Page 49 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

Elowyn

The quiet in my chamber had a weight to it, as if the room had drawn a breath and held it, refusing to exhale until it knew whether I would stand or break.

Twilight pressed against the windows, a thin, restless silver that made the glass shiver.

The Shroud hummed faintly in the bones of the palace, the sound you feel more than hear, like a wasp trapped under a bowl.

Ward-fire burned low in the hearth, bluish along the edges as if the flame had learned to mimic moonlight to please the walls.

Beeswax and cedar drifted in the air. The scent of my own skin clung to the linen at my throat, salt and silk and the ghost of myrrh the court wears when it means to hide its cruelty under perfume.

My mask sat where I had left it, onyx crescent set carefully on the writing table beside the forged temple ledger, its silver edge catching the hearthlight in a narrow smile. I couldn’t bear to wear it a moment longer and couldn’t bear to let anyone see my face without it.

I set my palms flat on the table and leaned until the cool wood pressed into my bones. My breath didn’t steady. It only grew quieter, as if silence could make itself small enough not to be noticed by the hour that hunted it.

A soft knock, not a question but a courtesy, broke the stillness.

“Enter,” I said, and my voice remembered how to be even.

Nyssa slipped in, the door closing with a click like a secret settling into place.

She carried a pitcher steaming faintly and two shallow cups.

One parchment-colored tendril of hair had escaped the knot at her nape; an errant ribbon of rue thorn clung to her cuff.

The basket hooked over her arm smelled of mint and bitterwood and the sharp green of crushed rosemary.

She smelled like the truth: clean hands, clean fear.

She didn’t ask permission. She never has, not about small mercies. She poured water into a cup until it fogged, then pressed the back of her fingers to my throat and the inside of my wrist. Her touch was cool. The bruised ache beneath my skin recognized it and ached harder.

“Pulse is quick,” she murmured, not in judgment, in observation. “Drink.”

I took the cup. The water burned my tongue with its heat, but it softened some unloved place in me on its way down. Something climbed my throat, regret wanting words, grief wanting work, and then went quiet again because I forced it to.

Nyssa set the second cup down untouched and leaned her hip against the table, the way a woman does when she plans to take her time and knows you will let her.

“Say it,” she said.

“I lied,” I answered, because if a princess can’t speak a sentence that plain in her own rooms, there is nothing left of her but paint. “To the court. To the council. To him.”

Her eyes flicked, not surprised, simply making sure words and heartbeat matched. “And you won’t regret it.”

I glanced at the window, where the threadbare veil trembled like old silk on a line.

A crack ran the length of my certainty, visible only when the light slid at a certain angle.

The mountain had taught me to listen to fissures.

Shadowspire taught me to admire gleam. I have never trusted the palace in that argument.

“No,” I said. The word was a clean blade. “I won’t regret saving the child.”

His name rose up and singed my mouth, Valimir, so I swallowed it. If I used it aloud in this room, the walls would learn it. Wards remember things people think stone can’t love.

Nyssa’s mouth softened at one corner. “Good,” she said, and the single syllable carried more weight than any benediction a priest would dare. She took the pitcher again, topped off my cup, and waited.

The waiting made a shape for my shame to sit in.

I stared at the mask. It stared back without blinking.

The ledger beside it lay open to a page lined in my hand, tidy columns of invented dues and sanctified time, ink neat enough to persuade a steward, bland enough to bore a queen.

I had written the lie with such precision it could have passed for devotion.

“When I was a child,” I said, surprising myself with the urge to tell a story no one had asked to hear, “my mother told me masks kept us safe. That to be untouchable, we must never be known. I learned the curve of this one before I knew what my own smile felt like.” I turned the crescent with two fingers; the lacquer squeaked.

“And now that I finally used it for something that mattered, the room calls it sin.”

Nyssa didn’t reach for me. She doesn’t fill silences with comfort unless asked; she knows some words bruise less if you let them land without hands trying to catch them.

“You did what the law forgot how to name,” she said when my mouth closed on anything useful. “It will punish you for teaching it a grammar that saves someone it called already-spent.”

I let a laugh out that didn’t belong at court. “They’re petitioning already?”

“Maelith himself,” she said. “Stitched together from gossip and signature and the sort of law that likes the sound of its own teeth.” She studied me, the way only a person who isn’t trying to be pleased by what she sees can. “They may not spare you.”

“I know.”

Outside the window a gust of wind dragged its knuckles along the glass and set the flame in the hearth to a rougher motion.

The Shroud’s hum deepened into a note that felt like warning.

Somewhere below, the herald tested the staff against stone; it made a sound like ritual being rehearsed too often to mean anything but cruelty.

I set the cup down. “When they come,” I said, “bar my door.”

Nyssa’s head tilted. Not confusion. The practical assessment of a woman who wants to be sure she’s hearing a plan, not a plea.

“I don’t mean forever,” I added. “Just long enough that I have to open it myself.” My fingers found the mask’s silver edge and pressed. “There is something in me that would like to be dragged. It would feel like surrender made easier by hands. Let’s not permit that version any air.”

Nyssa’s eyes dimmed with a grief that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the world. “I can thread rue and salt along the lintel,” she said. “A stubborn binding. Not foolproof, but it will make them hesitate, and hesitation is often enough to teach courage how to get dressed.”

I made my breath obey me, in and out, even. “Do that.”

She set down the pitcher, and as she turned, the basket on her arm knocked lightly against the table.

The clink of glass and ceramic, the smell of crushed mint and sun-roughened rosemary, the bitter shadow of angelica, she had brought more than water.

She pulled a pouch of powdered chalk from the basket and shook it once, listening for lumps like a woman listening for truth beneath a story.

“I could warn him,” she said, quiet as a knife sliding under silk.

“I know.” My voice tore a little. “Don’t.”

Nyssa didn’t argue. She knows the way arguments often mean convince me to be who you need me to be. She also knows I don’t ask for that kind of kindness.

But the question hung in the air anyway, curious as a child: Why not.

Because I could still feel the shape of Rhydor’s mouth against mine, and the weight of his hand at the base of my skull, and the heat of his body teaching me what prayer meant without bothering with god.

Because I could still feel the harder thing too, the cold grip, the kiss that was hunger and not tenderness, the way he had taken what my twilight gave him and left me standing like a woman who had volunteered to be turned to ash and then discovered she had expected to be thanked.

Because if Nyssa went to him now, with truth soft and bleeding, he would turn the world into a room on fire to protect me, and our enemies would learn how to build houses out of ash faster than he could make roofs.

Because some loves are better when they’re made to wait for a while, lest their heat become an excuse for men to call war devotion.

I could not say any of that to Nyssa without making her part of a harm she didn’t name herself to be in. I am cruel often and try not to be that kind.

“I can carry the weight,” I said instead.

Nyssa tipped the pouch and let a thin line of chalk dust trickle along the door’s frame. It glowed faintly as it settled, a brief blue before the powder learned to bury its light like anything devout. “You shouldn’t have to,” she said. “But I know you will.”

We didn’t speak while she drew the symbols.

She knew the shape of the ones I needed and the ones I didn’t have the right to ask for.

Tidy runes, stubborn curves. She pressed thumb to forefinger twice when she reached the lintel and whispered a name for the strength that lives under cupboards and in corners, the kind women call on when the house pretends it can’t learn.

When she was done, the room felt different. Not safer, Shadowspire doesn’t allow that, but tuned, like a string set in the right key.

“Let me see your hands,” she said.

I held them out. There was ink under one thumbnail.

A crescent of my own nail had cut my palm where I’d made a fist too hard to hold myself steady.

Nyssa dabbed rosewater on the crescent, then crushed mint leaves between her fingers and rubbed the oil into my skin until it remembered it belonged to me and not to the hour.

She looked down at the mask on the table, then back at me. “You don’t have to wear it to convince them.”

“I know.” And I did. In the council chamber, I had worn it because the ritual demands a certain number of lies on the stage to feel honest. In here, the only ritual required was the one I set for myself.

Nyssa poured the second cup. “You look,” she said, not filling the sentence, letting me choose the word.

“Tired,” I offered.

“That’s not the one,” she said. “But we can borrow it for now. Drink the rest. You’ll need your throat.”