The Black Prince: Part I

by P. J. Fox

  Isla couldn’t help but picture all those women’s hands, working together. What a beautiful sight it would be. And how sad, too: for all those hands would belong to women who’d lost what mattered most. Their hearts lay in the center, because their hearts lay all together in a single mass grave. For that was what being a parent meant: living with your heart forever outside your body, forever outside your control.

  She could only pray that she’d never use her hands for this task, on a child. Hers, or anyone else’s. On her father was bad enough, but it had been his time.

  Greta handed her the edge of a new strip of linen. Greta herself held the bulk of the strip, rolled into a tube, feeding it to Isla as she needed. They were alone in the shrine under the chapel, a featureless stone box lit only by a hanging lantern and, since Greta had gone to fetch it, a fat pillar candle rooted in wax at the earl’s head. Somewhere, water dripped. They were alone.

  In the North, preparing a body for burial was women’s work. Isla should have been assisted by her sister, and her stepmother. But Apple hadn’t left her bed since the night before and Rowena had outright refused. Given that set of circumstances, Isla hadn’t had the heart to accept the offers of the castle’s women. All of whom had been eager to support her in this time, and all of whom had respected her far too much to gainsay her when she told them she was fine on her own. Even though she wasn’t.

  Questioning another’s strength was not done in the North. To do so implied that one thought the other person was unable to determine their own needs and to take responsibility for them. Northerners showed love for each other by treating each other, not as children but as fellow warriors. If Isla needed to face this task alone, then she needed to face this task alone.

  Only Greta had joined her. Without comment, only gathering the linen to her chest and waiting. Isla hadn’t precisely forbidden her, which mean that her presence was no insult.

  She’d opened her mouth, intending on telling Greta to go, but in the end had only asked Greta where the earl was laid. She didn’t know. And she didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t her people; their customs weren’t her customs. She took no comfort in them, only found them strange. Which was one of the reasons she’d wanted to be alone.

  And now here they were.

  They’d washed the body in water and vinegar, and now they were wrapping it for burial. He wouldn’t be burned, like a tribesman; set aloft on a cloud of smoke to meet his ancestors. Nor would he be laid beside them, beneath the hills. He’d be lowered into the earth, as was the custom of his own people.

  There was a small cemetery in Barghast for those who’d been members of the church in life. The earl would go there. Fear of contagion prevented his being brought home to Enzie; a rotting body drew ill humors, regardless of the cause of death. And besides, who would take him? The earl had died friendless, penniless, and alone. His manor was in receivership, his family scattered to the four winds. Isla could only hope that, now that he’d left this mortal vessel, his own Gods would take him in.

  The honored dead among the tribesmen were dressed as they’d been in life and then laid in their own boats. Small enough to row unaided and light enough to carry overland, they were an essential possession. And, for the funeral, filled with other possessions: weapons, tokens of his achievements.

  His comrades and loved ones pushed the boat forward, its spine carving a channel through the sand, until it reached the water. Prayers were said and then, with a final burst of effort, it was set forth. After the current had caught, an arrow was lit and fired and the boat set alight.

  The people of Darkling Reach were placed aloft on great pyres and burned. Only a few, the remnants of the very oldest families, returned to their ancestral barrows. Cremation was the safest, and cleanest. But the church forbid cremation. The church taught the resurrection of the dead. Which made heaven some sort of stopping place, Isla supposed. Like a never ending church service, where the faithful merely waited for the final battle. What then, was the point?

  And what justice, if a man was cursed with his literal physical body in the afterlife? What about those who’d died in battle? Or, indeed, as martyrs for the church? Surely they, above all others, deserved an afterlife free from pain.

  If her father had died in Enzie, he still would have died, but to the tune of a great deal more pomp and circumstance. A priest was stationed in the room, along with those of a man’s family deemed pure enough to be present, to hold the death watch. No mistresses or illegitimate children were allowed, as this might taint the air. Invite the presence of evil. Something. A forced marriage defined by mutual hate was deemed more godly than a natural joining built on love.

  All knew when a death watch had begun, as the priest journeyed to the afflicted’s house preceded by a crier. Usually a deacon, or one of the priest’s own illegitimate children, he rang a handbell as he warned those within earshot of approaching doom. He did this until the priest had actually placed hands on the afflicted and begun speaking the last rites.

  According to the church, all men were first born and then lived in a state of sin. Without that arbitrary set of words muttered over him as he passed, Isla’s father had therefore been doomed to hell. A teaching she’d never believed, but she knew he had.

  At least she could give him the second requirement: burial in consecrated ground.

  This was also not a concept Northerners had. To them, all ground was considered sacred; all ground was the body of the Mother, all sky the body of Her consort. To reject any portion of her as not sacred was the sacrilege.

  If they’d been in the South, then her father’s body would have been embalmed by professional mourners and then placed in state for three days so the peasants who farmed his fields could come and gaze upon their beloved lord. To assuage them in their grief, or to make sure that he was dead. Whereas Northerners, being practical, engaged in no such chicanery. To them, the body was merely a vessel. Empty, once the soul had fled and with no further purpose, other than to renew Father Air and Mother Earth so new life could form from their union.

  A draft came from somewhere, and the candle flickered.

  Greta looked up.

  Isla didn’t. She wrapped each finger, individually, as she’d been instructed. And then she wrapped the hand, making it into a sort of mitten, and began to wrap the bandages up his arm. Eventually, his arms would be crossed over one another and then held in place with more linen until the whole of the earl’s body was covered.

  Had he, again, been in the South, this wouldn’t have been done until he’d been dead for some days. No amount of embalming could have hidden the stench, which was apparent even now. Faint, but yet strong. Had he been a Northern father and she a Northern daughter, she would have decorated these fingers with jewels rather than linen. Because possessions, like the bodies of the men who’d once owned them, meant nothing. To sacrifice a man’s worldly goods to the fire signaled both grief, and acceptance. That a man’s fortunes, like his life, waxed and waned with the moon.

  A warrior released what was not his, knowing that the minute he could no longer toss away his greatest possession in service to a greater need his soul was in chains.

  Isla finished one arm, and began on the other. There was a time when touching the cold and unyielding marble of corpse flesh would have sent shivers down her spine. When its waxy pallor, so strange in the candlelight, would have done the same. But she lay with a corpse every night, felt the strength of rigor mortis in his hands as he made love to her. Saw that same waxy pallor by the light of the fire, while she took dinner and he watched.

  Finally, she was done.

  Tristan waited above. With Asher and with Callas. She didn’t know if Rowena would join them, and she didn’t care. She did wish, though, that Hart were here. Hart had known, of course, that his father would die in his absence.

  But there’d been no discussion of what that meant, to either of them.

  She stood.

  Greta signaled to the guard wai
ting outside that they were ready for the coffin. It was brought in. Coffins, in the North, were used only for transport and not for the actual burial. Wood, unlike cloth, was too precious to waste.

  Isla watched them lift her father, and place him inside.

  How was he meant to rise from the earth, if his body had passed into it?

  Coffin or no, all men decayed. Were they resurrected as bone fragments, or as clouds of dust? She felt something stir deep within. Some unnamed and barely understood knot of emotions that for the most part she worked to ignore. And now couldn’t.

  She didn’t acknowledge the coffin as it was removed. But instead stared, for a long time at the empty slab where her father had lain as though he were still there. She didn’t know how long, but she started when Greta touched her shoulder. She’d forgotten about Greta, too.

  “It’s time.”

  Isla nodded.

  She was dressed in gray, the traditional color of mourning in the North. As was Greta, who’d chosen this clothing for her. When she emerged into the chapel, she saw that Tristan and Asher were dressed the same. Tristan offered her his arm, and she took it. Asher took her free hand, the kind of sweet gesture that he wouldn’t much longer make.

  And, united, they walked to their carriage.

  Her father would travel alone.

  Tristan’s carriage, which was almost never used and existed solely to serve those matters of state where riding on horseback was impractical, was a great black thing that had been carved all over in a series of stylized motifs of twisting vines covered in pointed leaves. They were picked out in green, representing House Mountbatten’s colors. His house crest, too, had been carved into either side directly above where the running boards were mounted. There were internal curtains which, when pulled back, allowed the family to be seen.

  They were drawn this morning.

  Tristan helped Isla in, and then Asher.

  He was about to enter, himself, when a strident, shrill voice rang out across the courtyard. “Well I never!”

  Rowena.

  “Leaving without me? Am I supposed to walk? And on the occasion of my own father’s funeral?” She glared up at Tristan. He, for his part, remained impassive. Isla watched the interchange through a gap in the curtains, which had been cut from a heavyweight wool. There was a fur throw inside, too, for which she was grateful. Her hands were cold.

  Although she thought, at that moment, that she might be even more grateful if she used it to smother Rowena.

  Rowena’s entire person must be cold. She was dressed, not in the demure hooded gown of the mourner but in a vibrant red-dyed confection that bared half her bosom. Who was she trying to impress? And then Isla saw her sister eyeing Callas.

  The desire to see her sister joust for that ring almost overcame Isla’s own grief, and fury at Rowena’s insensitivity for intruding on it.

  “You may ride in the second carriage.”

  And then Tristan was inside, on the seat opposite. He rapped on the roof and they were gone, leaving Rowena standing alone. Asher poked his head out through the curtains and stuck out his tongue. His father pretended not to see. His mind was, Isla could clearly see, elsewhere. Nor could she sense anything through the bond. Whatever his thoughts were this day, and they certainly weren’t about the earl, they were his own.

  They followed her father to the graveyard.

  The South was replete with lore concerning the perils of not receiving a proper burial. From the dead rising as wights and terrifying their families, to worse. Children snatched. Turned. Entire villages being wiped out by the marauding undead.

  The previous spring, she’d given no credence to what she’d regarded at the time as the ramblings of overheated minds. All the stories had one moral in common, being that everything could have been avoided if the deceased’s family had only listened to their priest. Isla, meanwhile, had been secure in seeing the world as a place of reason. Where everything had a logical, rational explanation. Even her own occasional premonitions, the times she’d noticed things that other people, for some reason, hadn’t, had been easily explained away. They were all busy drinking and fighting amongst themselves; Isla wasn’t.

  And then she’d met Tristan.

  Tristan had brought magic into her world, by every means that it was possible to do so.

  She remembered back to that first dinner together, when they’d watched each other and barely spoken. She’d known only that he had a terrible reputation and that, even so, there was more about him that even her own father didn’t know. And that there was more. As if by some strange common consent, the rest of the world ignored his claws. And, Gods, his eyes. Because he was rich. Because he was powerful. And because he was gorgeous. The most gorgeous man she’d ever imagined, let alone seen, a truth she had to admit to herself even as she found him repellent—and why? Because she’d known, even then, that he lived outside the bounds of their world.

  The aura of mystery in which he shrouded himself only added to the twin aura of danger. Possessing both the wisdom of centuries and eternal youth, he offered both life and death. Everything and nothing. But in the end, none of that had mattered. She’d only wanted him.

  She wondered, sometimes, what their life would be like together if he were human. She didn’t want anything to change, because she loved him just as he was and couldn’t bear the idea of him being different, but at the same time there were things she longed for. Children. Her father’s funeral was a stark reminder that the world she’d come to inhabit, because of Tristan, had only endings. Never beginnings.

  She parted the curtain slightly with a single hand, staring out into the world without seeing it.

  And then they arrived.

  The cemetery was a good enough size, and square, bounded on all sides by a low stone wall. There was a small chapel, a Northern architect’s attempt at recreating something of the South. Its gray stone was bleak against the gray sky. There were a few headstones close to it, some cut from the same stone but mostly made from wood.

  A thin dusting of green covered the mud, and peeked out from the still remaining snow drifts. Isla found herself thinking that was surprised that the ground had thawed enough for her father to be buried. She’d found herself thinking a number of strange things, this morning. While thinking, all the while, that she’d rather be somewhere else and hating herself for that.

  She felt Tristan’s arm around her.

  The priest waited for them under a small tent, which had been erected for the purpose. Isla heard Rowena’s voice, ringing out. Softly, slowly, the mist around them began to gather into rain.

  Rowena followed Callas, who was garbed in his formal robes, over to where they were standing. Isla wished that Callas could perform the service. At least he was someone she knew. But Callas himself was barely welcome here, a representative of gods that the church considered devils.

  Still, he was resplendent in all black and gathered an aura of power to him, simply by standing there beside her, that the priest did not have. The priest who glared at Callas from under his bushy brows. He was a short, squat man, a Southerner by both coloring and attitude. Isla wondered how he’d ended up here.

  Rowena certainly thought Callas was handsome, smiling up at him as though they were at a feast.

  He looked down at her. He was a good head taller, and broad-shouldered. Just the sort of figure she read about in her stories, with his black-gloved hands and his sword at his side. Piercing eyes, a strong jaw, and an aquiline nose. That was what they all had, the princes of fairy tales. Wasn’t it?

  “Are you cold?” he asked, as though attempting to discern the reason for her interest.

  “Oh.” She giggled. “Only a little.”

  But instead of offering her his cloak, as she’d no doubt intended, the sorcerer only returned to studying the pit.

  The coffin was unloaded, and brought forth. Again by guardsmen. Because even had he died on his native soil, the earl had had no friends.

  The
priest began.

  The droplets intensified into steady rain.

  The priest droned on, with no particular feeling, about how some famous bishop in the church had decreed that all men be buried so that their heads lay to the west and their feet to the east and how this was right and good and in accordance with the Mediator’s teachings. “For thus,” he explained in that same dull tone, “does he pray by his very position that the sun might rise and all life begin again, in accordance with the will of the church.”

  Looking around, Isla saw that the markers had been laid in a circle around the church. Her father had no marker yet, although one would be carved in time. And eventually that marker would fall, and be removed, a new hole dug and her father’s resting place reused. Because by then, everyone who’d remembered that he’d ever lived would be dead.

  And there were always more dead to bury.

  Now the priest was giving thanks for the Mediator’s victory over sin and death, a victory of which Isla could see no sign. She was surrounded on all sides by both. The priest reminded them, moreover, that the true purpose of a funeral wasn’t to grieve therefore but to give thanks. If comfort was needed, then comfort should be taken from the proclamation of the great mystery that was the union of the Gods with the Mediator and of His central purpose to the lives of all things.

  Her father’s body was lifted from the coffin and placed into the earth.

  Moments later, the first shovelful landed.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  The Hamels’ oldest son was getting married and he and his new bride would, after the ceremony, be moving back in with them until such time as they could complete work on their own house. It would be small, at first, just a central wing that could be added onto in time. Growing along with their family, and their wealth. As his parents’ house had done.