Page 45 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)
Elowyn
The council floor was a theater of knives, and tonight every blade had my name carved into it.
Lanterns drifted in slow orbits beneath the ribbed vault, each sphere of ward-fire suspended by threads of glamour so fine they looked like moonbeams made visible.
Their silver halos washed the chamber in cold light, gilding masks, catching filigree, setting a thousand jeweled eyes to glitter.
The stone itself seemed polished to a high sheen, the inlaid veins of Shroud script pulsing faintly with law’s lazy heartbeat.
It smelled of crushed myrrh and beeswax, of the waxed leather of scabbards, of bodies that had dressed themselves in incense and fear.
I entered alone.
My footfalls clipped the marble’s edge, too loud, too singular, and a hush rippled outward through benches tiered like an amphitheater of judgment.
Fans stilled. Heads angled. The weight of a hundred stares fell across my throat like a necklace soldered shut.
I kept my shoulders straight and my chin high, my mask the correct crescent of obedience, its onyx edge kissed with a thready line of silver.
Behind the lacquer, my face was calm. Beneath it, the skin of my cheeks felt too tight, like a drum pulled past its pitch.
Across the floor, the only fire I trusted stood flanked by iron.
Rhydor. He did not look like a man returned from steadying a kingdom.
He looked like a blade just before it meets the whetstone, all edge and withheld bite.
His veterans stood a half-step behind in a formation that would have looked ornamental to anyone who had never watched them lock shields.
Tharos’s iron hand rested on the mouth of a scabbard; Korrath’s cane tapped once in the same rhythm to which ash soldiers have marched for generations; Brenn’s grin glimmered like a dare that he would withdraw the moment it cost me.
Torian’s gaze alone was still, counting.
Rhydor’s eyes found mine and held. The memory of his mouth, the ache of it; the warmth of it; the cruelty of last night’s need, flared along my lips as if the air itself remembered.
Heat swam low in me, humiliating in its honesty.
His gaze didn’t soften. It burned. He didn’t move toward me, but the space fell away.
The herald struck his staff. The sound cracked through the chamber like a cage door slamming.
“Council convenes,” he intoned, voice trained to throw itself against stone and land everywhere at once. “Masks of Lunareth, attend. By law of the Shroud, by veil and vow, we gather.”
A soft murmur answered, the rustle of silk and whisper of parchment sliding into position. Each ritual word locked into the ward-lines beneath our feet, and the floor thrummed with the satisfaction of its own authority.
Maelith stepped into the lantern light, tall and spare, robe weighted with tradition.
He looked like the law grown into a man: dark hair silvered cleanly at the temples, mouth thin enough to cut, eyes the color of ink that had been left in a cold room too long.
In his hands he carried a folded parchment sealed with silver, the seal impressed with the twin crescents that meant petition and punishment.
“By right of precedence. By witness. By wound,” he said, as if reciting a prayer to a god only he still believed in.
“This body has received a grievance against the Princess Elowyn Thalassa: breach of consort oath, concealment of heir, dereliction of royal duty. Twelve houses sign. The law asks only to see and to know.”
He laid the parchment on the lectern as if setting down a measured blade, and Raven House, men who loved to memorize the sound of knives, leaned as one to feel the air it displaced.
The arcades quivered with whispers. I tasted them like bitter tea that had steeped too long: three nights absent… a knight in her shadow… dawn returning… Moonshrine? moonshine… The smell of crushed myrrh thickened until it felt like sweetness trying to conceal rot.
Sylara glided forward with her fan half-opened, a chrysalis made of jewels and poison.
The smoke-light turned the stones of her gown into moving water, and each step bared a calculated length of ankle, as if she hadn’t finished deciding whether she was a witness or a seduction.
She paused at the lectern’s edge and arranged her face into concern.
“I hate to speak,” she began, and the curve of her mouth called it a lie.
“But devotion to crown requires it. I saw our princess cross the arcade at dawn two mornings past, veiled. Sir Thalen at her side. The household recorded three days’ absence.
I do not accuse. I only wonder. We ,” she moved her fan to include the room, the Shroud, the law, “only wonder if devotion to the veil was truly what it seemed.”
Laughter trickled; then someone fed it and it flashed. Masks dipped and turned, the room’s gratitude for spectacle rising like a tide. The lanterns’ glamour did something sly across lacquered faces, making their expressions beautiful even as they sharpened into cruelty.
I stood and breathed.
“You will answer,” Maelith said, not to be theatrical, but because the law enjoys hearing itself be inevitable. “Princess, will you speak?”
Rhydor didn’t move, but his name lived in the pressure of the air. Elowyn , it said; and then, lower, and mine alone, please. I could feel him without looking, the pull of him, the war in him, his body remembering every place it had found me, his anger remembering every place he had not.
I met his eyes. The heat that lived behind his ribs crossed the floor. My pulse answered like a traitor.
“I will,” I said, and my voice did the thing Vaeloria trained it to do, it slid into the places ritual made and took on their authority.
“I do not confess to any breach. I do not admit to concealment. My absence is recorded because I recorded it. Moonshrine rites. Temple seclusion at Veilturn. The steward has my notice in his ledger and my seal pressed in wax. Has the steward’s table forgotten how to turn a page? ”
There was a chuckle somewhere too brave. Sylara’s fan snapped shut, feather-edges like tiny teeth. Maelith did not look at her. He looked at me the way a man listens to a lie because he wants to be certain of where to set the knife.
“Temple rites are sacred,” he said mildly. “And secret. But the law must be assured that secrecy does not hide sin.”
“The law must be careful not to become sin’s excuse,” I returned, and the hush that fell wasn’t respect so much as a new sound the room didn’t recognize and so feared a little.
“What do your petitioners hold, Maelith? Scent? Glimpses? Servants’ stories folded like paper cranes?
Will the Shroud teach itself to make law from appetite? ”
Rhydor’s eyes flared, heat; approval; want. The muscle in his jaw jumped once, a pulse I had learned the rhythm of with my mouth.
Sylara’s smile deepened a notch, perhaps from the pleasure of a better fight than she expected. “Adorable,” she murmured, just loud enough for nearby masks to adopt the word and feel clever for it. “She thinks poetry can drown a rumor. Alas, rumors float.”
“I think law should not drown the innocent,” I said, and the tide of whispers pivoted, some masks glancing toward Maelith as if suddenly remembering they wear names under their paint.
He raised a hand, the small, precise movement of a man who believes he directs the wind. The herald’s staff tapped once in echo and the floor hummed its readiness to enact whatever had just been named necessity.
Before he could bid the Masks forward, Rhydor’s voice broke the room.
“Elowyn.”
The whisper of it didn’t fill the chamber, but it crossed it; and it crossed me. He hadn’t moved from his ring of iron, but his body had found a way to be nearer. Heat lived in the syllables. It remembered my night. It punished my morning.
He didn’t say my title. He said me.
A dozen images crashed through me at once: my hand on his jaw in mountain wind; the shape of his shoulder under my palm; the sound he made when the last of his restraint broke against my teeth.
He wore the daylight version of himself now, steel, self, sword, but the memory of his mouth against mine stained the world.
He took a step, no more, and the veterans moved with him, cohesion caught forward like a tide that had not wanted to pretend to be a carpet in the first place.
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to.
“Come with me,” he said, quiet enough that the words were only mine; loud enough that the room would still hear they’d been spoken. “Behind the pillar, or nowhere. Tell me. End this.”
The urge to go was a fist closing on my heart.
It would be so easy, for a breath, to be just the woman who had said together while moonlight made a conspiracy of our bodies.
To tell him where I had gone. To say Greneford and Jolie and Mortaine , and trust him to reshape the room’s cruelty with fire and law and everything he knows how to wield.
But the room wasn’t empty. The Shroud watched, and the law listened for ways to make obedience cost less than truth.
I didn’t move.
“No,” I said, softly. “Not here.”
His head turned, fractionally, as if he couldn’t believe his ears had bothered to bring him that word.
“Not now,” I added, because I’m not cruel. “Not for them.”
“Then when,” he asked, and made when sound like an oath and a threat and the geography of a man who refuses maps that don’t include the road he needs.
I might’ve broken then, even knowing what it would wreck.
Whatever defenses I had cobbled together from temple lies and forged notices and glamour-held sleep nearly gave way beneath the memory of his mouth.
My body wanted to take the step. It wanted to burn in public and let consequence collect us both.
It wanted to love him with the same ferocity with which I meant to keep a child alive.