Shadow's End (Light & Shadow) (20 page)

“That was before the Queen’s pregnancy,” the Duke said, distracted. “She can’t be risked now—if Wilhelm falls, that child is uncontested heir. She’s to be on the uppermost floor of the Fortress, and she’ll have all of the Royal Guard protecting her. She’s to withdraw tomorrow when the men leave.” I nodded, but as I looked around the room, I saw Temar standing at the door to the Duke’s bedchamber, watching his master. To my surprise, there was neither his usual blank stare, nor thinly veiled hatred on his face. He was thinking, his attention entirely caught by the Duke’s commentary. When he saw me watching him, his face went blank, and when he saw me looking, his eyes narrowed slightly, and he took the closest thing to hand and disappeared, once more, into the Duke’s rooms, away from my prying gaze.

Chapter 20

Tomorrow, to war.

Miriel had been white-faced and shaking, shocked into wakefulness by the sudden descent into open battle; it seemed we had been waiting forever, and her mind, slowed by the tea I had made her, could not comprehend reason, but instead only horror. I had sat with her, soothed her as she leaned her head on my shoulder and tears ran down her face. She did not sob, she only held tightly to my hand, and at last I had put my arm around her shoulders and lowered her, gently, to the bed.

“Aren’t you scared?” she whispered, so softly that I had to bend my head close to hear her. I smoothed a lock of hair away from her face and tried to smile, but it was more a lopsided twitch of my lips than anything genuine. I was terrified.

“They’re wearied from their march,” I said reasonably. “They’ll be looking into the rising sun as they fight, and we have the best generals of the generation working together. They’ll have a plan. They’ll win, and send the Ismiri home again.” She only blinked in response, and slowly her breathing became deep and even. I was about to lever her up slightly to work my arm free when she said, sleepily,

“I should have stopped this.”

“What do you mean?” I frowned at her, and her eyes fluttered; she was half asleep.

“If I was the leader I thought I was, I could have stopped this. I should have. I shouldn’t have bothered with the treaty—we should have come back at once and found some way out of this.”

“You did what you thought was best,” I said, a weak comfort, and
even so close to sleep, she frowned. Her brow wrinkled slightly.

“For Heddred,” she said. “For
the people.” Her voice was growing fainter and fainter. “But how does this help them, if they die?” And at that, the herbs still in her blood, she had slipped into unconsciousness, leaving me awake and frightened.

I brushed my hair out and took off my suit, lined my daggers up neatly beside my bed and set out my boots, and then I put on my pajamas and slipped into bed. But I could not sleep. I could not believe that the there was an army, sitting on the plains, outside the city walls; I could not imagine that there was a second army, perhaps marching even now, through the darkness. The sheer scale of it was beyond me, so that I felt I could believe it only for a moment before my mind told me that none of it could possibly be real. For all that this invasion had been the stuff of my nightmares for weeks, I had somehow managed to believe that it was a dream. In the many nights that I had sat and peered out of the windows of the Fortress, I had never seen the invaders, and I had begun to think that they would blow away like morning mist, and never arrive at all.

I was seized by the desire to look out onto the plains. It was terrifying that I might see the armies by the light of their fires, lying in wait like predatory beasts, but now that I had wondered at it, I had to know: could I see the Ismiri army in the distance? Their thousands upon thousands of men, clustered by campfires, feeding themselves on the grain from our fields. It was like fearing an intruder in the room, or some nightmarish monster under the bed—at once mocking myself, and in terror, I knew that I must see the truth. There was nothing more important than seeing with my own eyes what Heddred faced.

I got up out of bed and put on my suit
once more, brushing through my cropped hair with my fingers and slipping each of the daggers and tools into the secret pockets, and then I opened the door and left. For once, Miriel did not waken and demand to know where I was going; she was lost to the world, taking refuge in her dreams. I cast one last look at her, and then closed the door behind myself.

The guards at the door barred my way, but relaxed themselves when I pointed to a nearby window seat. It was a westward-facing wall, and there had been many a night that I had cr
ept out and watched the plains, relaxing only as the hours ticked away and no strange lights appeared on the horizon. They might have given me up to the Duke once, but now there was nothing for them to give away; there was nowhere for me to run, no plots for me to spin. I was only a scared girl, looking into the darkness to see if an enemy waited there.

It did—this army was not the stuff of nightmares, but flesh and bone, real men with a terrible purpose. Below the shimmering beauty of the night sky, lying on the rich farmland of my nation, sprawled the Ismiri army. Staring out to the West, I saw it at once, and my heart seized. I wanted to pray, but the words stuck in my throat; praying had never brought me comfort. There was only a day’s march standing between the two armies, nothing more. Two dawns from now, the battle would join, the ranks of men shouting war cries and brandishing weapons—a fine moment that would descend
at once, I knew, in chaos.

A battle was as much luck as skill, Donnett had taught me. He had been twenty at the Battle of Voltur, and he had seen the men next to him felled by arrows and swords, run through by spears, their heads split by the great war axes Ismiri generals carried. He said that he had seen men cut down by their allies, Ismiri and Heddrian both, dying before their own friends realized who it was they had killed. Battle was madness, Donnett had said, the men exhausted and filled with terror—they might go mad
with fear, or with battle lust, and it was like nothing human.

The Duke had seen this, and yet he was prepared to lead an army into battle once more. He thought it rank stupidity to try for peace. A waste of a messenger, and the end of any advantage the Heddrian army might hold. The Ismiri would think us weak, telling them that their ruinous march across the plains would be forgiven, if only they went home
now. It was not noble, the Duke had said, sneering, to throw away a battle and consign one’s citizens to invasion—it would be nobler to cut down the army where they stood, take any means to destroy them and win peace that way. We would have no concessions from Kasimir.

If only we weren’t dealing with Kasimir, Miriel had said.

I thought of Pavle, the young man following his older brother into battle. I wondered if it had been like this when they had been children: Kasimir running ahead, taunting the younger child, and Pavle tottering along behind him, unsteady on his feet but determined to follow his older brother. Even now, in such a great enterprise as this, knowing that thousands upon thousands would die, Pavle followed, determined to prove himself. The Ismiri knew of both his doubt and his devotion, and they wavered as well—but, like Pavle, they would follow Kasimir wherever he led. A man does not march thousands of miles only to abandon his fellow soldiers and march home through strange territory, cursed by his companions and his lord.

But they wanted to
run; I knew that without question. Only Kasimir, with a hatred that bordered on obsession, could think this march a good plan. I thought of the Ismiri camp: hundreds of nobles and thousands of foot soldiers, weary and homesick. I wondered if they felt ill at ease, if the land looked different than their own. I wondered if they were afraid. What were they saying, in their camps at night? Did they curse the luck that had brought them Kasimir for a lord?

I tried to give up my perpetual doubt and pray. This was not the whisper of a prayer for good luck, uttered in the darkness, words uttered for convenience, with no hope of any change. This was a true wish. Feeling like a fool, and yet wondering what else I could do, I interlaced my fingers and bowed my head and I prayed, moving my lips silently so that the guards would not hear me:
Please, if you care for the people of Heddred, find some way to turn away the army before there is a battle.
It felt selfish, and I bit my lip.
It is not only for us
, I reasoned, with the invisible Gods I so scorned.
The Ismiri have families, too. Would it not be best for them to go home as well?

Nothing. Silence.

I sighed and leaned my head against the narrow window, feeling the edges cut into my skin. What had I expected? The Gods, if they even existed, either cared very little, or would not deign to answer one such as me. There had been eight wars between our nations, and they had never once intervened—and surely many other men and women must have made much the same prayers then. We were on our own.

And, I a
dmitted with fearful honesty, it was certain that Miriel and I were helpless. We were not soldiers, who could wield swords or even command armies. We would not be the ones who could lead the soldiers to victory, urging them on to fight for King and country.  We were not wives, who could whisper in their husband’s ears for courage, and we were not even healers, who might salvage something out of the ruin of battle. We were only two girls who would, if all went well, get a signature on a scrap of paper and then sit back and hope for everything to go our way.

It was sickening—it was the ruin of everything we had hoped for. And, as Miriel had pointed out,
our escape and our months of work for the rebellion could both come to nothing. It was words and promises on parchment, flimsy enough to a common-born citizen, and nothing that could stand as their shield against invaders. What was it that we had worked for? Was it any nobler than the Duke, so consumed with his quest for power that he would lead an army out and face ten thousand enemies?

The thought struck me like a punch to the gut: would Temar go with him? Every general would have a standard-bearer, and a cohort to ride at his side and keep him safe from harm. A bodyguard, of all people, should be at his lord’s side, but surely Temar would not be there. He had no place in a battle, he was not made for daylight and an open fight—he was a Shadow. And yet, all this was self-serving logic: the truth was, I felt all the breath leave me at the thought of him in such danger.

I could not think of it. I would go mad. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. But I could see his face in my mind: the clean line of his jaw, the eyes, so deep a brown that they might be black, the skin always tanned, even when the snow and cold had faded mine to bone whiteness.

Who was he? Five years,
I had known him, and what did I know now that I had not seen on sight? He had once sworn by a name I did not know—saint? Angel? God? That told me nothing, in any case. He looked like no one I had ever seen, but then, the Guards said that there were men of every color in the markets, one with skin that was truly white, and eyes that were red, and some men from the Bone Wastes with skin like cherry wood.

And yet Temar spoke Common with no accent I could discern. It was as if anything that could be erased, any sign of his life before this, had been wiped away. He had no notable scars, nor tattoos. I had seen his chambers once, and there was nothing there save his clothes—no possessions of any sort. I wondered, not for the first time, if Temar did not speak of his past because he had none at all.

But he must have a past—no man could serve the Duke, with no reasons of his own, and yet tell me that he understood love and honor and justice. There was nothing of that in Temar’s service. That meant reasons
of his own, and reasons meant a past.

And how could I know nothing of it? Any person, given time, would slip and tell stories. Temar knew a dozen small things about me, as I knew such things of Donnett, Miriel—even the Duke. I knew that Donnett could not stand to eat
salt fish, for he had grown up in a coastal town in the north and run away in his fifteenth year. I knew that Miriel had once thought to become a knight, and dressed up in a pageboy’s clothes; she had been caught, and thrashed. But I knew nothing, not one thing, about Temar, about his childhood.

Behind me, the door opened, and I jumped at the noise. I looked around to see Temar make his way out of the Duke’s chambers with a brief word of thanks to the guards. His eyes swept about the corridor and came to rest on me, and he froze.
There was the jolt, now, as there always was when our eyes met; I felt my lips part, and saw him swallow.

“I bid you a good night,” he said, after a pause, and set off in the other direction. But I had seen his look—Temar had not wanted anyone to notice
him. Temar felt guilty, and uncomfortable. And that alone was reason enough to wonder where he was going. I hastily uncurled myself from the window seat, cursing my aching muscles, and hurried after him.

Chapter 21

“Where are you going?” I demanded, when I caught up with him, and he shot me a look—annoyance quickly veiled by the sweep of his dark lashes. He was so preoccupied with his task, and I so determined to find out what it was, that for once the tension between us eased.

“Nothing,” he said shortly. “Go back to your watch. Go to sleep.” He was in no mood to bandy words with me. He wanted me
gone. I would not have that.

“No.”

“Go back, Catwin,” he insisted, but I followed him as he went into the stairwell and began to climb. Normally, by himself, he would lope up the stairs quickly, taking them two at a time; he always moved quickly, even when he had no need to hurry. Now his footsteps dragged; he did not want to do this, whatever it was. We climbed and climbed, and I began to wonder where it was that we were going. When at last we approached the healers’ chambers, I spoke up at last.

“You look strange,” I said finally, and he jerked around; he had been so absorbed in his th
oughts that he had not even noticed me following him. He had forgotten my presence entirely. I swallowed back my hurt pride and saw that he was sweating, even in the chill of the building, and his skin was an unhealthy pallor. “Are you ill?” I asked, nervously. He started to shake his head, and then said, suddenly,

“Yes.” I narrowed my eyes, but there was no doubting the greyish tinge I saw, or the brightness in his eyes.

“Let me get you medicine, then,” I said. I realized, with a rush of pain, that I wanted to see Roine again. I had swallowed back my tears all afternoon, and lost myself gratefully into the fear of war—for that was better than the fear of losing Roine. But I could not let her go onto the battlefield without begging her to be careful. “What is it you have?”

“A fever,” he said, a little wildly. “Some men of the Council had it, even the King.”

“Oh,” I said neutrally, nodding, and then I saw it: the flash of relief in his eyes. “No,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “You’re not sick. No one’s sick. Why would you tell me that?” I expected some glib response, but he turned me to face him, gently, and took my hands in his.

“You must go back to bed,” he said softly. “Protect Miriel and the Duke. There is something I must do, and please, Catwin, if you believe nothing but this, at least trust me now—you want no part of this.”

There was only one question, and I voiced it unthinking: “Who?” His face clouded, and the answer slammed into me. In a moment, I had his arm and I had dragged him over against the wall, peering into his face, wrapping my hands in the fabric of his shirt to hold him close. “No. You can’t. Why would you ever do that?” He did not answer, and I felt horror rise up in me. “For the love of all Gods—she’s with child!”

“I know that!” His face was anguished, but set. He was not turning back, and I could hardly find the words to speak. I was babbling, trying to keep my voice from rising.

“She’s sixteen. Temar, she’s only sixteen, what can she have done? What threat can she pose? She doesn’t know anything.”

“She stands in our way,” Temar said, bleakly. “And
if it is not her, then it is hundreds more on the battlefield two days hence—and that is all that matters.” He spoke the words as if he had repeated them to himself a thousand times, and still did not believe them.

“It isn’t all that matters! Gods above, even you’re frightened by it! You’ve never done something like this!” It was a guess, but it hit home. He swallowed and closed his eyes, and I shook him.
“Temar, wait—what do you mean, it’s her or…others?” He opened his eyes and looked at me bitterly.

“The Duke seeks a way to the throne, you know this. He would take his chance to eliminate those who stand in his way—and what better time than in chaos, when a man might say he saw anything?”

I stood stock still, trying to make sense of the words. The Duke would move against his rivals in battle. But if his rivals were Heddrian lords—for I must think of this slowly, now, to make sure that I was not mistaken—then he meant to turn his forces against the rest of the army. He would cut down the lords and their men alike, heedless that he took the lives of his own countrymen. I could not believe it, but Temar’s stillness told me that what I feared was true.

“That’s mad,” I said, finally. My voice was shaking, and I wanted nothing more than for Temar to say that I was mistaken, that such a conclusion as I had drawn was ridiculous. But he only smiled bitterly.

“Mad,” he agreed. “He had the throne within his grasp, didn’t he? And then it slipped away. And now he will wait no longer. I told him that, given time, Miriel might take the King’s fancy—that there is no need for such a plan as his.” His lip curled, as it always did when he spoke of Miriel. “But he will not wait for that; he will not see reason. He will take the chance in battle, and it will come to nothing but ruin.”

“
And so you would kill an innocent woman—half a child? And her with child?” I tightened my fingers around his arms. “You can’t do this,” I said urgently.

“I have to.” He shrugged, brushing my hands away from him
. “I know what I’m doing—believe me, I know. And I will pay for this. But there’s no other way—his plan will fail, and I cannot let him fail. I must give him the chance to choose another path. There is more to this than you could possibly imagine.”

“Try me,” I whispered back, passionate, and he opened his mouth—then shook his head. He was holding me away from himself, looking down rather than meet my eyes.

“You want no part of this,” he reiterated. “I would have had you ignorant of this entirely, but at least take no part in it. Go back now.”

“I can’t stand by and let you do this,” I warned him.

“You must,” he said, very seriously. “Miriel must sit on the throne, and Marie is in her way. Marie, and the baby, both of them.”

“Miriel?” I frowned at him, dumbstruck. “You’re doing this for Miriel?” Two thoughts occurred to me at once, the first that Miriel would not want the crown, not ever, and most certainly not at this price, and the second: “But you hate her,” I said, uncomprehending.

“Of course I hate her!” His voice was harsh. At my warning look, he dropped his voice, but nothing could hide the rage I saw in his eyes. There were years behind this, years upon years of… I could not know, could not say. The more I knew, the less I could make of any of it. “She hates me, she blackmails me, she has her own games and her own plots that I must try to learn from
you
—and she has your loyalty, too, damn her! But she is the key to everything. She is…” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “She will be my savior,” he said finally, eerily calm. “On this one, small thing, rest thousands of lives, and my freedom.”

A thought began to take shape in my head, but it was still too vague; there was nothing I could say to this admission. I stared at him, wordless and horrified, and he shook his head at me. “I should have kept you out of this,” he said softly. “I should have let the Duke beat you and send you away to the village when I caught you reaching for my dagger. Forgive me.”

“For what?”

“For making you what you are. There’s no way back from being a Shadow, Catwin.” His eyes were completely black in the low light of the stairwell. He tried to move away and I shook my head at him, holding on as he tried to unwind my fingers from the cloth of his uniform.

“No. Don’t go.”

“I have to.” His voice was so filled with anguish that I was stopped in my tracks, and he nearly pulled away from me. I caught his arm at the last moment. “Catwin—“

“A moment, only.” He paused at my assurance. “Do you swear to me that this is your own plan, of your own devising, and that there is some balance to it, so great that it could justify killing a young woman, and her with child? Do you swear?” He stared at me, frozen.

“I swear,” he said, finally, his lips barely moving.

“And this ties to the first oath you swore to the Duke?” I pressed. “It is to fulfill that oath that you do this?”

“How do you know of that?” His face paled, and I shook my head.

“Not important. Do you
swear
?” I insisted, and at last, he nodded.

“I swear.” I nodded and released him.

“Then I will do what must be done,” I said simply.

“
What?
” He could barely force that word out, he was staring at me in horror.

“I will keep this from your soul,” I said, “because I will believe you that there is a reason, and that the reason is honorable, and just, and loving. So tell me now if you’ve been lying. Because otherwise, I will do this for you.”

“Catwin…” He gave a despairing laugh. “Do you know what I have done in my time? I am damned a hundred times over. This makes no difference.”

“It does,” I observed. “For even you, who say you are damned, who say you have reasons greater than my comprehension, shrink from it.” He clenched his hands and looked away, then shook his head at me.

“No. I will do it.”

“Then I will interfere,” I said
, sliding my hand to my belt, to my dagger. “I know how to avoid notice, and I know how to attract it, too. There is only one way you can do this on your own, and that is to kill me as well. So make your choice.” If I was right, and he had some greater purpose than the Duke’s ambition, he would shrink from killing me. If not, he would slip a dagger between my ribs, love or no, and I would be dead in a few moments. In the split-second after I spoke, I feared that I had been wrong, and that all his words to me had been no more than a clever lie. But he was shaking.

“Why would you do this?” He almost sounded pleading.

“To free you.”

His brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

“I would not expect you to.” I stepped closer. “My reasons are my own. I only ask you to trust them, as I am trusting you.”

“I can’t stop you, can I?” he asked, finally.

“No,” I said, after a moment. “I don’t think you can. Not without killing me.” His shoulders slumped.

“I will go with you.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Take no part in it. Give me the poison you would have used—that was why you said there was a fever, was it not? So I would not question?” He nodded, defeated, and when I held my palm out, he reached into his doublet and pulled out a vial of poison. “Go pray for me in the chapel,” I whispered. “I will come find you when I am done.”

“I do not pray in chapels,” he said, strangely. “But I will go and wait for you there.” I nodded and turned away, but he grabbed my arm to stop me from leaving. “Please,” he begged. “Don’t do this. You’ve done nothing like this before. Let me do it.”

“No.” I shook my head and pointed to the stairs, swallowing back the fear that he was right, and that there was no coming back from this. “Go now. I will find you when it is done.” He was defeated. His shoulders slumped and he left, hesitant, with a backwards glance over his shoulder, as if he was not quite sure what it was I had done.

I watched him go, then pulled out the vial of poison he had given me and stared at the dark liquid. I swallowed. There was only one way to do this, and that was not to think of it. I waited until Temar’s footsteps had faded, and then I set off, my feet dragging as his had, my breath coming short and my skin growing cold.

I tried to clear my mind as I approached, light-footed. It was like a dream, the quiet approach, the feeling of light-headedness. I waited for the guards to stop me, seeing murder in my eyes, but I was a Shadow indeed; they did not even turn their faces as I moved past them. I paused, to look at them, but they stared straight ahead.

Rich hangings on the walls, carpet underfoot. The light-headedness was growing worse.
Gods forgive me
. Temar was right: I had never done anything like this. I approached, my footsteps silent, and I pulled the velvet bed hangings aside. Quick as thought, with no time to persuade myself otherwise, I leaned tipped the poison down. Open mouth. Lips, breath. I could see the chest rising and falling. This was life, and I had just taken it. I backed away, unsteadily.

Waiting in the darkness, I began to hope that I had failed. With each moment that passed, hope swelled. Temar had misjudged, this was no poison; or perhaps the Gods had intervened at last in the business of mortals. This must be, and yet I could not help but hope that it had come to nothing. I had killed before—with knives, solid and unbending, no slow creep of poison. I had killed attackers, a man with a weapon, not a sleeping victim. I believed, beyond all doubt, that this must be, and that it must be me who did it. And I, who had never truly believed in the Gods in my deepest heart, began to believe that I would be damned indeed, whether I succeeded or failed—if not by them, then by my own guilt.

Then I heard it: the faintest gasp, a hollow cry of pain. I squeezed my eyes shut, forcing myself to hear this, and jumped when I heard the bed curtains wrenched aside. I found myself faced to face with a monster: eyes wide, face contorted. There was the slow creep of recognition in the gaze.

“
You.”

“Me,” I replied, my voice shaking.

“There is a special level of hell for servants who betray their masters.” At that, I felt the horror lift. Just for a moment, the guilt did not press down so heavily.