Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) (43 page)

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.

She was my ally, and the other half of
myself, in ways I could not have explained. But I feared her
sometimes. I wondered if she ever feared me, who already had blood
on my hands, who watched the world through the eyes of a spy. Even
I feared myself. And, if I was not so foolish as to believe that I
could keep my hands clean by riding out the storm in the Duke’s
shadow, I feared what would come when we chose a path.

“
What
can
we do?” I asked, to distract
Miriel from her melancholy. “What choices do we even
have?”

“
We don’t have any choices
yet,” she admitted. “But I’ve thought about it, and being on our
own side means that we’re always waiting for our luck to turn—for a
chance, something that could set us free.”

“
Free from the Duke?” I
asked, and she tilted her head to the side.

“
Free from our enemies,”
she said. “But I’ve thought…what does it mean that we can’t tell
who wanted to kill us? And it means that everyone is our
enemy.”

“
We should trust no one,” I
agreed. Miriel smiled, satisfied to hear her thoughts from my
mouth.

“
Exactly.” She sobered at
once. “We have to stay, there’s nowhere to go, and anyway, no way
to leave. Which means we stay in a court that hates us.”

“
Then our goal is to stay
alive,” I said. It was a poor jest, in part because it was no jest
at all. Miriel’s mouth only twitched, half-heartedly.

“
Garad is our only ally.
Him, and Wilhelm.” She took a deep breath, and I saw her fighting
to tell herself that what she felt for Wilhelm was nothing more
than a girlish fancy, and in any case could cause her nothing but
pain. “But, Wilhelm is powerless, and that leaves
Garad.”

“
Not a poor ally,” I
said.
But a fickle one
. She nodded at the unspoken.

“
And then our enemies. We
know some of them, but not all, and they’re powerful. Which means
we need Garad’s favor, yes?” I nodded, and she nodded back. “Yes.
And I said we should wait for a chance, something that would set us
free…”

“
The throne,” I guessed,
and she nodded.

“
It’s the only way to
survive at Court. I must make Garad make me Queen. My uncle should
help us. And when I am Queen, then we have power in our own right.
But until then, nothing is more important. I mean it Catwin.” Her
gaze sharpened. “Not Roine. Not Temar.” I swallowed, as I always
did when I thought of him; I hesitated when I thought of Roine’s
steady faith in me. But I nodded.

“
Not the rebellion,” I
rejoined. “Not Wilhelm.” After a pause, she nodded.

“
You know, I wanted to make
Heddred whole,” she said. “Above all, I want to help this
rebellion. And once, I wanted Wilhelm. But I can never have
Wilhelm…and I cannot help the rebellion without first having enough
power to do so. I can’t see any other way. So I must forsake it for
a time, so that one day I can come back and help it…” I had no
response, and so we sat in silence, thinking of what we would give
up: for Miriel, her dream of happily ever after, and her sense of
justice; for me, my loyalty to my family, and my childish love of
Temar.

“
You know, if we do this,
we will be without honor,” Miriel said. I frowned, questioning,
unable to follow the sideways slant of her thoughts, and she looked
back at me, meeting my gaze openly. “We will be liars, every day,
to everyone but each other, won’t we?” I nodded, uncertainly, and
she smiled suddenly, feral and dark. “Then perhaps we should not
fear other sins. We will make our enemies live to regret that they
ever went against us. And then, when they are gone, we will shape
Heddred to what it must be.”

I shivered. Was this only the angry words of
the scorned and powerless? I could agree if I believed that we
would never be able to exact our revenge; what I feared was that we
might be able to. I could imagine it only too well. I knew that at
this very moment, I could make my way into any noble’s rooms and
kill them as they slept. Sometimes, I wondered why I did not do so.
I shuddered.

“
It is not all dark,”
Miriel said, understanding. “Catwin, this is a dark path, but the
end is good. And think—do we have any choice? I’ve wondered,
sometimes, if the Gods mean us to tread this path. That is our fate
together—to lose everything we have held dear until now, so that we
may heal our Kingdom.” I looked at her, and saw a woman whose
fierce idealism was warped into ambition; I feared for her, and
yet—

She was right. There was no other path. My
dream came back to me, and there was the feeling of a net closing
around me, fate drawing me into a pattern too big for my eyes to
see. I shook my head involuntarily.

“
Let’s worry about
surviving, first,” I said softly, to distract myself. “I don’t
think that part is going to be easy.”

“
That’s your task,” Miriel
reminded me. “To keep us both alive. And mine is to enchant the
King.” Unconsciously, she straightened her shoulders, turned her
head to show the line of her jaw. Her uncle had bidden her to learn
how to stir a man’s desire with only the set of her head, and she
had learned it well. He might regret that, now that her talents
would be set to the task of enchanting the court for her own
purposes, and not his. He had always used us for his own ends; now
he was our enemy, even if he did not know it.

“
What are you thinking?”
Miriel asked me.

“
Fooling your uncle is the
first thing we need to do,” I said softly. “There are only two ways
to survive having him as an enemy. One, make him think we’re
friends again. Two, be stronger than he is.” I looked over at her,
and she nodded.

“
Or both,” she said
promptly, and I thought that the Duke would indeed be sorry that he
had forged her into such a woman. He should not have had her taught
military history. She was quite good at it.

“
Or both,” I agreed. “So
for now, we have to make him believe we’re all friends again, so he
can help you become Queen.” Miriel nodded decisively.

“
You keep us alive, and I
will become Queen.” It was a poor jest, in part because it was no
jest at all.

“
You’re not afraid he’ll
lose interest before you can get a treaty signed?” I asked
curiously. It was the other question that had been worrying me.
Garad had flaunted her to the court, he had taken great joy in
defying his guardian. What if that wore thin, and reality intruded,
before Miriel got a crown on her head? But she only grinned at my
fears, a knowing smile.

“
I can do it,” she
whispered back. “You’ll see. I’ll do it. One way or another.” She
smiled. “I’m the best, the very best.”