Page 9 of Rhapsody of Ruin (Kingdoms of Ash and Wonder #1)

Rhydor

The room still smelled like her. Not the cloying sweetness they pipe through these halls to drown good sense. Her. Moon-bloom and something sharper I couldn’t name, something that tasted like the moment before a strike when the world narrows to the line of a blade.

I lay on my back a long time after the door shut, watching the false stars crawl their cold routes across the ceiling, listening to the echo of her breath fade from the stone.

Heat throbbed in my blood like an aftershock.

I had not lost my mind in a bed since I was very young and very stupid. Tonight I had come close.

I told myself it was the ritual, the surge that leapt at first touch in the hall, sparks bright enough to make the court gasp. I told myself it was the damned glamour that slicked these walls and got into a man’s lungs until he mistook hunger for need.

The lies tasted thin.

I sat up and dragged a hand over my face. The sheet fell, cool against skin that still remembered the heat of her. The muscle along my jaw ached from clenching too long. My pride ached worse.

I should have sent her away when she walked in with that mask of serenity and that mouth set like a line I wanted to cross. I should have demanded the truth of her, about what game her court was playing, about whether this marriage had always been a cage with a prettier lock.

Instead, when she said no masks, I believed her. Instead, when she touched me without pushing that heavy sweet magic into my lungs, I answered like a man who had been starved and trusted the bread.

I laughed once, low in my throat. A sorry sound.

Armor lay where I’d thrown it, a slope of dull steel against the chair.

My crest glinted where I had set it on the table before the ceremony and refused to let the guards drag it from me.

I crossed to it and set a hand on it and breathed until the heat in me settled into something steadier.

I would need that steadiness in the morning.

The court would have heard already. They were probably listening at the keyholes while I stood there with my hand over my blood and my pride stitched back into place.

I pulled on trousers, left the tunic, and crossed to the window built of lies.

The false sky threw cold light across my skin.

I pressed my palm to the glass anyway, pretending I could feel real night beneath it.

Beyond, I knew, the mists lay close over Shadowspire and the gardens dripped with silver dew.

The dragons of my line had never chosen a place like this to anchor themselves.

We were mountains and fire, not water and mirrored floors.

I was married into water now.

A soft knock sounded and then Torian came in without waiting for permission, which he had earned a hundred times over. He took in the room in one precise glance, then angled his body toward the door to block the view of anyone who might pass.

“You’re awake,” he said. “Or you never slept.”

“Does anyone sleep where the walls listen?” I leaned one shoulder against the sill and tried to make my mouth remember something like humor.

Torian didn’t try to humor me. That was one of the reasons I kept him close.

He came to the table and laid a small packet on it, silk-wrapped, sealed.

“Names,” he said. “Brenn and Draven brought them. Who laughed hardest during the ceremony. Who carried the joke to the gardens. Who asked after Kyssa, and why.”

“Who asked after my wife?” The word came easier the second time than it should have.

Torian’s mouth didn’t move, but his eyes did. “Sylara asked first,” he said. “As if testing the quartz for cracks.” He paused. “Iriel watched your face when you refused the bow at the gate. He watched hers when you accepted the marriage. He watched your hands when you touched.”

“Then he saw what he wanted to see.” I turned the packet in my fingers. “He thinks I am a man you can push if you find the right ledge.”

He studied me. “Are you?”

I smiled without showing teeth. “He hasn’t found the ledge.”

Torian’s gaze flicked to the bed. He said nothing about it. That, too, was the mark of a brother who had survived enough with me to know which subjects to leave covered until morning.

He moved to the window and looked out at the painted sky, then at me. “They’ll push in the gardens at midday. Something public. Something that forces you to choose a side before you’ve decided what the sides are.”

“They already tried. The servant.”

“Then they’ll try again. They’ll test her, too.” His glance sharpened. “You stood with her.”

“She stood first.”

He considered that. “Good,” he said after a beat. “Let them think they can predict you by her.”

“What do you predict?” I asked, because he would have thought it through already.

He folded his arms. “That Vaeloria wants your fire chained to her walls more than she wants your goodwill. That Iriel wants your temper out in the open where he can paint it as beast’s fury.

That Maelith wants law to do what swords cannot.

” His mouth tightened. “And that your wife won’t break when they test her, which will make them hate her more. ”

Wife. The word did something strange in me, like a scale settling onto a balance and finding its counterweight. I had not expected the sound of it in my own head to be… steadier than the rest of this place.

“Get some sleep,” Torian said, which meant he was done lecturing me for the hour. “Your face looks like a blade that forgot its scabbard.”

“Compliments this early,” I said. “You must be worried.”

“I am,” he said simply. He went to the door, paused with his hand on the latch.

“I’ll have Korrath map the guard routes around the garden galleries.

Tharos will check the peace-wraps at the portico.

Brenn will listen. Draven will pour drinks until masks slide.

” He glanced back at me. “Kyssa will watch Elowyn.”

I looked over sharply. “She doesn’t need watching.”

“Kyssa does,” he said. “From herself.” He let the door click softly behind him.

I stood there with the packet of names and the ghost of Elowyn’s mouth still warm against mine and told myself that the sudden tightness in my chest was simply the vise of politics closing.

By midday, the vise had teeth.

The gardens were an insult to hunger, tables groaning with fruit that glowed faintly with glamour, meats spiced until the scent stole your breath.

Lanterns hung like moons from branches that dripped with silver dew.

Harps and drums wove a pulse that made the heart stumble and then match it.

Vaeloria watched from a raised pavilion, veiled and serene.

Iriel sprawled like a cat loosed into a dove-cote.

Nobles circled and grazed and pretended not to hunt.

We stood in the open like beasts on display.

Elowyn moved through it with that impossible grace that made the court forget itself and the servants remember it.

Masks followed her. The scent of her reached me before she did, caught in the breeze that slid along the hedge and the water and up under my armor like an unwelcome hand. I refused to turn to her first.

It didn’t matter. The court found a sacrifice without waiting for our eyes to meet.

A girl tripped on the grass. The tray she carried bucked; opal wine spilled like liquid light across the ground. She fell to her knees and froze there, lips moving with apologies no one had time to hear.

The fox-masked lord who loved the word Masking too much snapped his fan. “Disobedience,” he sang. “Shall we teach obedience?”

The chant took like tinder. Mask her. Mask her. Mask her.

I felt my breath go cold even as the rest of me burned.

Elowyn didn’t look at me when she stepped forward. She didn’t need to.

“The steward sent her,” she said, and her voice cut so cleanly through the song that it took a heartbeat for the court to remember it had been singing. “She obeyed. If you Mask anyone, Mask the one who gave the second order.”

A silence that wasn’t silence followed. It was the intake before a bite lands.

I took the step she left open to me. “The princess is correct.” I could taste iron behind my teeth. “Your law names the higher rank accountable. Your steward bears it.”

The steward blanched. Vaeloria turned her head and the veil stirred and the steward started to kneel in fear all on his own. Iriel’s smile did not move. Sylara’s fan did.

The chant died.

The girl was allowed to go.

I breathed again without meaning to. So did Elowyn. The sound of two lungs remembering air at the same moment might have been funny if I hadn’t wanted to put my hand over her heart and feel proof that it still beat.

By the time the tables had been reset and the servants had stopped shaking, the courtiers had found a new subject for their sharp teeth: us.

Dragon and Fae princess standing within an arm’s length on the grass.

The weight of our accidental alliance settled over the lawn like humidity before a storm.

We stood there until we had to stand nearer. The shadows shifted at our feet. The murmur of the fountain covered words meant for no one else.

“Even suspicious,” she said without moving her mouth, “you followed my lead.”

“Even calculating,” I said without looking at her, “you left me the only answer.”

I felt more than saw her smile. It moved the air between us. “And it worked.”

“It did.”

I could hear the rest of the sentence we both didn’t speak: It will cost us.

When the music swelled again, I stepped back. She did, too. The cord that ran between us did not slacken.

By nightfall I would tell myself a dozen more times that I didn’t trust her. That the court was weaving us toward something sharp and pretty it would love to watch us bleed on. That I had made a mistake letting my mouth learn the taste of her.

By nightfall I would still feel the phantom of her pulse against my thumb.

The gardens breathed; the court laughed; the queen watched; the heir smiled his thin smile. Somewhere, a mask of a fox learned a new trick with its fan.

And I stood in sunlight-that-wasn’t and shadow-that-never-moved and told myself that a man could hold two truths at once: that a cage could be a battlefield, and that a woman could be a weapon and a salvation in the same breath.

Tomorrow they would test us harder.

Tonight I would sharpen the blade.

And if Elowyn set it in my hand and held it there, I did not know whether I would use it to cut the locks off this palace or the hinge on my own heart.

Either way, the court would watch.

Either way, something would bleed.