Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) (42 page)

“
No,” she murmured. “I
can’t…”

“
You have to,” I pleaded
with her. “Or you’ll die. Please.”

“
Die?” The word was a
breath.

“
Yes. You’ve been
poisoned.” Her head dropped towards my hand, and I tipped the herbs
into her mouth. “Chew. Don’t spit them out. You have to chew them
for a long time, Miriel, to make the oils come out.”

“
Mmf.” I put my hand over
her mouth.

“
You can’t spit them out.”
I kept my hand there for a minute, counting in the darkness, and
then I said, “Now swallow them.” I felt her throat work, and she
made a gagging noise. She was hardly moving.

The wait was agonizing. The serving woman
had banged on the door at first, but that had ceased; I assumed she
was going for the Duke. I flexed my fingers, and was pleased with
their response. The antidote had worked, for me—but what if I had
been too late for Miriel?

I tried to steady my breathing. The worst
had happened. Someone had tried to kill me, to kill us, and I did
not know who. This was no knife fight in a darkened corridor, with
the interrogation techniques Temar had taught me, this was a
whisper in the dark, death like a kiss. I tried to run through
names in my head, and closed my eyes against the sheer number of
them.

Gradually, so gradually that I thought I
might have been imagining it, Miriel’s breathing grew stronger. She
shifted against me, rolling her head along my collarbone.

“
I don’t feel well,” she
said, finally, and I could have laughed in relief.

“
It gets better,” I said,
my heart fairly pounding out of my chest, and I found that my arms
were wrapped tightly around her. “You’ll feel better
soon.”

“
Mmf.” Miriel pushed away
from me and rubbed her face with her hands, clumsily, then looked
up and around the darkened room. “Why are you here?” she asked,
curiously. She did not remember, she had been deep down, so close
to death that I swallowed to think on it.

“
Someone tried to poison
us,” I said. “I was in Roine’s rooms, so I was able to make an
antidote.”

“
Who?” Miriel asked, and I
swallowed, then held up my hand. I counted off my
fingers.

“
The Dowager Queen and the
High Priest,” I suggested. “Guy de la Marque. Perhaps someone else
on the council. Jacces, of course.” There was a pause. I did not
want to say the last name on the list.

“
My uncle,” Miriel said,
unflinching, and I nodded.

There was a long silence, broken by the
sound of men shouting in the outer rooms. Miriel reached over,
unsteadily, and pulled me close again. Her dark eyes were shining
with tears. Her forehead was nearly pressed against mine.

“
Say you’re on my side,”
she said, simply. When I opened my mouth, she touched my hand to
stop the words. “My side, and no one else’s.” Her deep blue eyes
were pools of black in the darkened room, holding mine. The
beautiful fringed lashes, the red lips, the beguiling tilt of her
head—all of it disappeared. There was only the dark gleam of her
gaze.

“
What, now? Now that
someone is trying to kill us?” The pounding of feet was in the
privy chamber.

“
That’s why we need each
other,” Miriel say. “You’re the one who came to save me, you’re the
other one they tried to kill. I need you to be on my side. Not my
uncle’s side, not anyone else’s. Not Roine’s.” She paused. “Not
Temar’s.”

I paused, and she, this strange fae creature
with her soft voice, smelling of bitter herbs and rose perfume,
waited. Neither of us paid any heed to the banging on the door.

“
I promise,” I said,
slowly. I tried to form the question, but I did not need
to.

“
And I am on your side,”
she said. “I promise. The two of us, we’re our own side.” I felt
dizzy. I had been given one task alone: to be Miriel’s shadow, to
protect her. I spent more time in her company, watching her,
thinking of her, than anyone else in my life, and I did not think
that I would ever understand her.

“
Should we open the door?”
I asked her.

She nodded, and released her grip on my
collar. “Yes. You have your daggers?”

“
Always.” I exchanged one
last look with her, then hopped off the bed and straightened my
tunic.

“
Open up!” It was Temar’s
voice. I stared for a moment at the door, saying goodbye to a
friend, and then I walked over and opened the door.

Epilogue

The two figures stood in the cold, watching
the night sky. Their voices were lowered against the bustle around
them.

“
It was a foolish attempt.”
Cold, accusing. “You could have guessed that it would go
wrong.”

“
I saw an opening, and I
took it.”

“
Now they know. Now they’re
on their guard.”

“
Now we know for sure what
they are capable of,” the second asserted. More quietly, they
added, “We will not fail again.”

“
No.” The first considered
the sliver of the moon. “We will not have another chance at them,
before it is too late. We must try a different tack now. Watch them
carefully. And watch yourself—they’re not fools, you should assume
they’ll suspect you. This time, you will wait for my
orders.”

“
I will.”

####

Thank you for reading Book I of the Light
& Shadow trilogy! If you enjoyed the book, read on for an
excerpt of the sequel, Shadowforged. Whether you liked the book or
not, I encourage you to take a few moments to leave a review—not
only will your feedback help other readers to make an informed
choice, but it will help me to improve my storytelling! You can
find more information about my books, including upcoming works, at
my website:

http://moirakatson.com

Shadowforged

Light & Shadow, Book
II

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 grew so tired of waiting for his judgment
that we almost welcomed the fall of the axe.

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.