Shadowforged (Light & Shadow) (11 page)

“And
you
want me to be understanding of nobles?” I asked, skeptical.

“Aye,” he said cheerfully, with a twinkle in his eye. “It’s hard on ‘em, lad. They’re not all there in the head. It’s from marryin’ their cousins all those years,” he added, in a whisper. I gave a watery laugh and he clapped me on the shoulder. “Cheer up,” he advised me. “It’ll blow past.”

But it did not. As the weeks wound on, I waited for my own anger to fade, as it usually did. I waited for Miriel to forgive me, as she usually did. But instead, we watched each other like polite adversaries. We never came to open opposition; we still shared bits of information, we still worked with the tiny signals and unspoken commands we had developed. But I found myself wondering if she might indeed be hiding more than I knew, and she watched me with quiet suspicion; whenever she saw me with Temar, her eyes flicked back and forth between us, and she did not care that I saw.

She knew that I had not told the Duke of Jacces, or her letter—indeed, I had not told anyone of the many letters I had passed back and forth between the two of them, my routes between the palace proper and Miriel’s chambers becoming ever more complex, to evade the spies I was sure Jacces had set to find his supposed ally. Miriel needed me; she left the letters for me, and waited for me to retrieve the responses. But she knew that I could tell her uncle, and she hid her thoughts from me now. She did not share the content of the letters she exchanged with the High Priest, and I did not ask.

I had thought at the time that the Duke’s offer had failed, but now I wondered if he had planned this. Perhaps he had known that I would take the offer to Miriel, and that she would be suspicious. He might have known, with some deep cunning, that our tenuous friendship needed only a nudge, and then: a widening gulf, silence where there had been laughter, an edge in our voices. Or perhaps that had been a plan of Temar’s devising.

In my hopeful moments, I tried to believe that Miriel and I were simply outgrowing our squabbling. In my exhausted, resentful moments, I thought that it had been foolish of us even to try to build our own alliance, never mind a friendship; we had learned one secret, oh, the greatest secret—but that success could only be followed by failure. A half-breed noble girl raised in seclusion, romancing a King: that was fanciful, and dreadfully romantic, a fairy tale in the making. The bedtime stories never mentioned friendship between a future Queen and her little orphan bodyguard, and now I knew why.

We might share quick minds and have grown up together in the same nowhere corner of the world, only to be thrown together under the harsh rule of the Duke, but Miriel and I were far apart in station, in glamour, in skills. How could the King’s mistress share her view of the world with a shadow half-soldier? And without such an understanding, how could they share dreams? And from there: plans, a side of their own. It was impossible.

Worse, we had compounded the bad luck of being part of the Duke’s faction with the foolishness of plotting against him. I asked myself if I had run mad. Two girls, choosing for their target a war hero, with an army of a retinue—and the army of Heddred—in his camp. While we had begun a correspondence with the leader of the rebellion, that had led to no open alliance—and was our lack of progress not good? Shameful, how pathetic our rebellion was: a few words, a few secrets. But better that we abandon such an ill-starred alliance before it led us too far into danger. We could still walk away; the High Priest would never know that his correspondence had been with us.

What Miriel thought, I still do not know. We slipped away from each other, in evenings of silence, too-polite exchanges, smiles that did not reach our eyes. I was as lonely as I ever had been. It was worse than when I had come to the palace, knowing no one at all. Then, I had had Roine’s friendship and Temar’s guidance. I had not had any secrets to keep. Now, I lived two lives, my teacher mistrusted me, my surrogate mother would not speak to me. And I had lost even Miriel’s friendship.

I waited each night for the slow, deep breathing of Miriel and Anna, and then I curled into a ball and wept onto my pillow. I was so alone, and I was so afraid. I had never faced the world alone. I did not know how to survive alone. However symbolic Miriel’s support had been, it had been all that stood between me, and my fear.

I made sure that my eyes were dry and my face clean each morning, and I felt myself become very quiet. I made my face a mask, as Miriel once had, and wondered if the tight knot of fear in my belly would ever go away. The days seemed ceaseless and unchanging, I opened my eyes each morning with weariness.

And then, as we moved into the thaw of the year, the King came to Miriel with an incredible plan.

“Why should monarchs pretend to be allies while all they share are cold words?” he demanded. “Do you know, I have never met King Dusan. We have never met, and yet—and yet!—we write to each other as if I am my father, or as if we are our grandfathers, back and back. And why?” He was too excited to wait for Miriel’s response. “Think how many insults and how much anger we carry on and on from those generations. It is not our anger, it does not need to be this way. It should not be this way.”

He was flushed with conviction, and I had two thoughts at once. First, that he was almost unbearably naïve, and that the Council must be at a loss to find ways to advise such a boy. Second, that I could see why Miriel had begun to fall in love with him, all those fateful months past. Even now, made bitter by disappointment, I saw a warmth in her smile that was not only deception. Garad shared her same hopeful heart; I had the fleeting idea that life had warped them both, and it was sad that they could never now be truly happy together—whatever Garad might think.

“So tell me!” Miriel was flushed and laughing at his passionate speech. “What was your idea?”

“Oh, my love—“ Miriel’s smile never faltered at the endearment “—my love, you must be my champion in this—“

“
Tell
me!”

“—for I know the Council will be ranged against me, and I could not bear to have you against me as well. They will tell me it is impossible,” he finished in a breathless rush. Miriel wrapped her fingers around his and smiled, so warmly that I myself wanted to confide in her.

“You must tell me this idea that makes you so happy,” she said, and a smile broke across his face like dawn.

“We will travel to meet Dusan,” he said. “We will all meet together on the plains, the whole of the Courts, all the great nobles of the world, and discuss the future of Heddred and Ismir like men, not squabbling boys. It will be a great event, the most historic moment of our nations! It will be the true beginning of the golden age.”

As we walked back to our rooms, I said to Miriel, “You did very well.”

“I didn’t know what to say,” she confessed, with a laugh. “Such an idea! What do we do now?” I sobered, and checked the hallway. It was empty, and so I put a hand on her arm to slow her. I did not have to say anything; she knew what I meant without me speaking a single word. I saw her bite her lip.

“You’re not betraying him,” I assured her, my voice low. “He’ll tell them all tomorrow,” I assured her.

She nodded. “I know. And you’re right. And it’s a good plan.”

“And you’ve been very good about not getting us into trouble,” I conceded. It was not everything, but it was enough, after our laughter, to open the door. She inclined her head, like a Queen.

“Then let us go tell my uncle,” she said.

“This is a bad idea,” I said, out loud, before I thought. A bad idea to begin working against the Duke once more, a bad idea to renew our alliance. It was dangerous. Miriel only tilted her head to the side, and smiled. She did not have to ask what I was talking about, she always understood me.

“Don’t leave me, Catwin,” she said. “You’re all I have.”

Chapter 11

Garad had been correct: the Council swore that it could not be done. The Duke, having gone white with fury at the thought of ushering the Ismiri army through Voltur Pass, had raged at me and at Miriel when we brought him the news. Miriel sat, pale and trembling, and I knew that she hoped only to escape this meeting without her uncle’s anger turning to violence. Finally, his fury had burned away, and he dropped into his great, carved chair and stared at the wall.

“Do not encourage him,” he told us, and we nodded, frightened into silence. “Let us try to bring him around.”

And so he had gone to the Council meeting the next day, where Gerald Conradine predicted betrayal on the open plains, and Guy de la Marque told the King that he overreached himself; this time, none on the Council spoke against him for raging at the King. They, too, were terrified. Half of their time was spent assuring Garad that Dusan would never agree to such a thing, and the other half was filled with desperate pleading to abandon the idea. Every member of the council had lived through the last war, most of them had fought in it, all of them had lost family—Ismir had been beaten back, Heddred had won, could the King not leave well enough alone?

Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Garad sat silent on his throne while the men of the Council spoke earnestly. He listened to their words, he marked who spoke and who did not. He nodded in response to some comments. He let the Council beg him until their voices failed, and then he said simply that his mind had been made up, and he would send the invitation shortly by courier.

The Duke, forewarned by us, had regained his composure enough to sit quietly in the Council meetings, biting his tongue against what he saw as willful stupidity. While the other Council members left, only to join together in knots and mutter fearful predictions in the banquet hall, the Duke would retire early to his rooms each night, unnoticed.

Only those of us in his faction knew that he was working to create a plan that would both win him the adoration of the King, and soothe his own troubled mind. When Miriel and I were called in for urgent meetings with the Duke, we could see maps strewn about on all the tables, little figurines set up to show Voltur guardsmen, Kleist troops, the Royal Army.

Temar, in a rare moment of friendship, showed me the Duke’s most recent plans. He brought a map to our lesson, rolled up carefully in a leather tube, and he had me brush off a table in the corner so that we could spread the map out on a clean surface.

As we smoothed the map out and laid little weights at the corners, I could not help but marvel at my life, that priceless objects were everywhere now. I had become so inured to gold, jewels and silks, books and maps, that I rarely thought of it anymore. And then sometimes, Temar would show me a book or a map, and I would remember that I was wearing warm clothes, that braziers burned in my bedroom, and that my belly was full and had been every day that week.

“Miriel cannot speak of this to the King,” Temar cautioned me, and his voice brought me back to the moment. I nodded, in agreement with the principle, but Temar still felt the need to explain. “We cannot let the King think that the Duke discusses his plans with Miriel. The King cannot think that they are a united group.”

“Yes,” I said simply. It was not worth the argument to tell him that I knew as much; when Temar thought of me as a child in need of instruction, he did not think of me as a woman who had betrayed him. I fought the uncomfortable thought that I did not want him to think of me as a child at all, and poured the little figurines out of their bag. I held them out to Temar, one by one, and he began to place them on the map.

“Here is where the King would meet, yes? And this is a portion the Royal Army.” He tapped to the north of the King’s proposed meeting place. A blue figurine went there. “Another here.” East of the meeting place, equally ready to meet the King if he were in need, or stand against an advancing force.

“Now.” Temar placed three green figurines on the board to the south, behind a mountain. “These forces can sweep west and north, or east and north, to flank the Ismiri. Retreat can be stopped by a detachment of Voltur guardsmen—“ blue figurines, placed in the foothills “—or enabled by sweeping the guardsmen along the north flank, to funnel the Ismiri back through the passes. What do you think?”

I did not know what to think. Although I was the one who studied combat, Miriel was the one with a head for army maneuvers. As young ladies were not taught such things, she had read of them in my books, and now I went to her when I had questions about something Donnett or Temar had taught me. I was memorizing the layout of the map, so that I could ask Miriel about it later.

But Temar was waiting for a response now. I pointed to the green figurines.

“Green is the Kleist army?” I asked, and he nodded. “Is the rest of the Royal Army at Penekket?” He nodded once again. I was running out of questions. “Who commands the Kleist army?”

“Edward DeVere,” Temar said, surprising me. “Guy de la Marque will need to be with the King, of course, and DeVere knows the land.” I nodded. My surprise had been foolish. The DeVere family did indeed own that land, stretching from the Western road at the north, almost to the Bone Wastes in the south. It had been their proximity in the West that had first allowed the Duke to seek them out as potential kinsmen. They had been happy enough to sell a second son to him, and ignore the fact later.

Temar noticed neither my wandering thoughts, nor my lack of skill in deciphering the map. He had been tense all the time we were speaking, and now he said, worriedly,

“The guardsmen will hold Voltur, and a detachment will wait to make sure there’s no sweep behind Dusan’s party.” I heard real fear in his voice, an echo of the Duke’s own. The Duke had raged at the stupidity of allowing the Ismiri army—even a detachment—across the border, and he planned for the possibility of the King’s assassination, but his one true fear was that of Voltur falling back to the Ismiri. Temar, in his strange, almost symbiotic bond with the Duke, had taken on the fear as his own. It was a danger from which he, in all his skill, could not shield his lord.

“But the Duke likes this plan,” I said, cautiously. It was an attempt to comfort him, and I felt foolish when Temar snorted, his fear forgotten.

“Of course not. He looked to Voltur and the Royal Army to keep the Ismiri at bay, he always feared an invasion. Now we’ve let them over the pass ourselves and stretched the armies out. No, he doesn’t like the plan. But it’s the best that can be done if the King keeps insisting on this.” He looked over at me, and I realized that the last portion was a question.

“He does,” I said. “Unchanging.”

“And Miriel says?” I tried to keep my shoulders from stiffening at his habitual suspicion.

“The usual. That peace is to be desired, she supports his plan for a golden age.”

“Huh.” He did not ask more, and I did not offer it, and neither did we mention the suspicion that ran between us. That was the rule now. We lived in a half-truce, bought by determined silence. It was more bearable to behave as if nothing had changed save the greater cooperation between Miriel and the Duke. It was certainly better to pretend that such cooperation was real.

Accordingly, neither of us mentioned that one of the two had nearly overset the plans of the other, that both of them would gladly see the other dead at their feet, and that there was a strong possibility that one had tried to kill the other and pin the death on his political rivals. By denying the enmity between Miriel and the Duke, we denied the root of our own.

If we were two other people, perhaps, we might have believed that this truce could last forever. Perhaps it truly would have lasted. Yet we faced the truth that it could not work for us. We might be human, no more and no less than the thousands that crowded into the palace walls, but we were also Shadows. Both of us were accustomed to watching for danger, and laying traps to seek enemies out and kill them in their lairs, before they followed us to our own. Neither of us would be able to let such an accomplished enemy lie in wait indefinitely.

Both Temar and I knew that a reckoning was coming between the two of us, and that it would happen when one of our masters turned on the other. We also forgot this fact, half out of convenience and helplessness, and half because our illusion of friendship was so convincing that we had begun to believe it. The most painful times were when the inevitability of it broke through the illusion we had built up, when I remembered that one day he would be a sworn and declared enemy. We were making it worse, pretending to this friendship, but I do not think that either of us knew what else we could do. Certainly, I did not.

It had been a dark and lonely winter. Temar’s anger had been expected, nearly a relief after the months of waiting for him to discover the secrets I held. I had borne it without complaint, telling myself that it was no more than I could expect. But when Roine’s pleading and tears had turned, also, into cold silence, and my tenuous alliance with Miriel had crumbled, I had felt very alone indeed.

Now, with Miriel’s distrust less sharp, I could bear Temar’s suspicion. She would be glad when I brought her back a portion of the Duke’s plans, and asked for her help in deciphering them. But when I returned to Miriel’s rooms that day, I was greeted by a sharp glare from Anna, and Miriel pacing around the room in her best gown, looking panicked.

“He’s sent for us,” she said bluntly. “Put on your good suit, quickly.” She prowled around the bedroom while I changed, looking in the mirror frequently, and I could hear her murmuring her prettiest phrases to herself. She liked to practice before she went to see the King; this unexpected summons had panicked her.

“He said we were to be very discreet,” Miriel said, and I could hear the distaste in her voice. It was a matter of contention between the two of them that he insisted on discretion. Miriel never said a word against it; indeed, her words said the very opposite: that discretion was wise, that he must keep himself above the reproach of low people and filthy minds. But she was wondered what it might mean, that the King—having gone to the trouble of announcing his infatuation to the court—still took care to keep his meetings with her secret.

Now, like Miriel was doing herself—I could see the fear in her eyes—I wondered if the King was planning to tell Miriel that he could see her no longer. He might well be entertaining offers of marriage from powerful groups within the Council. I racked my brain, and then I remembered Temar’s words to keep Miriel out of the King’s reach. I pointed to her gown.

“That’s too demure.”

“What?” She looked down, and then shook her head. “I look beautiful.” There was no narcissism in her voice; she was only stating a fact.

“Yes,” I said impatiently, “but you look…untouchable.” She was dressed in the softest spring green, a heavy winter gown with elaborate brocade at the cuffs of the long sleeves, and a chain of crystals around her waist.

“I’m supposed to be untouchable,” she reminded me. “My uncle even reminded you of that. I only put myself forward and flirt when we’re in the eyes of the court. Then I’m out of reach.” I thought of the subtlety of her flirting, the delicate flutter of her eyelashes, the tiny sway of her hips. She was masterful in her flirtation, entirely above reproach and yet with allure in every word, every gesture. But it was no longer enough, and most especially not enough if her suspicions about this meeting were true. I shook my head.

“That won’t work anymore. You need to be proper, but you need to be within his reach.”

“What if he’s going to tell me—“ she broke off, white-faced. “I’ll look a fool, if I display myself like a whore and he doesn’t want me anymore.” But she moved as I touched her shoulder, and I set to unlacing her bodice.

“You won’t look like a whore,” I said. “And even if he is summoning you to say that, it’s not because he doesn’t want you.
You’re
to dress so that he knows what a mistake he’s making. Then be demure. You’ll get him back.”

“Which dress, then?” she was intrigued.

“The new deep blue, for summer.”

“It’s too thin,” she demurred, but I shook my head.

“That’s the point. You’ll be shivering when you arrive. It looks vulnerable.” I helped her into the gown and laced it as quickly as I could. She looked in the mirror and nodded, noticing—with a professional eye—how the color made her hair gleam, how it set off her eyes. It was a deep, rich color, the silk so soft that one could hardly look at it without wanting to reach out and stroke it. Her skin was creamy, and she shone with youth. Freed of the heavy folds of the green dress, the sway of her hips could be seen. She nodded at her reflection, and then I helped her put a cloak around her shoulders and we set off.

“My Love,” the King said, as she came into the room. As she did with him, Miriel gave a little shrug and the cloak slithered from her shoulders. I saw the King’s eyes take in every inch of her, and he swallowed. As I knelt to pick up the cloak, I commended myself on a job well done, and hoped beyond hope that he had not set his stubborn mind to giving her up.

“My love, I have the most wonderful news for you,” he said, “but…also a most delicate question.” I melted away to the side of the room, laid Miriel’s cloak over a chair, and tried to become invisible.

“Dusan has accepted your proposal!” Miriel guessed, breathless, and the King laughed, nodded, and grasped her hands. He was relieved to see her looking happy; I knew that she had put his cautionary words out of her mind in an instant. She must be seen to celebrate his good fortune. She sobered, however, as his face fell.