Shadowforged (Light & Shadow)

I knew the dream by heart now. I could hear the snow crunching underfoot, and the hungry moan of the wind, but I felt no cold on my skin. I was home and not home, I would have a chance once more to see the mother and father I had never known, who had given me away on the very day of my birth.

As I did every night, I wavered as I stood in front of the door to their hovel. I could go in and see my father pleading with my mother to keep me, and my mother pleading with my father to give me a quick death, and spare me the betrayal that would otherwise follow me all my life. Some nights, I would walk away, through the village, staring up at the Winter Castle through the billowing snow. Tonight, I pushed the door open and went in.

I watched the familiar argument without comment. I was a shadow in the corner of the room, a young woman that my father could never see. He pushed his way past me every night; I had never been brave enough to see if he would walk through me. Tonight, as I did on many nights, I waited for him to leave. My mother would see me, then—what she saw, I did not know. She did not know me for her daughter, but some nights I truly believed that she had seen across the years, and spoken to me, myself. I waited for her to tell me that I would be betrayed, that my betrayal would be the end, that my sorrow would tip the balance.

But tonight, instead of lying shivering in her pallet bed, she levered herself up and stared at me. After a moment, she motioned for me to come closer and hesitantly, I obeyed her. I had seen this dream every night for a year, and never had it changed. My heart, which had been beating slow and strong with sleep, began to race; I knew this was a dream, but I could not wake, I could not flee. I only knew that I did not want to hear what she would tell me.

“So,” she said to me. “The betrayal has come.” The sound of her voice came across years, like the baying of hounds, like the trumpeting of the warn horns. “You survived. But it is far from finished.”

I woke suddenly, the echoes of her unearthly voice ringing in my mind, and saw the early morning sunlight streaming in the windows. For a moment, I hardly recognized where I was, so jarring was the quiet calm of daybreak after the sound of the storm, and the terror of my dream. I was soaked in sweat and breathing hard, and I lay back and tried to concentrate until the gasps slowed. At last, I opened my eyes.

My clothes were rank with sweat, and I sighed at the thought of going to the laundry. I would be late for my lessons, and Donnett would scold me. Then I remembered that I could not go to the laundry. I could not go anywhere at all. I would stay here, in these clothes until the Duke decided to let me leave this room.

This was the sixth day of our captivity here, and every day stretched interminably. We waited, Miriel and I, for the Duke to make his move, not knowing what events had come to pass outside this chamber. We knew that the court must be in an uproar, quite as shocked as the Duke had been to learn that Miriel was the King’s confidant, his friend, his mistress in all but deed. What did they think, now that we had not emerged from our rooms in near to a week? We could not know; we knew only that the Duke was furious with us, and we were growing so tired of waiting for his judgment that I felt we would very nearly welcome the fall of the axe when at last it came.

On the big four-poster bed, I heard a rustle, and I looked over to see Miriel crane her head over the side of the mattress to peer down at me. By the look of it, she had been awake for some time, waiting for me to wake up as well. She raised an eyebrow, as if to ask about my harsh breathing and my sweat-soaked brow, but when I shook my head, she shrugged and inclined her head silently towards the door. I nodded and lifted my clothes off the shelf quietly, and she took her robe from the foot of the bed, and we crept out of the room together—not to her privy chamber, but to the receiving room, where her maidservant might not hear us if we spoke.

Each day for a week, Miriel and I had woken early and gone out to the main room together. She would tie her robe closed and then sit in one of her beautiful padded chairs by the hearth, and I would restart the fire from the last night’s embers. When it was crackling again, I changed from my sleeping clothes to my usual black, while Miriel averted her eyes courteously.

Then she would gesture to the other chair—it had become a ritual as graceful as a dance between us—and I would curl into it and stare at the fire. In the half an hour or so we had before the maidservant woke and came out to find us, glaring at us accusingly, we would sit silently and stare at the flames in the grate. Our thoughts went round and round together and both of us knew that there was no need to speak them.

Danger was forefront in my mind; danger, and the fact that we were trapped, helpless, at the eye of a target—no way to run, and nowhere to go even if we could have escape. In this snare, we thought endlessly on our helplessness, as the Duke undoubtedly meant that we should. When he had found us trapped in Miriel’s rooms, frozen with shock at the fact of our escape from death, he had hardly wasted words on us.
Think on your allegiances,
he had said curtly,
think on who you wish to offend
. And he had gone, giving orders to the guards that we were not to be let out.

Now we waited. We were singularly quiet in our confinement; it was one of the things that so unnerved the new maidservant. The old maidservant had disappeared, inexplicably replaced by this dour woman. She had been tasked with watching us, to make sure that we sent no messages, and made no attempt to escape. She was outmatched, completely useless as a guard. If I was minded to, I could have killed her in a moment, and even Miriel was well-versed enough to sneak messages out past her. It was the Duke’s guards, and Temar, who kept us confined and cut off from the world. But the woman felt obliged to do her duty as the Duke had instructed her, and she resented us for making it clear that she was ill-suited to the task.

Neither Miriel nor I was minded to make it more pleasant for her; I had taken to sharpening my daggers each afternoon, while Anna looked over at me nervously and Miriel tried to hide her smile. Miriel, meanwhile, affected not to notice that she had been kept in the room by her uncle’s order, and took to sending for ridiculous things: a specific book from her uncle’s library, a new quill to write with, a length of ribbon to decorate a gown, a lute to practice one series of notes over and over again while Anna gritted her teeth.

All of our jokes were wordless; we shared whole conversations with the lift of an eyebrow, a hidden smile. We moved silently, in concert, and this unity unnerved Anna all the more. We took joy in our unity, for there was precious little joy in our lives. We had no true allies beyond each other, and we had a great many enemies. Miriel had said one day, in a rare break into speech:

“It almost doesn’t matter, does it?” I knew what she meant, and agreed with a silent nod. With so many enemies who might kill us, who would kill us—what was the difference in singling out the one who had tried? To follow that lead to its end, oblivious of all else, was to ignore the swarm of enemies that surrounded us. And so, instead of spending my time puzzling over it, I recited, every night, the litany of our enemies: the Dowager Queen, the High Priest, Guy de la Marque, Jacces, the Duke. Every time I recited, I wondered how many more names I did not know.

It was one thing to be practical, and be wary of all enemies, but I held out hope that we might yet learn who had done it—and why. I did not need to tell Miriel to watch the faces of her fellow courtiers when she was finally allowed to leave the room, and she did not tell me to make enquiries to find the servant who had brought us the poisoned food. I was already working to determine what type of poison had been used, and Miriel knew as much. Miriel was always watchful, and I knew as much. Together, if we could find our would-be killer, we could find a motive.

Today, Miriel surprised me by asking:

“What do we want?” I considered the question. We wanted our freedom, but that was not enough. Open the doors to this room, and we were still in the palace. We could not leave—where else was there? Miriel had no family, no allies; she could not live as a peasant. I had nowhere to go, either—Roine was my only family, and she was here at the Palace—and in any case, I could not leave Miriel. It would be to leave a girl to her death, without even the comfort of a companion.

“What do you mean?” I asked, unable to determine what she might be asking. My voice was rusty from disuse. She paused, then shrugged her slim shoulders. Even her simplest gesture was elegant. I thought of my own face, plain and nothing, against the dramatic beauty of hers, and thought wryly that it was good that I was the shadow. She would never fade into the background.

“What’s our goal?” she clarified. “My uncle hasn’t killed us yet, so he probably won’t.” She was matter-of-fact; if it bothered her to think that her own flesh and blood would have her murdered, the emotion did not show in her eyes. She could be as cold as the Duke at times. “Which means, we should decide what to do when they let us out of here,” she continued. “Every faction has a goal, and we’re a faction. So, what do we want?”

I closed my eyes for a moment. It still seemed strange that her words had not been on a dream:
We’re our own side
, she had told me. I could hardly believe it, just as, if I were to close my eyes, I could pretend that there had been no attempt on our lives. If I concentrated, I might pretend that the Duke had never discovered the secret of Miriel’s meetings with the King. And if I closed my eyes tightly and blocked out the world, I could almost think I was home, in the Winter Castle, ignorant of the world and free of its machinations. Then I opened my eyes once more and I was trapped in this little suite of rooms, with too many enemies to count, and a fifteen year old girl as my ally against the world.

“It’s whatever you want,” I decided after a scant moment of thought. I did not add,
but I wouldn’t mind running away
. I had the wild notion that we could do it, run away and survive on our own. But that would never do—they would find us someday, and Miriel could never be happy in a hovel, with homespun. Still, it was amusing to picture her living off the land.

The truth was that I did not know how to decide what we wanted. I always told Roine that I could not leave Miriel, but the truth was that I had nothing else in my life, no place to take refuge. There was only the palace, and that was Miriel’s world, not mine. And above all, I had sworn to shape myself to her like a shadow. I hated the man who had made me promise that, and I had betrayed him—but the promise had stuck, somehow. Miriel’s fate and my own were intertwined, but my fate was tied to the words of a madwoman, and the thought that Miriel might be dragged into my fate was too strange; she was the light, the glittering one, the girl who might be Queen.

“Do you know, the brightest hope in my life was that I could love the King, and be a good Queen to him,” Miriel said softly. “And that cannot be. Now I do not know what I could hope for.”

It was jarring to hear those words from the mouth of a fifteen-year-old girl, and it made me want to cry. It was like peering down into Miriel’s very heart, and seeing the girlish hope for happiness, the simple desire that her duty and her heart should lead her to the same end. Somewhere, Seven Gods alone knew where—not from her mother, not from her uncle—Miriel had come into a sense of morality. When her life had descended into a living hell, what she had clung to was her streak of idealism. She had cherished the dream that her purpose of catching the King’s heart could do good for the country.

She had wanted it so much that she had tried to forget the boy she might truly have loved: Wilhelm Conradine, the King’s own cousin. She had tried to turn her heart, and she had seen only a piece of Garad: his dream of a golden age, a peaceful age. She had once believed whole-heartedly in a future where they ruled as equals, her at his right hand and her advice healing the nation from its centuries of war.

Now she knew that her heart had betrayed her. Miriel had not understood that a boy of fifteen, emerging from the certainty of his own death and burdened with the weight of kingship, could not be the man she hoped to love. He could not admit mistakes, and his decisions were too weighty to be undone without strong will and a graceful heart, an ability to name himself as wrong. Garad was not that strong, he was too driven to be loved, too driven to be a storybook King with a perfect kingdom. Above all, he was not Wilhelm, the boy whose smile inspired Miriel’s own, the boy who shared her sympathy for the rebellion. Garad had been born to power and death; having eluded death, he would not give up even a piece of his power.

And, with the unbending morality of the young, Miriel would never forget this, and never forgive it. Having thought that Garad shared her vision, she had believed that her life might yet be happy. It had been devastating to see the illusion shattered, and Garad’s belief in his own idealism did not make it any easier to bear. She felt that she had been made a fool of, and she knew as well as I did that her attempt to escape and set her own course had set her in the full glare of the court as well, at the mercy of the forces there.

And Garad, of course, was the King. He could command Miriel to be his Queen, he could ruin her if she refused—and how could she refuse, what else was there for her? What other man could be what she had hoped for from Garad? No other man in the world, save perhaps King Dusan of Ismir, could give Miriel the chance to be such a force for good, on such a large scale. Garad would command Miriel to his side, and then force her to watch as he betrayed the sentiments she held so dear. He would never see her pain, and I could not say if that made things better or worse. I did not know how Miriel would bear it, save by stripping away her idealism. And what was left then? Only ambition.

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