by P. J. Fox
“What are you thinking?” he asked, stroking her hair. The touch was idle. Familiar. Possessive. It made her ache inside.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“That your wounds are well stitched.”
“Callas tended to them, as well as coated them liberally in some kind of terrible potion.”
“Are the rumors about him…and you…true?”
“No.” He stared up at the ceiling. He seemed content, not offended by her question. But there were rumors, and she was curious. She knew so little about him and, despite her better judgment, she couldn’t suppress her urge to know more.
“Would it matter if they were?”
“No,” she said honestly. “I just…find the idea of two men together interesting.”
Hart smiled slightly.
It was a long time before their conversation resumed and, when it did, nothing could have prepared her for what he said next.
“Something…happened to me, in the mountains.” He fall silent. A log popped in the fire. The faint noises of merriment drifted up through the floorboards; that bard was back in the common room. His most popular ballad was a florid, moaning thing about lost love.
“And I found myself thinking of you.”
She tensed. He sat up, throwing the covers off. After a moment, she sat up, too.
She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been this. For him to leave, maybe after promising to come back. And for that, she supposed, to be that. She was nothing and no one, a farm girl who’d learned to care for men’s wounds by cleaning and bandaging those of their animals. Who had no wit, and no letters. Whereas men like Hart…they could have anyone. She’d found herself picturing, at times, the women he must meet. At court. All eager for him. And who wouldn’t be? He was handsome, yes; but he was powerful. That might not matter much to Lissa, who’d never had much use for the status quo, but she knew how the world worked.
Her heart beat fast against her ribs, and so loudly that she was amazed he couldn’t hear it.
He turned. He wore the same dark expression that, already, she was coming to know so well. “I have funds.”
“I know.” And she did.
“I want you out of here,” he said. His eyes searched hers. “I can’t live with you,” he continued. “I have obligations to my lord, however, that must come first.”
She didn’t know which lord he meant, but she nodded.
“But I can put you up in a house, and visit you there when I have time.”
“But I’ll get in trouble,” she said stupidly. “I can’t leave here.”
Hart’s expression darkened further. “I’d like to see that master of yours defy me.”
“What?”
“If you can be bought, then you can be sold. Indentures are purchased all the time. I’ll make him a reasonable offer and, if he gives me trouble, he’ll realize in short order that I was merely doing him a courtesy.”
“Oh.”
Hart must have seen something in her face, then, because when he spoke again it was in a softer tone. “I don’t want to own you. I don’t want to be a replacement for Marcus, or for any of the men who’ve had you before, forcing you to sing for your supper or be beaten.” The silence stretched. And then he continued. “I’m proposing to make you a citizen.”
He—she could scarcely believe her ears.
Her life hadn’t been her own since before the sheriff’s men came, what seemed like a thousand years ago. A bunch of thugs in dented helmets. Who made it clear that they would have had her, themselves, had not the sheriff himself been coming along not too far behind.
Hart’s eyes searched hers. “I want you, yes, but I want you with me of your own free will.” He took her hand. She could tell, although he was being gentle with her now, that he was strong. Strong enough to break her bones in a single squeeze.
“You’re free. Free in your heart. I wouldn’t…I wouldn’t take that away from you.”
The last part of that thought was left unspoken: that he knew what a loss it would be.
“You…truly?” She still could scarcely believe what she was hearing.
This…couldn’t be happening. Was he being serious? He couldn’t be being serious.
“Yes. But Lissa, you must understand. There are certain things I…cannot offer. Marriage. If and when I marry, it will be at my lord’s behest. And not for love but to secure an alliance.” His eyes bored into hers. She nodded. She did understand. “I am…not a man to be domestic. I am a soldier, and live as such.
“All I can offer you is my heart, such as it is, and a promise that I will not abandon you.”
Which was more than anyone else had ever offered her. More than she’d ever dared to hope for. She knew what he was telling her: that he was a man divided, a man who might seek to carve out a small portion of the world for himself but who would never be truly free. He might come to her, might even care for her, as he claimed, but he had no intention of altering his plans. Which might or might not include other women, even another family. A legitimate family.
It didn’t matter to her, though. She’d thought, after her father lost their farm, that any kind of normal life was closed to her. Any kind of stability. Standing on the auction block, her charms exposed for the world to see, she’d never felt less human. Slavery might be illegal in Morven, but it was alive and well. And seven years, even if she was released after seven years, was a lifetime to a girl of sixteen winters who’d only ever dreamed of some day maybe tending her own farm. A girl who was suddenly facing life as the property of all men, and special to none. Whores didn’t get married. They lived and died as whores, their clients growing steadily more wretched as their youth disintegrated.
Even if some man did would settle for another man’s—another thousand men’s—leavings, the life ruined them. Lissa had seen it, in some of the older women. The ones she met in the mornings, doing her errands. They came to not want anything else.
She’d dreaded that for herself, above all things: the morning she woke up, and realized she didn’t care.
“But…why me?” She thought again of the women at court, the women he must meet. They were glamorous. They were…everything. She was nothing.
He considered her question. “I think that you and I might…please each other.”
“Oh.” This was all so strange. And then, “when?”
She expected him to tell her, perhaps in a week or two. Perhaps in a month or two. Perhaps when the fighting was over, or unicorns returned to Darkling Reach.
“Now.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
The silence stretched.
Finally, he broke it. “You understand what I have to offer.” His tone was firm. Uncompromising. Emotionless, as always. His eyes still hadn’t left hers. “Do you accept?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
He rode home in the grayscale of a cold false dawn.
Cedric’s hooves clattered on the cobbles, squared and correctly placed like all the rest of Barghast. All around him, the city was coming alive. Lamp tenders extinguished the lamps that had aided the watch in keeping the city safe overnight. Somewhere, in a different, lower quarter, pickpockets were robbing the bodies of those the watch hadn’t managed to save. A city was still a city, and these were dangerous times.
Bakers were arriving at their bakeries, some unlocking doors and some merely coming downstairs. Bread by true morning meant dough now. Even Hart, who had never baked so much as an oat cake on the fire, knew that much.
Butchers pushed frozen meat along in carts. Passing through one square, he saw an entire bollock standing upright and hard as marble. Its frost-glazed seemed to glare at him, as though demanding to know why it should be forced to suffer this indignity.
Hart couldn’t suppress a small smile. He hoped his poor old pig hadn’t met such a fate, but supposed that she must have. No creature, man or beast, was immortal and they all served their purpose.
/> Good old Rosie.
Fishermen were coming in, too, with fish they’d caught by boring holes in the ice. Spring might be showing her treacherous face in the South, but up here the season was still theoretical. Sometimes, or so Hart had heard, the last of the snow didn’t melt until midsummer. Long after the first round of crops were harvested and the second one planted. Hart had trouble crediting such a thing, but supposed he’d find out for himself soon enough.
Lissa was right: he was still alive.
He’d told her he couldn’t offer her marriage. Not because she was a prostitute; he hadn’t cared about that even before he’d learned that it wasn’t her choice. Although he’d suspected as much. He’d learned to read faces, through torture. Although he’d always had a fairly good sense of people, or so he’d like to think, the precise application of pain in small amounts was an art form that, when practiced, sharpened the senses. To achieve the desired result meant playing a man like a string instrument. And that, in turn, meant attuning oneself to the finest gradations of movement. The faintest tremble of a lip; the smallest sigh. These things were, not faint strains but crashing cymbals to a true master.
No. He’d come to understand several things as he lay prone on his cot and, later, on the journey home. And one of them was that Callas had been right. Although he’d never voiced the thought directly, that marriage was not for such as them, he’d made his opinion clear enough. At least in regard to himself. To Callas, of course, it was no great loss. If anything, when contemplating his narrowed choices, he seemed relieved.
Hart had told Callas that he wanted a wife, and a home. And he did. But the simple life of a husbandman was one he’d left back in Enzie. If he’d stayed, perhaps, then yes. He might have had those things. Spent his days hoeing his little plot and scratching behind the ears of his pet pigs. He might have eventually escaped his father’s yoke. If never his loathing, which Hart had managed to internalize until he hated himself almost as much.
And what was a dream, if its fulfillment brought no release? Hart knew now, as he’d known then, that to be happy meant leaving home. Adopting a new home. And, with it, a new life. He could never be the thirteenth earl of Enzie. So he had to decide, instead, who he could be.
Who he wanted to be.
The man he’d chosen to become, on the night of Isla’s wedding and again every night since, as he said his prayers, the man he’d chosen to become the first time he’d felt himself grow an aching erection from pressing a man into an iron maiden and the man he’d chosen to become when he’d offered his first life to the Lord of the Flies, that man didn’t keep pets. He laid with women, not in hay lofts but on linen sheets. He inspired, not laughter from them but terror.
He might still marry, but it would be at the duke’s behest; to serve him, and the kingdom. Love and marriage were two entirely separate things, as his own conception had surely proved. And was Hart even capable of true love? He didn’t know.
He’d surely never felt anything approaching the single-minded devotion that Isla seemed to feel for her lord. He truly was pleased for her, though. Isla, above all others, deserved joy. She’d given so much to others, throughout her life, and received so little in return.
Lissa had asked, why her? And the truth was, Hart couldn’t have said. When he examined his own thoughts, as he had often since that first night, his only answer was that something had struck him. Like a thunderbolt. The feel of her skin, how she trembled. That first shy, darting smile. All were seared into his memory. Her only life had been as a servant and then, as a vessel for other men’s pleasure. And yet she was still so innocent. So pure. He wanted, needed something of that for himself. Needed to guard it. To protect it. Or so he told himself. In truth, he wanted to hoard it for his own. Jealously, like a dragon lying atop its treasure pile.
In her presence, he felt…almost whole again.
He knew that he was stealing it from her and he didn’t care. He knew, too, even if she didn’t, that other men would come along. Men who could, and would offer marriage. A real life. Not all the ladies at court had begun life as ladies.
It wasn’t—couldn’t be—love. He barely knew her. And yet he’d meant what he’d said, that he wouldn’t abandon her. If only for his own selfish reasons. A man who’d truly loved her would have left her alone, to seek her fortunes among the worthy. Not preyed upon a self-loathing he recognized, because it sang out to those same feelings in himself.
It takes one to know one was one of Apple’s favorite phrases. Apple, whom he’d bedded under his father’s nose more times than he could count. He could only say in his defense that she’d sought him out and not the other way around. She was nothing to him but a warm cunt, and an opportunity for revenge. He didn’t even find her attractive.
He’d fucked her near the time of Isla’s wedding and again in the mountains, because she was there and because she’d begged him to. Her begging, more than her failing charms, had been the aphrodisiac. She’d come; her muscles had tightened around him in a way they didn’t when a woman was putting on a show. And he’d been simultaneously thrilled and revolted.
What was he doing?
Who was he?
These days, he was a stranger even to himself.
Callas was right on another score, too: he didn’t need marriage to have a woman.
If he died in battle, as Bjorn had, as he probably would, he’d still end up inflicting the same tortures on Lissa as if they had married. He knew that. But there wouldn’t be the same expectation. With him, she could retain a certain independence. Open her own shop, if she wanted. Save her own money. Life as she chose, within reason. As her benefactor, he expected certain rights. And loyalties. All of which he believed she understood, without their being spelled out. But other than that….
He wondered if choosing this path made him like his father. Although his rational mind knew, on some level, that it did not. Unlike his father, he’d acknowledge his children. All of them. Because he wasn’t weak. And because he’d chosen to live in the North, where such was expected. A man’s seed gained no magical powers through marriage.
Hart thought idly of Father Justin, and this time his lips curved into a true smile.
In the North, free from the corrupting influence of creatures like the now deceased priest, children were merely a fact of life.
In the South, the commission of sexual sin, as it was known, was considered equal to that of murder. Sexual sin or, in other words, doing the exact same thing in the exact same place and in some cases with the exact same person but without the virtual presence of a man like Father Justin sharing in the fun. And they’d called him idiot, back home.
Hart enjoyed the traditional pose, which was all that the church technically allowed, but he also enjoyed exploring a woman’s mouth as well as her third orifice, the last particularly because there was no possibility whatsoever of her conceiving a child and because, too, most women, while they might protest a little at first, came to crave the sensation. Like all sex, it was only pleasurable if it was done right. Many women, in the North too although mostly from the South, had been under the mistaken impression before they met him that they didn’t enjoy sex. Merely because they’d never been with a man capable of giving them pleasure.
Hart had been told, his whole life, that he was a sinner and that his existence in and of itself was indeed a sin. That, regardless of whether he lived out his days in an abbey, praying and doing penance for the souls of others, there was still no hope for his resurrection. Because he’d been born in sin. So why not enjoy himself why he could?
From a louche to a demon wasn’t that much of a transformation; he’d always embraced the dark side. All that had changed was that the dark had gotten a little darker. But he’d always, since he was a child, lived an existence without hope.
Which, ironically, was why he’d always been so willing to help others.
He, for the most part, viewed their circumstances without judgment. In his previous life, he’d br
ought more than one girl to Cariad for pennyroyal and tansy. Not girls he’d impregnated but girls he knew as friends. Girls desperate that no one find out they weren’t to be virgins on their wedding nights or their families would turn them out. Or worse.
Girls whose betrotheds would leave them, even if those betrotheds were the cause of the problem.
The whole idea made Hart sick.
Yet he was the sinner.
He knew, too, that that was why he’d been so immediately drawn to Tristan: the duke was a like soul and Tristan, too, had understood what simmered underneath Hart’s façade. When Tristan had offered Hart a position in his household, there had truly never been a doubt that Hart would accept. Hart might have lied to himself, for awhile, but his true path had ever been mapped out for him.
Ignoring the cold, which numbed his fingers and toes and damn near stopped his heart when the wind gusted even through his layers of wool and leather, he turned his thoughts back to Lissa.
He in his shirt, vest and trousers and she in his cloak, they’d gone downstairs to speak to the innkeeper. That pasty, bloated maggot of a man was taking his ease at the kitchen table. A broad, scarred slab of a thing where he had most assuredly never labored.
And Lissa defended this man?
Then again, as his thrall, she hadn’t much of a choice. She had to think well of him, and convince him to think well of her, if she wanted to survive life under his roof with the minimum of pain. Or survive at all.
Marcus, who, on further reflection, reminded Hart not so much of a maggot as a toad, had pretended reticence at first. A fat, blinking toad. Harmless enough, when one considered its existence rationally, and yet obscurely terrifying.
Lissa had been frightened. As time and circumstance had trained her to be. Hart had not been. He’d been annoyed. But when he’d suggested that instead of coins, Marcus could accept his own balls in the purse he was offering, Marcus had reconsidered his point of view. Hart had demanded paperwork. Marcus had demurred, claiming there wasn’t any. Which meant either that he was a fool for not keeping it or an even bigger fool for lying to Hart. And imagining—what? That he could wait until Hart’s back was turned and spirit Lissa back to the inn?
