Page 57 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)
Elowyn
The chamber doors had not stopped ringing in my bones when he touched my elbow.
Not a gentleness. Not a command. A pressure at the hinge of my arm that said move in a language older than law.
Shields clapped in our wake like thunderhead applause, the wall of iron my husband had raised against the law he had just defied.
The Masks did not follow, not yet. Their hesitation hung in the air like the last second before lightning strikes.
Rhydor steered me into a seam in the stone that only servants and soldiers knew, a narrow door tucked behind a tapestry woven with moonlight and lies.
The corridor beyond was close and unadorned, mortar smelling of damp chalk and old oil.
Ward-light pulsed along the ceiling in a thin vein, slow as a tired heartbeat.
Our footfalls rapped over slate, clean, efficient sound, unlike the ceremonial hush of the council floor.
The contrast made my skin prickle. I could feel the chamber we’d left behind like a body I’d slipped out of, its gossiping organs still at work.
We moved fast and without speech. He was heat, compressed and banked, a furnace that had not forgotten what fire is. When his hand left my elbow my body wanted to follow it, as if the air had learned the shape of his grip and couldn’t quite remember how to hold me upright on its own.
We turned twice, three times, down passages that never see silk.
I brushed the wall with my fingers and felt where chalk runes had been scuffed by years of hands tracing them in the dark, quiet prayers for a safe shift, a safe errand, a safe sin.
Somewhere below, gears clanked to a slow stop as Torian’s signal reached the locking bars.
Above us the Shroud shivered, a tremor I no longer let myself call omen.
Incense still clung to the stone here, thin and stale like perfume on a dress a day after a party.
Sweat cut through it: the sharp salt of fear and heat, of men who had prepared to die and were told instead to wait.
Rhydor didn’t look back. He set a pace I could match because my pride demanded it, because my breath had been measured into an instrument long before I learned to sing to anyone.
My mask bit into my cheekbones. I didn’t lift it.
His voice, “Over my ashes”, still reverberated under my ribs and threatened to turn the calm I wore into something reckless and human.
I had no time for that softness. I had no time for anything but the next step, and then the next, and then the door he chose.
He shouldered us through a final turn into a chamber tucked under the spine of the palace, one of those narrow rooms where seamstresses meet or scribes take their wine when they are finished quilting down a lie.
It had a window the size of a man’s palm, high and barred, a slice of the Shroud smeared across it.
It had a hearth not lit and a chair that had been broken and mended poorly.
It had a door that would hold if men pushed and give if men rammed; and a lock you could convince to act like a wall if you knew the glyphs it wanted.
He released me only long enough to draw a line with two fingers along the lintel, quick, practiced strokes, the kind of ward you learn in a campaign because you’ve watched too many men die for want of a door that knew when to be stubborn.
The latch responded with a soft, final click, and the faint bright seam that marked the threshold’s spell closed like a mouth choosing not to speak.
Then there was only stone and breath and him.
We leaned as if the walls had pressed us there.
It wasn’t orchestration; it was gravity.
My back hit the cool, slightly damp plaster, and I let the chill climb my spine until my shoulder blades remembered where to fit against a surface that did not want to hold the shape of a woman.
Rhydor set both palms flat against the opposite wall and bent, forearms creaking leather, head low between his shoulders.
The line of his neck was a blade. The heat of him worked through the air in waves, smudging the threadbare chill.
The room had the small echo of a place whose use is fast and secret and easily denied. It held our panting and let it be loud.
“Say it,” I said, because the silence felt like ritual and I needed it to be choice.
His head lifted. The lantern-light, only one, low and ordinary, climbed his cheek, traced the scar at his jaw that my mouth had learned last night.
He didn’t come away from the wall. He didn’t move closer either.
He looked at me as if asking my hands for permission while his pride forbade his mouth to beg.
He was dragonfire and restraint, man and myth, and I hated him for making me want both enough to burn.
“You’re alive,” he said at last, and the relief in it was so wild it sounded like fury.
“You stopped them,” I returned, and the gratitude in it felt like betrayal.
He made a sound. Not a laugh. A cut.
“They’ll come again.”
“I know.”
“And you’ll lie again.”
I kept my back to the wall. My mask scraped when I turned my head. “Yes.”
He stepped forward then. Not far. Enough that the air I was breathing became the air he was breathing.
Enough that I could count the tiny, errant flecks of ash caught in his stubble, the fine line of soot along the seam of his collar.
Enough that I could smell what the council floor tries to kill: sweat and leather and heat, the clean metal tang of a blade wiped too quickly, the burnt-sugar scent my magic leaves in the air when it has been forced to make room for dragonfire.
Anger made a sound in my throat. I didn’t know if it was towards him or myself.
I heard again the crack of his knuckles on Thalen’s jaw, the gasps it tore from lacquered mouths, the way my body had betrayed me by wanting to defend the knight he’d blooded.
That memory flared oddly now that we were locked here: Thalen’s blood; Rhydor’s hand; desire and fury in a braid I could not untie.
“Why,” he asked.
“For him,” I said.
We both knew what name I chose not to use.
We both felt it move between us, small and heavy, too alive to be spoken aloud in a room that could learn it.
His eyes closed for a second, lashes like soot on his cheek.
When he opened them, no law in the palace, or the world, could teach them to be anything but honest.
“Say his name,” he said, low and rough. A command, a confession, a plea.
“Not here,” I answered. And I hated the way that truth felt like cowardice.
He exhaled, a long scrape. The hand nearest me lifted, hesitated in the inch of air that divides permission from assault, then settled, flat, careful, against the stone beside my head.
Dragon heat radiated through his radius and into my skull.
The pulse at his wrist beat where the bones of my cheek felt it.
My own pulse answered within the trap of lacquer and cloth.
And then I reached for him, because if we waited any longer the only thing left would be words, and words had already failed us all morning.
My fingers found his tunic, the rough weave dark with the sweat of his stand, and curled, pulling him down to me.
Our mouths met with less grace than last time, teeth knocking, both of us too hungry and too angry to make art of it.
He tasted like salt and ash and the iron bottom of the cup we had both been made to drink.
I opened to him anyway. He answered with a sound I felt between my shoulder blades, a groan that wasn’t surrender and wasn’t victory, just a man learning he still had a mouth for something other than orders.
He kissed me like reprieve and sentence both, like he forgave me, like he would never, like all the ways men and women invent to keep from being turned into saints by other people’s stories.
My palms slid up the heat of his chest, found skin at the open seam of his collar, the slick edge of new sweat.
He shuddered where my fingertips grazed the small scar where breastbone divides.
The shiver lit me. Rage and gratitude melted into something lower and older, the place where my twilight meets his fire and both ask the other to be gentle and neither can.
His hand left the wall and found my face.
He thumbed the edge of my mask once, as if measuring how much of me he was allowed to touch.
Then he hooked two fingers carefully beneath the onyx crescent and lifted just enough to take my mouth without lacquer between us.
The chin strap grazed my skin. The absurdity of it, making love to a woman while half a moon remains on her face, would have made me laugh if it didn’t make me want to cry.
He didn’t take until I gave. He had to know, after everything, whether I would.
I told my body the truth before my mouth: I arched against him.
His breath broke; his hand slid down to my hip and pulled, slotting us together.
My thigh found the line of his. He made a rough sound and answered with motion.
The spark happened between us the way it always does: the tiny, bright bite of his fire tasting my twilight, the soft sizzle where the two disagree and then harmonize.
It isn’t magic you can perform on a stage with gestures and seals; it is heat mixed with need mixed with the old pact between the darkness and the dawn: I will give you my edge if you promise not to name me wrong when you talk about me later.
His mouth moved to the angle of my jaw and left heat there; my nails left careful crescents on his back through cloth.
He hissed; he pressed closer; I let him.