Page 33 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

He angled his body toward mine, a movement I could have called warmth if I had not learned the difference between heat and comfort.

He smelled like iron again. It made me think of the first day under the mountain, the way the cliff had answered my voice when I called for a door it pretended it had never had the intention of opening.

“Teach your law the hymn,” he said. “Give me one hour and two sober Varcorans and I’ll bring you the seal on the gloss that makes Maelith pretend he had always meant to be honest in public.”

I should have told him yes and left it at that. I looked at the mist instead. It moved in long slides over the lower city; it clung to the bones of the buildings as if trying to learn their shape the way a blind woman learns a face. “There is a cost,” I said.

“Always,” he said. “Name the first one. We’ll add the second later.”

“My mother can smell humiliation the way a hawk smells blood,” I said.

“If we make the court attach consent to binding and witness to oath and chain to command , she will think of a way to name that treachery and sell it to our guests as virtue. She will call your mercy political theater. She will call my grammar sentiment. In the interval she will cut a glove to fit some new hand and hang it so publicly that every servant in the palace learns which signature he should fear.”

He did not flinch at the shape of fear in my mouth. Drakaryn pronounces it differently. “Then we get to the signature before the steward does.”

“And if we cannot?” The mist wanted to press its face against mine.

The terrace was too open to be honest about comfort, and the sky was too low to be called large.

“If we spend our notes and your seal and the court performs a last-minute miracle at the lectern and makes a vow out of a lie and calls it willing because a gloved hand told an old woman to agree?”

His hand was still half over mine. He turned his palm errant enough to slide the weight of it into the place where my thumb met my wrist, the small spot where a pulse will confess the truth you won’t. “Then we use the river.”

The sentence was so Drakaryn I could have laughed except my body wanted to learn what river meant in his mouth. “The Serathis?”

“Varcoran Hold,” he said. “The way the mountain listens when you stop performing for it. The way a wall hums when the wrong web teaches the right pour to pretend it didn’t hear the theft. If the room refuses to admit grammar tomorrow, we’ll make the floor confess. It remembers.”

A wind moved across the terrace, not as cold as earlier. It tugged at the edge of my sleeve and found the seam where I had hidden the extra copy of the ledgers. I slid my palm over it and looked down at the line of our two hands. He did not move his. I did not either.

“Your city is failing,” he said quietly, not to the terrace, not to the paper, and not only to me. “So is mine. I don’t know yet whether we can teach them to listen fast enough to save either.”

“Neither do I,” I said. The admission felt like bitter tea that had gone cold. “I do not care whether they will love us for it.”

“Good,” he said. “I am not especially in love with being loved.”

Something in me exhaled. We had done the arithmetic. The numbers did not please the people who called themselves comfort. They pleased other ghosts. I let my shoulder angle the smallest measure toward his.

“What will you call this,” he asked, almost idly, as if we were standing in a training court rather than on a ledge with a city beneath us bending its head to hear whether we lied, “if it works. A victory. A survival. A habit.”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

The word came with more wind than it deserved. It dove off the terrace and brought back an echo from somewhere below where you could still smell the river when it was in a mood to be honest.

“We stand in front of the council with a hymn and a gloss,” I said, counting, because I had learned to trust my numbers when the court had taught me to doubt my heart.

“We make the steward read it. We make him read it again. We make Maelith put his hand on the margin where the scribe wrote willing and say aloud willing means key not kindness . We bring the Varcoran seal for the copy and the Whitewood signature for the hymn. We call for the witness who was in two places and make him choose one. We force the bravos in fox and fern to clap for the only song that saved them from watching a girl’s face disappear. ”

He moved closer still. Not enough to touch more than the skin our hands were already sharing. Enough that his warmth pressed into a strip of air between my ribs and our paper. “And once we’ve forced them,” he said, “we choose how to use the time they didn’t mean to give us.”

We both looked down, not at the page this time, but at the city. The mist swallowed and returned a breath while we watched. It did not try to be dramatic. It only did its work.

He lifted his hand. I kept mine where it was and didn’t call that a mistake.

He laid his palm flat on the parapet and stared at it as if it belonged to a man he did not despise and did not have to pretend to be proud of in order to survive the hour.

The scar at his throat caught the lanternlight and made the line look fresh.

The wind learned it and then forgot it again.

He drew a breath and let it go as if setting down a weight he meant to take up later. “I will not let my people starve,” he said to the stone. It wasn’t a promise. It was the shape of one. Promises wear perfume here. Not this one.

“I will not let mine sing a hymn to a ritual without learning where it hurts,” I answered. Not a vow. Not yet. The word tomorrow warmed my mouth anyway. “And when they call you beast for that sentence, I will make them use the grammar properly.”

“They’ll call you cruel for correcting them,” he said, and smiled without looking at me.

“They have been calling me soft for years,” I said. “Let them try something new in their mouths.”

Silence again. Not the kind the court sells to itself as composure. The kind the upper terrace keeps for people who have done enough for an hour, and perhaps, with more to do, have made an agreement with air to stop bleeding on the parapet.

He turned then. Face to face. Close enough to make me aware of his mouth and honest enough to make me ashamed for noticing. I met his eyes and made no apology for what they told him. He did not make one for what they answered.

We did not kiss. We had not earned the grammar for it. We stood in the last available inch of distance and let heat lift between us without pretending it was something we did on purpose for a crowd.

“Tomorrow,” I said again. It sounded different in my throat the second time. Less rehearsal. Less threat.

He nodded once. “Tomorrow.”

We gathered the papers together. His hand did not brush mine again.

He let me fold the gloss into the hymn and the ledger copy into our notes.

He kept his palms flat against the parapet as if the stone might judge him for touching me and find him wanting.

The thought did something that hurt and felt less like a wound than a reminder of how I had been built.

He straightened. The air cooled the strip his warmth had occupied and told my body it was foolish for noticing. He stepped back. I did not.

He bowed, not the court’s ridiculous bow, not the one he never gave me when my mother watched, but the bare tilt of a head a man offers to a river he means to cross in flood and knows he might drown in before the far bank remembers his name.

“Princess,” he said.

“Prince,” I returned.

He turned and went through the arch the way he had entered it: not softer, not louder, only with the weight of a choice he had not announced. The ward-candles shivered. The wind found my hair and did what it wanted with it, because it could.

I put both palms flat on the parapet long enough to teach the stone my skin. When I stepped back, the city did not do me the courtesy of pretending it would thank me tomorrow. It would be alive; that would be enough.

I gathered the notes and slipped them into my sleeve where the seam would not look as if it bore more weight than silk.

I lifted my chin at the mist and did not forgive it for swallowing the river’s noise.

I turned toward the arch and the stair and the corridor I would need to walk with a mouth that smiled correctly at men who wanted me to do it so they would believe their kindness was enough.

At the threshold a movement caught the corner of my eye.

Not an escort. Not a spy. A boy, Namyr, carrying a broom he did not need to carry in a corridor no one had asked him to sweep.

He had a face I had almost seen in another room today, the bottom lip too full to hold still when the law learned a new word and pretended it had always loved saying it.

He froze, then sketched a bow so awkward it broke my heart worse than trembling hands. “Highness.”

“What is it?” I asked, because the broom had not been his idea, and because boys drafted by fear to carry messages no man wants to admit to have the right to speak or swallow as they choose.

He lifted the broom higher to prove it existed. “Nothing,” he said, and the lie put water into my eyes because it was the same lie my people had been trained to believe would keep them safe if they only tried hard enough to make it sound clean.

I took one step toward him. The broom trembled. I stopped a step away. “Come to the lower archive at dawn,” I said. “The one with the door that wears no jewels.” I did not lower my voice. “Bring no broom.”

His mouth opened. He made the shape of ‘yes’ and could not make the sound.

I did not make him. “Tomorrow,” I said.

He nodded so fast I feared for his neck and then fled in a direction the palace would not remark upon in its morning count.

I went along the upper corridor and down the small stair and into the gallery where the musicians liked to tune when it rained against the glass.

It did not rain; it was still twilight. I loved and hated that about this city; I loved and hated it for everything that made grammar difficult.

Below, the kitchen sent up a fresh ribbon of smoke.

Somewhere a woman laughed the way a woman laughs when she does not get to laugh tomorrow and knows it.

Nyssa met me at the turn toward my rooms, mask in one hand, the other holding a tray with two cups and a pitcher that steamed. She didn’t comment on my hair, or the color in my cheeks, or the papers in my sleeve. She had learned me before the palace had.

“Tomorrow,” she said, and neither of us pretended to misunderstand.

“Tomorrow,” I said, and did not look back at the terrace because if I had I might have given the city the luxury of seeing me want something it could not sell to me later.

I drank tea that scalded and wrote until my hand cramped.

I signed the notes in a hand uglier than my mother’s and truer.

I sealed them and had the seals witnessed and thought of the boy and the broom and the way the law had looked when its favorite hunger had learned it was not allowed to perform at the table today.

I thought of the hymn and the gloss. I thought of willing as key and willing as blade and willing as love and rejected the last and set the others side by side.

When the lamps burned low and the glass walls remembered the veining of the city in only their own shadows, I went to the window and pressed my fingers to the pane the way I had pressed them to the parapet.

The glass made my skin shine the way the moons do when they smile without warming.

I traced a circle on the cold and then refused to close it at the bottom.

“Tomorrow,” I told my reflection.

She did not roll her eyes. She knew what I meant.

I blew out the last light and crossed the room by the memory of where the floor did not catch my feet. The bed was too large and too soft; the sheets smelled like lavender and my mother’s favorite lie, that comfort can be duty if you call it by the right name.

I lay down and did not sleep. The city breathed; the river pretended not to. The palace sang a verse I would correct in the morning.

I held tomorrow against the roof of my mouth like a lozenge that would not dissolve.

When the wind changed, it brought the smell of smoke that was not resin.

The ward-candles along the corridor flared, then steadied.

I closed my eyes and saw the stairs. The arch. The terrace. The moment when two hands made the same grammar without permission.

Tomorrow lifted its head and waited.