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

should
feel privileged. But I only felt miserable.
    Every day, after the hours of lessons and
humiliations, I ate my dinner as quickly as I could and climbed the
steps to Roine’s tower. There, I went to my little corner bed,
hunched myself under the covers, and refused to answer any of her
soft-voiced, worried questions. When I was certain she was asleep,
I would muffle my tears into the little pillow. I cried like a
child, I cried like an animal will cry, who cannot understand what
is wrong, only that there is pain and there seems no end in
sight.
    But I had only so many tears to shed, and
when my sobs eased, as they always did, I would lie awake and stare
at the sloped ceiling of the tower. In the dark of those nights, I
learned then that it was not enough for me to endure and wait. I
must find a way out of this maze of misery.
    That was a puzzle. For night after night, I
could think of no way to escape. And then it came to me. There
could be no retaliation against Miriel, and so I must fortify the
one defense given to me: knowledge. If she laughed when I was
wrong, well, then I would never be wrong. I would learn every name
on the map, every obscure noble in the spidery lineages, I would
remember the philosophers and their dry theories, and I would never
need to hear her little titter of scorn. She had had schooling from
the time she was old enough to sit and be fed; I had not. So, I
must catch up.
    I knew better than to try to sneak into the
tutor’s rooms, but I did know where other books could be found. The
old library had been one of the first discoveries of my childhood,
and although the contents of it were priceless, the room was
ill-guarded and almost never used. Even I, when I first found it,
had thought it boring and never gone back. Now I remembered it, and
it was little enough trouble to sneak there after my dinner, and
dart away with some books hidden under a pile of blankets I was
bringing to Roine.
    I studied by the light of a guard’s lantern,
somewhat I had begged from Aler, the chief guard. He was sweet to
me, the little half-orphan, and when I could, I would go sit on the
high, lonely walls, and listen to the wind with him. I was shy
about my plan, and so I would only say that I wanted to study, and
Aler looked at me, at the bruises on my arms and my face, at the
furtive eyes and the determined chin, and gave me the lantern
without a word—but, I thought later, with a little bit of pity in
his eyes.
    I began to read with the sole purpose of
escaping Miriel’s derision. I stared at the overwhelming numbers of
books and felt the same sinking feeling from the first few days:
that I was outmatched. Then I remembered that, hidden in these
books, lay the key to my release, and my despair was coupled with a
grim determination that, if I must suffer through days in Miriel’s
company, the days would not be any more miserable than they had to
be.
    When I opened the first book, sneezing from
the dust, I saw only the relentless march of words, each to be
painstakingly decoded, sounded out silently in the quiet of the
night. I remember that I felt only exhaustion. The task was
daunting. I struggled through that first book until I could stay
awake no longer, and then I doused the lantern and stumbled to bed,
barely making it to my little pallet and lacking the energy even to
pull the covers over me.
    Roine had to shake me awake, thrusting a
piece of bread and a cup of goat’s milk into my hand as I struggled
to open my eyes, re-braiding my hair herself, and telling me the
time so that I fairly flew down the stairs to the day’s
lessons.
    I got a beating that day for arriving
disheveled, with my clothes rumpled from sleep, and another for
yawning—I waited until the teacher’s back was turned, but Miriel
had gleefully remarked upon it—but I barely cared. Behind the
exhaustion was a new curiosity, a challenge such as I had never
felt in my whole life.
    I had learned to sneak and creep about so
that I could