Shadowforged (Light & Shadow) (27 page)

“Not even for the rebellion? Not if it would save the rebellion and bring you back to him?” Miriel blanched. Then she straightened and shook her head, confident once more.

“Not even for that. He’d do anything else for the rebellion, but he never would have sacrificed Garad’s life. He has too much honor for that. He’d go to Garad and plead openly for the rebellion, and go to the block as a traitor, before he’d have hurt his friend.”

I shrugged. “Maybe.” At her furious, red-eyed glare, I relented. “Alright! I don’t think it of him, either. It’s not him I fear. But I’m telling you, it doesn’t add up.” Miriel softened, and then leaned against the wall of the carriage. She had barely slept in days.

“We’ll be back soon,” she said. “My uncle has to bring us back. And then I can ask him. Yes, Catwin, I’ll ask him. Are you happy now?” It was the first touch of her temper I had seen in days, and I was in no mood to respond to it. At my noncommittal shrug, Miriel gave a little sigh and looked out the window once more.

“We’re getting into the foothills,” she said, and I craned to see the gentle swell of the land, belied by the sharp slabs of rock that thrust out of the ground all around us. The Voltur Mountains were an unforgiving home.

I felt a strange pain, to see this familiar land. It was not that I disliked it, or that I feared it. I had been born and raised here, looking out over the land and seeing the world in the piercing sunlight above the clouds. I had weathered the mountain storms and endured the bitterest of winters here, and I fancied that my heart sang to see my homeland. No, the hurt stemmed from the fact that I knew, beyond doubt—in my very bones—that I no longer had any place here. In truth, I was not sure if there was anyplace left that I
did
belong.

Chapter 27

The wind whipped around the edges of the castle, moaning as if it could call the warmth out of our very bones with its ceaseless wail. I shivered and stirred the fire, repeating to myself for the thousandth time that I hated mountain winters. I never said it out loud, for it sounded soft to my ears—a plains girl, a city girl, might complain of such things, but a mountain girl had no business being so weak. I told myself that as I lay awake each night and gritted my teeth against the sound of the wind. It never stopped, it never relented of battering itself against the castle walls; I thought sometimes that I might go mad.

Three months. Three months stuck in this Godsforsaken castle at the edge of the world, with only sorrow and loneliness for our companions. Between the moan of the wind and our nightmares, we hardly slept, and our waking hours were spent in constant fear of border raids. Our seventeenth birthdays—Miriel’s, a feast with strained good cheer, and mine, a sweet roll and a hug from Miriel, and an extra round of duty on the walls from the Lady—had been tainted by the threat of war. It did not matter whether or not Kasimir had sent the King’s assassins—war was coming, inexorable, catching all of us up like a wave, to batter us against our foes. We saw the guardsmen carried back bleeding, and we heard the clash of steel carried eerily on the wind. We knew. Sometimes, I wondered if we had been sent here to die on Ismiri swords, tokens to sympathy for the Duke.

And—worst of all—at last I understood the cruelty of the Lady’s exile. I did not miss the whispers and spite of the Court, but I, too, now knew the loneliness of moving from the ceaseless bustle of Penekket to the utter isolation of the mountains. If there was no intrigue, well, there was no laughter, either; the halls of the Winter Castle were dark and deserted. There were no spiteful whispers at dinner, but that was because there was no one at all in the hall save Miriel, the Lady, and the few servants who attended them. There were no sly servants looking for silver coins when they brought bathwater, and pouring secrets into your ear for another copper, for there were no secrets to whisper, and the servants gave no special service. Everyone in the Winter Castle did their duty, no more, and no less, and they did it with the dull eyes I had recognized from those who are simply trying to survive. There was nothing to fight for here.

Miriel and I had arrived here in shock, terrified of the faceless enemies we had made and grieving the death of our King. I was consumed with guilt. Now that he was dead, I could not stop picturing the mischievous smile of the boy we had met, disguised, in the hallway. I remembered, with awful clarity, the way his face lit up when he described his Golden Age; uncomfortably, I recalled how Miriel and I had laughed at his grandeur when he named the Meeting of the Peacemakers. An act of monstrous vanity—yes, it had been that. But Garad had kept to his ideals in the face of interference by his Council. And in the end, he had seen the pain he had caused Miriel.

Miriel, never before overly devout, had spent the first days of our stay in the little chapel. It was freezing cold there, and Father Whitmere still scowled at any sinners who might dare cross the threshold. But Miriel went, and she knelt before the altar and stayed there for hours, her face upturned, her thoughts and her prayers locked away inside her head. I went with her, but there was no comfort for me in facing the Gods. When I prayed, the words were bitter in my mouth. I could not help but believe that it was my tangled fate that had brought the King to his death, and Miriel’s maidservant as well. If ever I could have forgiven the Gods for giving me the fate of betrayal, I could not forgive them the death of innocents.

By silent agreement, Miriel and I never spoke of this murder attempt, just as we had barely spoken of the last. Each of us could reason well enough, we could name those who would have wished the King dead, and we could name some who would have wished us dead. What I did not understand—what I could not understand—was who, other than Gerald Conradine, would have taken the chance to have both the King and Miriel killed. Surely Kasimir would not have cared enough, and that went for Nilson as well. Nilson, indeed, had no reason to suspect that if he killed Garad, Wilhelm would provide him with the soldiers he needed to fight the rebellion. The High Priest, even if he were brutal enough to kill Garad—and he had loved Garad like a son, I had heard his grief when he saw the boy’s body—would have wanted Wilhelm to have a wife who would affirm his devotion to the rebellion. Guy de la Marque might have wanted Miriel dead, but why would he have sacrificed a tenuous hold over the King for no hold at all over Wilhelm? And Isra might likewise have sent those soldiers for us, but she would never, never have killed her own son.

Round and round our thoughts went, but there was never any conclusion, save the worst one: that it had been Gerald Conradine, with Wilhelm himself as an accomplice. As the weeks wore on without a single letter from the capitol, without the tiniest whisper of new information, I found that I was torn between my surety of Gerald’s guilt, and the uncomfortable prickle of Donnett’s words, spoken months ago:
the one who betrayed ye is one ye wouldn’t suspect.
Would Gerald have acted, knowing that Wilhelm would be the first one suspected of murder? Would Wilhelm have snatched at the chance to save the rebellion, and known to kill us before we could name him?

I never spoke those words to Miriel. We had little enough chance to talk during the days in any case. The Lady wished Miriel to be at her side, and she had ordered me away from her presence. I was commanded to join the Guard, walking rounds on the windswept walls, and although none of the guards were quick enough to have caught me if I had decided to abandon my work, I did each round I was assigned, stubbornly gritting my teeth against the bitter cold. I wondered sometimes if this was part of the guilt I carried for the Lady’s loneliness, understanding it as I did, or if I walked these walls because I felt close to Aler here. I had asked after the burly guardsman when I returned, and was met with a sad smile.
He died, lass, a year or more past. Didn’t you know?
I had not. And I had never gotten to say goodbye. When I walked my rounds, it was as if he was there at my side.

Although I was banned, also, from sleeping in Miriel’s rooms, I always found my way in and we lay in silence together in the darkness. Sometimes we told each other of our days, making a dry joke of the monotony; it was one of the only times we smiled. As the days wound on, and our link to the Court began to fade, I noticed the strangest thing: even as we sank into dull routine and hardly spoke—for what was there to say?—we turned to each other for comfort. We had become allies in the face of danger, and we had weathered countless more threats, always pursuing the goal of triumphing over our enemies at court and becoming players in the game, instead of pawns. Now that our goal lay irrevocably out of reach, and there was no game to play, we still faced the world together.

So it was that when soldiers arrived from the Duke, I found another guard to take my round and ran for Miriel. She and her mother were already receiving the Guard Captain as he gave them the Duke’s message, and it was only Miriel who saw me lurking in the shadows and gave me a tiny nod. I went to wait for her in her rooms, and it was not long before I heard her running down the hallway to me.

“We’re to go back to Court,” she said breathlessly. “He’s moving mother to a castle on the plains, and we’re to go back. But the man didn’t know anything more than that.” We stared at each other for a moment, and then to my surprise Miriel came closer and perched on my chair, leaned to whisper into my ear as if this was the deepest of secrets: “You don’t want to go back, either, do you?”

I drew back to look at her, shocked beyond belief to hear such a sentiment from her. “Don’t
you
?” I whispered back, and after a pause, she shook her head.

“Not…really,” she admitted, in a rush. Now I wondered just what it was that she had been thinking over, in her long hours spent in the chapel. “I mean—I don’t know. I do. I want to see Wilhelm.” Her face warmed at the thought, but she bit her lip. “But I don’t want to face them again. All of my dreams for Heddred since I was a little girl—I didn’t realize it then, but all of it leads to the rebellion. I know I need to be at court to change things…but to be at court is to see everything I despise. They’ll hate me when I come back and hold power over Wilhelm, too. Anything he does will be compromised by it. I know that I have to fight for what’s important, but Catwin, I hate it. I’ve always hated it.” I remembered her passionate outbursts to me when she had realized she was her uncle’s pawn, her sheer exhaustion at maintaining the charade of love in the face of a Court that wanted to see her fall to nothing.

“We could run away,” I said, the old litany. She smiled at me, and leaned her head on my shoulder.

“Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But I don’t want to go back, either. There’s nothing…good, there.”

“We’ll make it good,” Miriel promised me. “And we’ll find out what it is you want.”

“I want not to have this stupid prophecy about me,” I said promptly, and she smiled.

“I have to get back to my mother. She says you’re to pack my things.” I sighed.

“She would. I’ll start.”

I struggled with Miriel’s gowns for most of the afternoon, swearing at the billows of fabric and trying to determine how to wrap what little jewelry Miriel had brought with her. At length, the gowns had been fit into her two trunks; I rather suspected that whatever maid unpacked these would be horrified, but I had done the best I could. All in all, I was rather pleased with myself by the time Miriel returned.

I knew at once when I saw her that something terrible had happened. There were tears in her eyes, and her face was blank. She was stunned, she walked as if numb, one hand trailing along the wall to hold herself up.

“I’m to be married,” she said. “One of the guards gave me this, to give to you. It was from Donnett, and…I opened it.” I shrugged. I would have shown it to her in any case, as she had always shown me her letters from the High Priest. “It says I’m to be married.” The paper was shaking in her hand, and I knew without asking that her marriage would not be to Wilhelm. I went across the room and took her hands in my own.

“It will be okay,” I promised her. “We’ll find a way out of it. I promise. Wilhelm will put a stop to it, maybe.”

“He won’t,” Miriel said. I could hear a sob lurking at the back of her throat, and all of a sudden I knew the rest of the news. She said it anyway. “He’s married. He was married last month. To Marie de la Marque.” And with that, her face crumpled. It was the first time I had seen her cry. She had been passionate, she had yelled and screamed that she could not bear her life; she had been exhausted, and despairing, and on the verge of tears. Certainly, she had been terrified into tears when we were close to being found, in the wardrobe all those weeks ago. But she had never once broken down and cried out of grief.

Now she sobbed, and I wrapped my arms around her and held her and felt tears in my own eyes. I found myself praying, angrily—had she not suffered enough? Had she not paid, in fear and pain, for every lie she had told?

My prayers, such as they were, turned to curses. As we made ready for the journey home, Miriel propped up with wounded pride and little else, I realized that there was nothing, now, for me to lose. What could the Gods do to me that they had not already done? They had threatened me with death, they had let innocents die, they had allowed Miriel to be beaten to within an inch of her life and poisoned. I knew my fate, and I knew it to be a bitter fate no matter how pious I might be. Why should I swallow down my anger and hope that they took pity on me?

So I cursed them when I saw Miriel’s exhausted determination, the same lost expression I had seen when we set out for Penekket the first time. I cursed them when I realized that I would be returning to the Duke’s service as he played whatever game he had formulated, and I would be set against Temar—the man I might have loved, the one thing I might have told Miriel I wanted. I cursed them as we rode down the winding mountain path and through the village; I did not look around me, and I did not look back. I looked around at the thawing prairie and I swallowed down bitterness so that I did not say the words aloud, and at my side Miriel rode through the half-frozen wasteland like a little ghost.

And then one day on our journey, the sun broke through the clouds and the roads became nearly impassable. For the first time since she had told me the news of Wilhelm, I saw Miriel smile; we had stopped, to pull one of the carriages free of the mud, and she and I had gotten out to stand in the fresh air. Miriel was looking up at the sunlight and feeling the breeze on her skin, and I saw her face lift out of fear.

“Can we ride?” she asked one of the guardsmen, and he shrugged. There were spare horses, he said, and if we thought we could master them, we could ride along. His tone said that he did not think much of our chances, but he was too tired to care, and Miriel agreed eagerly. When the carriage was free, we were both lifted into the saddle, and we set off in the fresh air.

I watched out of the corner of my eye as Miriel’s mood lightened. Her fingers eased on the reins and she rode with an air of contentment. As we cantered, she began to sing, and threw a smile over at me: her trademark invitation. My voice, light, untrained, joined with her smoky alto, and we sang of winter nights, and summer days that seemed very far away.

Then Miriel glanced around, wrinkled her nose mischievously, and launched into a tavern song so bawdy that even I had only heard it once before. My voice faltered; I looked ahead at the Guard Captain. He was in close-headed conference with one of his men, he was paying no attention to us; he would have no story to carry back to the Duke. All around us, the guardsmen were smiling, in on Miriel’s joke. I laughed, incredulous, and then sang along recklessly. As soon as the Guard Captain turned his horse, Miriel changed the song, without a falter, without a changed note, and we were singing a song of harvest when the man fell in with our party.