Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) (18 page)

They did not get a chance. Miriel was as
sweet and courteous as the most placid of girls. She was
deferential; she never intimated, by word or deed or gesture, that
she resented them or noticed their sneers. If paired for a dance,
Miriel would do her part with her usual perfection. If asked to
sing in the maids’ rooms, she would change her voice to fit against
her partner’s. When the girls went in to dinner at their table, she
never jockeyed for position as the other girls did, each trying to
be closest to the King’s table on the off chance that the poor,
sick boy would look over at them.

Instead, Miriel spoke courteously and
engagingly to those who chose to sit with her. She sparkled just as
brightly as if she had been trying to charm the King himself. She
did not longingly watch the ones who thought themselves her
betters, and she did not behave for a moment as if she would rather
be elsewhere. She toasted her companions and laughed merrily at
their jokes, inquired about their health and offered opinions on
their gowns, if they asked her—Miriel was fast becoming an object
of envy for her beautiful wardrobe.

“
Oh, but it sets off your
eyes!” I might hear her exclaim, as I waited on their table at
dinner. “No, you mustn’t give it away. Trim it with new ribbon and
it will be lovely.”

The girls were too young to see it, but I
thought it was like watching the currents in a river. Slowly,
Miriel was becoming the focus. Those around her were happy in her
presence and glad to see her; gradually, as I watched, more and
more heads turned at her approach, more voices offered her
greetings, a seat on a bench, a partner for a dance. Miriel was
rising through the court, as her uncle had told her to do, and
against my will, I began to wonder where all of this would
lead.

Chapter 15

To those who watched her when she was at
dinner, or speaking with the other children after the meal, Miriel
was a perfect girl, without flaw. None of them knew that when
Miriel retired to her rooms at night, she did not put on her
nightgown and robe and retire. Each night, she practiced something,
be it the turn of her head to greet a newcomer, the delicate sweep
of a curtsy, or her now-envied smile, a spontaneous burst of light
across her face, as if she were overcome with joy. While I studied
manuscripts or sharpened my daggers, Miriel practiced walking,
talking, eating, and breathing.

“
What are you looking at?”
she snapped at me one night. I had been given leave to return early
to my rooms, as Temar had told the Duke that I needed time for my
studies. The Duke had warned me that I would be given such
liberties only until I was fully trained and I, secure in the
knowledge that I was endlessly outmatched by my studies in
weaponry, had reveled in the chance to be away from Miriel and the
courtiers for a few hours.

But Miriel had returned early, and she
was—as was becoming usual—annoyed by my very presence. Miriel was
scrupulously kind to her maidservant, to the pageboys who brought
her messages, to the maids who lit her fire and cleaned her rooms.
The same courtesy was not extended to me.

That night, I only shrugged in response to
her sharp-tongued question. I was reading a history book, and even
I, who adored books, had to admit that this one was a particularly
dull account of Wulfric II’s reign. Miriel was practicing running,
and the tap-tap-tap of her heels on the floor made it all the more
difficult to study. But the past few weeks had been an exercise in
not voicing criticisms, and I did not wish to break my pattern now.
Someday, I told myself, Miriel would stop regarding me as her
enemy.

Not now, however. Tonight, my avoidance
gained me nothing.

“
Am I
disturbing
you?” Miriel asked
dangerously. “Is my practice disturbing your studies?” Mutely, I
shook my head, but her temper had sparked and there was no
returning to quiet. She wrenched the book out of my hands and threw
it at the wall, then whirled back to stare at me, fists clenched,
breath coming short.

“
Do I ever complain of your
studies?” she demanded. “Do I ever order
you
to be quiet? No! I never do. But
you see fit to criticize
me
, when I have the harder task by
far—“

It was the last untruth I
could tolerate in silence. “No, you don’t!” I jumped down from my
seat on the table and matched her, face to face. “All
you
have to do is wear
fancy clothes and go to parties!
I’m
the one who has to guard
you,
I’m
the one
who has to learn poisons and spying—and I’m the one who’s going to
get beaten if that book is ruined!”

Miriel was staring at me, open-mouthed. She
never expected me to talk back. Adults, she ceded too—her tutors,
who knew things she did not, her mother, who she loved, her uncle,
who she feared. They were older and more powerful. I think I was
the first person her own age who had dared to counter her.

“
And you criticize
everything I do, anyway,” I added. I was warming to the theme. For
weeks, I had been respectful, I had bitten my tongue on retorts and
bowed my head against barbed insults. A dozen times or more, I had
bowed when I would gladly have slapped her face instead. Now, every
retort spilled out.

“
You think I
want
to be here? You
think I follow you around because I like you? I would rather be at
home, out of your way, away from you nagging at me and out of this
whole stupid place. You think I wanted to learn to kill people? I
didn’t, and I never wanted to be your whipping girl,
either!”

At this, Miriel laughed. Shockingly, she
threw back her head and laughed, the first genuine laugh I had ever
seen from her. She was wild-eyed.

“
My whipping girl!” she
exclaimed. “Oh, my whipping girl? I would like that! Can I order
you to be that, then?” Savagely, she ripped at her gown, tearing at
the laces, ripping the delicate fabric. She dragged at it until she
stood completely naked in front of me, and I shrank
away.

Until her shift was off, I had thought her
quite unhinged. Now I was horrified: from her ribs to her knees,
Miriel’s skin was mottled with bruises, some in stripes from a
cane, some from fists. I knew the way knuckles left a mark. I
stared at her, unable to look away, trying not to be sick.

“
Last week,” Miriel said,
now unnervingly calm, “I made a joke that my uncle thought was
unladylike.” She pointed to one of the bruises, a thick stripe
along the side of her ribcage. “The week before, he saw that I had
missed a step in a dance.” She pointed to another bruise on her
thigh. “Shall I name all of these for you?”

I shook my head.

“
When
you’re
in pain, you’re allowed to
wince,” Miriel said precisely. “This one is from when he saw me
slouching at dinner. He has a guardsman beat me,” she added,
irrelevantly.

I stared, and found myself shaking. Until
now, I had not quite believed that any of this was real. Being an
assassin had still felt like a jest to me, as if it were too dark
to be true. And now Miriel had showed me her own flesh, covered in
bruises as bad as my own, and the whole world felt a little bit
darker, a little less like a jest, even a dark one. I had the sense
of being dragged down to the bottom of a river, caught in currents
too strong for me.

“
Lace me up, please,”
Miriel said, still calm. Her hysteria had disappeared. She had
pulled her shift back over her head, and stepped into her gown. I
moved towards her as in a dream.

“
Don’t you want to sleep?”
I asked her, as I took the laces in my hands and began to pull them
tightly. If I watched very closely—and now I did—I could see her
wince as I tied up the gown.

She turned a look on me that was haunted. It
was not the look of a child. It said that she did want to sleep,
she wanted to sleep and never wake up. Her voice was eerie.

“
I still have to practice,”
she said. Finally, with the same courtesy she showed to the
daughters of minor nobles, to the palace servants who cleaned her
rooms—but she had never before shown me—she said, “But you can go
to bed if you like.”

“
Miriel…” It was the first
time I had said her name out loud. She did not look at me. “You
should have someone see to those.”

“
I’ve been to see Roine,”
Miriel said simply. “She gave me a salve for it. Thank you for your
concern.” She had shown me her naked body, she had shown me the
very cause of her perfection, and yet it was as if she was farther
from me than she had ever been. I did not know what to say; I
stepped away from her and let her return to her
practice.

So Roine had known. Roine had seen, and not
told me, she had waited for me to learn it on my own. I wondered if
she knew every noblewoman’s secrets, and filed the thought away for
later. Someday, a cold, remote part of my mind said, I would need
to know which of those beautiful young ladies had been to see
Roine, looking for herbs and potions.

“
Miriel…” I said again.
This time, she looked right into my eyes.

“
When I catch the King’s
eye,” she said softly, “and I have his heart—then I will be free of
my uncle.”

I pretended that I had never heard her
words; close to treason in the tiny enclave of the Duke’s faction.
Miriel and I never again spoke of Miriel’s tasks, or my own. Our
resentment of each other now had a form: Miriel could not forgive
me for seeing her practice each piece of perfection, for having
seen her bruises, for being a piece of her uncle’s plans for her; I
could not forgive her for being the reason I was here, learning
skills no child should know, witnessing darkness that should not be
a piece of the world.

In the days that followed, a gulf grew
between us, an enormity of horrors we knew together and yet could
not speak of. Both of us were consumed with surviving, and each of
us hated the thought that the other might escape—as if there were
only so much survival and luck to go around.

Watching Miriel was painful now, and I
watched her even more closely than I had before. When I saw her
duck through the arch of arms during a dance in the maids’ chamber,
when I saw her embrace a friend, I knew how much pain lay behind
her joyful smile. Miriel hid her bruises as carefully as she ever
had and continued to be the charming new favorite of the children.
For the first time, I came to admire her strained charm as much as
I was ever weary of it.

Now when Miriel snapped at me—for after the
kindness of that one night, we returned to our hostility—I
remembered how I had felt on the first night of our journey, when I
looked into her deep blue eyes and saw a girl who knew already how
to wait. I remembered realizing how formless she was, how easily
she shaped herself to her audience. I had the disquieting thought
that I might live with her every day and never really know her.

And now I helped her. She played cards well,
but resented the element of luck, and so I had Donnett teach me
ways to cheat, that I might pass on to her. To my shock, she
possessed an uncanny knack for it, pulling off the dirtiest tricks
without batting an eye. We developed a trick, she and I, where I
would watch for the Duke; when he appeared in the room, I would
offer wine to one of Miriel’s companions, and she would know to
abandon her cheater’s plays before he saw.

Miriel’s tutors reported to the Duke that
she read well, wrote with beautiful penmanship, could do passable
mathematics, and had a good understanding of history and politics.
Her dancing instructors assured the Duke that no young lady was as
graceful as his niece; when he asked me, summoning me for my own
report on her, I could assure him that their words were true. At
rest, Miriel was only a skinny—if beautiful—child, but in motion
she was a wonder to behold; and she was always in motion.

She might be a child, but the Duke was
careful to ask me, at every report, if there was any whisper of
impropriety. Every time, I shook my head and responded, “No, my
Lord,” with absolute confidence. Other girls of the maids’ rooms
flirted with boys, the immature flirting of children who are to be
betrothed, the pretty girls always ready to hope that a man might
overlook their low birth, the well-bred girls driven not to be
outdone. There were none of the sideways glances and secret smiles
one could see in the court proper, but there was always a childish
flirtation or two going on between the young ladies and the young
gentlemen.

Miriel was never involved in these. When a
boy would arrive to sit with the ladies, Miriel alone did not
swivel to stare at him. She would include him in the conversation,
polite to a fault, splitting her attention equally between each of
her companions. She would include him in her toasts and laugh at
his jokes. But never did she look into a boy’s eyes with anything
other than polite interest. Other girls might make cows eyes at a
boy, or stare wide-eyed at the young man on the throne, but Miriel
had a frank, disarming way about her when boys were present, as if
posturing for marriage were the last thing in her head.

The Duke’s suspicions were not entirely
unfounded, however. Four times—for I, increasingly nervous, had
counted—Miriel had been drawn into discussion with Wilhelm
Conradine, the King’s heir. Wilhelm was a fine-built young man,
handsome, with clear blue eyes and sandy hair that fell softly
across his forehead; if he had not been such a strange figure at
the court, the King’s heir and yet an outcast, utterly mistrusted
for his father’s blood, all of the best born young ladies would
have swooned over him as the minor nobles’ daughters did. Miriel
did not seem to see his high cheekbones and full mouth, her eyes
did not linger on him as the other maidens’ eyes did—even Marie de
la Marque would steal glances at him. But Miriel would speak with
him, on philosophy or theology or politics, and their conversation
was so quick that I could hardly understand the words.