by P. J. Fox
But her father had spent his days hiding in his tumbledown manner, half in his cups. And then, in later years, more than half. He’d spent his inheritance, spent more than his income, spent his health and his courage and for what? He’d never fought for his kingdom nor provided aid for those who did. He’d never done anything, except crow over his own good fortune for having been born to a title.
She found herself staring at the doctor. He was pale, like all Northmen, with coloring similar to Tristan’s. Dark hair, dark eyes. The blue of the bottom of a lake. He had a family. A wife and three children. He was young, for his position: perhaps forty winters.
His robes, like his eyes, were blue. Almost black. Well tailored and slim fitting. He had muscular hands. Squared off nails capped long fingers. He wore no rings.
He was handsome. In another lifetime, Isla might have found him attractive. Or, rather, acted on the knowledge that she did.
Strange, what one found oneself thinking about in times like these.
“How long?” Tristan asked.
“A few weeks. Perhaps even as long as a few months. Perhaps much less.”
“I see.”
“The body decides these things in its own time. What happened earlier…his heart was overworked. He has not been receiving enough air. Which leads me to believe that the sickness has spread. Upward. Into his lungs. Perhaps even further.”
Isla had felt like she’d been alone, like everyone in the room had just stared at her while she begged for help. But Tristan had been right beside her and had fallen like a shadow over her father’s still form. He’d done something with his mouth, almost like kissing. Giving, Isla had realized, his air.
Apple had shrieked at him to stop, and that it was witchcraft. And then the doctor—Quentin—had come, at somebody’s behest, and the room had been cleared. Isla knew that she could stay but had elected to go, because someone needed to talk to Rowena. And Apple. Someone needed to be the adult.
“And there is no cure,” she repeated.
“No. But we can help him to feel comfortable, until he journeys to the Summerlands.”
The reference was jarring. Like a bucket of ice water to the face. It was easy to forget, until times like these, how different the North truly was from her homeland. So much of the time, their two cultures seemed the same. And, for the most part, people were the same everywhere. Motivated by the same wants and needs, the same jealousies. But they weren’t the same. The North didn’t have the Celestial Kingdom. That was a teaching of the Southern church: that all men who gave their lives in service to the Mediator went to a glorious heaven where all their needs would be met.
The Summerlands were eternally stretching plains of grass, where pleasure and food were abundant. Ruled over by Arawn, the Lord of Death, they were free of disease and all other earthly sorrows. The earl wouldn’t go to Valhalla, the hall of eternal feasting ruled over by the chief of the gods, Bragi, because he wasn’t a warrior. Nor the mate of one, to please him in the eternities. The Northern religion was a harsh one, with no room for cowards.
That Quentin had suggested even that the earl would journey to the Summerlands was, Isla knew, a kindness. Although a man of letters, Quentin had taken up arms to defend his lord. He bore the scars of Ullswater Ford: a missing finger on his left hand and a leg that ended below the knee. He wore a wooden prosthetic.
There was no true concept of hell, in the North, as there was where the church held sway. No lakes of fire, no demons cackling as they rent their victims’ flesh. Rather, men like the earl journeyed to a gloomy place where their bed was called sickbed, their dish was called hunger and their knife was called famine. They had sowed not in life; now neither would they reap.
Most, whom moral men would condemn, went there. Men who’d failed their fellowmen. Who’d failed their own higher selves, through cowardice or simple sloth. And yet there was another place. A place for oath-breakers and those who harmed children. A place which name was not spoken but where men were said to rot in a vast swamp, their ever-open eyes fixed on the sky. Ever-open and as white and featureless as hard boiled eggs. A place where nothing ever happened save a great dragon came to gnaw on their corpses and their souls were as witch lights, leading others to their doom.
Was this her father’s fate?
“I’d like to see him,” she said.
“He’s lucid now. In an hour or so, he’ll require more milk of the poppy.”
Isla stood. She needed to do this alone. Although she was never truly alone.
Tristan let her go. There was no need for words between them. There wouldn’t have been, regardless. Love had its own language.
Seconds later, she stepped into the guest bedroom where her father rested. He’d been here only since the previous afternoon but already it smelled like a sickroom: of camphor and stale urine and that strange, unidentifiable thing that might simply have been sorrow. Or decay, came the thought unbidden. Tristan saw through her eyes, and his own opinion was that the smell came from the men themselves, as their bodies prepared for what their minds denied.
He was propped up on pillows. He seemed smaller somehow. More frail. Some of his color had returned, though, making it hard to credit the prognostication that he had mere weeks. He looked better, in truth, than he had in years.
His eyes tracked her across the room, but he remained silent.
She took the seat by his bed. “Hello, father.”
He swallowed. A brief tightening around his eyes showed that it hurt. But still he said nothing. Perhaps he couldn’t.
“I’m glad you’re here, and that you’re receiving proper medical care.” Which she was, wasn’t she? He was her father; she was supposed to want the best for him. And these days, it was hard to sort her guilt from her anger. Her eyes studied his. “I want you to know that I forgive you.”
He swallowed again. “Because I’m dying.”
She didn’t respond. Had the doctor told him, she wondered, or had he known? And if he’d known, or even suspected, then for how long? Since before he’d contacted Tristan with a proposal of marriage for Rowena? Since even before that?
“Well,” he began, and for a moment her heart lightened. Maybe this would be the moment when their breach would finally be sealed. He must surely regret what he’d done. Wish, in his final time, for her to know his love.
And then he continued. “At least I’m not going to hell.”
“But…what?” She felt so stupid, but she couldn’t summon any other response.
“You’re a sinner. A whore. You stole your sister’s husband, beguiling him with your wiles. Which you then paraded for all the manor to see, humiliating me.” His eyes narrowed. Sick though he might be, they still glowed with a certain fell light. They were still the crafty, slitted eyes of a bog sprite.
“It doesn’t matter that you lost the child. Everyone still knows.”
Gods. Was there no one who believed her? What she wouldn’t give to have been pregnant. And what did it matter, regardless? Tristan was her husband. Technically, under Morvish law, he had rights to her upon the completion of their betrothal contract. More to the point, though, she was an adult woman and capable of doing with her body what she wished.
“Yes,” she said coldly. “I lie with my own husband. The secret’s out.”
“Worthless tramp. Announcing that like you’re proud of it.”
“It’s a simple fact!”
He turned his head slightly. “So selfish. Always so selfish.” He sighed. “Never did a single thing in your life, just to please me.”
“But that—that’s not true! I gave my life to helping you. Running the manor in your stead, doing all I could to see that it produced and with nothing! No money, and we were always short-handed.” Her father would raid the accounts and then complain that Isla was bankrupting them with her requests for flour, or salt, or her frivolous insistence on digging a new well. One that actually produced.
“You thought you were a man. You disgusted me.”
&nbs
p; Her mouth dropped. “What?”
“You were ever a source of shame, with your reading and your lecturing. No one cares about cheese making. And now Rowena, beautiful Rowena who is what a daughter is supposed to be, can’t make a good match because of you.”
“Rowena is marrying the man of her choice!”
“Rowena has suffered, as I have suffered, because of your selfishness.”
“What would you have had me do?”
“You never cared about me. You wanted me to die, so you could steal my money.”
“No!”
“And now you’re in league with that sorcerer.” Whom, if he hadn’t already forgotten, he’d just claimed Rowena should have married in her stead. But maybe he wouldn’t have been such a horrible sorcerer, then. Isla suspected that the main source of her father’s discontent with Tristan lay in the fact that he’d chosen Isla.
“I’m certain, as is your entire family, that you spread your legs for him and every guardsman at every opportunity. Who knows, maybe even your own brother.”
Isla just stared.
“Father Justin should have killed you when he had the chance.”
“So it’s true, then.”
But he only looked at her. Now, now he stopped speaking. The man whose true heart she’d always denied, even in the fact of so much evidence.
“Father, how did Jasmine die?”
For a long moment there was silence. And then, “you’re here trying to kill me. You malicious and deceitful child. You’re trying to upset me so badly that my heart fails. Why?”
“Wait, I’m not. I—”
“Stop upsetting me!”
“I’m not—I’m not trying to upset you I just—”
“Get out! Get out!”
She stood up and, with as much dignity as she could summon, she left.
THIRTY-ONE
Isla felt him approach before she saw him.
She was outside, on the colonnade, leaning her weight on the stone rail as she stared out into nothing. Dusk was enrobing the land. Behind her, toward Barghast, lights would be twinkling on in houses large and small. But out here, facing the cliffs and the black expanse of lake beyond, she could pretend that she was the last person on earth.
“You must be cold.”
“He hates me. He really does.” She shook her head slightly, as if to shake herself free of this new knowledge. She might have said, at that moment, if she’d been asked, that she felt like crying. Only she suspected that she no longer knew how.
“All this time, I thought…I don’t know what I thought. That he was old. That he was confused. That he didn’t mean it.”
She’d cherished those few times that he’d been…she had to admit to herself now, neutral. When he hadn’t been cruel. When he hadn’t used her, or Hart, as targets on which to vent his spleen. Absence—absence of rage, absence of criticism, absence of him—had felt so wonderful that it had felt like love. When he’d been distracted enough by his own amusements to tell stories. To make them laugh. Those had been the best times of her childhood, the times she’d treasured against…the other times.
But what had she been treasuring? The self-absorbed ranting of a drunkard? This was the so-called father she’d worked so hard to forgive?
She felt Tristan’s hand on her shoulder, a gentle touch. Velvet-covered iron, capable of crushing her bones to dust. Which, in her heart of hearts, she found obscurely comforting. Tristan wasn’t weak; he never blamed others for his own transgressions. His own failings. Of course, to her, Tristan had no failings. She could see them abstractly, but he meant too much to her for them to matter.
“Your skin is like ice.”
But she didn’t feel cold. She also didn’t know how long she’d been standing in this spot, only that when she’d first arrived it had been sunny. She remembered thinking how nice it had been, to absorb the pristine white of the snow and listen to the sounds of silence.
She let Tristan fold her in his arms.
He was warm. He’d been feeding. Life pulsed inside him, seeping into her through her skin. Stealing the cold she hadn’t known was there. “I want to be alone with you,” she said.
“And I with you.” She felt, rather than saw, his faint half smile. “Our house does seem to have grown a bit…overcrowded.”
“I feel like such a failure.”
“Did you ever learn the fable of the sun and moon as a child?”
She tilted her face up, so she could see his, caught off guard by this seeming non sequitur. “What?”
“The sun loved the moon so much that he died again each night, just to let her breathe. You are my moon, Isla. You sing to the water in my veins.” He stroked the side of her face, his talon pressing ever so gently into her skin. “Without you I would be nothing.”
“I feel so conflicted.”
There was no need to recount what had transpired. Or indeed to tell him how much his words meant to her. Or to tell him that, even so, she knew now that her father would die without anything ever changing. The chance to make things right, that she’d hoped for all these years, would never come. He never had been the man she’d needed him to be, she knew now, and never would become that man. He would only pass into oblivion, hating her. As Apple hated her. As Rowena hated her.
“I felt much the same when my father died.” He referred to his human father. A remnant of his original host still lived inside him. He had the original Tristan’s memories, his wants and needs. They’d shaped him into the man—the being—he was now.
How much of the original Tristan was left? Isla had often wondered. And how much of love was, to him, like the muscle memory of which Hart spoke? An ingrained knowledge that ran deeper than one’s consciousness, that allowed one to rise from a dead sleep sword in hand? A demon might not love, but he guarded the knowledge of what love had been to him once with a fierce loyalty.
“And my brother, too.” He turned, his arm still around her, and led them down the colonnade. She let him lead her. They weren’t going back inside but, rather, down one of the outside staircases that connected the battlements and to the gardens.
“My father, Borin, was a cruel man but he adored his wife. My mother. Sienna was her name, for the beautiful pigment produced with iron-bearing earth. And she was like the earth: placid and stable. The perfect foil for my father, who was neither.
“After she died, he…gave into his darker tendencies.”
The darkness of the grove opened before them.
“I thought, for a long time, that he didn’t love her. Because of how he treated her at times. Or, rather, how he treated other women.” Tristan’s footfalls were silent on the earth. Paths had been shoveled clear, but Isla’s shoes still crunched through the remaining skim of frost.
“But I came to realize, in my later years, that he did. We often ask ourselves how much someone loves us when in truth that’s the wrong question.” He turned toward her, his eyes reflecting blackly in the last of the light. “We should ask ourselves, instead, how capable they are of loving at all.”
“Yes,” Isla agreed.
“Morin, my brother, had no such excuse.” Tristan’s eyes were back on the trees before them. An artificial grove, but still wild; every puff of wind laden with the promise of magic. “His bride was named Alice, too.” Like the Alice he’d eaten. Isla’s onetime friend. “She hated him, and with good reason.”
“He was unkind?”
“Her screams echoed through the castle on their wedding night.”
Isla shivered.
“Your father is not capable of love, Isla, any more than I.”
“But you made a choice.”
“And so did he. I could have remained the person I was, keeping thralls in the dungeon. I fed on them at times; it amused me. Letting them live. Tasting their fear as I left, that I’d come back and do it again.” He paused, remembering. “It was sweet.”
“Oh.” Isla’s voice was small.
“I chose a different path, aga
inst my nature. And not due to the pleas of my victims but the desires of my own—heart, as it were.” He stopped. “I was the man you married before we met and I will be that man tomorrow, not because of you but because of me.”
“I…think I understand.”
“Our desires might be beyond our control but our character is a choice.”
In other words that her father, whatever his failings, was still responsible for who he was. In the darkness and in the light. He could have fought against the needs that drove him, instead of accepting their presence as some sort of proof of Divine acceptance. He’d no doubt believed that he had the Gods’ stamp of approval when he’d thrown Jasmine down the stairs, just as he seemed to still believe now. She had, after all, only been a whore.
And Hart only the son of a whore.
“The adoption continues as planned?” The following afternoon. A date that had been chosen before her family had made its reappearance.
Tristan nodded.
“Good. I was afraid….”
“I intend to suffer no man’s interference in my plans. Especially not that man’s.”
“And Rowena….” She was so horrible to Asher.
“Your sister and your stepmother are alive by your sufferance.”
“Oh.” That same stupid response again.
She studied Tristan’s face in the gloom. His strong jawline. The bow in his chiseled, almost too firm lips. The high, sculpted cheekbones. His pale skin. The haunted, almost otherworldly expression in that piercing stare. The one that looked right into her. He was, quite simply, the most handsome man that she had ever seen. And the fact that she’d tasted him, and felt him inside her, did nothing to diminish his allure. Each time he touched her, she felt like she’d never been touched before.
He…captivated her. There was no other word. She could gaze up at him like this forever.
“My prince of ice and snow,” she whispered, repeating words she’d used before.
“Your prince who will guard you, and care for you, from now until the end of time.”
“I’m scared.” The words were barely audible. She was scared of pain, of change, of conflict. Of the war that was sure to come. The occasional whisper from the South had grown into a low, pressing susurrus. That Piers wasn’t long for the throne. That Maeve was raising troops. That it was only a matter of time before Maeve reclaimed what was rightfully hers. With or without her son.
