Shadowforged (Light & Shadow) (9 page)

“It’s all about enemies with you,” she accused me. “You only care about who we can trust and who we can’t.”

“We can’t trust anyone,” I said fiercely. “Except each other. That’s the most important thing.”

“No!
It’s to live so we can do important things, because there
are
more important things! Things like the rebellion, that shape the whole world. Catwin, there’s a world beyond the court, and who said what, and who danced with whom!”

“Not for me.” I clenched my hands to stop myself from grabbing her and pulling her close, as she did when she wanted to hiss something in my face. “I took my vow to keep you safe, and so that’s what I do. I protect you. There’s nothing more important, and you can’t say it doesn’t matter—who’s rescued you a dozen times so you could whine about philosophy and sympathize with rebels? Me. You wouldn’t even
be
here if it wasn’t for me watching your back.” She stared at me, wide eyed. “So you decide, because you’re the oath-breaker. Not me. You decide what you want. Until then, I’ll keep faith.”

I did not wait for her response, for I knew she would have none. I turned around and went to bed, not bowing, not waiting for her. I left her staring after me, and I lay in the dark and thought myself a fool to have trusted her.

Chapter 9

The next morning, not speaking to me, Miriel woke early and sent Anna to order hot water for a bath. She shed her clothes—I was glad to see that there were no longer any bruises on her skin—and she bathed silently. She would smooth her hands over her skin, covering it with the rose-scented soap she used, and then she would scrub at it until her skin was nearly raw, so pink that once or twice I nearly moved to stop her. I sat in the room with her, ostensibly studying, but watching her and wondering what change my words had wrought this time. She did not acknowledge my presence even once.

I sat and snuck glances over at her, a book open on my lap. I could not think what to say to her. I could not find the words to apologize.

At last, she sluiced clean water over herself and wrapped a bath sheet around her body as she wandered around to each of her wardrobes, looking at the priceless gowns inside. She selected one of a pale pink trimmed in white and had Anna lace her into it, tightly. She slid a cuff of pearls over her wrist, and twisted tendrils of her hair back, to be pinned.

“How are you?” I asked her, tentatively. I saw her consider an angry retort, a witty disclaimer; she only shrugged her shoulders and continued to look in the mirror.

“You were right,” she said, after such a long pause that I had forgotten the question. “We need to survive.” I knew that tone in her voice, and I knew there was a reason she had waited for Anna to leave the room. I only waited, and her next words came in a rush. “But I can’t just let the rebels go without aid. I have to try to help them.”

Even expecting it, I felt my shoulders slump. “Don’t.”

“It isn’t a choice, Catwin.”

“Yes, it is!” My voice rose, and I went over to her, knelt at her side and took her hands in mine. Once, she would have slapped me for such a thing; now, her eyes flared but she did not pull away. I tried to find words that would explain to her, a girl who had never known hunger or cold or homelessness, what it was that she risked. “My Lady, this is to step into danger. Can you not see that?”

“Catwin.” Miriel smiled, and I made the mistake of looking into her eyes. They were very warm. She squeezed her fingers around mine. “Don’t you want something to believe in?” I blinked, then shook my head and tried to pull my fingers away. She tightened hers.

“This is believing something that could get us killed. It’s dangerous to believe it.” I heard Anna’s tread on the floorboards in the privy chamber, and I lowered my voice. “To help them would be treason.”

“It’s not treason,” Miriel whispered back passionately, and as Anna entered the room, Miriel picked up her hand and twisted her wrist about to look at the bracelet. “Yes, thank you, it’s clasped now.” She smiled at me, then over at Anna, who only glowered; it was her usual method of dealing with the two of us, now.

I left for my lessons, but I found that in the coming weeks, I could not banish her words from my mind. Something to believe in, she had said. I did not think I had ever believed in anything. Certainly not something so dangerous as an uprising against the monarchy itself, but when I thought on it, I was not even sure what I thought of the Gods, or the saints, or the old myths.

At the Winter Castle, I had never thought further than the next day. First, I had been a child, considering my next meal or my next escape into the tunnels in the rock. My life had been stolen rolls and skinned knees; the noblest thing I had done was help Roine with her patients. I had had a gift for that, but no call such as Roine felt, to heal the ill, set bones, and cut away disease. When I had been chosen to be taught by Miriel’s tutors, my world had narrowed simply to avoiding the Lady’s anger as much as I could.

We had traveled to Penekket and I had learned just how big the world was, and what could be found at every corner of the land. I knew more than I had ever dreamed existed, and yet I was still a child: I had seen no farther than my next meal, my next training lesson, my next encounter with the Duke. I watched what happened, and I pondered on what it might all mean in the future, and yet…

Something to believe in. I did not have anything to believe in. It had never occurred to me to find something to believe in. I did not even know how to believe in anything, beyond staying alive.

I watched Miriel, as if I could learn the secret of it from her. After her melancholy, and her excitement, she had returned to her studies with fierce intensity. She sent me to the library for more books, and I had more than a few close scrapes with the Royal Guard, when I was weighed down with heavy volumes and could not have run fast enough to evade them. Miriel read the books voraciously, and I saw that she was beginning to write her own tract on the subject, hiding the pages behind books on the shelf. I asked her to tell me her suspicions, but in response I received only a mischievous smile, and the assurance that it was right in front of my face.

“Is it Wilhelm, that you think is Jacces?” I asked her. “The Duke? Garad? Who?”

“Oh, figure it out yourself,” she said. “The sooner you do, the sooner you can go spy on them.”

When she was not writing or studying, she seemed to be learning all over again how to be the most enchanting and desirable of women. She practiced her dancing until the tapping of her shoes drove me to take my books and barricade myself in the bedroom. She practiced walking back and forth until I thought she would wear a path in the floor. She was learning to walk with the tiniest sway in her hips, and she now greeted everyone with an enchanting flicker of the eyes: down modestly, and then up through her lashes.

She had been perfectly accomplished at being enchanting before, and so I was bemused at this new obsession. Garad seemed no less enchanted with her now, and almost every one of the maidens had taken to dressing their hair in curls, and wearing the colors that Miriel wore. I watched her, waiting for a clue, and one day I found the key to all of it.

“Tighter,” Miriel said, over her shoulder. “In at the waist.”

“My Lady is perfectly slim,” Anna panted. “The dress looks beautiful.”

Miriel frowned, she put her hands flat on the front of the gown and pressed, looking down, and at last I understood. I gave a snort of laughter that I tried to turn into a cough, but it was too late. Miriel shot a glare at me and turned pink with embarrassment, and I saw her mouth turn down at the corners.

In the past months, I had grown until I looked like a gangly colt, turning unexpectedly awkward, losing the balance I had so carefully cultivated. I felt as if I must train twice as hard just to keep the same control of my muscles. I was awkward in my own body, and I hated it—and, hating it, self-conscious, I had noticed only that Miriel, on the other hand, had stayed as perfectly tiny as she had been when we arrived before our twelfth birthdays. I had envied her the lack of strangeness. She did not need to go back to the Quartermaster, week after week, begging for new clothes and being frowned at.

Now I saw that this was a problem for her as well. Being small was not a problem in itself—the Dowager Queen’s short stature had created somewhat of a fashion for tiny women. No, the problem was that Miriel continued to be as slim and shapeless as a child. Where the other girls were growing into new gowns, Miriel’s gowns fit as well as they ever had. The drop-waist gowns that were coming into fashion only accentuated Miriel’s lack of figure.

It had been one thing to be the smartest of the girls when all of them were children. Then, a merry laugh and a brilliant smile would do to attract the notice of those seeking a bride for their son. “She’ll grow,” I had heard more than once, one father to another as they haggled over dowry. “And four children in as many years—her mother was fertile.” But now, as the other girls did grow, matching the awkward coltishness of the growing boys, Miriel remained small. A liability.

So she worked without ceasing to be the most interesting, the wittiest, the most vivacious of the girls. She sparkled as never before, the graceful turn of her head and the cheerful peal of her laughter were copied not only by the other maidens, but by the Queen’s ladies. Miriel outshone Marie, who had faded into the background with her father’s disgrace, and she outshone Cintia, who had been so ignored for so long that she seemed almost to prefer to be overlooked.

The Duke noticed, and
one night he summoned me to his study alone. I went, wondering what strange trouble we had gotten into now. Had Anna heard more than we thought? I resolved to speak to Miriel about that, and to tell her to hide the philosophical treatise she was writing. If I got out of this alive, of course. I breathed deeply and tried to calm my nerves.

“My Lord?” I asked as I entered, and I bowed deeply. I always tried to act with all the respect the Duke wished of me. I took a deep breath, and remembered one of the things I had learned from Miriel almost at once: clever prevarication was no better than a lie. A lie was a lie, and a lie required commitment. If I needed to lie in this meeting, I must do so freely, without hesitation. There would be no mincing words with the Duke so that he might look back and see that I had never truly
lied
. I just wished that I knew what this meeting was about, so that I might have had time to come up with a good lie first.

The Duke looked up from his work with his customary indifference, and at his lack of rage, I felt a flood of relief so great that I thought I might lose my balance. Then I looked at his eyes again and wondered for a moment I wondered what it was that he saw when he looked at me, at anyone. It was one of the puzzles of our meetings.

He did not tell me that he had a task for me, for both of us knew that I was only summoned when he wanted something from me. He did not ask how I fared, because he did not care, and he did not ask how Miriel fared, or if any crises had arisen. He assumed that I would tell him if anything important had happened. And so the Duke wasted no time with trivialities; in his presence, I became aware how many unnecessary words other people used.

“You are to ensure that Miriel remains a virgin,” he said bluntly. He looked back to his work and made a mark on one of the documents he was reviewing. The conversation, such as it was, had finished. He expected me to go now.

“My Lord…” I tried to find some way to phrase my question delicately. “Is there some specific…threat?”

He cast an annoyed look at me, and then hi
s eyes narrowed. “You tell me, Shadow. Is there? She takes more care with her appearance now. Is there a man? Is there a threat?” I stared at him mutely, thinking of the men who stopped to stare at Miriel in the hallways, of the priests who stole glances at her during services. I thought of the noblemen who put their sons in her way, and then wondered if they were too old for her themselves.

I did not consider telling him the truth: that Miriel was
worried that she was too small and, to be truthful, skinny as a boy. The Duke would have little sympathy for her plight, and only be angry to find a fault with her. So I shook my head. “Nothing specific, no, my Lord.”

“She does not encourage any man?” he pressed me, and I almost smiled. He should know that everything about Miriel spoke of desire, spoke of subtle yearning; he had ordered it to be so. Miriel could encourage a man with nothing more than a word of greeting. At the ripple of her laughter, I saw unslaked longing in men’s eyes. Every gesture was an invitation, every word was a whispered promise.

But the Duke’s instructions to her long ago had been followed to the letter: whatever her promise, Miriel never gave anything of herself. She stood out of reach, a veritable goddess, flesh and blood and yet as unattainable as a woman made of snow and ice; she melted out of reach of a man’s fingers, and she walked so that the hem of her gown might barely brush a man’s boots.

“No,” I said. “She does not encourage any man. Beyond the King, of course. And she never does anything improper with him,” I hastened to add. He stared at me in silence, until I felt compelled to say something more. “So I do not think there is a threat, my Lord.”

The Duke looked as if he did not entirely believe me. “There is always a threat,” he said. “Miriel is beautiful.” If he felt anything for his niece, be it love or pride, none of it was evident in his voice. He might have been speaking of the weather conditions for a siege. He might have been discussing a horse.

“Even if she were not beautiful, young men delight in seduction. And there are many who would be glad to have my heir dishonored and unfit for marriage.” The look in his eye indicated that I had best be content with this explanation, but I did not bow and withdraw. I was sifting through evidence in my head.

“How am I to ensure this?” I asked, finally.

“With force, if necessary.” The Duke did not seem to understand the question.

“If you have further questions, you may ask me,” Temar said smoothly. I let him draw me out of the Duke’s study, into the public room, and then I shook my head at him.

“I don’t understand. Why would he call me here unless he suspected her, and if he suspects her, why isn’t he angry? She really hasn’t done anything,” I assured him.

“I know,” Temar said, so blandly that I wondered what else he knew. He saw me thinking it over, and smiled a smile with a lot of teeth. “He doesn’t suspect her,” he assured me. “But the Council has made…a suggestion.”

I raised my eyebrows and waited, and Temar smiled. I saw the anticipation in his eyes; he wanted to tell me what he had heard. He wanted to share the information he had gleaned at keyholes. Sometimes when I saw the conspiratorial gleam in his eye, things seemed as they had always been: the two of us quick to notice the same details, able to share a joke with only the flicker of an eyebrow.