Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) (16 page)

I had very little time to sit and watch,
however. No matter what other duties I might have, my studies were
the most important thing. I trained and I learned every day. Every
hour that I was awake had a purpose: waiting on Miriel, or
training, or studying. My head was a whirl of thoughts from the
moment I woke up until my head touched the pillow at night, and
although I was so tired that I fell asleep as soon as my head
touched the pillow, I even dreamed of my training. I practiced
falling and sneaking, making potions, binding wounds, swinging
maces.

Gradually, I began to notice the changes in
my body. When I looked at my body in Miriel’s mirror, taking my
account of my injuries, I could see the lines of muscles under the
skin. I had more stamina as well. I had come to the palace with the
energy of a child, but had been exhausted by my drills with Temar
and Donnett. Now, the weeks of dogged perseverance through pain and
exhaustion had given me the ability to keep going longer, to push
harder, and I began to notice that I was able to move more quickly,
that I was more balanced on my feet, that I could block a blow.

If I had hoped for praise, I was to be
disappointed. I might be getting better—cleaner with my forms,
quicker in my strikes, quieter as I walked—but the closest Donnett
ever came to praise was an approving grunt, and Temar’s praise came
in the form of, “Again.” If I mastered a technique, my reward was
to start learning another, and another after that, with endless
repetitions of the basics to perform every night.

Temar in particular wasted no time. For all
his easy humor, his lessons were tinged with urgency. Temar alone
knew how much I had to learn, and he also knew what was at stake if
we failed. This training was not an idle exercise: moving quietly
was essential, and striking quickly and effectively could mean the
difference between the life and death of both myself and
Miriel.

At Temar’s insistence, I
now listened to the gossip of the servants and the nobles, and so I
knew that his worries were becoming more and more specific. The
rumors—always abundant—were massing, and becoming more pointed: of
war with Ismir, tensions with Mavlon, whispers of rebellion all
across the south from the Norstrung Provinces to the southern Bone
Wastes. Servants whispered the name
Jacces
, and quieted hastily when
nobles came into earshot.

I knew that I did not know everything, for I
had only the rumors of the minor nobles and the servants. Donnett’s
words on secrets and servants rang true almost always, but the
state secrets, the most important secrets, were kept in the minds
of the tight-lipped Council members. Temar was the one who attended
late night council sessions with the Duke, and so he knew the best
information. He came to train me in the morning with his eyes
shadowed by fatigue, and somewhat more. He did not speak to me of
his fears, or of the Council meetings; I had to guess if I wanted
to know what troubled him.

Slowly, over the weeks of listening at
dinner and creeping down dark corridors after drunken Council
members, I built up my theory. Voltur was the first line of defense
against Ismir, and so the war itself would be a problem for the
Duke to attend to, if it came to that. The Duke’s own lands would
be in danger first and foremost. But for Temar, the thing to fear
was the rapid shifts in favor that a war engendered. It was the way
that the court could turn on a man in a moment, when they saw the
opportunity to snatch what was his.

The Duke had risen to nobility from his work
in the last war. He had been granted an old title and new
territories, the spoils of war, and with success he had made
enemies—not of those who fought with him, for any man who had
fought at the Duke’s side was loyal to a fault, but instead of the
nobles whose names were older, and whose purses were lighter. Those
men whispered in corners that Eral Celys, that merchant’s son,
should never have been made a Duke. He had risen higher than he
should. In war, anything could happen. Men died, and no one thought
on it. Perhaps it was time for the Duke of Voltur to have an
accident, so that his lands could be given to another.

I knew some of their names: Henry Cessor,
Guy de la Marque, Arman Dulgurokov. All were fellow members of the
King’s Council, who sought power and prestige and wealth, and
feared the influence of the Duke, who had risen from nothing to
snatch one of the choicest duchies out of their waiting fingers.
When I had asked Temar about them, he had looked at me askance, and
then assured me that all of them were ruthless men, men who could
kill and not think twice about it, and that I should never trust
any one of them.

A threat to the Duke’s safety, that alone
Temar would not fear. It was to be expected. It was the very reason
for Temar’s presence at court, and I knew that he could win a fight
against any single combatant. Likely, he could win against multiple
assailants—and the Duke was hardly helpless, himself. But the Duke
was not the only one in danger. It would not be enough for the Duke
to die, for if he fell in the King’s service, who was to say that
the King might not gift all of Voltur and more to the Duke’s heirs?
And the Duke, having no children of his own, had only one heir
before his line was ended.

Miriel.

And so Temar trained me with single-minded,
desperate intensity. He trained me over and over on the quick draw
of my weapons. I knew not only how to strike and stab, how to fight
with short and long blades, but also the way to flip a knife to
throw it, and then switch my grip back to the haft. I learned how
to adjust my throw to the balance of the knife, so that I could use
any weapon that came to hand. I was quickly becoming lethal with
the razor-sharp set of daggers the Duke had ordered made for me,
but now I could be almost as deadly with a use-blunted, battered
old blade.

I learned to shut my mouth when he taught me
a skill that seemed ridiculous, knowing that he was teaching me for
a reason. One day, Temar brought a basket full of strange objects.
I peered through the box, wondering what sort of lesson this could
be. I saw decorations, china ornaments, earthenware mugs and wine
goblets, plates, even a clock. Temar would place one just out of
reach, spin me around until I staggered, and then I must pick up
the object and throw it at a target. I had been amused at the
exercise, but the grim look on Temar’s face suggested that he found
it no laughing matter, and from that I knew that either he had won
a fight this way, or it had been used against him.

Gradually, the piece of my training that I
feared came into play. It had started subtly; after tumbling, I had
learned to drop from ten feet, fifteen feet, and land quietly. When
I had learned to draw my weapons quickly, without looking at them,
Temar taught me to draw them without even a whisper of sound. When
he saw how well I could sneak, he taught me to wrap black cloth
over my hair so that it would not gleam in the shadows.

Neither of us mentioned it. Temar’s own
silence was a dare to me, I knew, and I did not have the words or
the courage to take it. And so, by the time Temar undertook to
teach me garroting, or the use of poisons, the training had gone
too far for me to plead a delicate conscience. I swallowed my
protests and set to work, quietly ignoring the feeling that the
makeup of my own self, my very morals, was shifting while I was not
watching.

To my own disquiet, I was good at mixing
poisons. It was not a complete surprise, for I had learned the
rudiments of herb lore from Roine and her books. I knew already how
to steep leaves to release the oils inside, how to grind leaves and
shred roots, how to mix a powder and a liquid evenly. I possessed
the innate sense for proportions, and Temar only nodded at each of
my creations. He taught me his own uses of Roine’s knowledge, how
to dip a blade or a dart in poison, and how to handle it once it
had been coated in the stuff.

We practiced throwing knives that had been
dipped in a poison that would slow my muscles but not—at this
dose—cause me harm. I shredded the spike-edged leaves myself, then
marveled at the dreamy feeling that came over me when I nicked my
finger on the blade.

When Temar gave a yell and attacked me,
driving his shoulder into my solar plexus, I felt only the vague
sense that I should be feeling alarm, or surprise.

“
Fight
, Catwin!” he yelled, his voice echoing strangely in my
head.

Oh
, I thought dreamily.
Another
lesson.
Vaguely, I knew that he had hit me
in the face; I knew that I should care. I wanted to care, but even
the wanting seemed very far away.

“
Catwin!” Another hit.
Realization: I did not have to care, I only had to win. It was
another hit while that realization worked its way from my mind to
my muscles, and then, as Temar dropped towards me, I managed to
bring up my fist. My aim was off, but training held my wrist
straight. With a muffled curse, Temar staggered away.

“
I win,” I said softly, and
I rolled my head to look at him, where he was on all fours trying
to catch his breath. I thought it funny, the drug still working in
my blood, but he did not.

“
You got in one strike,” he
said, and his tone conveyed that one strike was not good enough. I
was still cushioned by the drug, too relaxed to be offended, and in
any case, a thought pierced through the haze: he was afraid, not
angry. He was expecting an attack, and he was deeply worried that I
would fail.

“
There must be a part of
you that nothing touches,” he said, was he helped me to Roine’s
rooms. “Not hits, not pain, not drugs.”

“
That’s not…how drugs
work.” In the wake of this one, I felt sick. The lights were too
bright, and I was dizzy.

“
Listen to me.” He swung me
around so that I could lean against the wall and look up into his
face. I tried not to be sick. The corridor was deserted, but still
he leaned close to speak to me. “When you realized you were
drugged, you let go and you gave up. But it’s like drunkards at a
feast—they
want
to be drunk. You have to fight to keep your head clear. If
you don’t, when there is an attempt—and there will be—Miriel will
die.”

I went to my lesson with Roine with Temar’s
words ringing in my ears, and later, that night, I dreamed again of
the day of my birth. I stood in the drafty little hovel and
listened to my own wailing, and I watched my mother and my father
argue, him holding my little self out to her, her pushing me away.
Watching the conversation again, identical in every detail, I
wondered if it was truly a dream. I wondered if this was how it had
happened; I wondered why my mother had been so determined to have
me killed. Had she known that the betrayal that was coming was
worse than death? Or had she known, I wondered now, that I might
become a Shadow? I woke in the darkness, with tears streaming down
my cheeks, and wondered if she had wanted me killed, because she
knew how many I would one day kill. If she had thought that the
world would be better without me in it.

Chapter 14

“
You took that herb hard,”
Roine remarked, a few days later. At Temar’s insistence, she was
teaching me the use of other poisonous plants, feeding them to me
in small doses, so I might know the effects. Her voice was
carefully neutral; only when Roine was absolutely sure we were
alone did she show that she disliked my training. She pointed to a
set of tools and jars on the table. “Come here, I’ll show you how
to make the antidote.”

Roine always asked which poisons I had
learned to make with Temar, and she taught me the antidote whenever
she could. From the Duke’s largesse, Roine’s storeroom was stocked
with herbs she had never been able to procure before. Many a time
at the Winter Castle, confronted with an illness she could not
treat, she had said, “If only I had…” and she had frowned, because
Roine hated, above all else, being unable to cure a patient.

She wanted for nothing now. She had every
herb she had ever spoken of; I was sure that she had every herb
that was named in her beautiful books. Her shelves held bandages of
good cloth, her stores of herbs were fresh and abundant. She had
access to new books, and she worked and read by the light of good
candles.

In fact, the only thing Roine lacked was
patients to treat. Aside from my constant accumulation of bruises
and scrapes, Roine had little to do—officially, that was. I knew
that Roine had become a healer for the women of the palace. Rarely
did we have a lesson, that we were not interrupted by one young
woman or another, huge-eyed and hesitant. Roine spoke to each
kindly, pressed packets of herbs into their hands with specific
instructions, and sometimes gave them the doses herself. The
servants, she was careful to call by name; the nobles, she was
careful to pretend not to recognize.

As I ground the herbs carefully, Roine
asked, “And Miriel?”

“
The same.” Roine was one
of the few to whom I could speak of Miriel, as herself, as a
person. To the Duke, Miriel was a commodity; he did not care in the
slightest how alone or terrified she might be as long as her smile
was constant and her manner charming. To Donnett, Miriel was a
noble, and Donnett thought all nobles were the same—excepting the
Duke, who had been born a commoner. To Temar, Miriel was a puzzle
for me to solve; I was to learn her patterns, so that I might learn
to anticipate her wishes. Roine, alone, seemed to care how Miriel
fared.

I scowled into the concoction. Roine cared
so much that it was difficult to tell her how I felt about my
strange companion. With Roine asking after Miriel’s health and
happiness, mentioning how difficult it must be to be a noblewoman
not raised at court, commenting on Miriel’s precarious place in the
world, I began to think that Roine was taking Miriel’s side.