Page 61 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

Rhydor

Twilight had a taste in Shadowspire, and tonight it tasted like metal.

I stepped out onto the narrow balcony above the inner courtyard and let the evening take my face in its cold hands.

Silver light pooled in the stone like water that refused to freeze.

The lanterns that the Fae love, those floating spheres of ward-fire leashed to their invisible tethers, drifted in slow, smug orbits between the black ribs of the palace.

Far below, the court moved like schools of scaled fish: jeweled masks sliding past lacquered masks, fans opening and closing like gills, servants darting with the soft efficiency of creatures who have taught themselves to be ignored in order to live.

Incense curled up from braziers, that old blend of myrrh and rose they pour over everything they mean to sanctify.

It couldn’t hide the other scents, polished steel, beeswax, the faint copper of law heating itself for use.

I gripped the balustrade. The stone was hard and cool, damp with the breath of the Shroud pressing down.

I have held onto cliff faces while a storm tried to peel me off the world, and somehow this felt more precarious.

Below, in the arcade nearest the council doors, the Black Masks stood in small knots, posture relaxed by a handspan, visors angled toward idle conversation, men pretending not to be the instruments they are.

The nobles had already begun to rewrite the afternoon for one another, trading versions of my line like coins: over my ashes , outrage in some mouths; poetry in others; promise in mine.

Word travels strangely in this palace, quick where it should stumble, sluggish where it should race.

Torian says rumor is a kind of math here, not the sum of things but the shape of how people prefer them.

He had told me, a quarter hour ago, in that ledger voice of his that always sounds like he’s ordering grief into columns, that the petition would be rewritten overnight.

Maelith would carve treason more neatly into it, sharpen the line where privilege stops and punishment begins.

Tomorrow they would return with law polished to a brighter cruelty.

And we would answer them again with the same weapons, delay, denial, the posture of patience, and if that failed, the old ones: bodies and iron.

I put my hands around the cold stone and let my palms learn its grain. The balustrade was pocked by years, by winters, by the quiet, steady indignity of being leaned on by men who believe it keeps them from falling. The dragon in me wanted something else to hold.

Across the courtyard, a balcony rhymed with mine in the geometry of this place.

The palace is a spider, and its symmetries are its web.

I knew the measure of that distance well enough to pace it with my breath: three deep inhales to cross it in memory, six if I lied to myself and took my time. I did not have to wait long to see her.

Elowyn stepped into view with the careful grace of a woman who knows the world wants her to trip.

She did not come all the way to the rail at first; she hovered just behind the shallow embrace of shadow, letting the corridor light gild her cheekbones and the edge of her mask.

The onyx crescent caught the last thin blade of day and threw it back as if to prove it wasn’t purely ornamental.

Her cloak hung open; the gown beneath was the same storm-gray wool she had chosen to make war look like reason.

She was not alone, I caught the brief silhouette of Nyssa at her shoulder, a line of chalk dust pale on the healer’s sleeve, but in the second that mattered, the healer bowed her head and stepped back.

The door behind Elowyn slipped shut. She was alone with the evening and me.

We did not wave.

We did not nod.

We looked.

There are words for what happens when ice meets fire, and none of them serve.

There is a sound, soft, angry, satisfied, that stone makes after metal has been held to it long enough to leave a mark.

That is closer. I had been inside her mouth less than an hour ago, had swallowed a sound she hadn’t meant to give me, had learned for the second time in as many days that my body is not immune to the kind of prayer that does not require gods.

Now we looked at one another from a span of cold air and stone and watched the world stand between us with the confidence of a magistrate.

People moved below, a slow eddy around the fountain and its marble basin, the water enchanted to mirror a sky that no longer belongs to the city.

Even it had learned fear. The Shroud hummed like something breathing shallowly in sleep, steady now, but thinner than it was.

Veins of silver ward ran inlaid along the pavement and up the columns; they pulsed on an old rhythm that has forgiven none of us our sins.

Elowyn tipped her chin a fraction. Her lips were a color the palace calls elegant and I was honest enough to name bruised.

It was not the mask that made lying possible that failed me now; it was the memory of how quickly my hands forgive her for refusing to forgive me.

I had told her, quietly, when there was no one to annotate my courage, that I would stand and hate her for it.

I had meant it. I still did. The hate lived in a chamber of my chest and beat not with my heart but against it.

Every time she chose secrecy, it knocked.

She lifted one hand and set it flat on her own balustrade. The gesture was small. It felt like a sentence.

Something shifted behind me. Torian’s tread is light enough to make a king forget he wears a crown when he hears it. He stopped at the threshold instead of crossing it, which is one of the reasons we still drag ourselves back from the places grief likes to nest and call it duty.

“Maelith has accepted neutral ground,” he said softly, voice pitched so the door would catch it and take most of it away. “Tomorrow. Third hour. The Hall of Keys.”

I grunted. I knew what neutral meant here. It meant Maelith believed he had tilted the floor enough that it could call itself even. It meant my favor token had gone to buy a stage on which the law would enjoy making me learn how to improvise in front of a crowd.

“And Iriel?” I asked. I tried to make his name weigh the same amount as anyone else’s. It did not. My tongue added lead.

“In mourning,” Torian said. “Which is to say, in meetings.”

He did not have to make the rest of the sentence; I could write it with my own hand.

Iriel would not show his teeth tonight. He had men called counselors to do that for him.

He would show a mask that made grief fashionable and let the law believe it had been given the dignity it thinks it requires to be cruel without irony.

He would keep his hands clean in front of an audience and wash them in private with the ink of what he had taken.

“I will walk the east galleries,” Torian went on. “Let them see me working. Let them assume I worry the trade lines more than the law. It makes them comfortable. Comfortable men sign papers they haven’t read.” His pause had weight. “Do you need me to fetch you?”

I did not take my eyes off Elowyn. “No.”

“Then I will fail to be at your shoulder at precisely the important moment,” he said. I heard him bow without turning. I heard him leave.

I stood at the rail and watched the thing I was not free enough to cross.

Elowyn’s gaze had not shied, had not hardened, had not softened.

It kept its own counsel. That is one of the things I loved about her before I admitted that is what it was.

She does not let anyone do her believing for her.

It taught me to respect her and taught me to hate her in the same moment.

I have not found a way to untie that rope without hanging myself.

Below, a pocket of courtiers performed discretion badly, the kind that makes them believe their masks are soundproof.

A lady in pearl (I learned to know her voice even when it’s my visor she’s complimenting) said something ugly about dragons that would have earned her a broken jaw in a yard where plain men eat.

Brenn’s laugh cut it in half before she could finish the sentence and turned the ragged ends into something useless with a joke.

He looked up later and saw me at the rail and made a face like we are not done but we can do this without killing anyone yet . I love him for it.

Somewhere in the west arcade, Korrath’s cane beat a quick triplet. Draven’s answer, an easy drawl, followed; I didn’t catch the words, but I caught the shift in the air. A rumor about a veiled lady and a knight changed corridors. Good. Let it run in a circle until it tires itself and sleeps.

I looked back at Elowyn and forgot the court again.

I did not know what she was thinking. I have known the shape of her breath, the sounds she makes in a locked room, the heat at the base of her throat.

I have not known the thought that lives behind her eyes since I discovered she could lie better than the law does.

It humbled me that there was anything left that could surprise me.

It angered me that I wanted to be allowed into that chamber of her skull and could not find the door she would tolerate my hand on.

Something, anger, pride, grief’s pet trickster, made me do the unwise thing.

I lifted my chin a fraction more and let the dragon in my chest breathe.

Not a blaze. Not even a flare. A thread, thin as a ribbon, of heat and light.

It slid between my teeth and drifted into the air, curls dissolving before they learned to bite.

It smelled like iron and pine resin and that intimate scent dragonfire has when it is allowed to be domestic.