Page 35 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

We went back to the notes so our faces wouldn’t confuse the air.

She pulled the rubbings from the Vale, the two circles, the jagged refusal, and laid them beside the hymn.

The mountain burned a stick of juniper someone had left in the brazier’s basket, and the smoke climbed the edge of the stone instead of the sky, as if it had been taught the manners of this place and didn’t intend to show off.

“Willing,” she said, touching the italic with a gloved finger.

“If the vote in the room goes the way I expect, we can force the Whitewood to read it into the ledger. Then the law has to learn to hear itself before it performs. You can use that window. Mercy you buy with shame can feed a thousand people longer than mercy you purchase with applause.”

“And if the room refuses grammar,” I said.

“Then we make the floor speak,” she said.

“Varcoran. The north. The part of the mountain that isn’t impressed with the way we plate light over its old teeth.

You give me the seal; I give you the hymn.

If the lectern lies, the stone tells the truth.

Even a court that has learned to applaud its own rituals knows better than to argue with rock. ”

We sat in a quiet that wasn’t silence. The flare and settle of the brazier cut the hour into workable pieces.

From time to time a gust found us and tried to press the notes against our palms. I set a hand on one corner; she on the other.

We kept our gloves because the night bit, but the heat in my hands came from somewhere closer than the brazier.

The mistake, if that’s what you wanted to call it, happened then, or the choice.

It’s hard to tell which in a place like this, and it probably doesn’t matter.

I moved my fingers the width of a pen-stroke. She didn’t move hers. The slow thrum in my wrist answered her pulse through layers of leather and air. We looked down like thieves refusing to meet each other’s eyes so they wouldn’t have to admit they’d already agreed about the door.

“Say it,” she said, the way she had two nights ago when the boy in the garden shook and I wanted to call my brother a child for how badly he used his power.

“Drakaryn is starving,” I said, and let the word hold its simple weight with no embroidery to make the court feel brave for hearing it.

“The Shroud is failing,” she answered, and the honesty in it made me want to breathe easier and didn’t.

We stood too close for comfort and not close enough for what the hour wanted.

I kept my eyes on the notes because looking at her face would have turned truth into something pretty I couldn’t afford to carry back down the mountain.

The wind softened. The brazier spoke quietly to its own coals.

The kettle we hadn’t filled clicked inside itself as if boiling absence were enough to count as tea.

“We present a united ask,” I said to the papers.

“Two numbers, one mouth. You speak for food; I speak for time. Then we trade weapons. You teach me which plank to break under the lectern to force the floor to confess; I teach you the shape of a petition that looks like fairness and costs them more than their pride to refuse.”

She nodded; I didn’t need to see it. “After the council,” she said, “we go back under the city. The archive. Tier Three. We pry the gloss out of the Whitewood’s ledger and make Maelith hold it with both hands so he remembers it has weight.”

“We hold back tonight,” I said, without knowing I meant desire until my mouth made the shape of the words.

“Until sunrise,” she said.

Heat rose between us, as if agreeing with that grammar made the air bolder. I didn’t step into it. She didn’t step away. We let the hour sit where it sat and did none of the things a man who has been cold this long might have earned and was not yet allowed.

For the length of five breaths neither of us tried to let the mountain decide for us.

Then she drew her hand back from the paper slowly enough that the air didn’t complain.

She set her palms on the parapet, the way she always does, as if making a place learn her skin lets her learn its name, and looked at the city with an expression I had learned not to hate and not to love, a look men call resolve when they mean to say I can’t believe I have to do this again and I’m going to anyway.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

We folded the notes into their oilskin, tight and neat. I killed the brazier with a flick of cold dirt; the flame regretted leaving, but it went. The ledge took our footprints and made them small. The air caught whatever we didn’t say and put it on a shelf somewhere the court doesn’t get to count.

“Ready?” I asked, already stepping away from myself into wing and wind.

She looked toward the arch of sky where the last honest dark balanced on the rim of the valley like a cup. “Yes,” she said, and her mouth didn’t try to make it braver.

I took her up. The city opened for us like a book in a language nobody bothers to teach courtiers.

The ward-lines hissed in irritation at the rush of our passage; the Serathis flashed a pale blade under the bridge where we had argued three nights ago about whether delaying was the same as refusing.

It isn’t. It never will be, not if you remember to bring the debt with you when you pay.

We crossed the wall low. The Masks on the inner patrol leaned the other way again.

Thalen’s scout raised his lantern and lowered it once.

The kitchen yard breathed the heavy, human noises of a place that keeps people alive whether they deserve it or not.

I came in over the alley. She slid out of my arms into the dark the way a woman does when she’s done being caught and means to go back to being who she is without needing anyone to hand her name back to her.

“Tomorrow,” she said again, and the third time lived in my chest like a coal.

“Tomorrow,” I answered.

I could have put my hand on her wrist then and it would have been true. I didn’t. She could have reached for my jaw and found the line that has always been too tender on winter nights. She didn’t. We gave the hour the gift of restraint and let the city keep it.

She went one way, silent, the little moons at her throat obedient and apolitical; I went the other, wrapped back in a man’s body and the hackles it grows for protection.

Torian waited in the dark court with the mule and the satchel and a face that had counted through a longer night than mine.

He handed me the shirt I hadn’t already pulled on and one of those looks that says you don’t have to tell me anything, but I see what you aren’t saying.

“Numbers,” he said, because he knows how to keep me honest.

“On your table by dawn,” I answered. “With a list of which houses will pretend to be offended and which will be and what it will cost to make them stop.”

He inclined his head. “And the hymn?”

“In her sleeve,” I said. “In mine, the gloss.”

He blew out a breath and tilted his head toward the east, where the mountains keep their own clock. “You’ll sleep?”

“When the river remembers to,” I said.

He didn’t argue. He hadn’t slept either. We walked side by side across the yard that pretended to be nobody’s, and when the wind came in from the north it carried with it a taste that didn’t belong to this palace, iron and the honest smoke of a fire that remembers it knows how to work.

Above us the Shroud held steady for a breath too long. When it let go, the run of light across the palace roof caught on a seam and stuttered.

“Did you see, ” Torian began.

“I did,” I said. I felt it in the old scars, the ones no silk touches. “Crack.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, and this time it sounded nothing like mercy.

“Tomorrow,” I said back, and went to sharpen the blade that would make grammar bleed.