Page 48 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

“Yes.” No tremor. Not even in the vowels. She kept her face aimed toward the courtyard as if it might teach her how to be stone. “You said you would stand.”

“I will.”

“And hate me for it.”

“Less than I hate the law,” I said, and surprised myself.

The breath she took punched; then settled. “You’re wrong,” she murmured. “You’ll hate me more. It’s easier. The law doesn’t bleed when you cut it.”

My jaw clenched. “Neither do you,” I said, because if you don’t want a dragon to grieve you, give him a reason to lie that flat, that fast. “Not in public.”

She turned her head. Only a fraction. The mask was a crescent, which meant I could see one eye. It was silver and dangerous and as soft as a throat in the moment before its owner decides to be a poet or a soldier.

“And you,” she said. “You bleed only when you’ve decided to make a legend of the wound.”

I huffed a laugh that did not belong to the corridor. “You’re getting better at that.”

“At what.”

“At hurting me.”

The lanterns hummed as if pleased to be included in anything that might mean need instead of law. Elowyn looked back down at the courtyard. No one passed below. The world can sometimes be kind enough to give you a silence during which you can choose the thing you’ll have to call bravery later.

“Torian will set the hold,” I said. “If they reach for you, we make a box out of iron and move you through it. Draven will seed the arcades with witnesses who owe him their vanity. Brenn will get your name out of the room before a hand has time to shape it into cruelty. Korrath will teach a Mask captain what a cane means when it is not in a gentleman’s hand. ”

“And you,” she said.

“I will stand,” I repeated. I did not put anything soft around it. “If they ask if you have sinned, I will tell them a different word and make them jealous for it.”

“You’ll lie,” she said.

“For law, yes,” I said. “For you.”

That made the heat move under her skin. Not blush. It took too much blood for that. Something lower. Something that asked whether wanting counts as a sin if the room has already made up its mind that you live in one.

She closed her eyes. Her mouth softened, the smallest degree.

The corner that smiled at me in a mountain wind remembered what it had said with its whole body and returned to the world for a heartbeat.

Then it was gone, because the corridor exists to teach anyone who forgets that hope is embarrassing.

“Torian will be ready,” I said, because the only way to stop a man from reaching out to touch a throat in a hallway full of enemies is to make him talk tactics. “You go to your rooms. Lock them. If anyone not wearing my blood opens your door, you scream so loudly that a god would blush.”

“And if it is Iriel,” she said.

“If it is Iriel,” I answered, and unless you have been a brother you cannot read all the futures you put into a two-syllable name, “then I will make the room learn that there are things more royal than law.”

She snorted, a sound like a woman remembering how human she is.

“You will do no such thing. You will mutter something eloquent about trade and shame and delay, and Maelith will hate how much the law loves the sound of you until he realizes he is loving himself when he applauds you. And then you will come find me and tell me that you stood and that you hate me and I will tell you that you are right and then we will do it again tomorrow.”

“You forgot something,” I said.

“What.”

“That I love you,” I didn’t say. That sentence would have set the corridor on fire and nothing in it deserved to be warmed. “That I’m very tired,” I said instead.

“Good,” she said. “Tired men are harder to flatter and easier to force.”

“I will remember that,” I said. The smile I did not make lived in my chest and hurt.

We stood without speaking for a span of breaths long enough for a man to ask himself whether breath is a luxury or a habit.

Behind us, the tail of the court poured out into the corridor, brighter masks, louder laughter, bolder boys.

Gossip is never late. The law hummed under our feet, content with the myth it had built of itself.

“Elowyn,” I said again.

She exhaled. “Yes.”

“You should have told me,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“Will you.”

“Tomorrow is not a kind place to put truth,” she answered.

The door at the end of the corridor groaned. The Black Masks were moving again, not toward us, yet, but toward the drill that lets a man believe his body is not only an instrument of someone else’s need. The captain did not turn his head. His line moved like a thought.

I stepped away from the balustrade and let my hand fall to my side. The space between us cooled. The smell of myrrh thickened, as if the corridor were trying to remind us that sanctity is always an available lie.

“Torian,” I called, not taking my eyes off the Masks.

“Yes.”

“If the law reaches for her, break its hands.”

He did not pretend to misunderstand. “With pleasure.”

I turned away from the corridor’s view of the courtyard and away from the woman I had not permitted myself to love and toward the place where men plan for hours how they will survive minutes.

Torian fell in beside me; steel made a sound like a winter laugh farther down the passage as Tharos’s gauntlet closed and opened.

I did not look back. My body did. It always will.

A dragon learns to live with the way his bones have longer memory than his mind.

Behind me, I heard the small sound of her leaning heavily once against the stone and drawing breath like a woman asked to carry a world.

The breath steadied. The mask fixed. The corridor learned nothing about either of us.

“Ready the veterans,” I told Torian, and when he nodded I added the thing that had to be said aloud to count; otherwise law will not hear it and neither will men.

“And tell them,” I said, “that no matter what she has done, we are iron. They hold the floor, even if it breaks.”

He did not say yes with his mouth. He said it with the way his feet found the ground.

The lantern light turned the corridor into a tube of silver; the masks behind us formed knots that made it resemble a gut full of jewels. I went down it toward the part of the day in which I would have to make my mouth do what my hands used to be allowed to: fight and call it love.

The Shroud beyond the walls trembled as if it had a voice and had chosen not to use it this hour.

The law hummed, satisfied with its own weight.

The woman I had married leaned her forehead against stone where no one could see her do it and taught her lungs to do what hearts sometimes forget: keep going.

I did not pray. There is no god my blood believes in. But I did decide something, and decisions are a kind of prayer if you have lived long enough to know that you will likely be asked to die for them.

When the time came, I would stand. And I would hate her. And I would not let them touch her.

Every sentence true, every one wrong, and the corridor as pleased with itself as if it were a poet.

“Let’s finish this,” I told the air, the law, my brother, and myself.

The corridor swallowed our steps and did not answer.