Read Shadowborn (Light & Shadow, Book 1) for Free Online

I dropped into a strange dark place
in my mind and I counted the lashes, so that I could reckon each
back when at last the time was right.
    If I failed at any task, I would be
punished. I would get a cane across my palms for forgetting a
noble’s lineage, more arithmetic problems if I did one incorrectly,
pages and pages of penmanship if the tutor did not approve of the
shape of my letters. I could be sure that any further work would
earn me a reprimand for the Lady.
    “ Wasting the tutor’s time,”
she would say crisply. “Pages and pages of paper, wasted because of
your abominable penmanship.” If I failed, I whetted her appetite
for her own victory over me; if I succeeded, I knew that I only
stoked the anger that burned within her. When I won, I only ensured
that every other failure, real or imagined, would be punished more
harshly. There was no true victory in success…save for the true joy
I found in the learning.
    At the first, everything had been so new
that I was nearly scared. Instead of the patterns of my fingers,
the strange combinations of fingers and hands, I learned the higher
numbers. I learned how to write them on the page, add them together
and subtract them—although it was still easier for me to think
about folding my fingers down. When I read, it was not only that I
must puzzle out each word, but I must start by remembering each
letter. In the first few days, I felt a wave of nausea when I saw a
page full of letters and numbers.
    And then it all changed. I had spent the
first days counting the smallest victories and measuring them
against the long list of my failures; slowly, the balance tipped. I
did not even notice, until one day I realized that I had read an
entire page without noticing the very words themselves. Then I
noticed that arithmetic, so daunting to the Lady Miriel, was no
more than a set of clever puzzles to me. I took a fierce joy in
completing a set of problems first—though after her first tantrum,
I learned to keep my paper to myself, and pretend to keep writing
until after she had turned in her sheet with a triumphant toss of
her night-black curls.
    Maps and lineages came less easily, the old
names softened by the years until one could deduce nothing of their
pronunciation by sounding them out. Robbed of her opportunity to
taunt me about how slowly I read, how poorly I reckoned numbers,
Miriel took her joy in how little I knew about nobles. Every time I
stumbled on a name, I could be sure that she would laugh at me. She
had the perfect laugh, did Miriel: the cultured, throaty little
giggle of a court lady. She knew just how to widen her eyes at me
in disbelief: I had startled the laugh out of her, she had not
meant to giggle, she was only surprised, you see—how could one not
know of the de la Marque family, or the Torstenssons, of the
Cessors?
    And then there was philosophy, theology,
trade: grand concepts about rights and honor, chivalry, the duties
of men and women, the promises of the gods. My utter incompetence
in remembering the long list of names and philosophical schools was
matched only by Miriel’s instinctive brilliance in the subject. I
might be able to count and remember dates better than she could,
but where I stumbled through thuses and therefores, Miriel darted,
lightning-quick, through schools of thought and dragged out
historical events to prove abstract points. In those lessons, she
was so frustrated with my slowness that she forgot even to insult
me; she stamped her foot and pouted when she could not make me
understand a point.
    The first few weeks passed in a haze of
misery. Miriel’s fourteenth birthday came and went, with great
celebrations and feasts, and a month later, my own birthday was
celebrated only with a whispered congratulation by Roine, and a hug
as I set off to the schoolroom. Most servants did not even know the
date of their birth; I only knew because Roine could count the days
on her star chart. I should feel lucky, I told myself. I