Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) (33 page)

“
Miriel!” I did not use her
title, but she hardly noticed. “Stop!” I grabbed her
arm.

“
Let me go!”

“
Where are you
going?”

“
Away!” She tore her arm
out of my grasp and ran again, turning down one corridor and then
another. I did not think she was looking at where she was going;
she just ran, and ran. “He wants me to be a nothing, a cipher. He
would be me if he could, but he can’t.” She was crying, I realized,
from the sob at the back of her voice. “And I can’t
do
it
anymore!”

“
Miriel—“ At last we were
alone, and I grabbed her arm to stop her. This time, she did not
pull away.

“
I can’t!” she finished in
a breathless rush. “Do you hear me? I can’t do it
anymore!”

“
Shut up!” Her face went
white. She did not even know what to say to my outburst. I lowered
my voice so that she had to lean close to hear me. “Do you have any
idea what the Duke would do to both of us if he heard you speak
that way?”

“
I don’t care!” She had
flared up, looking up at me, her fists clenched. She was as proud
as royalty. “He can do anything he wants! I still won’t do it. I’m
leaving. The longer I stay, the worse it gets. For the love of the
Gods, Catwin, someone tried to
kill
me! I have to go now.”

If I could have taken her
by the shoulders and shaken her, I would have done so. ”Listen to
me,” I said fiercely. “You can’t leave—you, he’ll hunt down. And
you
will
do what
he says. You don’t know what he can do. You think you would be able
to hold out, but I swear to you, you can’t. You’d do what he wanted
in the end.” I leaned a little closer to whisper in her ear. “And
you’d hate yourself for that.”

“
I’d hate myself knowing I
didn’t even try,” she whispered back, passionate.

“
You don’t know anything,”
I hissed back. “We can’t win against him.”

“
We could!”

“
We could win, if we chose
our time.” The words were out of my mouth before I even knew what I
was saying.

She should have laughed. I should have
laughed. It was ridiculous. But, at the same time, it was deathly
serious. Miriel had always known that she was a pawn, as any other
young noblewoman would be, but she was realizing that the game was
more dangerous than she had known. She knew that I meant what I had
said when I told her that the Duke could win; if we were to try
now, we could not ever triumph against him.

If we waited…

For a moment, she looked hopeful. She was
transformed. And then her face slammed back into the mask of
nothingness she wore almost always now. She went icy.

“
I know where your
loyalties lie,” she said coldly. I swallowed down my retorts, and
my hurt.

“
Think what you want,” I
said, as cold as she. “You still have to do what he
says.”

Her shoulders slumped for a moment, and then
she took a deep breath, drew herself up, and walked back down the
hallway towards her rooms, as if nothing had occurred. She was as
mechanical as a little doll, and she did not speak to me for the
rest of the night. She had her maid take off her gown and brush her
hair, and then she slipped into her robe and went to her bed, lying
hunched under the covers. I snuck into the room as quietly as I
could, and lay on my cot, sure that we were both awake, and
wondering what she was thinking.

I was almost surprised to find her still
there the next morning. I had expected her to flee, but she was
almost her usual self. If her charm was a bit too forced, her
smiles a bit too bright, she was nonetheless resolutely cheerful.
She was being fitted for gowns when I heard shouts outside and
looked out the window. I saw the standards of the Ismiri guard, and
my eyes widened; the envoy was here, early, causing a commotion
with his procession to the palace.

I looked over at Miriel, and after a moment
of thought, I decided that I did not think she was in imminent
danger of being stabbed by an assassin posing as a seamstress. I
let myself out of the room quietly, then raced down the stairs and
into an alleyway, arriving in time to see the envoy’s caravan roll
through.

He and his guard—small, as befitted the
rules of diplomacy—rode white horses, dressed as for a tourney in
red and gold, the colors of Ismir’s royal house. He himself wore a
suit of rich brown velvet, lustrous and expensive, but modest. This
man did not set himself as minor royalty, as he might have done. He
could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty, even to my
practiced eye—strands of grey ran through his long brown hair, but
his bearing was proud and strong. He was lean as a whip, with a
hooked nose and a thin mouth, and he was watchful, too. I sank down
behind a rain barrel as he turned his head to look down the
alleyway where I hid.

The next afternoon, Roine sent for me, and
when I arrived, I found the serving girl. She gave me a timid
smile, and I drew her to the doorway, away from Roine’s curious
look.

“
You said you’d want to
know about who came to visit him,” she said. I nodded, and she held
up one hand, fingers splayed, to count. “A man with a sigil of two
crossed spears, one of the Royal Guard and the King’s steward, a
whore from the city, a man with a sigil of a lion, and one of the
priests.”

For a moment, I could hardly speak at this
windfall of information. Then I found my tongue. “Here.” I pressed
a piece of silver into her waiting palm. “I want you to mark the
whores that come and go—if it’s always the same one, try to learn
her name and where she works. Anything else?”

“
Man with a sigil like
yours, asking me to report the same things to him. Wanted t’know
who else asked me. I said no one.”

“
Thank you.” I held up two
more pieces of silver. “You can keep telling him everything that
goes on,” I said. “I don’t care about that. This is for telling me
he asked, and this is for keeping your silence about me.” I
blinked. “Why did you tell me about him, if you didn’t tell him
about me?”

“
Didn’t think to tell me
not to, did he?” Her smile was sly. “And I’m guessing he serves the
Duke, and
you
serve the girl?” She laughed at my face. “No need to answer.
But I’d serve her afore serving him. My thanks for the silver.” She
laughed as she disappeared down the long hallway,
whistling.

“
Who was that?” Roine asked
me, and I shrugged. She frowned at once. Roine did not approve of
me spying.

“
You wanted me to help
Miriel,” I said simply, and I turned and left.

Miriel was being fitted for her banquet gown
when I returned. All of the maids were to wear white, a color that
did not suit her skin, and so she was having her gown trimmed with
sapphire blue and silver to distract the eye. I waited until the
seamstresses had taken the gown and withdrawn, and then stopped her
before she could leave the room.

“
I heard from the woman in
the envoy’s chambers,” I told her. “He’s had visits from the
Torstenssons and the Conradines,
and
one of the bishops. And I had
word earlier from the choir boy: the Head Priest has had a visit
from an envoy from Mavlon.” She raised her eyebrows at me,
unimpressed by the value of my information.

“
Your plan won’t work,” she
informed me, as if lecturing the deeply stupid. “You told me
there’s no fighting my uncle, but you don’t seem to know it
yourself.”

“
We aren’t fighting him,” I
protested. “Not now. But we’ll never be able to if we only know
what he chooses to tell us.”

She waited a moment, pondering that, and
then she said only one word: “We?” It had all of her mother’s
malice, all of her uncle’s coldness, and in a moment, she was gone.
I heard the key turn in her bedchamber door.

Chapter 28

Whatever hatred Miriel nursed for her uncle,
whatever she felt for me, or schemed for the King, none of it
showed on the night of the Winter Festival. She was radiant: a girl
on the cusp of womanhood, beautiful and rich, with the world at her
feet. One would never know, to look at her, that she feared a
violent death, that she had been bidden to ensnare the King and was
doing so with the skill of a woman twice her age, that she felt
terribly alone each day. She laughed merrily, exclaimed over the
decorations and the other maidens’ gowns, and joined her table in a
dozen toasts.

The banquet was very fine, with twenty
courses, each grander than the last. Each was carried out on golden
platters and presented to the King, the Dowager Queen, and the
Ismiri envoy. There were great haunches of venison, roasted geese,
capons, fish of all kinds, pastries and breads, a wine to go with
each dish. Pages carried bowls of rose-scented water for the guests
to wash their fingers, and serving girls walked to and fro, handing
flowers to the women; the hall was fragrant.

The King neglected his mother, leaning close
to the Ismiri envoy and talking in an undertone, prone to gesture
emphatically. The older man wore the tolerant smile of those who
know the way of the world, but at times I saw a bemused, almost
wary look on his face. He was finding that the lion cub was not a
weak, sick boy, as they triumphantly reported in Ismir; nor was
Garad a coddled baby. He was a young man with a kind smile, but
sharp eyes and a quick mind.

I wondered if there would be any way to
secure a copy of the envoy’s report to his King. This man did not
look fool enough to leave drafts of his letters lying about. I
wondered, then, if there was any way to find out from Temar,
without the assassin realizing that he was telling me. He would
only tell me about the envoy unprompted if he thought it relevant
to Miriel’s entrapment of the King.

After dinner, the maids and young men
performed a pretty dance, a masquerade with all of the men dressed
in black and the young ladies dressed in white. Never good with the
flowery symbolism of masquerades, I tried not to yawn as I scanned
the crowd. There was no undercurrent of tension here, no sense that
something awful might happen. There was avid interest, of course,
divided between the young women on the one hand—I was sure I was
seeing bets placed as to which one might become Queen—and the
Ismiri envoy, who sat in state at the head table, given a place of
honor at the King’s left hand.

Having watched the King and the envoy at
dinner, I watched the nobles now. The members of the oldest
families in Heddred, for whom the rivalries ran deepest and the
plans were laid most carefully, rubbed elbows happily enough with
the minor nobles, at court to rise a little in the world with
wealth and bargaining. The most ruthless of the plotters and spies
smiled at each other, kin for a night. The division between
plotters and pawns did not seem so wide this evening—the Winter
Festival was the happiest night of the year, friends and enemies
drank together, laughed together, and ate from the same dishes.
Each entertainment was greeted with roars of approval.

The great hall had been transformed. From
the vaulted ceiling, down to the walls, hung white silk trimmed
with gold. Candles hung above the crowd like little stars, and the
great pillars had been circled with pine boughs and ribbons. The
servants wore armbands of white and gold over their palace livery,
and the Dowager Queen was resplendent in a white gown trimmed with
pearls and diamonds.

Gifts were brought out. Each noble gifted
the King with something clever from their own land. From the Kleist
family, it was a perfect copy of the city, made of a single piece
of marble from their quarries. From the Cessors, there was a
fountain shaped out of leaping fish, wrought of gold and
aquamarines. The house of Orleans, who had the most grain in their
land, gave the King their gift baked into a loaf of bread. There
were more, pretty carved orbs of ivory, a lump of ambergris, a
massive sapphire from the Duke, mined in the mountains of Voltur.
Then the King called for gifts for all of us, and we pages arrived
to shower the tables in sweets.

Indeed, it all seemed to be going very well,
until the Queen called the young women forward to be presented.
They lined up, Miriel near the back, and a strange hush descended
over the tables closest to the throne. There was an edge to the
Queen’s smile as she surveyed the girls, and the nobles,
ever-watchful of their monarchs, could sense Isra’s displeasure.
Everyone knew that something was about to happen, something beyond
pretty curtsies and kind words, but no one knew what it was. They
quieted, still as rabbits hiding from a predator, and they
watched.

One by one, the young women walked towards
the King and the Dowager Queen, and made their curtsies. Some were
dressed very fine indeed, with ropes of pearls or golden cuffs set
with jewels. The King and Queen greeted each one courteously, and
the Queen embraced her niece, Alexandra, and smiled warmly at Marie
de la Marque. When it was Miriel’s turn, I heard a murmur from the
crowd. They had murmured so for Marie, and for poor Cintia
Conradine, who had flushed scarlet at the attention.

“
Miriel DeVere?” the
Dowager Queen asked, as Miriel approached.

Miriel dipped into a curtsy and came up
smiling, and the whole court held its breath. The mother lioness
was coming face to face with a commoner’s daughter, the rival of a
favorite. Everyone knew that the King had bowed over Miriel’s hand
when he went to the maidens’ chamber after dinner, everyone knew
that he had remembered Miriel’s name without ever having been
introduced. The King might have picked a favorite, and the court,
hungry for scandal, had not seen theater this good in years.