behind me the council doors closed with a sound that pretended to be final. The fortress beneath the glitter breathed, steady and stubborn. The law we had humiliated this morning began the work of learning how to pretend it had always loved the correction we forced into its mouth.

And somewhere beyond the stone, the Shroud, thin as a lie, heavy as a choice, shifted in its sleep, as if amused to learn it had two fewer friends than it had counted on and two more enemies it could use.