Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) (5 page)

Thus began one of the first such struggles
in my life: on the one hand, me, determined not to let the Lady see
my pain; on the other hand, the Lady, determined to break me;
neither of us would back away from it. And always, when she had
won, she tempered it with regret—a disappointed sigh, a pretty
frown. If only I were smarter, more good-tempered, more obedient,
we would not need to go through this, would we?

I knew that she did not believe it. I looked
past her pretty blue eyes and there was nothing behind them but
spite. But, in the inevitable failure to outwit her, having lost
once already—then, the thoughts slid under my skin. For a moment, I
would believe her. And no matter how much I told myself that
nothing I could do would free me from the Lady’s spite, the pain
ate away at my determination.

But I did not give up, I did not slink away
to Roine’s tower in defeat, and my stubbornness earned me the
Lady’s hatred. She had always been determined to see me fail, but
she had not hated me, only my manners and my connection to her
brother. My resistance changed that. It pitted us against each
other, it spurred her to more cruelty—and she had a heart ready for
cruelty. Whoever she had been once, perhaps a young girl with a
pretty face and an unspoiled heart, time and disappointment and her
forced exile to the Winter Castle had twisted her into something
else entirely. In my dreams, she wore the face of a bird and
twisted into a grotesque, half-human being, like one of the
creatures from the old myths. Later, when I knew the word, I told
myself that she was a succubus, who fed on despair; then, I only
knew that I should let her have none of mine.

As the powerless will do, I dreamed of
revenge. I resolved, with the strange all-encompassing anger of
childhood, that someday I would have payback for what had been done
to me, and on the worst days, I dropped into a strange dark place
in my mind and I counted the lashes, so that I could reckon each
back when at last the time was right.

If I failed at any task, I would be
punished. I would get a cane across my palms for forgetting a
noble’s lineage, more arithmetic problems if I did one incorrectly,
pages and pages of penmanship if the tutor did not approve of the
shape of my letters. I could be sure that any further work would
earn me a reprimand for the Lady.

“
Wasting the tutor’s time,”
she would say crisply. “Pages and pages of paper, wasted because of
your abominable penmanship.” If I failed, I whetted her appetite
for her own victory over me; if I succeeded, I knew that I only
stoked the anger that burned within her. When I won, I only ensured
that every other failure, real or imagined, would be punished more
harshly. There was no true victory in success…save for the true joy
I found in the learning.

At the first, everything had been so new
that I was nearly scared. Instead of the patterns of my fingers,
the strange combinations of fingers and hands, I learned the higher
numbers. I learned how to write them on the page, add them together
and subtract them—although it was still easier for me to think
about folding my fingers down. When I read, it was not only that I
must puzzle out each word, but I must start by remembering each
letter. In the first few days, I felt a wave of nausea when I saw a
page full of letters and numbers.

And then it all changed. I had spent the
first days counting the smallest victories and measuring them
against the long list of my failures; slowly, the balance tipped. I
did not even notice, until one day I realized that I had read an
entire page without noticing the very words themselves. Then I
noticed that arithmetic, so daunting to the Lady Miriel, was no
more than a set of clever puzzles to me. I took a fierce joy in
completing a set of problems first—though after her first tantrum,
I learned to keep my paper to myself, and pretend to keep writing
until after she had turned in her sheet with a triumphant toss of
her night-black curls.

Maps and lineages came less easily, the old
names softened by the years until one could deduce nothing of their
pronunciation by sounding them out. Robbed of her opportunity to
taunt me about how slowly I read, how poorly I reckoned numbers,
Miriel took her joy in how little I knew about nobles. Every time I
stumbled on a name, I could be sure that she would laugh at me. She
had the perfect laugh, did Miriel: the cultured, throaty little
giggle of a court lady. She knew just how to widen her eyes at me
in disbelief: I had startled the laugh out of her, she had not
meant to giggle, she was only surprised, you see—how could one not
know of the de la Marque family, or the Torstenssons, of the
Cessors?

And then there was philosophy, theology,
trade: grand concepts about rights and honor, chivalry, the duties
of men and women, the promises of the gods. My utter incompetence
in remembering the long list of names and philosophical schools was
matched only by Miriel’s instinctive brilliance in the subject. I
might be able to count and remember dates better than she could,
but where I stumbled through thuses and therefores, Miriel darted,
lightning-quick, through schools of thought and dragged out
historical events to prove abstract points. In those lessons, she
was so frustrated with my slowness that she forgot even to insult
me; she stamped her foot and pouted when she could not make me
understand a point.

The first few weeks passed in a haze of
misery. Miriel’s fourteenth birthday came and went, with great
celebrations and feasts, and a month later, my own birthday was
celebrated only with a whispered congratulation by Roine, and a hug
as I set off to the schoolroom. Most servants did not even know the
date of their birth; I only knew because Roine could count the days
on her star chart. I should feel lucky, I told myself. I should
feel privileged. But I only felt miserable.

Every day, after the hours of lessons and
humiliations, I ate my dinner as quickly as I could and climbed the
steps to Roine’s tower. There, I went to my little corner bed,
hunched myself under the covers, and refused to answer any of her
soft-voiced, worried questions. When I was certain she was asleep,
I would muffle my tears into the little pillow. I cried like a
child, I cried like an animal will cry, who cannot understand what
is wrong, only that there is pain and there seems no end in
sight.

But I had only so many tears to shed, and
when my sobs eased, as they always did, I would lie awake and stare
at the sloped ceiling of the tower. In the dark of those nights, I
learned then that it was not enough for me to endure and wait. I
must find a way out of this maze of misery.

That was a puzzle. For night after night, I
could think of no way to escape. And then it came to me. There
could be no retaliation against Miriel, and so I must fortify the
one defense given to me: knowledge. If she laughed when I was
wrong, well, then I would never be wrong. I would learn every name
on the map, every obscure noble in the spidery lineages, I would
remember the philosophers and their dry theories, and I would never
need to hear her little titter of scorn. She had had schooling from
the time she was old enough to sit and be fed; I had not. So, I
must catch up.

I knew better than to try to sneak into the
tutor’s rooms, but I did know where other books could be found. The
old library had been one of the first discoveries of my childhood,
and although the contents of it were priceless, the room was
ill-guarded and almost never used. Even I, when I first found it,
had thought it boring and never gone back. Now I remembered it, and
it was little enough trouble to sneak there after my dinner, and
dart away with some books hidden under a pile of blankets I was
bringing to Roine.

I studied by the light of a guard’s lantern,
somewhat I had begged from Aler, the chief guard. He was sweet to
me, the little half-orphan, and when I could, I would go sit on the
high, lonely walls, and listen to the wind with him. I was shy
about my plan, and so I would only say that I wanted to study, and
Aler looked at me, at the bruises on my arms and my face, at the
furtive eyes and the determined chin, and gave me the lantern
without a word—but, I thought later, with a little bit of pity in
his eyes.

I began to read with the sole purpose of
escaping Miriel’s derision. I stared at the overwhelming numbers of
books and felt the same sinking feeling from the first few days:
that I was outmatched. Then I remembered that, hidden in these
books, lay the key to my release, and my despair was coupled with a
grim determination that, if I must suffer through days in Miriel’s
company, the days would not be any more miserable than they had to
be.

When I opened the first book, sneezing from
the dust, I saw only the relentless march of words, each to be
painstakingly decoded, sounded out silently in the quiet of the
night. I remember that I felt only exhaustion. The task was
daunting. I struggled through that first book until I could stay
awake no longer, and then I doused the lantern and stumbled to bed,
barely making it to my little pallet and lacking the energy even to
pull the covers over me.

Roine had to shake me awake, thrusting a
piece of bread and a cup of goat’s milk into my hand as I struggled
to open my eyes, re-braiding my hair herself, and telling me the
time so that I fairly flew down the stairs to the day’s
lessons.

I got a beating that day for arriving
disheveled, with my clothes rumpled from sleep, and another for
yawning—I waited until the teacher’s back was turned, but Miriel
had gleefully remarked upon it—but I barely cared. Behind the
exhaustion was a new curiosity, a challenge such as I had never
felt in my whole life.

I had learned to sneak and creep about so
that I could avoid the Duke, for sure, but in all of my sneaking, I
had discovered a love of exploring. It was quite a thing to follow
an old passageway to the end and find where it led, or know all of
the rooms of the castle, even the old unused ones with the shutters
gone and the winter wind laying drifts of snow inside.

The books I had stolen—borrowed, I told
myself—were as good as having a whole new castle to explore. I had
only read a part of the first book, and already I had learned more
things about the history of our country than I had ever suspected
could exist. The old kings of the land had made their capitol not
in Penekket, but in Delvard, in an icy castle much like our own and
far to the east, only nearly unassailable. When, after generations
of war, the kingdom of Heddred stretched all the way to the Voltur
Mountains, my home, a peace was declared and the king moved his
castle to Penekket, in the lowlands.

I, who had never known more than the
confines of the castle, who had never dreamed of anything other
than the bleak cold of the mountains, began to dream of other
sights. On the nights that followed, I gulped down my dinner
quickly, so that I might get to my books sooner. I saw the old
maps, I learned of historic battles, and the names of kings and
generals. I read of the Lady of the Mountains, whom some claimed
was a woman and others claimed was an angel, who led the first Lord
of Voltur to where this castle stood now, and told him to build the
castle and guard Heddred against Ismir for all time. I read of the
Prophesies of the Ancients, the old books still held in the
libraries at Delvard, the books from which all priests told us of
the times before, and the times yet to come.

I read other books, dull accounts of
droughts and famines, trade routes and merchants. In every book,
however, I lost myself completely, even the writings of the old
philosophers themselves. There were bits of knowledge to be
gleaned, whole worlds beyond this castle to be explored. I knew so
much that I could barely contain it.

And this is where I made the error that
nearly cost me my life.

It was a cold day, and I was sleepy. I had
read an account of the Council of Lords, from its very founding,
and although I had known that I should go to sleep, I had not been
able to close the book until I had read to the very end. I had
managed to stifle my yawns so that not even Miriel could see them,
but my mind was very slow to work. I could barely make sense of the
words the tutor was saying, until I caught a glaring error, and I
raised my hand.

“
Yes?” the tone boded ill,
and many times in the hours and days that followed, I thought that
I should have known better. It was true, what Roine said, that my
pride would get the better of me one day.

“
I beg your pardon, sir,
but that’s not correct,” I said.

For a moment, he could not speak. Then he
managed one word: “What?”

“
You said that the battle
was won by Arturus the Great. But it was Arturus II who won that
battle. It’s a common historical error because Arturus II was known
as The Grateful by his followers, for he gave thanks after the
battle to the priests who led him.”

The cane came down on my hands, and Miriel
stifled a laugh. “Incorrect,” the teacher said. “Arturus the Great.
You will write out, one hundred time times—“

“
But, sir, Arturus the
Great was born forty years
after
the end of the First Balic War.”

All of a sudden, it dawned
on him. He turned, slowly. “How do you know that?” he asked,
softly. And then, “How
could
you know that?”

Nine days later, when even the hunger had
fled and I had ceased to feel anything other than pain, I barely
stirred when the door to my cell opened. I stared ahead of me,
knowing that the guards had come to beat me again, knowing that I
would cry and I could do nothing about it. I could not turn my head
to the right anymore, to look at them, and the only defiance I had
left was to pretend that I was not looking at them by my own
choice.