Shadowforged (Light & Shadow) (7 page)

“And what if
he’s
the one who tried to kill us?” I asked bluntly. “Then we gain nothing. We’re in this just the two of us. We shouldn’t tell him yet.”

“We gain nothing anyway,” Miriel said. “Except that now he’ll have a tool to destroy another rival. So you choose, Catwin. You can mistrust him, and make nothing of it, or you can mistrust him, and use his power to destroy those who could harm us.” She saw me hesitate. “You knew what you were getting into when you swore to be my ally,” she reminded me. “You knew that we would have to side with anyone we could. You knew then that my uncle might have been the one who ordered us killed, and you still agreed to be on my side. Don’t you turn coward now.”

“It’s not cowardly to think about what we should share with him and what we should not,” I protested. “
You
agreed that we were our own side, not his. I think you just don’t want to believe that he could have done it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Miriel said. She tilted her head to the side. “It would be convenient. It would make so many of our enemies the same person, don’t you think?” She frowned at the look on my face. “What
are
you thinking? You look peculiar.” She wrinkled her nose at me, and sighed when I did not respond at once.

I thought on the way she had looked on the day that she first realized that the King would not hear her advice. I remembered talking to her in the aftermath of the attempt on our lives, and the passionate intensity in her voice when she had spoken to Roine of the populist movement in the south. Miriel was quick to anger, and for a few short days, she had been quick to laugh, too; after, she had sunk deep into her misery. Her blood ran hot, not icy. Miriel was not this strange, cold woman who cared only for ambition, who made a joke of this attempt on her life.

“I think that you’re casting away everything of you,” I said slowly. “You
should
feel betrayed that your blood kin would try to kill you, you’re only pretending that you don’t. You’re playing a part, and sometimes you forget what’s you and what’s the other Miriel. You said you would be forsworn if you needed to be, my Lady, but you deny yourself every day for no reason at all.”

“Now you’re just talking nonsense,” she said. But she said it uncertainly, and when I caught a glimpse of her eyes, I could see her fear.

She was very quiet that night, and the next, and the next after that. I was pleased to have found words for the strangeness in Miriel’s eyes, but I was no less disturbed by it than she was. For, to tell the truth, I was no longer sure of myself, either—weeks of silence with Temar, careful lies to the Duke, secrets from Roine. I was no longer sure where I ended, and my training began.

Chapter 7

The Duke was well pleased with Miriel’s strategy, and he used it readily enough, but he did not thank her for it. Back from the emergency meeting of the Council, he presented her with the changes he had made to the story, the line she was to take with Garad, and the sentiments she should espouse to the court, all without a word of appreciation for her quick thinking, or his new weapons against Guy de la Marque and Gerald Conradine. The only satisfaction in his voice was at the fact that he had seen Guy de la Marque humbled by his own ward; he did not even look at Miriel as he dismissed the two of us.

I realized then that he was not pleased, because he had expected no less. He would have been quick to rail at her if she had failed, but in success, Miriel was no more than a tool. She only attracted his notice when she disobeyed, and otherwise, she was as necessary but as soulless to the Duke as his sword, or his armor. He would curse a weapon that broke in his hand, but would never thank it for its aid.

I was more offended by this than she was. Miriel bore it without a word of complaint, as if she, too, expected no less from her uncle. As our sixteenth birthdays approached, she became quieter and more thoughtful. She was less quick to anger; when we returned to her rooms after a day of lessons and an evening of dancing in the maidens’ rooms, she would sink at once into a reverie and would respond little to my queries. She studied and practiced as much as she ever had, if not more, but it only seemed to occupy part of her mind.

I would find her staring out at the night sky, saying nothing. Although she did not seem particularly melancholy, nor angry, I could see trouble in her eyes. My comment to her had hit its mark, and she had not stopped thinking about it since.

I did not chide her, for I thought that I might understand, a little, the turmoil she was in. Miriel’s true self and her mask self were close enough that it was difficult to separate the aims of the two. Miriel, speaking earnestly with the King about the necessity of preserving peace, might forget for a moment that her mask self only agreed with Garad’s beliefs on how to achieve peace; she might begin to offer an opinion that commoners be given a voice in the government. She might, when plotting our strategy with me in an evening, forget that she was not only pretending to trust and work with the Duke.

We lay awake together at night, her in her great four-poster bed and me in my little cot, and I, at least, thought on what I had expected when we came to court almost two years past. I had been so deeply afraid of being trained to kill, so determined that I could not be an assassin, that I had not thought to guard my mind from the subtle, ceaseless lies of the Court. I had hated Miriel for being the cause of my half-imprisonment here, and I had trusted Temar completely.

I had thought that I knew who and what I was. But I was learning now that I had become a shadow in my heart, obeying Miriel without knowing what drove me to do so, and lying to the only two people I would have said I loved. And Miriel had come to court despising me, she had thought me nothing more than an instrument of her uncle’s will. What she thought of that now, when she would ask my advice and take it, listen to me and plot with me, and even offer me her arm to lean on when I was hurt from my lessons…that, I did not know. I could only hope that she was as confused by our unlikely alliance as I was.

Tentatively, we came to behave as if we might be friends. We celebrated our birthdays together in the darkened receiving room once Anna had drifted off to sleep. I had begged a little fruit tart from one of the pastry chefs, and Miriel had filched a bottle of wine from the cellars after one of her late-night meetings with the King. Sitting together on the floor by the dying fire, we giggled at the memory of her brazen thievery, the wine making everything funnier.

“Happy birthday,” she said, finally, raising the bottle to me and then taking a sip. She passed it over.

“Happy birthday,” I repeated, and took a mouthful, making a face at the taste. Miriel, who drank fine wines with every dinner, gave a giggle at me, and I wrinkled my nose at her.

I had the thought, unwelcome, that by this time next year she might be a Queen. I knew not to mention it; this night was too simple to mention plots and schemes, too happy to mention her disappointment in Garad. When she curled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them, though, I knew she was thinking of the same thing.

“I hope this year is happier,” she said simply. It was as fanciful as wishing for a fairy godmother, but I lifted the bottle to her and drank, then passed it back. We finished the bottle in quiet contentment, knowing that the world waited outside, in all its malice, but that tonight, just tonight, it was not here to hurt us. Then we hid the wine bottle behind some books and crept back to bed.

Dimly, before I drifted off to sleep, I remembered my dream of my birth. My mother had spoken of betrayal, but not after the first assassination attempt—only after the second. Betrayal was a funny word, I thought. Not enemies, not disasters, not danger. At the edge of consciousness, my mind loosened with wine, it did not seem so fantastical a thought anymore, I could even accept that the poison had been the first of many. And, with the merciful absence of foreknowledge, I slipped into sleep.

In the morning, we woke to pounding headaches and a small pile of gifts. Squinting my eyes against the light, I carefully examined each package, but saw nothing to make me too suspicious. Miriel opened each carefully, and exclaimed at the beautiful leather gloves she had received from the King, monogrammed in golden thread. From her uncle, she received a bolt of silk the exact color of her eyes, and from one of the maidens, a slim volume of poems.

“Nothing from Isra,” she whispered to me with a mischievous grin.

The surprise was a gift from the Ismiri envoy: a delicate bracelet of gold with a single golden pearl. I snatched it from her at once, twisting it this way and that in the light, but I could see no residue on the metal, could smell nothing beyond the familiar tang of gold. At last, perplexed, I gave it back.

“He knows my birthday?” Miriel asked. She cast me a look as confused as my own. Was it an offer of friendship to a future queen, a calculated bet that Miriel would win out, or was it a warning? A strange warning, but a stranger gesture of friendship. Even the Duke, turning it over in his fingers later that day, only shook his head and told her to be cautious.

But there was no being cautious for Miriel: she could not afford to change a single facet of herself, with the eyes of the court on her. She danced and rode and sang as if she had not a care in world. She watched what she could, she caught sight of the looks in the courtiers’ eyes, but it was I who must watch courtiers, and note their sidelong glances, and sneak along corridors to follow them.

I watched, scared, knowing that something must happen, that—as Temar had said—there was too much unresolved in the Kingdoms. I could not say how the dice would fall. The mood of the court shifted with baffling frequency, and it was Miriel who excelled at tailoring her actions to the tiny flicker of another’s smile. I watched for long-laid plans, and the court was the distraction, the mask of those who schemed and waited.

King Dusan’s accusation, and the King’s measured response, had created a veritable storm in the court. Gerald Conradine had been loyal all this time, and none of them had known, ladies whispered to each other. How fascinating, and how unfortunate that they had all been so unkind to him. Why, he had even been more loyal than some others on the Council—they had planned for succession with the King still living, after all, and all the while Gerald had been offered the throne and had refused to plot against his rightful monarch.

It was chivalry embodied, it was dreadfully romantic: the Conradines became the focus of the court. For the first time in months, Anne wore the Conradine crest proudly, embroidered intertwined with the Warden crest. Gerald accepted the newfound admiration of the court with a satisfied smile that put me more on edge than ever before. Wilhelm was no longer the most shunned of the boys, his prowess in hunting and weaponry was mentioned often, as well as his quick mind. And Cintia, pretty Cintia, became a rival to Marie and even to Miriel. Miriel’s influence over the King might be undimmed, but Cintia was the court’s darling, the girl who had been a nobody, utterly overlooked. Now, everyone remembered how charming she was, how beautiful, how well-behaved. She was praised and feted until I thought that perhaps we had made a grave miscalculation.

The Dowager Queen watched this changing landscape with narrowed eyes. She was not an unintelligent woman, she had survived the long years since her husband’s death, looking out on the sea of insincere faces, smiling at all and trusting no one. She had not faded into the background when Guy de la Marque had been chosen as Guardian of the King, but instead held equal power. She knew better than to try to advise a boy outright against his desires, and she knew better than to trust anyone who might benefit from her son’s youth—indeed, anyone at all.

In this unpredictable time, she allowed herself to be eclipsed. She told her son that she prayed for peace with Ismir, and she was unfailingly courteous to the Ismiri envoy. She did not mention Marie’s name, but instead praised Cintia unsparingly, smiling on the girl as if she were the favorite of all the Queen’s kin. It was next to nothing to send the maidens and the boys away, and then have the ladies and their eldest daughters dance, detain the King so that he should think of Miriel but see Cintia dancing before him.

Seeing the Dowager Queen watch, and wait, I felt a flicker of unease. Better when she had been our declared enemy, when she had been foolish enough to go against the King, when Cintia had been a nobody. Too many were rising too fast for my liking.

My solace was that Guy de la Marque’s favor fell in opposition to that of the Conradines. The Court turned on him in an eyeblink. If only he had thought to tell the King sooner about Kasimir’s plot, the courtiers whispered, think how many months of tension could have been avoided! We had come so close to war, and for what purpose? Of course, the courtiers were willing to concede, de la Marque had owned up to the event so as not to ruin Gerald Conradine’s reputation—but his perpetual narrow-eyed expression suggested that he had been far from pleased to do so.

For the first time, I felt sympathy for this ambitious enemy of ours. He would see Miriel dead at his feet before he would lift a finger to save her, but then, the same could be said of the Duke and Marie. I knew that de la Marque had made his bid for power, knowing full well the capricious nature of the Court—but it was something else again to see their spite in action, and watch him bite his tongue against the very truth that the King forbade him to speak. Truly, the King was a difficult master to serve.

Even in the Council meetings, where the truth was known, Guy de la Marque had lost his glamour. Gerald Conradine’s successful command in the war made for much discussion, while the accusations about Vaclav’s assassination were set aside; like the King, the Council seemed to think that the truth was a trifling matter. Unlike the King, however, the Council was spoiling for a fight, and it was more convenient by far to believe that Dusan had lied, attempting to rip apart Heddred by sowing unrest.

So focused were they on the West that they failed to pay heed to the spreading unrest in the South. Lord Nilson, having returned to his lands, sent desperate pleas for another royal proclamation, for Arman Dulgurokov to return to his provinces as well and control his people, for the King to send troops, money, anything. While Garad fretted and the council hemmed and hawed, while Miriel sweetly advised patience with the rebellion, Nilson was becoming more and more desperate. He knew that the relative silence of the rebellion was no true peace, only an army lying in wait.

Temar told me, in a whisper, that Nilson reported that his coffers were running dry with the cost of keeping his soldiers on patrol for so long, that he feared for his own safety, even in his castle among his own servants. What, he had demanded, should come of this if the unrest were to spread into the Bone Wastes? What then? But the Council ignored him, too busy with their reminiscences of the last war, and the war they seemed to hope for. The rebellion was only peasants, they said. One mob, but that had been an isolated event. What could come of farmers, armed not even with pitchforks, but only with words?