The Demon of Darkling Reach (The Black Prince Book 1) Page 22

  “You sit with him at table. You feed each other bites of food.” His tone turned to one of disgust. “It’s well known by the entire household that you visit each other at night and that he’s quite…solicitous of your welfare.” The priestly mask returned, as he once again changed tack. “Child, if you value your soul, you’ll free yourself from whatever hold he has on you and tell me what I want to know. It’s not too late to return to the light.”

  “And then you’ll let me go?” she asked, even though she knew the answer.

  “Of course not.” His chuckle was quite pleasant. Indulgent, even.

  “You’re making a mistake,” she said, willing her voice not to waver as she faced down the creature across from her. “I promise you, I don’t know anything. And even if I did,” she added defiantly, “I wouldn’t tell you.” She couldn’t explain why she’d told him what she had, only that she meant it. She hated the church, hated its hypocrisy and its lies and its disinterest in its parishioners, but something more had motivated her words—something hidden, from a deep place that she didn’t visit very often.

  “That,” Father Justin said, “is unfortunate.” He pulled the poker from the fire in a shower of sparks. A log popped and disintegrated. “Although the path of pain can be, in the end, even more clarifying. In your suffering, child”—he turned—“you shall see the Gods.”

  “You mean…?” He was going to torture her?

  Isla screamed.

  She tried to get up again even as her head swam and he jabbed the poker toward her. Almost casually, indicating what would happen if she continued to be so foolish.

  “Unfortunate,” he murmured again, moving closer. “Manifestly unfortunate.”

  Her eyes focused on the tip of the poker, bright white fading slowly into to a dull, infected red.

  “If you lack the will to free yourself, then I shall drive the demon out of you. Pain is cleansing. You will tell me what I want to know—and you will repent.”

  “Repent of what?”

  “Your lack of belief. Your evil association. Your refusal to do as your elders and betters command.”

  “What…are you going to do to me?” she breathed, unable to wrench her eyes from the approaching poker and barely daring to ask the question. The entire world had been reduced to that evil, glowing tip.

  “Put your eyes out,” he replied in that same conversational tone. “No man will care about you then, and you’ll have a much harder time peddling your feminine wiles as one more drudge. Beauty,” he added reflectively, “is a curse.”

  “But—please!”

  He took another step toward her and she dodged, still trying to escape the chair where he’d so effectively trapped her. Her head still swam and she felt ill; she realized, in some abstract and still functioning part of her mind, that she must have a concussion.

  Father Justin jabbed the poker forward suddenly and Isla raised her hand just in time, the burning tip scoring a deep groove in the back of her hand. The smell of crisping flesh filled the room and, underneath it, the coppery tang of blood. Isla shrieked again, in a mixture of pain and disbelief. She didn’t think she’d ever felt such bad pain and whatever happened, she would not let this man mutilate her. What he was proposing was a thousand times worse than the worst rape, it was the worst violation imaginable—which he knew, which he relished, which made it even worse.

  “Let go of me!” she cried.

  The tears flowed freely as he wrenched her hand away from her face with his free hand, still holding the red-hot poker in the other. He was much, much stronger than she and as hard as she struggled she couldn’t free herself from his grip. He kneed her in the stomach, pinning her into the chair with his massive weight and, pressing his forearm across her throat, leveraged the poker. Her vision began to dim at the edges, as he cut off her air supply.

  “And now—”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Just what do you think you are doing, priest?”

  That voice was unmistakable, as was the arrogance behind it. Isla sobbed in relief and slumped against the back of the chair. The poker, inches from her eye, dropped as her attacker turned. He moved slowly, lifting himself off of her with all the deliberation he could muster—as though it had been merely his idea to abandon his little project for now. He held the poker loosely in both hands, tip pointing toward the floor, as casually as if he’d been roasting a sausage. His robes were unruffled.

  Isla turned her head, finally remembering to breathe.

  Tristan stood in the door. He, too, appeared perfectly calm. He wasn’t looking at her. His attention was fixed on Father Justin, and the tension in the air crackled. Isla felt it constrict at her throat, cinch iron bands around her chest and make her heart pound. As much as she wanted to run out of the room, she was too poleaxed to move. She knew, as surely as she knew anything, that she’d never feel safe in her own house again.

  Faces appeared behind Tristan’s. His men; not her father’s. His men were glaring murder at the unfortunate fat man with the poker. Her father’s men were nowhere to be found. She’d called out; they hadn’t come. If Tristan hadn’t arrived when he did—

  She couldn’t bring herself to consider what might—what would have happened. To spend the rest of her life in darkness, suffering…all of a sudden, she was afraid that she might vomit.

  “Put it down, priest.”

  “What business were you on?” Father Justin asked.

  “My business,” Tristan replied, in a tone that brooked no further discussion.

  He was dressed in midnight blue from head to toe, a blue so dark as to be almost black. He took a step forward into the room, and Isla saw that he was still armed. His sword was a beautifully made, beautifully proportioned weapon, but ugly for all that: the blade was unadorned, and the crosspiece had been fashioned into a grotesque likeness of the Horned God. Great curving horns made the guard, and rubies glowed dully from deep within a helmet fashioned to look like a skull. Unlike Rudolph’s weapon, which was designed to impress, this weapon was designed for one thing only. Isla glanced from it, back up to Tristan’s face. The look he was giving the priest was not one she ever wanted to see directed at her, but Father Justin didn’t seem to notice his peril—or care.

  He was, after all, an emissary of the richest and most powerful organization in the known world; he and his brethren cared nothing for temporal power, because the playing of kings meant nothing to them. Kings came and went; the church endured. Tristan’s threats meant nothing to him and he obviously still believed that, royal sibling or no royal sibling, he could have Tristan tried on witchcraft charges. Father Justin didn’t need to believe in witches or demons to use the specter of those entities for political gain.

  Isla gazed up at Tristan and knew that he knew. Everything. She was impressed but, then again, she’d figured it out and she had the benefit of neither Tristan’s education nor his intelligence. She wasn’t stupid, but she wasn’t…like him. Still, she planned to tell him what Father Justin had said about the true king and his obvious involvement in, if not a plot to outright put Piers off the throne, then a group of men who longed to see such a thing happen.

  Because she realized that, now that Tristan was here, she felt safe. She knew that she’d actually have a chance to tell him these things—and that Father Justin wasn’t going to hurt her. Finally able to relax, she studied her adversary with new eyes. He wasn’t so frightening now; he was fat, and grasping, and womanish. The idea that someone like this should be in a position of power and capable of causing so much pain sickened her.

  The priest was terrifying enough when terrorizing a teenaged girl who lacked the strength to fight him off, but sweat beaded on his brow as he studied the man facing him. The room had begun to stink of sour sweat that none of the priest’s unguents were strong enough to disguise.

  “This woman,” he said, regaining some of his former arrogance, “is a whore. And you are no better.”

  “Yes,” Tristan agreed blandly,
“I’m sure that your relationship with your…page is an affair of the heart.”

  Father Justin purpled at the insult to his virtue. “I was helping her to free herself from the knotted tangle of sin in which you’ve enveloped her!” he proclaimed.

  “Oh?”

  “Pain is cleansing,” he insisted.

  Tristan’s expression, hard before, hardened further as he stared down the fat little man. Isla had never seen such a transformation come over anyone, and the duke truly no longer seemed human. He radiated, not wrath, but cold. A terrible, penetrating cold that seemed to nullify the heat from the now roaring fire.

  Father Justin dropped the poker, where it clattered on the flagstones.

  Another log popped in the almost total silence.

  “Leave,” Tristan hissed. “Now. Within the hour. Or this ends tonight.”

  “Your threats are hollow. If you had the cods to kill me, you’d do so now.”

  Isla was surprised to hear such vulgar speech coming from the priest, although she shouldn’t have been; but she was far more surprised at the speed with which he was apparently recovering. He’d managed to convince himself, within a few short minutes, that there was nothing to fear after all—that Tristan was just an angry, blustering suitor making hollow threats on behalf of his betrothed. Or his own honor. Except Isla knew Tristan better than that, had known him better than that from the first time she laid eyes on him.

  “I haven’t killed you before now, priest, because you’ve done nothing to earn my notice. And because my brother has tasked me with bringing peace to this kingdom, as irksome as I find the idea.

  “But make no mistake, if you prove to me that you’re a threat to said peace, then I will do as I see fit. Now leave.”

  The men locked eyes for a moment longer and then, gathering up what shreds of his dignity he had left, the priest departed. He drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t all that much, and stalked out. Isla hadn’t noticed before, but the door had been blown off its hinges. The massive oak panel hung crookedly from metal lumps twisted and misshapen almost beyond recognition. They looked, she realized uneasily, like they’d been melted.

  Up until now, it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder how Tristan had gotten into the study so easily if Father Justin had locked the door. She’d been in too much shock. Now she understood.

  She burst into tears.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “I called for help,” she sobbed. “Nobody came.”

  Tristan held her against him, her nose buried in his cloak as he stroked her hair in an almost absent-minded fashion with one of his frightening claws. Behind him, two of his men stood guard at the broken door. Despite the heat from the fire, Isla still shivered. She couldn’t seem to warm up. Every time she closed her eyes, even for a split second, images from her encounter with the priest invaded her mind’s eye. She couldn’t keep them out.

  “I know,” he said, but not unkindly.

  She clung to him, not even understanding why, only that she was finally safe and he was here and she needed someone, anyone, to make her feel safe and be on her side. The past few days had been unpleasant to say the least, their content vacillating between dreadful and mortifying. Cariad, her sister…and now Father Justin…another sob escaped her, just as she’d thought she had herself under control.

  “I’ve been so scared,” she whispered, her words barely audible. “And he—and he was going to…”

  “It’s alright,” he reassured her. “I’m here.”

  Somewhere inside, a dam broke. She cried for what had happened, but most of all for what hadn’t happened: for the narrowness of her escape, for the hideous fate to which she’d almost been condemned, for the bitter realization that none of her supposed loved ones cared about her enough to defy the will of the priest—a total stranger to them, a no one. A tin pot god in an institution run by men and a minor one at that. She sobbed out all the emotions for which she didn’t have the words, and sobbed for the realization that she had no one. She was all alone in what felt like an enemy camp.

  Eventually, her heart began to ease.

  She didn’t know how long she’d stood there with her face pressed into Tristan’s chest, but she felt like it had been a very long time. He, throughout, had said nothing. Only held her.

  Now, placing his hands gently on her shoulders, he pushed her back slightly so he could examine her. His gaze was searching. “Your hand,” he said, taking it in his own, “it must be seen to.” His hand, as alien as it was, bore the marks of an entirely too human life: small scars here and there, calluses from drawing a bow and pulling reins, from the thousands of jobs, large and small, that made up a man’s life. They must have been from…before. She studied them, needing something to hold onto. Something to anchor her.

  She moved, trance-like, as he helped her onto the bench near the hearth and called for something—she didn’t understand what—to be brought. She didn’t care about much of anything. She was cold, and tired, and she wanted to sleep. Tristan sat down next to her and pressed a cup into her hand. He told her to drink it, and she did. It tasted bitter; she made a face.

  Her skin was clammy and cold to the touch. For once, Tristan’s corpse-like hands felt like they were the same temperature. She absorbed this realization with disinterest. She didn’t even ask what had been in the cup he’d given her, or where it had come from. One of his men spoke a few words, then bowed briefly and left. They’d sounded like the droning of bees.

  “Normally,” Tristan said, picking up her hand again, “I leave these sorts of tasks to my personal physician. Or my grooms,” he added, no trace of irony in his voice. “But you, I believe, deserve my personal attention.”

  She smiled wanly, unsure of whether she wanted it or not. Except she was sure, wasn’t she? The burn was a red gash on the back of her hand, like the compressed lips of an angry mouth. The tissue on either side was livid, puckering and pulling away from itself. Seeing it made her stomach twist. Upending a small flask, he drenched a sponge in vinegar and applied it to the wound. She hissed at the stinging pain.

  A minute later, he repeated the same procedure. Three times, he washed out the wound and each time it hurt worse than the last. She felt like her flesh was melting off her bones, and gritted her teeth to keep from crying out. He smoothed a paste of dark, clouded honey over the newly raw flesh and tears sprang to her eyes. “This will keep the wound from becoming infected,” he told her, as he wrapped her hand in a length of linen.

  “It’s going to look hideous,” she said. She looked hideous, with her red-rimmed eyes and dripping nose.

  He slid a claw-tipped finger under her chin, and tilted her head up so her eyes met his. His expression was unreadable, but she thought that there might be, if not kindness in those obsidian pools, then at least understanding. “Never be ashamed of a scar,” he told her in that quiet, rasping voice. “It proves that you were stronger than whatever tried to hurt you.”

  “Thank you,” she said softly, strangely touched.

  She sniffed, and wiped her nose with her hand. It was an unladylike gesture. He handed her a handkerchief. Neither of them spoke. Behind them, the fire crackled. Minutes ago—hours ago, she wasn’t sure—that same sound had been ominous. Now it was merely cheerful. Perversely so. Sniffing again, she dabbed at her eyes and looked at him. Really looked at him. Before, when she’d been with him, she’d been afraid of him and her perception of his appearance had been colored through that lens. He’d seemed cold, inhuman, a monolith.

  He was still cold, still preternaturally still as he returned her gaze, but it occurred to her that he wasn’t human and never had been. The man whose name he’d taken was dead and had been dead for decades. The being she’d spoken with, proposed marriage to, the one sitting here with her now had no relationship to him other than the coincidental.

  And that, for some reason, mattered to her. He wasn’t a different human being, or a bad one. He was something else entirely, a creature whose
beliefs and actions couldn’t be measured on the same scale as hers. They were nothing alike…and yet they were. In ways that she couldn’t even begin to define. But what they had in common wasn’t species, or shared goals. It was at once something less meaningful, and much more meaningful.

  Tristan, for all that he was so different, understood her. Not empathized, perhaps, and certainly not cared, but understood—which was more than anyone else ever had, even those who loved her the most. Like Hart, and Rowena. And her father, the coward with the feet of clay, whom she didn’t think she’d ever be able to look in the eye again.

  “Thank you,” she said again, this time referring to the handkerchief.

  In the strong noontime light, Tristan looked far less threatening than he had in the orchard. Or even when he’d faced down Father Justin. His skin was as pale as alabaster, his hair as black as hers. Most men weren’t clean shaven, as it certainly wasn’t the fashion, but Isla decided she liked it. The planes of his face were well defined, but not severe. His eyes were his most arresting feature and, she saw, there was the faintest hint of blue in them. Like in his tunic. She’d seen them flash red, in the firelight, but now they looked almost like anyone else’s eyes. Almost. His lips had a cruel cast that even this faint softening of expression couldn’t entirely erase. Whatever she felt, looking at him, she knew he didn’t. She wondered if he felt anything at all.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, his voice quiet against the hissing and crackling of the logs.

  The strangely intimate moment stretched between them. A knot popped as the sap inside exploded. Suddenly, and no doubt as a product of her shock, Isla found herself wondering what it would be like to kiss him. She bit her lip in an unconscious expression of anxiety.

  He reached up and touched her cheek, his eyes still on hers. “And this?” He was referring to the cut, of course.