Shadow's End (Light & Shadow) (26 page)

“He meant to hurt a great many other people,” I pointed out, and she nodded, biting her lip. “If he
was truly kind, he would not have plotted to kill his own allies. If she had truly sought justice, she would not have sought to kill the DeVeres as well as the Conradines. He signed his own death warrant, and she signed hers. Wouldn’t it have been worse to pretend it never happened, and leave him there to plot against the throne again?”

Miriel nodded again. Then she held out the letter to me.

“This is for you,” she said quietly, and she put it into my outstretched palm. “Jeram gave it to me. It was found on Aron’s body, and the Merchant didn’t have the courage to read it until after we were gone. But it was for you. I wasn’t going to give it to you…”

I closed my eyes and felt my fingers close around the paper. “It’s from Roine,” I guessed, and Miriel nodded.

“I wanted to burn it,” she said. “I wasn’t going to tell you about it at all. But that didn’t seem fair.” She stood, awkwardly, brushing pieces of bark from her skirt. “I’ll leave you alone.” She trailed away, looking back over her shoulder, but I hardly saw her. I sat for a time, fighting the urge to open the letter, willing myself to walk back to the camp and toss it into the fire. Better never to know, I told myself. Better to let whatever mad words die with Roine, and be forgotten.

She had intended me to read this after killing Aron, after all—she had suspected that he might fail in his task, as each of her other plans had also failed. Whatever words awaited me here, they were her thoughts after I had run, when she thought that I had gone from her forever.
Even without looking, I knew that this must be her confession to me, and at last, holding the little scrap of paper, I knew why she had been so fearful when I returned. I should throw it into the fire. I should destroy it, and never know the depth of the betrayal.

But I could not. In all the nights that I had
lain awake, trying not to think of Roine, trying not to remember what she had done, I had told myself that I would never understand, that it would never make sense. I told myself that to try to comprehend madness was to seek it myself. I told myself that all of this was beyond my comprehension. And yet now I held the key to it, Roine’s own words, and I found that I could not simply cast that away.

Fingers shaking, I unfolded the paper.

Chapter 29

Catwin—

My greatest hope is that you never see this letter, for if you are reading it now, then I will have failed at my only calling in this world, and you will know me for a false friend and an enemy. And yet, as I write this, I find that my hope is also that you have survived to see this. Although I know I will spend eternity in torment for my sins, I feel that if I could only know that you had forgiven me, I could be content.

But how could such a thing be? You have run from the Court, but that will not help. You cannot survive. It is your fate to die by my hand, betrayed, just as it was foretold to me that I would one day betray the one I loved most in this world. I knew, for many years before I met you, that I would be your murderer, and that I would pass out of this world with sins on my conscience that could never be wiped away. It was a bitter fate, but I had made my peace with it—until I met you.

On the day you were born, the winds called out my name in summoning, and I went to take you from your mother’s arms and bring you back to the castle. Catwin, when your father told me what little he knew of the prophecy, I could not believe him. You were so small, and so perfect; you seemed to know me from the first, and yet you trusted me absolutely. When you slept in my arms, my heart broke. I held you and I wept, and I prayed that you were another child, unmarked by the gods.

I tried to believe that your mother had been mistaken. I tried to cast away my faith. I had not doubted the Gods, even when the priestesses had turned me out, but I doubted them as I saw you grow from an infant to a child. How could I see you, so young, so full of life, and believe that you would ever die? How could I embrace you and kiss you goodnight, and believe that I would ever lift a hand against you?

When Temar named you a Shadow, I fought him. I wanted to turn your fate to something smaller, leave you in Voltur forever, where you might be safe—but you told me that you had dreamed of your mother, Catwin, and I knew in that moment that my fate had come for me. The words she spoke laid my path bare for me, for at last I knew why I would betray you: for no lesser purpose than to bring about a better world and an enlightened age. I had watched Heddred as it was marred by the pride and greed of the nobles, and I saw that you would be the key to free us all.

I did not go willingly into the darkness; I hope you can believe the truth of it, even in the face of my betrayal. Do you remember that I begged you to run away, not once, but many times? Even if it caused me to fail in my purpose, I could not help but offer you a way out. I had not known how it come to pass that I would betray you, but it was clear to me when the moment had come at last—you were determined that you would help Miriel as she crushed the rebellion, and I could not allow that.

When you survived, I did not know what to think. I had steeled myself to betray you only once. How could I know that I would fail? I hoped that it was finished, that you would never learn what it was that I had done to you. But you were grown, beyond me now—you saw the world clear-eyed, you and Miriel had your own plots and your own schemes. And when fate called me once more, I answered it: it was I who told Jacces where you would be, it was I who agreed with him that, if anyone could name Garad’s killer and bring our plans to nothing, it would be you. You had been forged into our enemy, Catwin, and you did not even know it.

When you ran from me at last, I could only think that you knew I was your enemy. There was a relief in that—I cannot describe it but to say that, when you told me where you had run, when it became clear that you trusted me still, I felt the greatest despair I had ever known. My task was not yet finished; I must, once more, lift a hand against you.

Bitterly, to the last I do not know why it is that the Gods require your death. I do not know why it must be I who betrays you. I will never know, and I hope that you, also, will die ignorant of these things. I will pray that you may one day see that your death was the key to a greater, more enlightened world. I pray, also, but with no hope, that you will one day forgive me.

With love,

Roine

I sat in the dar
k, tears streaming down my face. I felt as if I had been bled dry; I had no more rage left in me, to throw things, to beat my fists against the ground. The grief was no longer sharp, but wrapped about me like a blanket, so overwhelming that it was all I could do to sit, and breathe. I sat until at last Miriel came back to find me. She took the letter from my hands and folded it, the gentleness of her fingers and the tightness at her mouth suggesting that she would rather tear it into tiny pieces, and then she handed me a bowl of soup and a piece of bread. She sat with me, patiently, until I realized what I was holding, and ate. The soup was cold, but I could taste none of it; I had to remind myself how to chew.

“Are you alright?” she asked me, finally. I wiped the last of the sou
p from the bowl as I considered. I did not know if I was alright. Everything seemed to have gone dark, narrowed in scope, and I could find nothing of myself—I did not know how I felt, or what I thought. Finally, I shook my head.

“No. It’s useless—meaningless. She didn’t have to do it.” I thought of her words, and clenched my hands. “She didn’t even know why, just that it was
fate
, just that the
Gods
wanted it. And so she tried to kill me—and she was wrong! The rebellion succeeded. I didn’t need to die.”

“But it was your betrayal that brought us to be allies,” Miriel observed. Even in the face of my anger, as she had left me before, she h
ad not let go of her belief. Once, it had been I who understood that we walked a piece of a great pattern; now it was I who was fearful, and Miriel who saw the path. “Maybe she had to believe that, and we had to fear for our very lives. Every betrayal brought us closer, and together, we brought the rebellion to fruition.”

“It didn’t have to happen like this,” I said, stubbornly, and Miriel
only smiled.

“You’re the Shadow,” she said. “I’d think you would be the one who believed in omens and portents and prophecies.” I only shrugged, finding it less amusing, and she sobered at once. “Catwin…” I looked over at her, and whatever she saw in my eyes, she shook her head. “Never mind. We should rest.” She took my bowl and spoon and we walked, together, back to the camp, undressing in silence in the privacy of our tent and stretching out on the bedrolls.

“Catwin?” she asked uncertainly, into the darkness.

“Yes?”
I hoped she was not going to ask about fate again, or prophecies. But she did not.

“Where are we going?” I rolled over on my side and propped my head up on my hand, and she leaned close when I beckoned to her.

“The Shifting Isles,” I said quietly, and she drew back to stare at me, her eyes wide.

“Really? But I thought…”

“I thought so, too. He always agreed that they were a myth when people said so.” I took a deep breath and rolled onto my back, staring at the ceiling of the tent. It did not seem real that Temar was dead, and yet I never forgot it; always, at the back of my mind, was the ache that he was gone, and that I would never see him smile, or hear him laugh, ever again.

But I forgot about Roine
, I always forgot what she had done, and how she had died. My mind cast it all away, time and again, and with each realization, it seemed to hurt just as deeply. It was not only guilt, as I felt for the Duke’s death, not only grief, as I felt for Temar’s, but grief, and guilt, and anger, and helplessness, all rolled together so that I could make no sense of it. I could forget everything else, but her one, hateful question:
How could you not know?
The words haunted my dreams, so that I woke gasping, soaked with sweat. How could I have been so ignorant? It had been there, before my eyes, every day.

It did not seem real to me that I could not go to her now, to have her embrace me as I cried for the loss of Temar, wipe away my tears and say something wise to make me smile and face the world with my chin held high. I did not know how to face this pain without her—the loss of Temar, the guilt at what I had done, and above all, the tangled grief of losing her. She should be the one to comfort me now; instead, she was gone, and I did not even know where her body had been buried.

In the darkness and quiet of the tent, Miriel reached out to take my hand, and we fell asleep with our fingers laced together. It was a simple comfort to hear her breathing as I woke in the morning, to know that she was still alive: not unscarred by the war, but whole, and safe. I had protected her life, at least. And when we had walked away from the Court, neither of us had had to go alone.

Indeed, we were very far from alone, for w
e rode with the Guard for three weeks. Gradually, as the fortress dwindled to a speck on the horizon, the rigid etiquette of the Court eased, and the guardsmen grew less stoic. They joked with us now, taught us their marching songs and laughed when we blushed, and shared a campfire with us at night. Miriel told them of Jeram’s exploits: the men slipping into Ismiri camps and setting the horses free, setting fire to the tents and the battle plans, and one time setting a herd of goats loose in a camp to spook the horses and chew up the tents. Whatever they thought of the rebellion, the guardsmen laughed at the thought, and I smiled to hear that my tactics had worked.

Miriel learned to put up tents and feed horses, and I learned the finer points of cooking over an open fire,
she and I laughing at the thought of the terrible cooking I had done as we made our way south, in our escape. After the sheer magnitude of the events at the Court, after the constant noise and crush, there was a solace in open sky and quiet companionship, and if we did not find an end to our grief, either of us, we had at least remembered how to smile by the time we drew close to the northern coast.

The plains of Heddred were
rich land, rolling hills carpeted in thick grass and stands of trees, the fields fragrant in the summer heat. As we traveled north, it all gave way to leaden skies and rocky hills. Twenty miles from the coast, we could already smell the tang of the salt air, and the birds pecking at the fields and eying our dinner were not pigeons or hawks, but sea gulls, and they cried constantly as they wheeled overhead. 

We parted from the Guard a few days out from the coast, sending them back against their insistence that they would stay with us as long as we wished. Miriel
had been calm, almost content, as we said our goodbyes, but her chin trembled as she watched them go, the Conradine standard fluttering proudly in the sea breeze. She had chosen her path willingly, her eyes open, but it was one thing to choose, and another to see the guards ride away from her, the last link to her former life.

W
e rode for the coast in silence, making our way past fishing towns and farmsteads alike, little outposts in this harsh land, so different from our home. The people coming out of their houses to watch us, curiously: a woman in the finely-made gown of a noble, but without jewelry, without a train or a standard; a young man, or a young lass, lanky, looking around with the sharp eyes of a soldier. At their wide-eyed stares, I wrapped my hand once more over the urn, the only thing of value we seemed to carry with us. As we rode away, down the sandy outcropping at the edge of the beach, I could see them watching us, wondering who we might be, and as we faded into the mist that rolled off the ocean, I began to wonder if we would ever see them again. It felt as if we had passed out of Heddred entirely, and we were alone in some other world now.

“They’d never believe us if we told them
any of it,” Miriel said, and I laughed to hear that she had been thinking the same thing.

“
Who you are? Where we’re going? No,” I agreed, and she turned to me, her little pointed chin held high, a few curls straggling loose from her braid.

“So?” she asked. “What now?” I looked to the ocean.

“We wait,” I said. “Wait and see.”