Shadowforged (Light & Shadow)

by Katson, Moira

  I pitched my voice low, so as not to wake Anna. “Who’s there?”

  “Catwin?” It was the King’s voice. “It is I. Garad.” I slid back the deadbolt and opened the door a crack, trusting nothing. It was indeed his familiar face. I opened the door wider and stuck my head out, peering the other way down the corridor; seeing that the hall was empty, I ushered him quickly into the room, and bowed in the darkness.

  “Your Grace.”

  “May I speak to your Lady?” he asked, as I closed the door behind him and slid the deadbolt back into place.

  I did not like the tension in his voice, but there was no refusing him this. “Wait here a moment,” I said. “I’ll wake her. Your Grace.” It seemed so fantastical an idea that I should be speaking to the King that I stumbled on his title. He nodded. He looked uncomfortable, he looked pained. But his jaw was set, he was resolute. I did not like where this was leading. I only hoped, grimly, that Miriel had a plan. Then I heard the faint rustle of her gown.

  “Your Grace?” She stood framed in the doorway, her hands holding her robe closed at her throat. She had appeared as suddenly as a ghost. I made a hasty bid to get out from between them, and very nearly upset an ornamental chair in the process. Neither of them seemed to hear the scrape of the wood, the thud, or my muffled curse. As I stood in the dark, clutching my toe, they stared only at each other.

  In a moment, they were in each other’s arms; Miriel did not even hesitate. I watched, blushing, my toe forgotten, as his mouth came down on hers, and I saw her come up on tiptoe to meet him.

  “I should not—“ he murmured between kisses, and I understood that my fears had been well founded. He had come here to tell her that if she would be neither advisor nor mistress to him, then he would be rid of her. And then, seeing her, he could not resist her. It was as she had said it would be, and I saw that she had not been choosing the words of her message to avoid his anger, but to stoke it. It was a dangerous game she was playing—all the more dangerous as his hands crept to her waist.

  Miriel was no less cognizant of the danger than I. She broke the kiss and flung her arms around his neck, laughing and crying as if she were overwhelmed with joy. A wife meeting a returning soldier could not have seemed more overjoyed.

  “Oh, my love—I thought I would never see you again and I—“

  “I cannot marry you!” he broke in. He pushed her away and repeated his words, and I knew that he was reminding himself as well as her. “I cannot marry you, my Lady.” For a moment, Miriel looked as if she had been slapped. Then she flared up. I could see tears on her long lashes.

  “So you come here to me—“ she broke off, speechless. “I obeyed your wishes,” she said to him. “I kept from you. I accepted it. But now you come here to give me more hope than I have ever known in my life—and then snatch it away from me again in an instant?” Her voice was rising, incredulous, angry.

  “I didn’t come here to kiss you!” he shouted back. I cast a fearful look towards the bedroom and hoped that Anna would know enough to stay there.

  “Then why did you kiss me?” Her hands were clenched.

  “I saw you—and—“ He moved to take her back in his arms, and she did not resist. She was like a little doll, she did not move as his arms came around her. Then, abruptly, she leaned her head on his chest and burst into tears. I heard her words choked out between sobs.

  “I swore I would give you up. I accepted that I must step back. I knew I would be shamed. I knew that I would marry without love, and that I would face the pain of seeing you every day with another woman at your side. I had dreamed that—“

  “Dreamed what?” he asked when she broke off on a sob. His anger was turning into confusion, dissolving with her tears. He did not know what to do.

  “That I could heal Heddred with my wisdom. It is so bitter to know that the best I can do for the kingdom is step aside for another to advise you.” I heard the question clear in her voice. It was a challenge: can Linnea advise you as I can? He heard it, and he answered it.

  “I cannot do this,” he said brokenly. “I cannot face ruling without you by my side.” He moved to pull her closer, but she stepped back, leaving him in the cold darkness of the room, alone.

  “And I cannot be at your side,” she said. “We both know it.” He held out his arms to her, pleading, but she sank down into a beautiful curtsy, her eyes on the floor.

  “I must have you with me,” he said desperately. He had acquiesced, and now he was bereft.

  “Your Grace, you cannot. Such would undermine you. It would seem dishonorable. I want to be at your side,” her voice trembled, “every moment. But what has been done, is done now. Your Grace has chosen—wisely.” To his credit, he tried to reconcile himself to it.

  “I would give you up for nothing less than a kingdom,” he said, and she nodded.

  “I know that. I regret my harsh words. Say you can forgive me, my love?”

  “Your love?” he asked, as if he could not believe his ears.

  “Always,” she whispered.

  “They tell me that we will forget each other,” he said, unsteadily, and she shook her head.

  “Then they do not know us, do they? They have never known a love like ours.” She did not wait for his assent. She smiled, her lips trembling. “I know that I will never forget you. I will think of you every day. I will pray for your Golden Age, even when I am far away from your Court.”

  “You are to go away?” His voice betrayed his anguish.

  “I must,” she said steadily. “There is only one woman you should ask for advice. There is only one woman you should come to in the night. And that is your wife, my love. And your wife is chosen now. I cannot keep from you, nor you from me. You must be here, and so I will go—so that you may be here, with your wife.”

  “Then be my wife.” He spoke wildly, and Miriel started forward to him, then retreated, holding her hand out to stop him.

  “No, please, I beg you—torment me with no false hopes. The marriage agreement is signed, you cannot go back on it. “

  “It has not been signed yet,” he said quickly, and I saw how cleverly she had drawn the information from him. Now, she lured him on.

  “My love—Garad—you cannot do this—“

  “Tomorrow, I will tell them that it cannot be done,” he swore. “My love—my Lady—tell me that I can call upon your uncle to discuss marriage negotiations. Could I?” Her laughter rang from the rafters and his eyes widened.

  “Surely you cannot mean that,” she said incredulously.

  “I do, I swear I do. Would he allow it?” She laughed again.

  “Oh, my love, what could make him happier than being able to wed me to the man I love with all my heart?” Only I could have heard the twist of grief in her voice. Her uncle had not cared, for a single moment of her life, what would make her happy. But her smile was steady, and the King’s face warmed. I saw the fact, then, that Miriel never forgot for a moment: above all, a King wished to be loved as a man. She had convinced him both that she shared his vision for the kingdom, and yet loved him only for himself, and now he knelt before her.

  “I came to you tonight to tell you that I could see you no longer,” he said seriously. “But my heart tells me that I cannot bear to do so. For the good of your King, Lady Miriel, for the good of Heddred—which will blossom under your wise leadership—will you do me the honor of becoming my wife and Queen? You may say yes or no without fear.”

  “I could not do other than say yes. My heart and my duty are as one,” Miriel assured him. She knelt with him on the floor. “Your Grace, Garad, my love—I will be your Queen.”

  The light creeping under the door gilded her hair as he kissed her, and I heard him murmur, “Then stand by me, wife, and none shall part us.”

  Unbidden, I had a memory of a face: blue eyes, sandy golden hair. A boy as passionate as Garad, and yet as determined for reform as Miriel. And I had the wish, which I would later regret with all my heart, that Wilhelm cou
ld be Miriel’s King.

  Chapter 17

  “He wanted to come to your rooms—and you let him?” the Duke was prepared to be furious.

  “Catwin was there the whole time,” Miriel said calmly. “She can vouch for me.”

  “No one will take a servant’s word for this,” her uncle reminded her. Then he looked at her more closely, at the small, self-satisfied smile on her face, and the glow in her cheeks. “What are you so smug about?”

  “He said he wanted to come speak to you,” Miriel offered. She smiled at her uncle’s stony expression. “I’m getting closer to it than you thought I could,” she challenged him. “Am I not?”

  “Then even you are not such a fool as to believe this is a done deal,” he rejoined.

  “Of course not,” she said scornfully. “He will renege on his agreement with—who was it? The Torstenssons?” As if she did not know perfectly well who it was. She raised his eyebrows at his flicker of surprise. “You did not know? Ah. Well, I will not trust an agreement. I will think it done only when there is a marriage treaty, signed and sealed and announced to the court.”

  “You had best think it done only when you have a crown on your head,” her uncle said sharply. “This is a man who could renege on anything. So don’t you allow him to touch you until the High Priest pronounces you his wife. In public.” His eyes narrowed. “You didn’t allow him liberties last night, did you?”

  “I let him kiss me,” Miriel said, untroubled. Of the people in the room, only I knew that she had practiced that line a dozen, a hundred times, in front of her mirror. She raised an eyebrow at the Duke’s face, which was beginning to turn red. “And he would have done more, had I not stopped him.” She looked as satisfied as the cat that had the cream. Only I, and Temar, would have thought to look at where her hands were shaking in her lap. The Duke was only watching her face.

  “If you or he breathes a single word of this to the court—“ the Duke’s voice was strangled with rage. This was the betrayal he had been waiting for, Miriel making decisions behind his back. It was time for her to capitulate, and I prayed she would know that.

  I should not have worried.

  “My Lord uncle.” Her voice was placatory, sweet as honey. “He came to my rooms because I had refused to meet with him that day. You had told me to get him back, and I had staged a retreat. He came forward to it, he came to my rooms. He had planned to tell me about the Torstenssons, and say that he could not see me again. But—as I had told you I would—I enchanted him, and he swore that he would go back on their agreement. Yes, after he proposed marriage to me, I let him kiss me.”

  “He has spoken of marriage before. I don’t see why this time should be any different.” He glared at her.

  “Because we were closer to losing him this time,” Miriel said simply. “Because my mind alone was not enough to keep him from his duty.”

  “So even you view his marriage to you as an abdication of his duty?” He was intrigued.

  “Not really.” Miriel shrugged one shoulder, negligently. “No other woman can advise him as I can. But if he wants an advantageous marriage, from a noble who is well-connected…then, yes.”

  I had the thought that the Duke might have been less angry if only she had been wrong. If she had made a horrible mistake. He did not want her to be able to choose a gamble on her own and have it pay off; he would prefer that she fail, rather than use her own techniques and win. I wondered if he knew, in some part of his mind, that as soon as she became Queen, she would have him destroyed.

  “If he comes to talk to me, I will entertain any offer he names,” the Duke said warningly. “If. I doubt he will, Miriel. I doubt it very much. By now, he will have remembered his duty. But if he does indeed come to see me, I will speak to him of your marriage. And you—you will not let him come to your rooms anymore. You will insist on meeting him at another place, so that you can give me forewarning.”

  “So you can spy on me,” Miriel said flatly, before she could stop herself.

  “Exactly so!” His hand slammed down on the arm of his chair. “I do not like this game you are playing. I doubt you can win it. And so I—“ he jabbed a finger at himself “—I will make sure that if you fail at your game, you are not ruined. I will ensure that you keep his ear and his heart, even if you are not Queen.”

  “Little good that would do me,” Miriel rejoined, and the Duke smiled. I did not like that smile.

  “Perhaps. Now go. And not a word of this to anyone. If anyone asks you, you are to say that you know nothing of it, that your uncle will surely tell you when a marriage has been made for you. You, Catwin, will say that you have heard no rumors of the King’s marriage to Miriel. None. That is all. Go, both of you.”

  Miriel obeyed him in this, as she always did when he gave her a direct order. She walked through the court as if nothing at all had happened. She was dressed in gowns no finer than she ever wore, she did not claim a place of seniority at the maidens’ tables at dinner. She was so sweet and so deferential that it was nearly sickening. She never showed, through a single flicker of her eyelashes, that she knew Linnea Torstensson was her rival.

  But within only a few days, the court knew. Somehow, the court knew both that the King was entertaining thoughts of a marriage with someone who was not Miriel—no one seemed to know who—and that, despite it all, his public indifference to Miriel was only a show. There were rumors that the two met secretly in the night, so many wild rumors that even Temar, with all his skill, could not scotch all of them. The court was violently divided between those who thought Miriel was a girl of absolutely, unswerving virtue, and those who thought she was no better than a whore.

  It was not long before the court knew, also, who Miriel might supplant. And this time, when the men of the Council knew that the King had been close to a marriage, they backed the family who might have secured the Queenship. This was not Guy de la Marque, ready to flaunt an army, this was a family that had petitioned, as any family might. Linnea was a charming girl, very kind. The Torstenssons were one of the oldest lines, nearly royal in their own right, ancient rivals to the Conradines. And the alternative…

  And so the rumor swirled that the King would discard an alliance that came with the goodwill of the entire country, for a smile from an upstart’s daughter. The councilors narrowed their eyes at the Duke, who disclaimed that he’d not petitioned the King for such an honor, and they watched Miriel, as if their fury could cripple her.

  Miriel affected surprise. She shook her head and parted her lips and blushed. She protested that such a decision had little enough to do with her—a flagrant lie, but then, such an impossibly strange situation needed such a lie. She said that she had heard nothing from her uncle regarding her marriage, and that until she did so, she would assume that the rumors were only that—rumors and lies. She praised Linnea Torstensson as a fine girl, a well-born girl, and said that it would be a fine match for the King—but, of course, she had not heard any evidence that he was considering Linnea, or even herself.

  This did not save her from the enmity of the Dowager Queen. Isra would take even a secret marriage treaty over a marriage with Miriel. She would not be pushed aside for a commoner, and yet she had learned that she could not go against her son, not openly. And so she launched her own subtle campaign against Miriel. One day, only the maidens from the oldest families might be invited to dance at dinner, another day, each maiden was to wear cloak pins to show her heritage: her mother’s crest on her right shoulder and her father’s crest on her left shoulder, so that Miriel alone must wear a copper pin on her cloak, while the other girls wore silver and gold. I heard whispers that the Dowager Queen prevailed upon members of the Council to question the Duke’s ability to rule Voltur.

  And no matter how the King might protest against it, the Dowager Queen kept alive the talk of mistresses and wives. Each day, it seemed, I heard one man or another jest with the King about the joys a ruler might have. When I heard even the Torstenssons laugh abou
t it, I had a thought to look over at Linnea. She was a pretty girl, indeed, generous and kind. I knew she had not ever been one to join in the talk against Miriel. I did not think that if she got the crown on her head, it would bring her much joy—not if her own family was willing to have the crown on her head and another woman in the King’s bed.

  Miriel had no time for sympathy, as I had.

  “A rival is the same thing as an enemy,” she told me, with scant patience. “If you think Linnea would have no joy being Queen, well, help me become Queen instead.” I could not fault her logic, and yet, I wanted to ask her if even she would have any joy of being Queen. But we never spoke of that. I only let myself admit in the depths of the night, to myself, silently, that I sometimes doubted that our goals were worth the price we paid for them; neither Miriel nor I would ever question it aloud. We looked only forward to the goal.

  It seemed foolish to me that I questioned our plan at all, for the King, true to his word, had indeed approached the Duke. What respect the Duke showed the King when the two of them spoke, I could not imagine, for when he told us of their conversations, my lord was as contemptuous as if he had been speaking to the village idiot.

  “He’s wavering,” he told the two of us bluntly, as we stood before him. The respect Miriel had been shown when she was his new ally was gone; the closer she came to her goal, the less the Duke seemed to think of her. The ornamental chair he had once given her was pushed to the side of the room, but she, who had once stood with her eyes on the ground, now kept her head up and her shoulders back. She looked at him as if she were Queen already.

  “And yet, my Lord uncle, he came to you today with new conditions for a contract.”

  “It’s nothing until it’s signed,” the Duke said flatly. “That woman has every family in the land proposing marriage to him.” There was grudging respect in his voice when he spoke of the Dowager Queen; I understood that he might well have used the same tactic. “You are to prepare yourself for him to marry another.”