Shadowforged (Light & Shadow) (28 page)

“We’ll ride until nightfall, my Lady,” he said respectfully. “We’re a few days out yet, but tomorrow night, Gods willing, there will be an inn for shelter.”

“Thank you,” Miriel said calmly. “I am sure that my uncle will be pleased with the good time we’re making.” When he was gone, she gave me a sunny smile.

“What’s gotten into you?” I asked her that night, as we donned our nightclothes.

“Check outside,” she said simply, and I cautiously peeked out of the tent wagon. No one was nearby; the men were cooking dinner. I nodded for her to speak, and she drew a deep breath. “I realized I don’t have to go back,” she said simply. “I don’t. I know we always said so, but I had never believed it. And when I realized…” She laughed at my stunned expression. “I wouldn’t expect it of you. You don’t have to. But…would you really run away with me?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. It was the only word that came to my lips. “Yes. Oh, Gods…Miriel, I didn’t want to go back.”

“Yes.” She came and clasped my hands, bit her lip. “There’s nothing for us there,” she explained. “I think you knew that. I just…hadn’t.”

“Nothing, even for you?” I asked her curiously, thinking of her gowns and her jewels. She saw what I was thinking and shook her head. There were tears in her eyes, but she was smiling.

“No. I’ll give it up. You see…Wilhelm’s marriage set me free. There’s nothing at all for me there, not now.” I squeezed her hands, but she was not looking for sympathy. She never saw things one at a time, did Miriel. She saw the whole, a jumble of possibilities, and she saw it all sideways. I marveled at it. Now she gave me the same mischievous smile. “You know where we could go,” she said. I felt my eyes widen.

“That’s dangerous.”

“It’s all dangerous. You know my uncle will be looking for us. But…” She swallowed and her smile dimmed a little. “I’m sick to my heart of Courts, Catwin. I thought we had set ourselves apart from my uncle, but we were always the playing the same game. I never really thought about what I wanted, I never wondered if there might be another way. And all of it, the lies…it was twisting me. I was turning into something dark.”

“I know.” I whispered back. I did know, I knew the shadow creeping up in my own soul. We stood in silence for a moment and then, surprisingly, she laughed.

“I feel like I’ve been set free,” she said wonderingly. “Can we really do this? Take supplies, go tonight?” I thought.

“Tomorrow night.” I decided. “At the inn. More noise to cover us.” She smiled, she could not help it, and it was the happiest I had seen her in months.

“Tomorrow,” she agreed, and we went to take our dinner with the men.

And so it was that the next night, Miriel and I snuck down into the stable, slipped the hostler a few coppers for his silence, and set out, riding hard, for the Norstrung Provinces, and freedom.

Epilogue

“Now she’s escaped us entirely.” The voice was accusing. “Surely you could have foreseen this.”

“I? It was not I who had her in my grasp and let them slip away! One girl against twenty men! Some elite force that was!”

“Ill luck. And the men achieved their first objective.”

“Little good that does us without Catwin! I have told you, time and again, what she means to us. There are stories about her.”

“And I,” the first voice said, “begin to doubt you. Prophecies and visions, repeated by peasants and bored nobles—the girl’s mother was no seer! How could she know what she saw?”

“It was a true prophecy, I know that in my bones. Everything we have gained from this can be undone in a moment, if we do not secure it with her death.” The words were a hiss into the darkness.

“Does it not trouble you? Killing this girl?” The first voice. Curious.

“It is her fate. I do not—I will not—question the Gods.”

“The Gods? Has it not occurred to you that they will damn us both for this?”

A pause, then the second spoke: “For this prize, I will accept damnation.”

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Thank you for reading Book 2 of the Light & Shadow trilogy! If you enjoyed the book, read on for an excerpt of the final volume, Shadow’s End. Whether you liked the book or not, I encourage you to take a few moments to leave a review—not only will your feedback help other readers to make an informed choice, but it will help me to improve my storytelling! You can find more information about my books, including upcoming works, at my website:

http://moirakatson.com

Shadow’s End

Light & Shadow, Book III

On the first night, wrapped in our warmest furs and still shivering violently against the cold winds of the plains, Miriel and I confronted the fact that there was no going back. We had not stopped for hours, desperate to get as far as possible before our guards knew that we had gone. They would follow us—they would have to, they would be desperate to find us before the Duke ever found out that we had slipped through their fingers. Whether we wanted to go to Penekket or not was of no concern to them, and I had no illusions about my skills at combat: if it came to a fight between me and a score of guardsmen, they would likely win. So we pushed the horses as far as they would go and then sought shelter in a stand of trees, vainly listening for the sound of pursuit even as the howl of the wind blocked out any noise but itself.

“Catwin, do you know how to get to the Norstrung Provinces?” Miriel asked, finally, after we had sat in silence for an hour or so. For some reason, the question struck me as incredibly funny, and I laughed so hard, and for so long, that I could not catch my breath. When I looked up, I saw that Miriel was laughing, too, stifling her much-practiced giggle behind a perfectly manicured hand, and holding her side as she shook with mirth. We laughed in disbelief at our own recklessness until at last we had exhausted ourselves, and then Miriel leaned back against a tree and asked simply,

“What have we done?”

The last vestiges of humor disappeared at once. I looked at her and saw her not as she was to me—ally, friend—but as she was to the world: the betrothed of the last King, a young woman of uncertain birth, wearing a priceless gown and cloak and sitting in the middle of a field on an early spring night. A runaway. A woman who could be everything if she chose to work her magic on the new king, or nothing at all if her uncle wished to punish her for her actions.

“We ran away,” I said wonderingly.
We ran away
. I felt the shape of the words in my mouth and, oddly light-headed, wondered if this was a dream. For a moment, I drifted, until the realization that all of this was real slammed down, and I felt a wave of nausea and pure terror. I wondered, wildly, if there was any lie we could tell to go back to the warm, well-fed, half-safety of the palace and the Duke’s patronage. I was ashamed of myself even for wondering, but I was terrified. I was taunted by my own mind, the little voice that said, mockingly,
you said you wanted this
.

And there was no going back. The nausea grew stronger, and from the look on Miriel’s face, she had come to the same realization: this was nothing we could deny or explain away, it was an irrevocable breach with the Duke. We could not pretend that we had done this in his best interests. We had said that we did not want to lie and dissemble anymore, and here we were: honest at last. And filled with fear.

This was a terrible, terrible mistake.

“Oh, Gods,” Miriel said, biting her lip. “We ran
away
.” I only nodded, numbly, and she rubbed her face, then sighed and looked up, “So what do we do now?” The golden light of dawn gleamed in her hair and gilded her face, and I realized that it had been growing steadily lighter. Exhaustion counted for nothing; our rest was over.

“We keep riding,” I said, and with the first decision, my confidence began to return. “We’re not far out of Penekket, so we should start veering south now. We need to stay off the road. And you should change.” I had procured a serving girl’s spare gown for Miriel, but we had left so quickly that she has not yet changed. She was sitting on a pile of bracken, wrapped in her warm velvet cloak and wearing silk and jewels.

“We’re still going south?” Miriel asked, wide-eyed. Even now, with no one to see us, she used her beautiful, practiced mannerisms. She had made her mask so well and so completely that she might never strip it all away. I could not have said how I felt about that—even in our disgust at how our masks and our true faces had become intertwined, at how the twisted darkness had crept into our very hearts, I would have lied if I said that Miriel’s mask was not exquisitely beautiful. It was so finely crafted that it would almost be a shame to see it broken down and destroyed.

“We have to go,” I said, judging by her fear that I should not say,
and there is no other choice
. I understood her fear; I could not revile it. “You’re going to be a great leader for the rebellion, after all.” I was trying to coax her away from her terror, and her face warmed at the thought, though she looked pained.

“I feel a fool,” she admitted, as she took the rough, homespun dress from one of our packs and shook it out.

“Why?” I looked at her curiously, and she took a moment and chose her words carefully.

“Because I’m doing this for Wilhelm.” She saw my face and hastened to explain. “I know it’s useless. I don’t hope to win him back.” She swallowed and curled her hands into fists, so tightly the knuckles went white. “I shouldn’t have to. He should have waited for me. I know I should be angry and forget him. But when I try to be angry, and cut him out of my heart, I…can’t.” She swallowed and blinked away tears. “I think: I told him that he must do whatever he could, risk everything he had, for the rebellion. I told him I’d do the same. And so even if I think he’s betrayed me…this is to keep faith with him. Even if he’s turned from me, I have to believe that he’s still true to this, or I won’t survive. So I am true to it, as well.”

I did not respond; I had no words to speak of hope, they would have choked me with jealousy. Miriel could still believe that Wilhelm kept true to their cause, and I…

If you meddle again, you will die
. Bad luck to adore the man who had turned me into a Shadow, and worse luck that my love had not disappeared when he became an enemy. When I thought of him now, it was not only with hatred and fear and the sense of a coming fight—it was to wonder what his kisses might be like, it was to think of the body that I knew, after years of sparring, almost as well as my own. My heart betrayed me every day, and it was bitter indeed to have none of the comfort that Miriel took from her hope.

I had the thought, so overwhelming that bile came to my throat, that the prophecy had spoken of betrayal—and who could betray me in this world more completely than could Temar?

“Please tell me you don’t think it’s—what are you
doing
?” Miriel’s voice rose to a shriek and she clapped her hands over her mouth.  I held my braid out in my hand and shrugged. Distracted by my misery, I had not hesitated, only sawed the hair away with one of my daggers; I could feel the rest drifting, ragged, around my head like so much honey-colored silk.

“Better to seem like a girl and a boy than two girls,” I said. “In case anyone sees us.” I had been staring down at my hair, and now I looked up and my voice trailed off. “Gods be good,” I whispered.

“What?” Miriel looked down at her dress, checking for stains.

“You look…”
Beautiful
. I should have known better than to expect that clothing alone could make Miriel less noteworthy. The rough cloth only set off her beauty all the more. In fine gowns and jewels, her looks were only a piece of a perfectly-polished puzzle, but now they were jarring. Her hair seemed darker, her eyes bluer. “Don’t let anyone see you up close,” I advised, trying not to let my envy show. But she saw it anyway, and smiled.

“Beauty hasn’t done me any favors,” she pointed out. “I’m not Queen, everyone hates me but you, and the man I love…” She swallowed. “And anyway, do you really think
you
can pass for a boy?”

“You’d be surprised,” I said drily, thinking of the dozens who called me, “lad,” or, “boy,” every day, their eyes seeing no further than my britches and tabard, their gaze moving on before they saw the hint of curves under my clothes. I knew for a fact that no one had ever noticed me at all, for the Court was so mad for rumors of Miriel that if anyone had ever noticed me, it would have been all over that the Lady Miriel was accompanied by a girl dressed as a boy. But their eyes had only ever slid over me; another servant in livery. “Are you ready to go?”

“One moment.” Miriel picked her way over the frozen ground and took my dagger. She pointed to the pile of bracken. “Sit.”

“We don’t have time.”

“We have a moment.” She stared at me until I sat, reluctantly, and then she took the locks of my hair in her hands and began to trim the chopped mess of it. Her hands were gentle as they cut it all to evenness, so that my hair no longer stuck out from my head but smoothed itself into a neat, golden cap. She ran her fingers through it, nodded decisively at her handiwork, and then she flipped the dagger about and presented it to me, haft first.

“Thank you,” I said, awkwardly, rising up. I checked her saddle, and then lifted her up and guided my horse to a nearby boulder so that I could jump up myself. I surveyed the road in both directions, then sighted our direction from the sun. I wished that I
had a map, but hoped that I could remember well enough where we were that we would not run into any major towns. Then, seeing our way clear, I urged my horse out of the trees and led the way southeast, away from the road.