by P. J. Fox
Hart had made his knife appear, reminding Marcus that he had it, and made it disappear within the space of seconds. And then acted like nothing had happened. When Marcus had raised frightened eyes to his, Hart had smiled.
Hart had suggested drawing up a new contract.
Marcus had agreed.
Lissa had watched in awed silence as he dipped the quill in ink and applied it to the cheap paper. Most paper was made from rotted rags, and smelled like it; this paper had smelled like, after the rags were rotted, a thousand goats had pissed into the vat. The contract he wrote was simple, as much from an urge to roll up the paper and secrete it as far away from his nose as possible as from an urge to leave the inn. Even so, he’d had about enough of this place and wanted to go home. He hadn’t slept properly in days.
Marcus signed his name in an unsteady hand and then Hart signed his in a great, sweeping flourish. He produced a long, thin stick from an inside pocket and used the candle on the kitchen table to heat it. A mix of beeswax and dragon’s blood resin, it had been dyed a deep emerald that glittered as it melted. A drop fell, causing the candle to flare, and everyone jumped. Everyone except Hart.
The slack-jawed thing that Hart presumed was the innkeeper’s wife made the sign against evil.
Pressing the tip of the stick into the paper he swiped on a large daub of wax and then, curling his hand into a fist, pressed the first knuckle of his little finger into it. He counted to five before pulling free, leaving a perfect impression of his personal seal in the wax. The signet ring had been a gift from Isla, and he treasured it.
The right to use a personal seal had been a gift from the duke.
And then he and Lissa had left the inn together.
He’d put her up at a different inn, one run by a former guardsman, before taking his leave. He’d been too tired to do more than promise to return. Which he would, as soon as he got some sleep. If nothing else, he had to return to the city soon to file her paperwork. The appropriate offices had been, rather obviously, closed.
His choice of establishment meant that Marcus wouldn’t get far if he did try something. Although he might lose those balls after all. What balls there were to lose.
It wasn’t pimping, precisely, to which Hart objected. It was the fact that this ungenerous toad of a man had somehow managed to convince Lissa—and most likely his other girls, too—that he was some kind of benefactor. That he was doing them some kind of favor, collectively, by not killing them. Had any of them any idea what fortunes they’d made for him? Men flocked to that inn night and day, men and, on occasion, women too and it wasn’t for that dried up bint’s mutton stew.
But Lissa was his now, his to protect and cherish and direct as he liked. His, and no one else’s. The one thing, perhaps, that truly was his.
Which, he supposed, was the true reason he hadn’t taken her home with him.
Married or no, he could still share his room with a woman. But then other men would see her and just the idea of their eyes raking her flesh, of them smiling and her smiling in return was unbearable. She wasn’t theirs, not even to chat with at dinner.
And he didn’t want her…exposed, to what he really was.
She might think she understood, but she didn’t.
And so he’d keep her, where he chose to keep her, and cherish her after his own fashion.
There would be one part of his life that would remain pure.
TWENTY-NINE
Half an hour later, he walked into a madhouse.
His rooms were in the same main keep as Isla’s and Tristan’s. He’d accepted them to be near Isla. To guard her. After the guards passed him through the iron-banded door, he’d stalked down the corridor and through the great hall, where servants still slept on benches. It wouldn’t be full light yet for another hour. His plan had been to enter the family’s private quarters through the small living room, where Tristan kept his collection of oddities.
Small for Caer Addanc.
Up the stairs and left down the hall was the quickest route to his bed. Which he’d anticipated meeting in short order; he hadn’t expected anyone to be up, except perhaps Tristan. He’d expected to arrive at his destination unmolested, and sleep for a week.
So he could only stare in stupefied silence at a room full of people, Rowena holding court over all.
The fire was roaring. The candle stands blazed. The room was near as light as day and it contained, at that moment, almost everyone he knew.
Rowena strode back and forth, declaiming like a minstrel’s barker. Apple, seated, alternately drank and shouted back at her. Isla, pale faced, said nothing. Her eyes were red rimmed, like she’d been crying. Tristan stood behind her, one clawed hand resting protectively on her shoulder. His expression was inscrutable.
Callas was there too, and looked like he’d like to throttle Rowena. Well, he was welcome to. Unlike Isla, Hart had never had much use for her. Her only point had been to marry Rudolph and perhaps bring some stability to the manor, but it looked like even that wasn’t happening. Which appeared to be the point of Rowena’s tantrum.
As usual, she was blaming the wrong person.
Thrust into the middle of a fight that appeared to have gone on for hours, it took Hart a few minutes to grasp the nature of the problem. Because no one was discussing it. No one appeared to care about it at all.
“I demand that we leave now. I want to get married and I—”
“Rowena,” Apple bellowed, “this is hardly appropriate!”
Apple was slurring her words. Callas rolled his eyes. Tristan’s eyes met Hart’s and he nodded fractionally. Hart returned the gesture. No one else appeared to notice that he’d arrived. He sat down next to Isla, who was staring into space. She had been crying. Still, it might be his imagination but she looked a bit healthier. Less like she might blow over in a strong wind. She turned her head slightly, pressed her lips into a small smile, but said nothing. Soon she was back to staring into space.
“I could kill her,” Tristan offered conversationally, his voice pitched low for them alone.
Not that it would have mattered. No one was paying attention to anything but Rowena. History repeating itself.
Hart’s expression blackened.
“No,” Isla replied absently, “that wouldn’t be nice.”
“Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” Although Hart had a fairly good idea, and a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He’d seen who was here, and who wasn’t.
He was also growing rather jealous of Apple’s wine.
“Oh.” Isla seemed to gather herself. “Oh. You don’t know.” She turned toward him and then back. “But how could you.”
Was there an unspoken accusation there? “Isla, I had pressing business in town.”
“I…I know. I just, I missed you. That’s all. It’s been very hard without you.”
He put his hand over hers. “I’m sorry.” And he was. He knew how lonely she was. The most devoted husband in the world couldn’t make up for family. Or friends.
Or a lost child.
“It’s father.”
Hart expected her to tell him that the earl was dead.
But instead, “he…had an accident. He fell. Tristan helped him.” She lapsed into silence again. Rowena was still ranting, but neither of them paid attention. “He’s sick, Hart. The doctor is with him now.”
And Isla appeared to be the only one who cared. Hart couldn’t say that he cared, but at least he had the good manners not to draw attention to that fact. Rowena might be single-minded when it came to her own affairs but this was tasteless, even for her.
“You can’t leave,” Isla said with a tired patience. This sounded like a point she’d made before, to Hart’s ears. “Not until father is well enough to travel.”
“And who knows when that might be?” Rowena stamped her foot. Actually stamped her foot. Her eyes blazed. She looked possessed, although that might have just been the light of the fire. “What about my wedding?”
“Rowena, now is hardly the time.”
Isla turned to Apple, a sudden, brittle energy animating her movements. “At least she’s being honest. Unlike you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You never cared for him.”
“That’s a terrible thing to—”
“You should have stopped him from drinking!”
Isla’s words fell into a stunned silence. Even Rowena quit her antics and stared. Isla never raised her voice.
“Then I’d have had no one to drink with.”
“How dare you.” The words were a hiss.
“Drinking was all that kept him bearable and you know it!”
“And now he’s dying!”
“What?” Apple’s tone was caustic. “You think he would have been different, if he were sober? Kinder? Gentler? You think he wouldn’t have tried to sell your sister to Tristan and you to that pig Father Justin? Well let me tell you something, you little chit.”
Hart saw Tristan’s hand, on Isla’s shoulder, tense.
Insulting her around him was a very, very bad idea.
“He was sober as a judge when he pushed his mistress down the stairs!”
And just like that, time stopped.
“The mistakes, the accidents? Who did you think was responsible?”
“You.” Rowena’s eyes were wide.
“I protected you.”
“You did no such thing!”
Apple had apparently realized something, because her own eyes widened slightly. But she addressed, not Rowena but Isla. “No one ever told you how your mother died.”
Amanda. The true wife. Hart’s mother, Jasmine, had only been the maid turned bed warmer.
“She was sick.” Isla sounded small then and very, very young.
Apple shook her head. In frustration, but not, Hart suspected, at them. She was very drunk. Not drunk enough that she was no longer lucid, but close. Hart wondered, now, how long she’d known. From the beginning? And how long, in turn, she’d debated telling the truth.
If they’d caught her after a few more cups, she wouldn’t have remembered. Too few cups, conversely, and she would have maintained her usual composure. Hart thought of all the times they’d laid in bed together, after. Talking. It was she who’d introduced him to several of the more…unusual arts of love. Had shaped his appetites for many things.
Including pain.
The sensation had always held a fascination for him, both in the inflicting and the experiencing. But she’d shown him how delightful it could truly be, how pain could both deepen and transform pleasure. Tied between the bedposts, feeling the fiery lick of her riding crop on his most sensitive places, for the first time he’d known true release.
They’d shared an intimacy, after their own fashion, but there was so much she’d never told him.
Would it have mattered?
He didn’t know.
He’d always privately blamed Amanda for the hurts of his childhood, although he’d never let that confuse his feelings for Isla. She was, and had always been, his only true family. The only person who’d ever showed him any meaningful or lasting kindness. And yet what Apple was saying made a strange, sick kind of sense.
“Amanda didn’t die of sickness. At least not in the conventional sense.” Apple’s tone took on a hard edge. “She died after giving birth. To a boy. The boy himself died a few weeks later.”
Hart blinked. Of course. It all made sense.
“Peregrine didn’t want another child, another boy, spoiling things for his legitimate heir. He who of course, hadn’t been…the most loving father to begin with. So he and Jasmine fought; she said that if he loved her, he’d love their son. She threatened to leave him. To expose him for the liar and fraud that he was.
“So he pushed her down the stairs.”
Hart remembered finding her on the flagstones, her head bent at an unnatural angle. Her eyes, green like his, had stared at nothing. They were already glazing over.
“When he drank,” Apple continued, “he didn’t hit you.”
And then the old man must have realized that he wasn’t getting any boys, at least not any real boys, after all and lost interest. In Hart and in his daughters as well. The last pieces of a complex puzzle fell into place.
Hart had few enough memories of his mother, and those very general: her laugh, her smile. How it felt when she held him. He’d associated her, then, with warmth and safety. And then she’d gone and there had been none of either for a very long time.
“I loved you,” Apple said. “I loved you.” She addressed Hart alone, as though there was no one else in the room.
His eyes narrowed. “You taught me to come when you beat me.”
Callas’ cup slipped from his fingers and landed on the carpet, rolling in a circle as its contents spilled in an arc across the intricate design.
No one noticed.
“Hart—”
“How old was I when it started? Fourteen?”
“You were man enough.”
“I was a child. A child you used.”
“You wanted it. You wanted me.”
Isla was staring at him, too. She’d known something, of course. She wasn’t stupid. She was the only member of this family besides him that wasn’t. But she hadn’t known the full extent of it. No one had.
He glared at Apple. The old hag. How could he have ever thought her beautiful? Even for a moment? She wasn’t, in truth, old. Barely old enough to be his mother, if even that. But she looked old. And she had a heart as black and shriveled as the oldest, most rotted tree stump. Whatever lurked inside of it, her perfect porcelain skin and fine features could only hide it for so long. Eventually, at some point, it had begun to eat its way through.
Gods, how he wanted to kill her.
“But,” Rowena cut in, “what about my wedding? Rudolph doesn’t even know where to find me.”
Hart stood up and, without another word, turned toward the stairs.
Five minutes later he was in his bedroom, alone.
Not even bothering to get undressed, he threw himself face down on the still-made bed and let oblivion take him.
THIRTY
Isla sat next to Tristan on the couch in the upstairs gallery. They were alone save for Tristan’s personal physician. Late morning light streamed through the windows. She’d only been up about an hour, having finally fallen asleep as the sun broke over the snow-capped firs.
She’d quit the carnival of despair that was her family gathering shortly after Hart had. Hart had ever been, she reflected to herself, the wise one. After her husband, she was closest to her brother; yet, still, there was so much she didn’t know. Hadn’t known. Until the night before. She felt a surge of rage toward Apple. That horrible, horrible woman. Isla wanted nothing more than to cut her down the middle like a ripe fruit and pull her organs from her, slowly, one by one.
Tristan, his arm protectively around her shoulders, knew this.
As she knew, in return, that the only reason Apple was still alive was that Tristan might yet have a more inventive use for her. And if, he’d pointed out through their bond, they could actually use her to help Hart then justice would be so much sweeter. Tristan had, if no true emotions, a beautifully cultivated sense of justice.
She blinked. She’d drunk two cups of the strong, bitter brew Hart favored, a supposed delicacy that Tristan had imported from the East. She was more exhausted, she thought, than if she hadn’t slept at all. When she’d woken after her those few restless, dream-filled hours, Greta’s hand on her shoulder as she advised her that the doctor would see them now, her eyes were all but gummed shut.
No one had attempted to wake Hart.
No one had dared.
Where Apple and Rowena were, Isla didn’t know and didn’t care.
“There is…a darkness.”
Tristan’s personal physician was Morvish like themselves, but had studied medicine at one of the famous universities in the East. Where most church-train
ed physicians viewed ailments of all kinds as merely the products of sin, and thus curable with prayer, those outside the church investigated the workings of the body itself. They saw disease not as a series of curses meted out by the Gods but as a logical process that could be understood through, not pilgrimage and fasting but study.
“In his abdomen.” The doctor pressed a hand to his upper stomach. “Here. On what we call the liver.”
Isla had no idea what that was. He could have been referring to the food on her plate or the stars in the sky. The art known as dissection, looking inside the body, was forbidden by the church on pain of death. There had been no books on it in her father’s library.
The doctor—his name was Quentin—seemed to sense her confusion. “The liver produces bile. It is one of the three essential organs. Avicenna, the grandfather of modern medicine, referred to it as the seat of all nutritive faculties. It can be…damaged by excess alcohol.”
“So if he stops drinking…?” Isla trailed off.
The doctor shook his head slightly. “I am afraid that no.” As he considered his next words, noise drifted up from the courtyard below. Of people shouting. Laughing. Of carts rolling along. Of life continuing, as it always had and always would. “The word we use for what ails him is translated from the Attic for crab. Carcinoma. For the finger-like tentacles. It begins to grow in one place and then, like the crab, it sends out these tentacles that pull it into a new place.” He paused. “Soon it consumes all.”
Isla absorbed this news in silence.
“My condolences. There is no cure.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t have said, precisely, at that moment, how she felt.
Tristan turned slightly, his eyes on her. “This is an old man’s disease, Isla. One that would be more common, if more men lived as long.”
