The Demon of Darkling Reach (The Black Prince Book 1) Page 15

  She sniffed, averting her gaze. She’d show him.

  In the setting sun, he looked less like a man than ever. The shadows gathering in the broad corridor seemed to cling to him and his eyes were dark pits in his face. He moved with an almost preternatural quiet and his hand on hers was as cold as ever. His touch made her skin crawl. “You can make me do things,” she said in a low tone, “but you can’t make me not loathe you.”

  A small smile played at the corner of his mouth. “That’s what you think.”

  In that moment she wanted, more than anything, to kill him.

  His smile broadened slightly. He knew, of course. That’s what you think. His tone, when he’d addressed her, had been insolent. And superior. Demon, man, whatever he was, he was hateful and that was that. Isla couldn’t even begin to imagine what he got out of controlling her like this, of playing with her, of alternating between treating her with the courtly manners of some lover from a ballad and threatening her, but she didn’t care. She didn’t.

  She wasn’t thinking about this miserable mess because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t help herself! Her betrothed kept her so off balance that she had to struggle constantly to keep up. To maintain some sense of self-preservation. To remind herself that, in spite of her fear, she could and would fight him. Hard.

  “I suppose that’s what you’re going to do,” she challenged, “lock me in some tower and treat me like an overgrown child.”

  “You have some curious notions of what constitutes marital bliss,” he replied in that same mild, slightly disinterested tone. “I won’t do anything of the sort, unless you force me to. Behave like an adult, and I’ll treat you like one.” He held his hand out, palm up, the marble whiteness of his skin obvious even in the flickering candlelight. “Now shall we?”

  Reluctantly, she placed her hand in his. His fingers closed over it, claws scraping her skin without leaving a mark. She wondered how functional they were and why, if he’d been born a man as Cariad claimed—or if the original Tristan Mountbatten had, and this was in fact his discarded husk now inhabited by some other creature—why he had them at all. Her mind had been such a whirlwind earlier, she hadn’t thought to ask. And now…she could hardly question her betrothed on the subject. Isla was hard-pressed to decide which would be worse: if he laughed at her, dismissing her out of hand and calling her crazy, or if he answered her.

  He reached up and, unexpectedly, slid his fingertips over the side of her face.

  He was about to speak when Rudolph appeared, Rowena clinging to him like a limpet and beaming up at him as if he were the most wonderful man alive. She’d clearly gotten over her earlier upset. Rowena was nothing if not willing to overlook Rudolph’s periodic lapses in devotion.

  “Hello!” Rudolph hailed them and then, seeing that he might be interrupting an intimate moment, faltered to a stop. Rowena beamed happily at nothing in particular. Isla saw Rudolph’s mind working as he fitted possible interpretations to the vision before him. And she saw that he saw that she and the duke were, to outside eyes at least, awfully…friendly. Her sister, naturally, noticed nothing that didn’t directly concern her.

  And why should she, now of all times? She’d just gotten betrothed. A betrothal was supposed to be one of the happiest moments of a girl’s life.

  Isla stepped back, and let the duke lead her into the great hall. Rowena, walking ahead of them, chatted happily about subjects ranging from puppies to wine to wedding plans. Technically, according to the strictest application of protocol, the duke should have entered first. He exceeded them all in rank and Isla, as eldest daughter and as the duke’s betrothed, exceeded her sister in rank. But Isla didn’t care about such things and if the duke did, he gave no sign. He was secure enough, or disinterested enough, not to care.

  He wasn’t petty, Isla thought resentfully, like her father.

  He helped her onto the dais and then into her seat, although she hardly needed such attention. It was the fashion to treat women like invalids, however, and at least in public Tristan was nothing if not correct—on the surface, at least. Much of his conversation was peppered with the same kind of veiled insults he’d given Rowena the other night.

  Asher stepped forward and poured them both wine, the duke first and then Isla. A page learned to be served by first learning how to serve others. One day, assuming he survived long enough, Asher would preside over a table of his own. By having lived the life of a servant, however theoretically and however part time, the idea was that he’d grow to adulthood with a certain sympathy toward their plight and, more importantly, an understanding of just how hard they worked and for how little.

  He stepped back, joining the other pages and servitors against the wall where each stood behind his respective master. The lesser guests’ attendants had to make due with standing at attention near the front edge of the dais; proximity to the far warmer fireplace was an honor reserved to very few, master and servant alike. The pages whispered to each other, giggling under their breath. Some were from exalted households and some were the bastards of hedge knights, but they were all children and the serious atmosphere affected them very little. Their concerns, in turn, were alien to the adults they served.

  To Isla’s left sat the earl and to the earl’s left sat Apple. Tristan sat on her right. The earl and his wife had no page and were served instead by Apple’s ill-favored and even more ill-humored eunuch. How the man had come to be an eunuch in the first place he’d never disclosed, but he was pale and effeminate and extremely unpleasant. Where Tristan, for all his pallor, was clearly an outdoorsman, Claudius’ face had the appearance and consistency of raw dough. Beady little eyes glared out from the fleshy pouches of his eye sockets, like two currants pushed down into an unbaked loaf of bread.

  The earl coughed uneasily, as the third guest of honor arrived. Father Justin was, as a representative of the church, supposed to be beyond such earthly considerations as rank. And yet he took his exalted position seriously, demanding every privilege that a father of the church might reasonably expect—and some. Father Justin wasn’t satisfied unless he’d been made the center of attention at each and every gathering he attended.

  He waddled into the room, now, a vision in robin’s egg blue wool.

  Ascending the dais, helped by a page of his own—a lithe and gender-ambiguous individual of about fifteen winters—he waved a beringed hand in what Isla supposed was meant to be a gesture of greeting. “Hello,” he said. He glanced around, expressing disapproval that others had arrived before him and sat, and were not rising now. “Hmm,” he added.

  “Good evening, Father,” the earl said.

  “Hmm.” The priest sat. His…page disappeared, seating himself at a table further down. He displayed absolutely no concern for the proprieties of the occasion. Unlike his supposed master. Isla, who found all this wonderfully amusing, watched with interest as she sipped her wine. She wondered idly how long man and catamite had shared a bed.

  Because Father Justin was late, the first course had already been served: miniature pastries filled with beef marrow. Next, for a treat, they were having eel. Isla hated eel, almost as much as she hated beef marrow. Her preference would have been for a savory pie, or venison with a fruit sauce, but she hadn’t planned the menu and no one had asked for her input.

  “Does your father choose these things just to vex me?” Tristan asked her in a low voice.

  “This is the best the manor has to offer,” Isla whispered back.

  “This is almost as bad,” Tristan countered, “as visiting the Earl of Strathearn. He only serves sturgeon and jellies.”

  “Well at least it’s not jellied sturgeon!” Isla hissed back. And then, overcome by simple curiosity—the same overriding drive to know more that had been the bane of Isla’s existence since she and Tristan first met—she found herself once again drawn into conversation with him. “What do you eat, at your undoubtedly more thrilling table?”

  “Venison. Boar, sometimes. Capon pasties,
blanc manger, hippocras.”

  He might as well have said that his socks were sewn from solid gold thread. In all her life, Isla had never heard of such a meal except perhaps as a wedding feast. What for the love of the Gods was he doing serving such things on a nightly basis?

  Contemplating this question, Isla was forced to realize, and not for the first time, that she was truly far, far more parochial than she’d care to admit. An earl’s daughter she might be, but compared to Tristan she might as well be a milkmaid. Indeed, she was certain that milkmaids closer to the capital were a good deal more sophisticated than she!

  “I see,” Father Justin observed rather pointedly, “that dinner has already begun.”

  The disapproval in his tone was palpable as he surveyed the scattered serving dishes, bowls, trenchers, and half-drunk goblets of wine. “Therefore,” he continued, “I shall endeavor to keep our prayer short.”

  Of course, Isla thought morosely. Prayer time. Father Justin, who followed none of the commandments of the church in his own life, never missed an opportunity to expound on its glories to others. Never mind that they’d already had a blessing.

  As everyone adopted a more or less appropriate attitude for prayer, he began. His tone was hardly reverent as he poured out his displeasure on topics ranging from the state of the economy to the state of the king’s bedroom. That the king’s own brother and closest confidante sat directly across from him mattered not one whit. And in this, at least, Isla could admire the man. As fat and rude and malodorous as he was. “Gods above,” he thundered, “deliver us from fornication! And deliver us from the harlots and their men folk who invade our kingdom, nigh even from a ruler who treats his own queen as little more than a concubine—sharing her with his subjects on a nightly basis!”

  Isla raised her head, aghast. By now, others too were staring openly at the priest. Admiration had slowly curdled into horror as Father Justin pushed past the boundaries of all propriety. Past audacity and into the realm of insanity.

  The church was a powerful ally, to be sure, but the powers of the priesthood did not confer immunity from treason. And Father Justin’s personal life was hardly above reproach. Homosexual sex was, in the church’s view, an act against nature and thus a crime against the Gods. Come into my closet, brother, Isla thought bitterly, glancing over at the priest’s catamite. Who was currently engaged in a whispered conversation with one of the guardsmen. Sex between men using what Cariad had referred to as the other passage was punishable by death according to church law and such punishments, when carried out by members of the same church—the same church that waxed poetic on the all-encompassing nature of the Gods’ love—included everything from mutilation to burning at the stake.

  When priests themselves were caught in the act, their punishment was carried out in the form of death by starvation: the offender was suspended in an iron cage barely large enough to hold him and left there until the Gods, in their mercy, saw fit to let him expire.

  Tristan listened interestedly. He neither moved nor attempted to interject, but Isla thought she’d begun to know him well enough to know that he was angry. He and Piers were close. Whatever their true relationship was. And then, in a sudden turn of phrase, Tristan himself became the subject of the attack. “And, Gods above, deliver us also from those who would mislead their subjects with honeyed words and lead them astray, into worship of the Dark One. Gods, too, grant that such men be struck down in the fullness of their power as a lesson to—”

  “Amen!” the earl said heartily.

  That the priest’s speech had been a deliberate attempt to embarrass Tristan was surely obvious to all. The earl’s interruption produced an uneasy silence, as Father Justin repeatedly cleared his throat—no doubt wondering if he should finish his thought—and everyone else wondered what would happen next. A few sipped their wine uneasily, and someone called loudly for more carrots. Isla, watching the priest sip his own wine, felt the first stirrings of…she couldn’t put a name to what she felt. Was it…loyalty? That this fat, sweating, revolting man who turned his back on the tenets of his own church and who’d clearly only joined that institution for financial gain in the first place should dare to insult her husband….

  Tristan might be a demon and his brother a lush but Father Justin was ridiculous. And a hypocrite. Isla didn’t think she hated anything more than she hated hypocrisy—perhaps because she, for so long, had lived at the mercy of hypocrites. Men like her father who prattled on about honor and chivalry, then lied to his neighbors by asking for loans that he had no intention to ever repay. Men like Rudolph, who’d talked of love for years but who balked at the idea of actually doing something concrete to honor his supposed affection for Rowena. Who, even after signing his name to the contract, had stared down at it with indecision writ clear across his brow.

  No, she decided, no one else was making any attempt to run this kingdom. Least of all Father Justin. Abbeys had vassals; Isla wondered how well Father Justin’s were eating.

  The second course was served, and conversation slowly turned to safer topics: the weather, the crops, who might be appointed the new Minister of War now that Piers’ original advisor had died of old age.

  After the eel made its debut, onion and mushroom pasties were brought in. Those, at least, Isla liked. Tristan served her from his own plate, cutting the pasty into small, bite-sized cubes with a few deft strokes of his knife. Under normal circumstances, Isla hated sharing a plate with anyone—although doing so was the custom—because the other person invariably had dirt-grimed fingers. Much as one was supposed to wash one’s hands before dinner, few did. At least not in the West.

  But Tristan’s hands, as odd as they were, were scrupulously clean. He cut up the coarse brown bread, served her herbed butter, and signaled for more wine. As carefully as he performed each procedure, he seemed disinterested. There was a perfunctory quality to his movements, and to his manners in general. Isla glanced up and saw Hart watching her. He was seated next to Father Justin, who seemed to view sharing his bench with a bastard as the next best thing to eating dinner at a leper colony. Hart grinned. Isla blushed.

  The roast was brought out, and carved. Carefully, Isla picked up the bites of food off the wooden trencher and ate them one at a time. She’d heard that, in the East, people speared their food with pronged instruments instead of eating it with their fingers as was proper.

  On Father Justin’s other side, Rudolph and Rowena were engaged in some kind of silly banter that was producing a lot of giggling on Rowena’s part. Probably discussing their wedding night, Isla thought dourly, if they hadn’t gotten there already. Not that they’d had the time, unless Rudolph’s was a disappointing introduction to the art of love indeed; they hadn’t been alone together for more than a few minutes all afternoon, and Isla knew from her previous conversations with Rowena that prior to this evening they’d never so much as kissed except once or twice and that very briefly.

  Isla, who hadn’t kissed anyone, for any length of time, felt discouraged.

  Rudolph made what was clearly a lewd suggestion and Rowena laughed outright, her blue eyes sparkling.

  Father Justin turned his head ponderously, fixing the couple with his gimlet gaze. “Sex is forbidden,” he announced, rather rudely in Isla’s opinion, “for reasons other than procreation.”

  Rudolph was in his cups, and had been since before dinner. Where he’d found the stuff, Isla didn’t know. Probably her father’s study; they’d undoubtedly stayed behind in there together after she and Rowena left to dress for dinner, drinking and bemoaning their losses. He gave the priest a pleasant smile. “Surely,” he said, “for pleasure also.”

  “No, not for pleasure.” Father Justin glared. His catamite looked up interestedly from the other table, having evidently heard such speeches before. His…page, Isla corrected herself. She hid her smirk behind the rim of her cup. “Pleasure is a sin. As are garments that suggest its pursuit! The codpiece,” he intoned portentously, “is a fashion of
the Devil.”

  “I don’t wear one,” Tristan said blandly.

  “No offense, old bird,” Rudolph replied, “but you are a bit old fashioned.”

  Of course he is. Isla bit her lip. He’s a hundred and forty years old. Tristan was dressed in the same costume she’d seen him in earlier, all shades of blue and brown. He looked well; the colors suited him. Isla couldn’t, quite frankly, imagine him in the sort of getup Rudolph favored. Tristan was too frightening to look ridiculous, and if anyone was capable of making a codpiece and those jester’s shoes look frightening, he was—but the effort of conjuring such an image quite simply hurt her head.

  “The codpiece suggests an erect—”

  “Yes, yes,” the earl cut in irritably. “We all know what it suggests.”

  “In some cases,” Apple offered, “the suggestion is all there is.”

  Tristan reached down and fed a bone to one of his hounds. Throwing one’s bones over one’s shoulder was considered bad form, as the careless missile might hit a servitor. The hound, an enormous black-coated thing almost as unpleasant looking as its master, took the offered treat with a surprisingly delicate bite and then retreated beneath the table to ravage it. Isla felt the weight of the beast settle on her toes. She shivered.

  “He’s friendly,” the duke said.

  “Like you?” Isla shot back, her words pitched low for him alone.

  But Tristan only smiled. He hadn’t drunk much wine—he never drank much, at least not that Isla saw—and neither had Isla. But in her case, the issue wasn’t temperance so much as disgust. She wanted to be twice as sodden as Rudolph but she just couldn’t bring herself to drink the swill her father served. Isla had, from childhood, been cursed with expensive taste. In some things, at least. The hound shifted its weight. At least her feet weren’t cold anymore.

  “His name is Maximus,” Tristan remarked. Maximus was a name culled from the oldest of the old tongues, and the name of a long-ago emperor who’d died gloriously on the battlefield. Or been poisoned, depending on which historian one consulted. “And his mate”—he gestured at the other hound—“is Claudia.” Apart from the fact that one of them was clearly male, the two hounds looked almost identical.