Shadowforged (Light & Shadow) (25 page)

“Who are you?” the King asked, his voice like a whiplash. “Why are you here?”

“Your Grace.” It was a voice I had never heard before, accented strangely. “I bid you good evening.”

“What is this?” the King demanded.

“This is the end, your Grace.” There was barely a pause, and then there was a choked off cry. I heard Miriel gasp in fear; my own mind had gone blank. Then the voice said, cold as deepest winter: “Sweep the rooms, kill any you find. His betrothed and her servant may be here—they must not be allowed to escape.”

Miriel was sobbing into my hand now. I could feel her tears wet on my skin, but she made no sound. We waited, breathless, as we heard the men tramp about. The minutes passed; I could feel every muscle tensed, beginning to scream with pain. I was finally beginning to believe that they had forgotten to search our room when I heard the leader’s voice.

“What about that one?”

“Yes, sir.”
Oh, Gods
. The door to our chamber opened, and footsteps approached. I readied myself as well as I could. If I could silence this man before he could call out—

A clamor in the main room, and both Miriel and I stiffened, the fear we had so tenuously controlled rising up until I thought I might vomit. There was the sudden sound of another group, and the clash of steel on steel. A was a jumble of voices, and Miriel and I curled closer together as our hunter exclaimed and hurried out of the room. “For the Gods!” I heard, and the clash of weapons. Above it all, a young man’s voice: “Garad!”

I do not know how long that battle took, how long we waited in the darkness for the fight to cease. I pictured Wilhelm, battling his way to Garad, to free his cousin from the grasp of the soldiers; I pictured the warrior that had such a cruel, cold voice. Huddled close to each other Miriel and I clenched each other’s hands and waited, hardly knowing what to hope for. It seemed to be hours before it ended, and yet at the same time, that it was over as quickly as it had begun. There was a silence: complete, stricken. And then the sound of broken sobbing. Fear began to creep in. What awaited us in that antechamber?

I had hardly begun to form the thought, when I heard another voice, choked with grief.

“Wilhelm Conradine, rise up.” The High Priest. So he had come with Wilhelm, to plead for clemency. I swallowed. Gods, if he had only come sooner…

And then the full importance of his words broke on me like a wave.
Wilhelm Conradine, rise up.
There was only one reason for the High priest to speak those words. In my head, I could hear Garad’s cry of pain—a whimper of fear so complete that I thought I might vomit. It had not only been the cry of the helpless, of a man held restrained as the soldiers swept the rooms for us. The gasp, Wilhelm’s grief, the ferocity I had heard in the Royal Guard, as they fought these intruders—all of it could mean only one thing. I felt my breath leave me in a second; I could hardly understand the thought.

Wilhelm, even as he must see the truth with his own eyes, did not seem to understand it. “Why?” he demanded. His voice broke on a sob.

“Ye must, milord,” a guardsman said gruffly, and I heard the clank as—to a man—the soldiers knelt.

“The King is dead,” the High Priest said, his voice carrying high above his pain. “Long live the King.” And to a man, they echoed him:

“The King is dead. Long live the King.”

Chapter 25

Long live the King—

—Wilhelm Conradine, rise up—

His betrothed and her servant may be here
—

The last phrase stuck in my mind. It was shock, I knew it, but I could not think of anything else. The phrase rolled around and around in my head as Miriel and I crouched, frozen with fear and stifling even our breathing.
His betrothed and her servant may be here.
Had they only suspected that we might be here, knowing that Miriel and the King were inseparable? Or had they known? Had someone told them? Who had known that we might be here tonight? Who had we told? The High Priest might have known. The Duke might have known—

“Catwin.” Miriel tugged on my sleeve. “We should go out.”

“No.” I gripped her arm to stop her from pushing the door open. “Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t know what’s going on.”

“What do you mean?” Our heads were craned together, our voices barely a whisper, but still I made a shushing noise. I could sense her glare even in the dark; she must speak it, she must make sense of it. “Those men came in here—“

“Yes! Those men. Who were they?”

“I thought—the accent—Kasimir?”

“But do you
know
?” Miriel stared at me, and I realized she did not want to know. She did not want to think, because the more she thought, the more she realized that she had been seconds from death. When she thought, she would remember that Garad’s body lay on the floor, and that even if she could bring herself to forget the horror of the murder, the rest of her life lay in ruins as well.

“I don’t know,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t know anything. I—“

“Shhh!” Her voice had been starting to rise, and I clamped my hand back over her mouth. We sat for a moment in silence, both of us terrified that we had been heard; I knew that I did not want us found here, not even by our supposed allies. And what would the court say if ever they knew that Miriel had been in the King’s chambers when he was executed, and survived?

“What do we do, then?” Miriel asked finally, her voice the barest hint of a whisper. I could hear her breath coming short, but her voice was deathly calm, the cold rationality of shock. I had to get us out of here before we both descended into raving madness. I thought, and came to the only option:

“We have to go to the Duke.”

“
What
?”

“Quiet! We have a lot more to lose by hiding from him than going to him. If we run away now, he’ll think
we
had a hand in this. And anyway, no matter how angry he is, it’s safest—he had the least to gain from any of this.” That, at least, rang true, but a little voice in my head whispered,
and he was also one of the only ones who knew you were going to be here
.
And you told that lie, and now he hates you.

“He’ll kill me,” Miriel whispered, a morbid echo of Garad’s words only—what—ten minutes past. This felt unreal; I wanted to wake up. I could feel my mind slipping away into shock, and I shook my head as violently as I dared, trying to clear it.

“We just have to get out of here…” I murmured. “We have to wait until they go.” Miriel made no response, and so we did wait, in silence, our muscles aching more and more as we stayed curled, frozen in fear. We waited while the King’s body was loaded onto a bier to be carried to the Cathedral, and I thought unexpectedly of Isra, being woken in the night to hear that her only child was dead by murder. My throat tightened.

When the way was clear, and the room empty, I pushed the door of the wardrobe open. We emerged, stumbling on cramped legs and blinking at the light of the oil lamps in the next room, and I wrapped Miriel’s cloak around her shoulders, for in our silence, the shock had hit her in earnest: she was shivering violently. For the first time, I gave thanks for Temar’s insistence that I learn to push away my fear until I had the safety to stop and think. I stooped to look into Miriel’s eyes until at last they focused on me.

“You need to close your eyes,” I told her. I was not sure she could see what lay in the room outside without breaking down entirely. I guided her through, mindful that she held her gown out of the way of the pools of blood, and got her into the servants’ corridor. “Can you wait here a moment?”

“Why?” Her teeth were chattering.

“I need to look at the…”
Bodies.
“…soldiers. I’ll be back.” In the room, I spent a moment looking over things, trying to commit the smallest details to memory, and then crept to the body of their leader. He wore armor that would look, to any casual observer, like the uniform of the Royal Guard; they had disguised themselves to sneak into the palace. Oddly, I was relieved—this was not a detachment of the Guard itself, then. Carefully, I pushed his braid aside and studied his neck, his hands, his wrists, looking for tattoos. Nothing. His dagger was finely wrought, though, made with ripples in the metal. Hastily, suddenly afraid of being found here, I grabbed the knife and left. I paused outside, seeing the two new guards who had greeted us earlier; their throats had been slit, and I wondered now if they had been accomplices, sacrificed for the illusion of two factions.

That
was a very interesting thought.

I guided Miriel carefully through the darkness, knowing that I should speak to her and yet too preoccupied with my own thoughts to concentrate. When we emerged into the main hallways by the Duke’s rooms, I heard the strident tones of his guards, and the clipped speech of a Royal Messenger. I pushed Miriel back and closed the door behind us as the man went past, and when he was gone we darted out and around the corner. Seeing our white faces, the Duke’s guards did not even ask why we were there; they swung open the doors without comment.

The Duke was pulling on his coat as we came into the room, and Temar was hastily slipping his minor arsenal of weapons into the various concealed pockets of his suit. Both of them stopped what they were doing when they saw us. I saw their instinctive anger at the sight of us, but even the Duke was cautious—they knew from our faces that something was terribly wrong, and I judged from their own that the Royal Messenger had not divulged the earth-shattering news of the King’s death. I tried to find the words to speak, but Miriel broke the silence first.

“The King is dead.” Her voice trembled.

“
What
?” It was Temar. He had gone whiter than I had ever seen him. The Duke was frozen in shock. I found my tongue at last.

“Assassinated,” I said. “Someone sent a detachment of soldiers, dressed like the Royal Guard. I heard them coming and hid Miriel in an antechamber.”

“Are they still in the Palace?” The commander in the Duke awoke. I saw he was ready to call for reinforcements, knew that he was bent on vengeance. I shook my head.

“No. The High Priest came with the true guard. They were…too late. But they were able to kill the soldiers who were there already.” Temar and the Duke exchanged a look, the glance between Light and Shadow, the sharing of something far beyond words, beneath conscious thought.

“I must go,” the Duke said abruptly. “I have been summoned to a Council meeting.” Slowly, his face changed. His jaw tightened. “The King,” he said softly, bitterly, “has called a Council meeting.” He had not realized, until then, how completely his chances lay in ruins. Another King, years more of courting favor. “You two, stay here.” He made for the door, but as it swung open, he turned to look at us. “You swear you had no part in this?” he asked dangerously. Miriel gasped, but I held firm. I would have wondered the same of him, if his surprise had not betrayed him.

“We swear,” I said, my voice even. He nodded curtly.

“I’ll make a plan when I return. Do not leave this room, and for the love of the Gods, do
not
open the door to anyone. If they have any sense, they’ll come for Miriel, too.”

“The Council, or the assassins?” I asked. It was Temar who answered.

“Both.”

The Duke waited a moment more. “Do not think this erases your betrayal,” he said, softly. “I will deal with you when I get back. Do not even think of running.” And they were gone, the two of them as grim as I had ever seen.

I managed to get Miriel to a chair and myself to another before my legs gave out. I wanted to laugh hysterically. The Duke could never have realized how little his anger meant to us now. What we had seen in that chamber was more horrifying by far. After a while, I realized that I was rocking back and forth wordlessly; Miriel was crying. Her sobs had gone hoarse, and she was muffling them into her hand as if she were still hidden, still listening to the footsteps of the soldiers coming closer and closer to our hiding place.

“It’s so much worse,” she choked out, and I nodded, not trusting myself to speak without crying, or vomiting on the Duke’s polished floors and fine carpets. It was worse—far worse than when the man had come to poison Miriel, worse than when we had found the poison in our food. To be so close to death, and spared for no reason—chance had placed us there, and luck alone had saved us, and it made no sense. My mind could not accept that I was still alive. I had only to close my eyes for the feelings of terror to rush back and choke me.

“Someone’s trying to kill us,” I heard myself say. Miriel looked up at me, her tearstained face blank. “You remember when the soldier said to check for us? I think they were there for us, too. This wasn’t just about the King.”

“But why—“ she had to stop and catch her breath around a sob. “Why us? Who would bother to kill us if he was dead? Anyone with sense would know that—“

“I don’t
know
,” I nearly yelled back, and her eyes went wide. “I don’t know who, and I don’t know why. We didn’t know why last time, either! We never know! We never found out!”

“Catwin, listen.” Miriel’s voice was strengthened by her own desire to believe that we had been safe. “They just wanted to make sure that no one had seen anything, so that they couldn’t be tracked.” Her words were eminently sensible, and yet I could not shake the feeling that those men had been sent for us, that they would have found us and killed us wherever we were in the palace. In my dreams, my mother had told my father to kill me, and spare me the betrayal that would follow me all my days. Superstition. I always said it was superstition. But it was becoming harder and harder to ignore.

“I don’t think so,” was all I said, and Miriel frowned and fell silent.

Time passed slowly. We were hungry, but too afraid to send for food. Exhausted, but frightened into wakefulness. Sometimes we paced, and sometimes we huddled in our chairs. We were still awake, both of us wide-eyed and frightened, when the Duke and Temar returned at last. The Duke was grim as he swung his cloak from his shoulders.

“They say the soldiers were Ismiri,” he said. “One of them carried orders signed by Kasimir.” I forgot that I was not to speak in the Duke’s presence unless prompted.

“That seems…incautious,” I commented, tentative. He was too preoccupied to be angry. He only nodded, but Temar said,

“Kasimir is incautious as well.” I nodded, my mind working furiously. No rational person would send soldiers with a letter, something that could be found if everything went wrong. Surely. But Kasimir was not rational, not about this. And I remembered the Duke saying that a full-scale invasion of Ismir would fail—was Kasimir more calculating than he had seemed? Was he trying to tempt us to make a foolish mistake?

“I don’t trust it,” the Duke said bluntly. “Too many people benefit. The Conradines, for one.” At this, Miriel stirred to life. She raised her head and stared at him, her eyes red-rimmed.

“Wilhelm would
never
be party to murdering Garad,” she said. The Duke raised his eyebrows at her vehemence.

“Perhaps,” he conceded. “But I’d not be such a fool as to trust Gerald.” I thought of Gerald Conradine’s slippery smiled and shuddered. Had he been planning for war, as Dusan claimed? Had he grown tired of waiting?

“You two will be sent back to Voltur,” the Duke said suddenly, and we both looked over to him. We had forgotten, for a moment, that his anger would be waiting to spill out.

“What?” Miriel asked disbelievingly.

“You need to be seen to grieve,” he said. He had been planning this out in his head, I saw. He was making the quick, hard decisions on which his survival had depended—first on the battlefield, and now at court. “And I don’t want everyone watching you and spreading rumors about your behavior.” His voice hardened. “
And
I cannot afford another crisis, or another betrayal.” I waited to see where he was taking this, but Miriel flared up, forgetting my lie in her anger.

“My betrayal? After you were the one who would have sold me as a whore?”

“You would have been favored beyond your wildest dreams,” he spat at her. “But you had to have your own way, and you have destroyed it all. Everything you
touch
turns to ashes. You have ruined my plans for this family, just as your mother did before you. Did you think I would not learn the whole of why the King was displeased with you? Your Shadow would have hidden it, but I know of your disgrace!”

Wilhelm.
I froze, but Miriel was undaunted.