Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) (38 page)

“
Yes,” Temar said
shortly.

“
But why should he want
war?” I asked. “Trade is beginning to prosper. The war cost them
most of their royal family.”

Temar said nothing, and I sighed at him. I
was about to say that I did not know the answer, when it popped
into my head. “Kasimir’s father was killed at the Battle of
Voltur.”

Temar leaned close. “In Ismir, there are
those who call that battle the Battle of Betrayal. Do you know
why?” I shook my head. I did not know much of the end of the war.
“Duke Dragan, Kasimir’s father, was heir to Voltur—they considered
it their land. You know that Voltur was the original seat of Ismir,
yes? It had always been contested. It looked like Ismir would win
the mountains.

“
Dragan arranged for his
troops to move through a small pass north of the battleground. They
would have circled back behind our lines and cut the men down in
the dead of night. It was a good plan, but Dragan’s advisor,
Mihail, betrayed them. Dragan’s best warriors were caught in the
pass by our archers. Dragan signed the peace treaty in return for
his life, and his brother has held to it. But Dragan killed himself
nine days later, and there are rumors that Kasimir seeks to avenge
his father by taking the land he considers to be his.”

There were the shouted cries to make way for
the King, and the clamor of his guard, and as the great ceremonial
doors opened, Temar and I slipped into the side chamber, taking our
places behind the Duke.

I tried not to look around
myself, awed, and focus on the people in the room. As always, I was
struck by how young the King appeared—until one saw his eyes. He
was hale enough now, but Garad’s recent illness was slow to leave
him,
and his rich clothes hung loose on
his frame. Even with his height, he seemed young, at best gangly
and coltish despite the proud set of his shoulders.

For once, I had the chance to look at him in
proper light, not trying to pretend that he and Miriel had privacy
in some darkened cellar. I was able to examine his face, and I was
struck by what I saw. His eyes were old. They were not handsome, or
long-lashed, or particularly expressive: they were a middling blue,
set deep in his pale face. But they were old. Those eyes had stared
death itself in the face, I thought. And worse things, I thought
wryly, thinking of the matters the Council discussed. Those eyes
had seen death warrants and torture reports, had heard the accounts
of famine and disease in his nation, rebellions against him before
he had even had a chance to rule in his own right.

I looked around at the men, each of them
puffed up with their own importance. They were ready to give
advice, and they expected it to be taken. But this was not a boy
for the ordering, I thought. Garad was no longer the sickly boy who
must take his medicine, who had no strength for political matters.
This was a young man who had seen darkness and trusted nothing. He
was a young man who had started to form his own council from the
children of those his Council trusted the least. The Council was
going to find themselves with a handful of trouble one of these
days if they did not have his goodwill, and I wondered how many of
them knew it.

Looking around at the faces of the great
Lords, I thought that some might be beginning to understand. Arman
Dolgurokov, the Dowager Queen’s brother, watched Garad with a
measuring gaze; he had been intelligent enough neither to ally
himself with any of the three generals, nor set himself forward. He
would lay low until he knew which way the wind was blowing. The
Duke watched Garad as he watched everyone: as if he would strip
away all of the masks and illusions and see his soul naked.

Guy de la Marque scanned the crowd as if he
would see where danger waited. He had the look of a man who has
found the earth crumbling under his feet. The court, willing to
accept his army with only alarmed mutters in dark corners, had
turned on him with a vengeance when they heard he had tried to
snatch up the King as a son in law. Now, faced with a warlike rival
in Ismir, and allegations that he himself had provoked the Ismiri
towards battle, his best hope was to escape this meeting
unnoticed.

“
So, my Lords.” The King’s
voice was light. “It is time to compose a formal message of
condolence to King Dusan regarding the regrettable death of his son
and heir, Vaclav. My messenger tells me that Vaclav was found dead
by his servants, either of illness or of poison.” He paused, and
scanned the crowd. If he saw me, he gave no sign of it.

“
The more pressing matter,”
he continued, “is that Kasimir, Dusan’s new heir, has accused us
all—you, my Lords, as well as me—of murder. He is advising Dusan to
march for the border.”

Whispers rose, and the King held up his
hand. The room went silent. “I do not need you to whisper to each
other,” he said. “I need your advice to me. When I have made a
decision, all of us can return to our beds.” He gave a glimmer of a
smile. “It may be the last good night’s sleep we have for some
time.”

Hours later, I rapped at the door to
Miriel’s room, then slipped inside. As my eyes adjusted, I could
see Miriel sit up from her post in one of the chairs. She drew her
robe around her against the cold and looked at me, her face a pale
oval in the dark room.

“
Duke Vaclav died,” I
whispered. I came and sat in the other chair and propped my boots
on the fender. “He was King Dusan’s heir.” A terse nod from Miriel
showed that she remembered this.

“
Murder?” she asked, in a
whisper, and I felt a brief pang that a girl of fifteen, woken from
sleep, should ask about murder as if it was an expected part of
life. But I nodded back.

“
Everyone thinks so.
Everyone says it would be Kasimir, the new heir, only Kasimir was
the first one to say it was murder. He’s saying it’s
us.”

“
Was it us?” There was no
horror, only interest. She asked, knowing full well that she was
expected to marry the man who might have ordered such a
thing.

“
I don’t think
so.”

“
What will the King do?
What does he
want
to do?” There was a good deal of bitterness in her voice,
more than the question warranted, and I frowned at her. She looked
down at her lap. “Now that I know I must say what he wants to
hear.”

I did not respond to the sentiment. She had
been a fool to think differently, and she was realizing that now;
it did no good to comment on it. “He still wants peace,” I said.
“His councilors are urging war. Guy de la Marque’s forces are still
close, they could be on the march with the royal army within a
week. The Duke doesn’t like that it’s not his command and his men,
but he doesn’t trust Kasimir.”

“
Garad won’t go to war,”
Miriel predicted. “He didn’t want to, and now they’ve told him to
do it, he’ll be set against it. He’s always hated how the three
generals fought on the Council, he says war is the worst thing for
a nation.”

“
We had better rest,” I
said, reaching out to help her to her feet. “And you be on your
guard. The stakes have gone up again, and the Duke will be having
you watched. He’ll be planning a way for you to play this; he’ll be
working on a way to keep you in the King’s eye so no jumped-up
lordling with a talent at war and a pretty heir catches his
attention.”

“
Like he did, himself?” she
asked, with a flash of her dark humor. I did not smile.

“
Exactly like that,” I
said.

Chapter 32

Time passed with agonizing slowness. It
seemed that the courtiers hardly dared to breathe as they waited,
each day, for a messenger riding hard from the west. After so many
centuries of war, border skirmishes and misunderstandings that had
turned to outright battle and destruction, the courtiers could not
help but think that war was inevitable. Garad might stave it off,
but he could do no more than that; no one could do more than
that

Months turned slowly, and spring came and
went. The Dowager Queen, who had first commanded that the Court go
to services twice daily to pray for peace, gave way in the face of
the muted panic she saw in the nobles. She no longer assured them
that their prayers would keep war from Heddred—now she organized
parties and banquets where the ladies danced as the spirits of
spring, or paid tumblers came to delight us all with their skills.
Even she, that most grave and pious woman, was trying to distract
everyone from the looming specter of war, and even she could not do
so: as soon as the tumblers departed and the last strains of music
faded, eyes turned fearfully to the empty throne, to the doors, to
the pages waiting in the corners. Nothing could keep the fear at
bay for long.

Summer dawned, and still the country
teetered on the brink of war. Messengers seemed to come and go
daily, but no one knew what news had been brought. No one knew what
to do at all. The members of the Council were most often absent
from dinner, and when they were not they sat at their places
looking drawn. In response to relentless queries, they would say
only that the King had everything in hand, and the Court should
rejoice and make merry; that they themselves did not believe it was
clear, and the Court grew more and more afraid each time they heard
the lies.

The most lively portion of the court was the
maidens, who continued to dress finely and dance prettily, but even
they knew enough to speak quietly at dinner and appear grave for
the Dowager Queen. There was little laughter, there were no toasts
or cheers. Everyone’s eyes flicked up to the royal table, as if
they might gauge the mood of the royal family. The maidens were
caught, expressly commanded to enchant a King who was most often
absent, and who, when he did manage to come to dinner, refused
absolutely to speak of the issue at all.

The courtiers petitioned, but Garad refused
to comment on the situation publicly, beyond an initial assurance
that the peace held. When he came to dinner he sat, perhaps looking
grave and drawn, but serene. He would speak to his mother, who,
having at first been calm, and then forcedly cheerful, now looked
as if she might have been carved from a block of ice.

Garad would also lean to his left, to speak
to the envoy. That man looked harried, more afraid even than the
courtiers, he looked as if he expected a knife under the ribs or
poison in his food, and he ate his dinner each night without
looking out at the hall, where every pair of eyes watched him with
mistrust and avid interest. The maid I had hired to spy on him told
me that a candle was always burning in his study, that even when
she came at dawn to take his laundry away, he was working, and that
his manservant went everywhere in their chambers with dagger, ready
to defend his master. The envoy was worn down with the strain of
trying to keep his country at peace, and he was terrified.

Messengers came and went every day, riding
hard and being escorted directly to the Council chambers.
Messengers set out from Penekket, proclaiming the king’s innocence
in Vaclav’s death and asserting, with stilted formality, that House
Warden would be forced to respond decisively to any accusations.
Just as often, messengers arrived from Ismir, often escorted by
guardsmen from Voltur, and what they said, no one knew. The members
of the Council walked about with their faces like thunder, and the
rest of the court subsisted on scraps of information and
rumors.

Miriel’s conversations with the King meant
that, for the first time, I had an idea of how much Temar might be
filtering the information he gave me. I was chagrined to realize
just how much he passed on to me when I thought to ask. I could
only conclude that the Duke saw no reason to keep Miriel ignorant,
not imagining that she would have any use for such information;
with an impending war on his mind, his mistrust of his niece had
faded. I would have liked to believe that Temar was passing
information on to me of his own accord, feeling guilty for having
once told me that I did not need to know such things—I knew,
however, that Temar would only tell me, and thus, Miriel, those
things that the Duke expressly permitted.

I knew, therefore, from both the King and
Temar, that the King was desperately trying to avoid war. It seemed
that he alone believed it could be done. Dusan, like the majority
of the King’s Council, had lived through two wars between the
nations, and they believed that enmity and war were the natural
state. The envoy was quick to assure Garad that King Dusan was also
desirous of peace, but equally quick to murmur that Dusan’s Council
was as warlike as Garad’s. Kasimir daily demanded justice for his
cousin: the heads of whoever had been party to the assassination,
and, of course, the return of Voltur, to avenge his father. When
Garad demanded to know how many of Dusan’s Council agreed with
Kasimir, he was met only with silence.

“
All of them,” he whispered
to Miriel one night, his head in his hands. “Every one of them
thinks I’m a murderer and wants me beheaded, or thinks I am
innocent but would stand by and see me killed anyway.”

I knew from Temar that Garad did not lose
his temper in the Council meetings. Temar could see that the King
was not best pleased, but had never seen Garad yell, had never seen
him insult his councilors. The Shadow wondered at it, calling it
unusual in a young man, and I must work hard to keep my face
straight. However much the King might have entered into this crisis
with a vision of peace and prosperity, he was now wavering between
fear, worry, and frustration. He did not rage at his Councilors to
their faces, but he fairly shouted his anger later, as he met with
Miriel in the darkened cellar. He pounded on wine barrels and threw
up his hands as he ranted of their stubbornness, their relentless
warmongering, their belief that he was a naïve child. He had no
sympathy, and no love, for those who could not share his vision of
the Golden Age.