Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) (7 page)

But then I thought of her
face when she had stared down the Duke, and I remembered his
words:
there are those who wish to see my
plans thwarted
. I thought that maybe Aler
was right, that what the Lady had been fighting for was to keep
Miriel with her. I thought of the way her mouth twitched every time
she walked out into the cold of the courtyard, how the braziers
burned hot and close in her tower rooms, all the year
round.

I took another sip from the flask, and this
time I let the brandy roll in my mouth before swallowing it. Aler
was right. Why keep the score, why even remember the Lady, when the
cold and the loneliness would kill her for me?

Aler never knew it, for I never spoke to the
man again, but he taught me as much about being a Shadow as Temar
ever did.

Chapter 6

My lessons with Miriel’s tutors were,
mercifully, halted in the preparation for leave-taking, and for
five blessed days I woke with the knowledge that I did not have to
steel myself to the pain of a wooden rod, school my face to show no
resentment, and face the unavoidable spite of the Lady. I saw some
bruises deepen, and others fade, and I was glad enough to be
allowed to spend my days with Roine, out of Miriel’s company.

We were far from idle, for by the Duke’s
order, Roine would accompany us to Penekket, and that meant that
the contents of her tower must be packed. I half-expected her to
revive her protests against going, but she never again spoke of it
to me. She only set to her work with her usual quiet efficiency,
and I, my shoulder growing less sore by the day, helped her.

I owned nothing more than a change of
clothes, and so there was nothing for me to pack, save Roine’s
possessions. She oversaw the preparations calmly, making sure that
her books were strapped together and wrapped in oilcloth before
being placed in iron-bound chests, her instruments placed carefully
in crates filled with straw. I cleaned beakers and wrapped them,
made sure that the books were organized by topic, and Roine checked
my work with her usual sad-eyed smile.

When we had finally cleaned the room of
Roine’s belongings, we hauled the big table and her shelves into
the center of the floor and I was given a big broom. I set to work
sweeping the years’ worth of dust from the edges of the circular
room, digging the bristles into the cracks between boards, and
dumping the dust out of the deep-silled windows. The windows were
cleaned as well, and the sills rubbed with oil against the winter
damp, Roine calling out panicked cautions as I scrambled up the
sills, the windows beside me open to the steep drop down the castle
walls, and I laughed and called back that I would never fall.

One of our last tasks was to prepare the
room for the next healer. One would be sent from Penekket, the
steward had said, but in the meantime the people of the castle
would be quite without aid, and this offended Roine deeply. No one
would have known it but me, for she only allowed herself a few
choice words about poor planning, and the irresponsibility of
nobles, and those were spoken quietly in the seclusion of her
tower. Her outburst over as quickly as it had begun, she set to
work creating an extensive kit that might be used to treat basic
injuries until the new healer arrived.

At her direction I folded clean cloths and
laid them beside a basin for hot water, rolled strips of linen for
bandages, and wrote labels for jars of herbs and ointments that she
was leaving behind. Scraps of paper were tied to each jar,
detailing the uses and dangers of each herb, and I, who had been
Roine’s informal assistant with some patients, was inclined to ask
a great deal of questions.

“
Why aren’t you leaving any
valerian?” I asked, proud that I could read the labels and
recognize the lack.

“
Valerian is difficult to
use,” Roine said. “The new healer will collect their own, I am
sure, but to leave valerian in the hands of the untrained would be
to invite trouble.”

“
What would
happen?”

She looked at me gravely. “The patient could
die, Catwin.”

“
But valerian eases pain,”
I said, not comprehending.

“
An herb may do many
things,” Roine said. “Valerian eases pain, but it also brings
sleep. Too much, and the sleeper will never wake again.”

I looked down at the small
jar of herbs in my hand, and found that it was shaking slightly. I
had watched Roine mix countless potions and bind countless wounds.
Sometimes, when the wound was not urgent, she would let me measure
out the herbs, counseling me to be careful. I could hear her
familiar refrain in my head:
no more, no
less
. But I had never known what that
meant. I thought that a potion was like a puzzle: when the pieces
fit, the potion worked, and when the pieces did not fit, well, no
harm was done.

Roine smiled reassuringly, as if she knew my
thoughts. “I will guide you when we work together, Catwin. I will
not let you mistake the dose.”

I bit my tongue and kept working. Roine knew
more of the world than I, and if her assurances rang hollow to me,
well, I had more important matters to think over, one in
particular. The question had burned in my mind, all through the
careful packing, through the loading of the carts and the cleaning,
through the travel preparations with the guardsmen and the
servants. It hovered on the tip of my tongue, threatening to spill
out every time I spoke.

The question did not lie only in my heart.
It planted itself in my head and then it spread, to everyone I
touched, and to everyone each of them touched. It grew its spidery
legs through the whole castle, until in everyone’s eyes, I could
see the same words hovering. They asked it of me without speaking,
as if I were one to know the answer, as if I could tell them
anything that they did not already know.

I never considered asking the Duke. He would
tell me when it suited him, and so he either did not think that I
should know, or he did not care—and either way, I knew better than
to press him. I had thought I might ask it of Roine, but every time
I tried to do so, I thought better of it at the last moment.
Something in her eyes told me that the answer saddened her. Aler
knew something of it, too, I thought, but whatever he knew, he kept
well-hidden and disclaimed it loudly; I think now that he only
guessed, and hoped that he was wrong.

With none of them to ask, I was left with
three unpleasant options: first, to ask the woman who despised me
above all others, the Lady. If I could weather the storm of her
displeasure, I thought she might let slip some useful information.
On the other hand, the bruises all over my body were vivid
reminders of why I should keep my distance. I had a faint notion
that the Lady was distressed by Miriel being taken from her, and
that asking her might cause her some pain, but then I remembered
Aler’s words and resolved to leave her in peace—at least, as much
peace as she could have.

The second option was to ask Temar. I
yearned to talk to him, not only to know the answer to my question,
but simply to be near him, to see his smile when he greeted me, to
have him devote his attention to me for a moment. And yet, I shrank
from him. I knew that Temar knew the Duke’s plans, and that he was
party to them; there was a strange, vague awareness that this was a
game, and Temar was not on my side. I knew that Temar was watching
me for the same qualities the Duke sought, and I wanted desperately
to know what those were—and was also afraid to hear them
spoken.

This left the most unpleasant option of
asking Miriel herself. Whatever this strange journey, the bizarre
experiment of teaching me reading and writing and history and
arithmetic, whatever it meant that Roine was to come to Penekket
with us and keep me safe, Miriel was somehow caught up in it.
Indeed, I was not fool enough to believe that I was the cause.
Miriel was the cause, she was the lynch-pin of all of this, and I
was the one who was caught up in it.

The Duke would not have told Miriel his
purpose, it would never have occurred to him to do so. She was my
age, only fourteen years old, and the Duke did not trouble himself
to ask our permission for whatever he intended to do, nor even
explain in advance what that might be. But the Lady might have said
something. She went around with her eyes red and swollen, snapping
orders at the servants, quick to criticize the littlest thing, and
there were tears behind her harsh words. That she did not want
Miriel to go was plain enough. But might she have said something?
Instructed the girl to disobey her uncle? Might she have let slip
just what the Duke intended?

If we were caught up in this together, I
reasoned, I might have a chance to speak to her. I hated the
thought of going to her with a question, admitting that I knew
nothing, but she was in this as much as I. She might answer.

I chose my time, and chose well, because I
had taken Temar’s latest lesson to heart. He had drawn me aside, as
I was preparing to leave, and had said, “I have a task for you,
Catwin.”

I had smiled up at him, basking in the
feeling of his gaze on me. “What is it?”

“
You remember how I asked
you to follow the Duke?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“
This is more difficult,”
he had said with a smile.

“
I can do it!”

He smiled at that. “I know you can, little
one. I want you to follow the Lady Miriel this time.” Across the
room, I saw that Roine had gone very still. I looked at her, then
back to Temar, who behaved as if he had not noticed.

“
I can do that,” I said
scornfully.

“
Here’s the hard part,”
Temar said seriously. “The Lady will beat you if she finds out. You
know this.” My face must have changed, for Temar took hold of my
shoulders. “So you must be very careful. You must know which
servants report to the Lady, and you must not let them see you. You
must watch Miriel without anyone realizing that you are doing it.
Can you do that for me, Catwin? Will you be safe?”

When he asked, I stared at him wide-eyed,
terrified into silence, and too proud to tell him that I wanted
nothing to do with this new assignment. Watch Miriel? Here? Then,
with foolish bravado, I had decided to do what I could. I would be
away from the Lady soon enough. I would risk it. What I would not
risk was Temar’s disappointment.

“
Yes,” I said, and he
smiled at me.

And so, I had watched Miriel carefully. It
was there, in the flurry of our leaving, that I noticed the first
strange thing about Miriel: she never truly smiled. She followed
the Lady about with her beautiful face grave and composed, like a
child playing dress up; she studied the Lady’s expression, always,
before she made one of her own, and when the Lady turned to see
what her daughter was thinking, she always saw a little mirror of
herself.

When the Lady scowled at a mention of a
rival family at court, Miriel narrowed her eyes and set her little
mouth in a miniature pout. When the Lady was pretending to look
interested in something the Duke had to say, about trade or the
paving of the highways, Miriel tilted her head and leaned her back
in a tiny copy of the Lady’s feigned emotion. When I saw Miriel
nodding gravely as she listened to a discussion of the High
Priest’s new teachings on the Gods-given rights of Kings, I had to
stifle my laugh into my hand, crouching as I was in the shadow of a
curtain. Even the Duke would not have been amused at that.

Miriel was a consummate actress, clever and
exact in her mimicry. But when the Lady smiled, startled into
laughter by some story of exploits at court, Miriel’s face could
barely follow the motion. Her mouth stretched wide, and her eyelids
crinkled, but her eyes were pools of black, falling away, a
bottomless pit. Even if the Lady’s laughter was cruel, or mocking,
Miriel could hardly mimic it. And when she walked on her own, as
she did more and more often while we prepared to leave, her face
fell into a faraway look of sadness.

When I realized that she did not smile, I
found myself thinking back on our lessons, on the times she had
laughed, or so I thought. I thought of her perfect little giggle,
and I realized that Miriel had never once truly laughed in my
presence. She made the sound because she had learned to do so,
because she had been taught, but there had been nothing behind her
eyes. If I had not been distracted by my pain, then, I would have
seen the strain behind the motion. I would have noticed the vague
confusion whenever she smiled at her tutor, as if she had learned
to mimic him but did not know what she was doing.

I could not think what this meant. I could
not understand it. So I tucked it away, to think about, and I
followed her, noting when she would slip away from her governess
and her maids, fall back out of her mother’s train and walk down
side corridors. I waited until after dinner one night, and then
shrank into the shadow of a doorway, waiting for her.

I heard the swish of her gown as she turned
the hall, the quick patter of her feet that faded as she realized
she was not being followed. Then I stepped into her path. I gave a
little bow, as a servant should do, and Miriel stared at me with
her eyes narrowed. Any surprise she might have felt was masked
quickly enough with anger.

“
I won’t talk to you,” she
announced. I was far from surprised by the sentiment, but I felt
irritation wash over me. We were the two singled out to go to
Penekket. One would think that she would be as curious as
I.