Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) (10 page)

“
I heard she was an enemy
of her cousin Elizabeth,” I said. “One of the Duke’s men said
something about it.”

“
Anne has said that she
should have lands that are Elizabeth’s, because she descends from
Arthur and Elizabeth descends from Charles.”

“
Is that right?” I asked
uncertainly, and Temar shrugged.

“
Anne has a higher claim in
royal lineage, but the lands Elizabeth holds once belonged to the
Heimarre family, who turned out to fight for the Conradines.
Elizabeth and her husband have no true claim, but better she has
them than a Conradine.”

“
Better for whom?” I asked,
and I was rewarded by the dark gleam of his smile.

“
An excellent question,” he
said. “Think about it tonight and tell me what you think in the
morning.” And he spurred his horse up to ride with the Duke, who
was having a very serious discussion with his stewards about the
uprising in the southeast.

This left me to my thoughts, and my grudging
service of Miriel. The girl was an enigma to me, unexpectedly out
of place in a landscape that grew increasingly warm and lush. The
countryside suited her looks perfectly, and I expected the girl who
had been so cold and so miserable on the early part of our journey
to be glad of the heat, but instead Miriel seemed to grow paler and
more miserable.

I wondered what she saw waiting for her at
the end of this road. She was to be in the lap of luxury, very far
from the drafty castle in which she had been raised. She would be
attended to by servants with better manners than her companions had
ever had. She would have the companionship of the richest and most
well-bred women in the whole of Heddred. The thought did not seem
to please her, and I could not think why—nor could I ask. Her
resolute indifference to me was as much a barrier as the difference
in our statuses, and any pity I had was prone to ebb when I saw her
look of dislike at my presence.

And so I spent the journey caught between
curiosity and determined ignorance, pity and anger. I would look at
her sad profile and I would spur my horse forward to speak to her,
smile at her; catching her glare, I would feel anger flare in my
blood. Every time she would order me away from her, I tried to put
a name to why I felt so driven to protect her. It was as if, when I
looked at her, I saw someone else. I thought she was someone who
would laugh at my jokes and be a friend as Aler had been my
friend.

Why I thought so, I could not say—the first
time we had seen each other was when she had laughed at my pain in
the courtyard, and our later encounters had not been any more
promising. We were worlds apart, there was no reason that we should
ever have been close. Yet, every time I saw her, in the moment
before I remembered that she hated me, and I her, I thought of her
as a friend. And that made her studied indifference all the
worse.

When puzzling out Miriel’s character wore on
me, I watched others. I studied laughter, having noticed that she
never laughed; now I had begun to watch for it in others. In any
case, Temar had told me that I was to learn to observe people, and
so I had, most especially Roine and the Duke; Roine, because I rode
with her and loved her and wished I knew what went on in her mind,
and the Duke, because his word was my law. I did not dare watch
Temar, for fear that he would notice and laugh at my efforts to be
covert.

I watched them, and I noticed that their
faces sank into reverie sometimes, as if they forgot that they
might be being watched. Roine was inclined to look tired and sad,
and the Duke weathered and grim; when startled from such a mood,
though, their faces were a wonder to behold. One day, as we rode, a
flock of birds leapt from the field alongside us and sprang into
the air, their plumage brilliant, their calls beautiful. I watched
as the Duke stared at them, the grimness worn away to contentment
by this strange, natural phenomenon. Roine was startled to
laughter; she smiled spontaneously and clapped her

hands at the sight, then looked at me with
genuine pleasure. I forgot to smile for a moment, and only looked
at her to memorize her face; even with all that came later, it is
one of my happiest memories: the sun on her face, the smile on her
lips.

But when I looked over to Her, to my liege
lady, I saw her staring after the birds almost sadly. Still, even
in this beautiful, lush land: Miriel never smiled. She never
laughed. Oh, she made the motions of it, but never once did I see
her caught unawares, never once did she look up at her uncle and
smile, or chatter amiably with her companions. Hers was not the
face of a girl who is amazed by the world she beholds. When
startled, she would falter, but never smile.

I thought back to her giggles when I had
been reprimanded by her tutor. They were note perfect, but now I
remembered the flatness of her eyes as she smiled. She had not been
amused, or even cruel as her mother would be. Malice depended on
the amusement at one’s own cruelty; Miriel had no amusement and no
joy. She was only fourteen years old, and unable to find a smile
for a rainbow, or a fawn and its mother, or the chorus of birds at
dawn. I wondered when the last time was that Miriel had been happy.
I wondered if the truth was that she had forgotten to smile truly,
or that never known how.

So it was that the first kind emotion I felt
for the girl was pity. It was the emotion that would turn her most
strongly against me out of furious pride, but it was the only thing
that could have softened my heart to her.

Chapter 9

“
Seven gods and seven
hells,” I whispered in awe.

“
Don’t swear by the gods,”
Roine said sharply. She had been un-amused with the language I had
learned from the guardsmen that rode with us. I nipped my lip and
offered up a whispered apology, but I could not stop staring at the
vista before me.

A gentle swell in the land gave us the most
beautiful view I thought I had ever seen. I, who had grown up in
the spare beauty of the mountains, had thought there was nothing
more striking. Even the rippling fields of green and gold, while
pretty, did not move me. But Penekket was something else
entirely.

The capital was a strange city, not so much
a sprawl of buildings as two, bleeding one into another. At the
north end was the city itself: teeming with life, spanning the
river Ves. Further south, along the river, the palace itself and
the houses of the nobles, clustered to the east of the fast-flowing
water. Between them, bleeding from the palace into the city, were
the academies, the courthouses, the more prosperous banks, and
bleeding from the city to the palace were the guildhalls, the
docks, and the brothels.

Between them, Penekket Fortress rose like
something out of a fable. It was built of a white stone from the
quarries in the south so that it shone like a beacon, visible for
leagues. It was a thing of true beauty, extravagantly fashioned,
built in the brief peace of Evan III as a twisted reminder of the
wars Heddred had endured; within three years of Evan III’s death,
Penekket had been attacked once more, and the royal family became
accustomed to withdrawing to the fortress in times of war.

I stared transfixed as we approached it. I
knew from my reading that the Fortress was as deadly as it was
beautiful, the walls built smooth to keep away grappling hooks, the
arrow slits so cunningly hidden with gorgeous carvings that one
might never even see from whence the arrow came. Penekket Fortress
had withstood three attacks, all well funded, all perpetrated by
exceedingly ruthless men. All three generals had failed, and had
watched their men drop like flies in the rain of arrows, reaching
the walls only to be felled by burning oil poured from ornamental
spouts. All the while, the Fortress had sat in serene beauty, built
so strongly that even catapults had not dimmed its elegance.

King Arthur, the Boy King’s grandfather, had
known the power of the Fortress, and had respected it. His
rebellion was unexpected, quick, and ruthless. He did not fight on
the open plain and battle his way to the heart of the city. He
never made a single challenge to the Conradines; he cut them down
in their beds, as they slept. He succeeded in taking the throne,
most said, only because he had caught the royal family before they
could seek sanctuary.

He had been a cunning man, Temar told me,
never one to meet a foe in outright battle if it could be avoided,
and his son William had inherited his ruthless strategy and
adaptable conscience. William would have ended the war with Ismir
in months, I was told, if he had not been felled by camp fever. The
reign of his brother Henry, the Boy King’s father, had been marred
by Henry’s stubborn insistence on meeting foes in the open. The war
with Ismir had nearly been lost time and again, and peace had only
been won again at Voltur with the cruel tactics of the Duke.

Now, Heddred was at peace again. Freed,
faithful men said, from the warlords. Waiting, others said
cautiously—or worse, hopefully—for the warlords to return. For
sure, their Fortress sat either as a beautiful, immovable reminder,
or as a beacon. I, who had never questioned the stability of the
King’s rule before speaking to Temar, was struck by how ominous the
beautiful tower seemed. I fancied that I could hear it calling for
its long-gone masters, and I shivered.

Beside the fortress, even the gold-domed
roofs of the cathedrals and palace buildings seemed unimpressive.
They looked as if they might be easily crushed by some vengeful
giant, wiped away like a child’s play house made of sticks. I had
the thought that, were the city to be felled by a plague, the
buildings would crumble and be overtaken by the land, but Penekket
tower would rise serenely over the landscape for millennia to come,
unchanged, unbowed.

As we drew closer to the palace, a swathe of
green caught my eye. Beyond the palace to the south lay a strange
thing: a forest, but somehow orderly and neat, bounded by fences of
iron and stone. The fence itself was well wrought but formidable—I
thought that if I were to stand on a tall man’s shoulders, I would
still not nearly be high enough to climb over.

“
What’s that?” I asked
Roine, and her mouth tightened.

“
That is the forest where
the King hunts,” she said shortly. She braced herself as the wagon
jolted over the paving stones.

“
It looks…” I could not
find the word.

“
Unnatural,” she supplied.
Her face was grim.

“
How d’you
mean?”

“
Speak clearly,” she
reprimanded. The idea that I should behave like a noble was one of
the few things she and Temar agreed upon. In other matters, she
would defer to him—she never argued—but with the air of a cat that
has its claws out and its back arched. But on the matters of
manners and speech, Roine has always insisted that I behave as a
girl of good birth, instead of the orphan bastard child that I
was.

“
How do you mean,” I said
clearly, and she gave a little nod in my diction.

“
I mean that the forest did
not grow there on its own. It was built by the kings before. It is
not a true forest.”

“
I think it’s pretty,” I
said. In truth, I did not care much either way, but I wanted to see
why she disliked it. I was not disappointed. Her eyes
flashed.

“
It is a pointless
extravagance,” she said flatly. “The gold it took to build that
forest, and stock it, and tend it, and fence it in, could feed all
the poor in Heddred for years.”

One of the guardsmen looked over at us,
askance, and Roine glared back stubbornly.

“
I don’t think you’re
supposed to say things like that,” I whispered, worried without
understanding why. For a moment, neither of them backed down, they
both ignored me. Then Roine gave a small sigh and let the tension
flow out of her shoulders. She smiled at the guardsman, then down
at me.

“
Out of the mouths of
babes,” she said clearly, her voice carrying. “The King is wise and
just, Catwin. It is not for us to question him. Say you agree,
child,” she added.

“
I agree,” I said
obediently, and I was rewarded with her smile. But I thought that
deep down, behind her smiling mouth and her pleasant demeanor, she
looked just like Miriel—biding her time.

As our party moved quickly over the last few
miles, the palace gained in grandeur, and my own fear grew. Our
journey had been like an enchanted time, when I was servant neither
to the Lady nor to her daughter. I had flown free of my former
life, and for a few days it had seemed almost that I would be free
all my life, but now the city loomed up out of the plains and I
knew that I was soon to be caged inside it.

And this was no little place like the Winter
Castle at Voltur. Now I could see the sheer magnitude of it—I gazed
up at the fortress and almost shuddered at the size of that—and I
found myself scared. I had been raised in a palace…I thought. It
was the former seat of Ismir’s royal line, and I had thought it
grand.

It was nothing to this. Even the road that
led to the palace was beautiful, made of paving stones interlocked
together. It was kept neat; someone kept the weeds from it and
replaced the stones when it cracked. I thought it must take a small
army of servants, and wondered what Roine thought of that, but knew
better than to ask.

We approached Penekket from the west, with
the setting sun at our backs, and when the road branched like a
river delta—something I had seen in one of the maps Temar showed
me—we followed it south, always south. This was the road that would
lead us to the heart of the palace, and it grew finer every time we
branched away, lined with beautiful hedgerows and well-built walls.
Guards patrolled these stretches, standing deferentially to the
side and saluting as our party went past.