Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) (12 page)

“
I had forgotten how much
children eat,” Temar said, scratching his head. “Here, have the
rest of mine.”

“
I can’t eat your food,” I
protested, and he grinned and tapped me on the nose, his ill-humor
from earlier quite forgotten.

“
I
can find the mess hall on my own. If I leave you, you might
wander off and starve before you could find another meal.” He
drummed his spoon on the table. “And don’t gulp your food like
that.”

“
Why not?” I asked, with my
mouth full, and he raised his eyebrow. I swallowed, hastily, wiped
my mouth on my napkin, and said again, “Why not?”

“
Appearances,” he said.
“The Duke doesn’t starve his servants; we should act as if we have
enough to eat. And it’s not well-behaved to gulp your food.” I
nodded, glumly, and tried to eat more slowly, thinking that there
were an awful lot of rules for behaving well.

“
Now,” Temar said, as I
ate. He leaned forward to me. “I’m to explain to you why you’re
here.” My head jerked up. “Do you want to know why I chose you for
this, Catwin?”

“
Yes.”
Oh, yes.

“
You’re brave,” Temar said,
seriously. “You were foolhardy to try to steal my dagger, but brave
as well. You proved you would walk towards danger if there were a
reason. When we first called you to speak to the Duke, I saw that
you were clever. You had found a way to count all the rooms of the
Winter Castle without knowing higher numbers. You explored, and I
saw, also, how much you saw in others.

“
But there’s more to it
than that. Be honest with me, Catwin, you’ve always been good at
manipulating others, haven’t you?” I frowned. I did not know the
word, and I was desperate to know where this was going. He answered
only my confusion. “You know what to say to get your way. You know
how to say things—your voice, your words, your face—to make people
think one thing when maybe the truth is another way.

“
Don’t look so worried. I
am not upset. Catwin, that is a gift. You can see into people’s
hearts from the words they do not say, and you know what to say to
conceal your own heart from them. You may never have had to use it
for anything more than—oh, let me guess—stealing pastries? Yes. But
you will need both in the years to come.”

“
Oh.”

“
And I saw that you could
move quietly and quickly, and I had heard from the servants that
you could climb well and that you were quiet, you did not speak of
gossip with them. I had asked them to keep an eye out for one such
as you. And they told me another thing as well: they told me of the
prophecies made at your birth.”

“
Oh?” This did not make the
slightest sense to me.

“
Those whom fate has
touched…well, let us say that they are drawn to one another.”
Temar’s face went still, he was very grave now. “Catwin, do you
know what I am to the Duke?”

“
You’re his…shadow.”
Suddenly, confronted with Temar’s unsmiling face, I was afraid to
say the word
assassin
. Temar had no such compunctions.

“
His bodyguard. His spy.
And his assassin,” he said. “Those at the Winter Castle suspect it.
Some here, too. But no one dares speak of it outright, and so
people pretend that they do not think it. In fact, because it is so
obvious, they tell themselves that it is a foolish thought and then
they disbelieve it. Do you understand how that would
work?”

I did, and I did not want to. Suddenly,
having Temar single me out did not seem good. I did not want to be
a person who understood these things. I did not want to be the girl
whose fate had been foretold. I looked around us, but no one seemed
to be paying us any attention. Soldiers were laughing and shouting,
eating noisily. None of them spared time for us, save to give Temar
a respectful nod.

“
Do you know how many other
nobles have someone like me in their train?” Temar asked me, and I
shook my head. “None,” he said simply. “None, other than the royal
family themselves.” His voice took on a touch of smugness. “Even
their bodyguards are not nearly so well-trained. A few nobles have
bodyguards. Many pay servants for information on their enemies—one
of your tasks will be to identify those servants in Miriel’s rooms.
A very few have paid mercenaries and assassins to make their
enemies, or even members of their own families, die as if by
accident. Yes, that happens,” he said, when he saw disbelief on my
face. “But no one other than the Duke has someone like me. I am
every one of those things, and more. I am known as the Duke’s
messenger, I am his clerk. I take notes for him in meetings of the
King’s Council, and I make sure I notice who mislikes him or speaks
against him.”

I nodded. I did not know what to say, I did
not know what I could say—for now I realized what a fool I had been
all of this time. I had spent the journey to Penekket wondering why
I had been singled out, I had searched for answers, and only now
did I realize that I had not been able to find an answer because I
had closed my eyes to the only answer there could be. The Duke and
Temar had even told me, the very first time they saw me, and I had
closed away the memory and pretended not to know.

“
Catwin, you are no fool.
You know that the Duke has great plans for Miriel. When those plans
come to fruition—that means, when it all works out, Catwin—Miriel
will be one of the greatest figures of the Court. Do you know what
that means?” Silently, I shook my head. I did not want to think
about it. I did not want to know where this was going.

“
It means that Miriel will
be in danger every day,” Temar said simply. “Anyone who rises at
court has enemies. The Duke rose fast, and made many enemies that
way. Miriel will have all of his, and she will have her own as
well. And they will act against her.”

Carefully, I laid my spoon down on the table
and folded my napkin. The room was pressing in on me, the sound of
the men eating was beating at my ears and I thought I might be
sick. I wondered if it would be possible to get up and leave, to
turn around and run as fast as I could for the door, run fast
enough that Temar could not catch me, and far enough that the Duke
could not reach me.

“
Do you understand what I
am telling you?” Temar asked me. I shook my head. I would not say
it. I did not want to say it, superstitiously believing that if I
could keep from saying it, it would not become real.

“
You will be all of these
things and more for Miriel,” Temar said. He did not spare me: “You
will be her shadow, shaped to her as I am to the Duke. You will be
her bodyguard when she needs one, you will take note of those who
mislike her or speak against her so that she will know her enemies.
You will collect information on the enemies of Voltur—of Miriel, of
the Duke—and if necessary, you will eliminate them. You are to be
loyal to the Duke, to him above all. Above even the
King.”

There was a long pause. I would not meet his
eyes.

“
Off to the baths, then,”
he said easily. He was terribly calm, as if he had not just told me
that I was to become a spy, a mercenary, an assassin, a murderer.
He seemed to know that he had overwhelmed me. “Bring your bowl,” he
added. I picked up the bundle of clothing, and my bowl and spoon,
hopelessly awkward, and followed him through the bustle of the mess
hall.

In the baths, bundled off to the women’s
rooms, I dunked myself under the water and tried to stay there
until the air left my lungs. Each time I came up spluttering, my
body not obeying my wishes, and finally I went over to the hottest
pool of water and scrubbed my skin until it was nearly raw. Then I
sat, staring into the mist, trying to accept what I had heard, and
not know it, all at the same time.

That night, I lay on a cot in Miriel’s room
and stared, sleepless, into the dark. I did not cry—even if Miriel
had not been only a few feet from me, sharp eyed and eager to see
me in distress, I would not have cried. I was not a baby, to cry at
misfortune—and in any case, this was far beyond tears.

And what had I to complain of? Of everyone I
had ever known, I would be one of the first to wear a new suit of
clothes, to own my own pair of boots. I was sleeping on my own bed,
snug and warm in the royal palace at Penekket. I lived in rooms
with a lock on the door now. I had had two meals today, as much as
I wanted to eat. People had gladly killed for less than that, and
my peasant self, my hungry self, the self that had woken in the
winter dark to do chores, track down herd animals that had wandered
off in the biting cold—that self told me not to be a fool. That
self told me to stay where I would be fed, where I would be
warm.

More, it did not matter if I liked this life
better than my old one. I faced, with calm certainty, the fact that
there was nowhere for me to go. I was a girl with no prospects for
the future, an orphan with no trade to learn, an unmarriageable
girl who had never learned to how to keep a house or raise
livestock, who had steadfastly refused to learn to spin or sew. I
had been granted a place at the castle in Voltur only because Roine
had taken me in. There was only one noblewoman there now, the Lady;
the castle was hardly short-staffed.

With a start, I realized that all of this
meant that I would never again face the Lady, and for a moment, I
considered what it must be like for her now that we had gone.
Miriel’s rooms would be quiet, scrubbed clean and closed up. At
dinner in the great hall, the Lady would sit alone, her husband’s
chair empty beside her, as it had been for over a decade, her
daughter’s chair newly empty at her other side. She would stare out
on a table half-empty, no nobly-born ladies to entertain her, few
enough servants to guard her. She would travel the hallways like a
ghost, her beauty fading with each long, cold winter. She would
know every day that her daughter was far from her, being ordered by
the brother she mistrusted.

Careful not to make a sound, I turned my
head to look towards Miriel. I could hear the wheezy snores from
her maidservant, who shared a bed with her, but Miriel breathed
quietly; her chest rose and fell so little that she might be dead.
I thought she might be awake, too, and I wondered what she was
thinking.

I turned my head away and sighed, as quietly
as I could in case Miriel was indeed awake and listening to me. It
was a sigh of acceptance, an acceptance that I could feel ebbing
and flowing, coming on more strongly now in my exhaustion.

Even if I could escape the Duke—unlikely,
and the idea of his anger made me shudder—there was nowhere for me
to go. An orphan had no prospects, and an orphan girl had even
less. If I went onto the streets, I knew where I would end up. In
the taverns on the road, I had seen girls only a little older than
me, and some who might be twenty but looked older than Roine. I had
seen the deadness in their eyes.

But—my mind went round and round—how was I
to be an assassin? I had only ever held a knife to cut ropes or
brambles. I had never learned to fight with a sword, my
archery—learned only to scare the mountain cats away from our
flocks—was passable at best. I did not know anything about making
poisons, only that certain herbs should not be eaten. I knew how to
walk quietly, and hide in the shadows, but it occurred to me that I
had only ever done so in a drafty old castle where I was an
unwanted child. Now I was in a castle full of curious stares, with
the Duke’s own sigil embroidered on my shirt and my tunic.

I scrunched my eyes shut and berated myself.
If I had been smarter, or simply less willfully stupid, I could
have foreseen that this was why they wanted me. Now that I knew, I
could see that Temar had told me—twice. I could have failed in my
lessons and they would have found another girl to accompany Miriel.
I would be at home with Roine, and everything would be as it had
been, as it should be. That could have been mine if only I had had
the good sense to appear as stupid as the Duke expected me to
be.

But how could I have known, until it was too
late? I comforted myself with that thought. What little girl had a
bodyguard? What danger could she possibly be in, to merit such a
precaution? The Duke was not stupid, he never did anything without
careful thought, and so…he must know something I did not. I
shuddered. Still, I shook my head at the notion. How could I have
believed, even if I had guessed, that I would be a spy before I was
fourteen years of age? It was beyond belief, it was ridiculous.

And—my heart gave an unexpected twist—if I
had pretended to be stupid, I would never have learned to read. I
would have been stuck in the Winter Castle all my life, with no
idea of books, or trade, or history. I would never have learned
mathematics, either, although I thought that I might not miss
accounting so much. I realized now that I could not go back, I
could not bear to go back.

I sighed again and squared my shoulders at
the ceiling, set my jaw, crossed my arms. I was here, for now. I
was stuck with a girl who hated me, for now. I could not see any
way out. But that was now, and not four months past, I had been a
girl who was a nobody. Now I was a girl the Duke of Voltur knew by
name. Who could say what could happen in the future?

Chapter 11

When I was very little,
Roine swore I was an impossibly practical child. She said I had no
sense of the fantastical, no appreciation for the lore of life. She
despaired of ever telling me bedtime stories without me
interrupting, for I insisted on asking why—
why
did the prince go into the
dragon’s lair,
why
did the woodcutter go into the enchanted wood?