Page 8 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

Elowyn

The castle breathed with me. Shadowspire’s lamps guttered in their sconces, silver ward-flame shivering along the corridors as if the stone itself tasted what I was about to do.

My palms were cool; my pulse was not. I walked alone, veil unpinned, the long spill of twilight silk whispering behind me as I took the turn that led to the wing they had given the dragons.

Two guards straightened as I approached. They did not bar my path. Of course they didn’t. The court had arranged the stage and waited for us to stumble into it.

Rhydor’s door was unlatched. The air inside held that thin metallic tang I had begun to recognize as his, iron and heat, as if a forge lived beneath his skin.

He stood by the window that pretended at stars, shoulders broad, cloak thrown over a carved chair.

The false constellations drifted slow and cold across the ceiling, but the room felt warm the instant his attention turned toward me.

“Princess.” His voice was rough, all gravel and restraint.

“Husband.” The word sat on my tongue like a dare. I closed the door with a soft click that echoed anyway.

I did not hurry. I crossed the room and set my mask on the table, the onyx catching the lamplight as if it still watched us.

I unhooked the jeweled weight that circled my throat and laid it beside the mask.

His gaze followed each movement, not with hunger alone, but with that edge of suspicion he wore like a second blade. Good. Let him suspect. Let him want.

“I will not be discarded,” I said. Our first truth of the night.

He didn’t deny it. “And I will not be trapped by glamour,” he answered. His first truth.

I let power rise, only a breath of it. Not the full swell I had used to taunt him before the wedding, not the kind that bent men’s knees.

Just the gentlest coaxing of scent and shimmer, a quiet invitation to look, to see.

Moon-bloom and spice unfurled, soft as a secret.

The lamplight silvered the edges of my skin and then faded.

I wanted him to want me without a spell to blame when he did.

I watched him fight himself. Pride, wounded and sharp, bristled against something lower and older that answered me. He was a man of iron; it showed in the set of his jaw. It showed in the way his hands opened and closed once, as if steadying themselves for battle.

“Do you see me,” I asked quietly, “or the court’s illusions?”

His gaze settled on mine, steady, unblinking. “I see a woman who walked into a room with her head high after an entire kingdom sharpened knives for her. I see a queen that frightens them.”

Heat went through me that had nothing to do with power.

“I won’t beg,” I said, because that wound lived in me, even here. “Not for worth. Not for you.”

“Good.” He stepped in, the distance between us collapsing until I felt the heat coming off him. “I don’t want your begging. I want your truth.”

My fingers found the clasp at my shoulder. The silk spilled down in a slow hush, pooling at my feet, cool air licking over newly bared skin. Rhydor’s breath caught, barely, but I heard it. I wanted that sound like a prayer.

I reached for him.

His tunic rasped under my hands, rougher than Fae finery, honest as the man who wore it.

He could have stepped back. He could have told me no.

He didn’t. He stood and let me unfasten each hook, his breath deepening as the fabric loosened, as touch made truce with pride.

The false stars shifted above us, cold and far. The heat between us did not.

When he finally lifted his hands to me, he did it as if lifting a weapon and laying it down at once.

His palms were warm, callused, reverent in ways he might never allow himself to name.

The first brush of his fingers at my shoulder sent a shiver down my spine; the second made my knees unlock.

His mouth found the place where my pulse beat thin under skin, and I tipped my head, an answer, an invitation, a vow.

We were careful at first, the way duellists circle, learning the give and take of new ground.

He kissed like a man who had been starving and didn’t trust the bread, like a prince who didn’t know if the feast had been poisoned.

I kissed like a woman who had been told her whole life that her mouth should only open to hold a promise someone else wrote.

The room narrowed to breath and heat and the rough scrape of linen, the delicate catch of my nails at his nape.

He tasted of iron and heat. I tasted of moonfruit and a little pride.

When sparks flared again where our skin met, we both startled, then stilled, then laughed once, the smallest, strangest laugh, the kind that happens when terror and wonder arrive together.

“I won’t be a cage,” I said into his mouth.

“Then don’t be,” he answered against mine.

I led him backward until the backs of his knees met the edge of the bed.

He sat, his hands sliding to my hips. He looked up at me, and something like awe cut through the suspicion there, quick as lightning, quick as regret.

I climbed into his lap, and his breath broke in a way that made something fierce and fragile unfurl in my chest.

“No masks,” I said. Another truth. “Not tonight.”

He nodded once. “Not tonight.”

I kissed him again, slower now, telling him things with my mouth I would not give the court in words: that I saw his fire, that I knew how it had burned him, that I wanted it anyway.

He answered with heat that built in careful increments until care gave way to inevitability, until pride gave way to trust that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with skin.

I did not use glamour to guide him. I used the ache in my hands and the patience in his, the language anyone could learn if they were willing to listen.

He learned quickly. He learned me as if I were terrain he planned to defend with his life.

When pleasure crested, it came not like lightning but like tide, rolling and relentless, and I let it pull sound from me I would never have given to anyone else in this palace.

After, the world found edges again. The window’s false stars drifted on. My heart steadied by degrees under his palm.

He didn’t move for a long time. Neither did I. A part of me waited for the recoil, for the telltale rush of regret or suspicion to shove me off. It would have been simpler. It would have hurt less.

He exhaled. “I still don’t trust your court,” he said into my hair. “Or your mother. Or half these walls.”

“Good,” I said, because I didn’t either. “Then we agree on something.”

He huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.

It stirred the hair at my temple. “You made me forget how to breathe,” he said, and the confession startled him as much as me.

He covered it by shifting, by finding the sheet and drawing it over my shoulder, by letting his hand settle again where my pulse beat.

I lay there a little longer than I meant to. Then I remembered the thousand eyes and the wagers, the way Sylara’s fan had stilled when our hands touched in the ceremony. Our chamber might have felt like a world apart, but nothing in Shadowspire stayed private for long.

I slid from the bed. The silk cool against my skin felt like waking from a fever. Rhydor sat up on his elbows, watching.

“You’re leaving.” Not a question.

“Yes.” I fastened the first clasp of my gown and met his eyes. “Because I choose to.”

For a heartbeat I thought he would argue. That the dragon in him would growl and pull me back down and make this a new kind of cage. He didn’t. He only watched me with that steady, storm-dark gaze and nodded once, and something inside me that had been braced for a blow unwound by a breath.

At the door, I paused. “I won’t be disposable,” I said again, because saying it once had not undone the years of silence that taught me otherwise.

His mouth curved, not quite a smile, not quite a wound. “Not possible,” he said. The words were raw enough that they might have been a mistake. “Not after this.”

I slipped into the corridor before either of us could ruin it with more truth.

The guards kept their faces forward as I passed.

Their eyes flicked, quick as knife points, and then went still again.

The hall smelled of cool stone and silver smoke, the ward-flames throwing faint shadows that fluttered like wings.

Far off, music lilted in a minor key. Whisperers would already be at work.

By morning, the court would know more than I wanted them to.

Let them. The board had shifted. The first piece had moved because I put my hand on it.

As I turned the last corner toward my own rooms, I felt the pulse of the wards change, the castle drawing breath in a new rhythm. I pressed my hand to the nearest stone and felt it answering me like a heartbeat.

Let them try to use this against me. Let them try to call me soft again.

They would learn softness could drown.

I closed my door and leaned my forehead against the wood for one heartbeat, then two. In the quiet that followed, the memory of his hands returned like heat.

I let myself feel it, just for that breath. Then I straightened and reached for the bell pull to summon Nyssa. I would need fresh water and a quiet dawn. I would need a mask that fit like a weapon.

By the time the first courtier whispered the word consummated with a smile that thought it could cut, I would already have a sharper blade waiting.

And if the dragon prince thought he had taken me and now owned me, he would learn I owned myself, and this marriage would belong to the one who knew how to wield it.

I was not disposable.

Tomorrow, I would prove it again.