by P. J. Fox
THE
WHITE QUEEN
P. J.
FOX
Book Two of The Black Prince Trilogy
This novel is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed herein are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places or events is purely coincidental.
THE WHITE QUEEN
Copyright © 2014 by Evil Toad Press
All rights reserved.
Cover art: The Creation of Eve, Henry Fuseli, 1793
Cover design by Evil Toad Press
Published by Evil Toad Press
ISBN: 978-0-9905963-5-6
First Edition: August 2014
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As always, this book couldn’t have happened without my family. Their continuing love, support, and tolerance are what make all things possible. I’d also like to thank the friends whose continuing interest and encouragement, over the past few months in particular, has been a lesson in friendship. Crystal, for understanding. Roxie, for having the generosity of spirit to egg me on, even through her own tough times. Corey, for the marathon conversations. Taylor, Michelle, Tabby, Melodie and Jennifer for making me feel special. Every book so far has been, and every book in the future will continue to be, a team effort; thank you, all of you, for being the best team that anyone could ask for.
P.J. Fox
For Shawnnee
Table of Contents
Chapter
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Fifty-Eight
Fifty-Nine
Sixty
Sixty-One
Sixty-Two
Sixty-Three
Sixty-Four
Sixty-Five
About the Author
ONE
The year was 1246, and it was a cold one.
A blizzard raged outside the thick stone walls, painting the world in white. But it, like all blizzards, raged silently; the snow absorbed the noise, and the lack of it was eerie as the wind rattled the windowpanes. Caer Addanc had ever been a wealthy keep, and the upper portions of the windows in the solar were made from diamond-shaped panes of leaded glass. The lower portion of the windows were open to the elements, to allow for fresh air. Tonight, the interior shutters were battened tightly against the storm.
The seasons moved life in the North; winter was brutal, but no season was without its terrors. And at these high elevations, the weather was unpredictable at the best of times. A seemingly perfect day could turn cruel at a moment’s notice, wind rising up and whitecaps forming on a lake that had been glass-smooth an hour before as clouds formed in the mountains. Life was a constant battle for survival everywhere, but nowhere more than in the North. And nowhere more than in Darkling Reach, where the tribesmen were taking full advantage of the kingdom’s turmoil to rape and plunder with abandon.
Those who could afford to built a covered passage linking house to barn. Some of these passages were quite spacious, and used as rooms in their own right. In the nicest of the homes, those owned by yeoman farmers who worked their own land, broad windows let in sunlight that spilled across the floor and allowed the yeoman’s wife and daughters to spin and weave in relative comfort. A spinning wheel was a large apparatus and took up a great deal of space; only a man who’d already made good could afford one.
And in such a fashion, Tristan had often remarked, was man kept at his station: he who couldn’t afford to card and spin his own wool must ever pay others’ exorbitant prices for doing the same. The average serf was forced to spend, to survive; to spend, instead of saving the funds that would, under other circumstances, help him achieve independence.
Those who couldn’t afford the lumber, or the labor costs, strung up guide ropes to help them navigate in weather such as this. Animals had to be fed and watered, no matter what. Occasionally, some foolhardy type set off to find his barn without such an aid; the barn was only ten paces distant, he’d laugh. What could possibly happen?
Sometimes the bodies of these men were found; sometimes not.
Those who hadn’t grown up in the North didn’t understand. Settlers came up from the South, seeking opportunity. A smart man with a strong shoulder had ever been able to make his way here, where lack of land and title might have otherwise held him back. Success in the South came from a fat purse; here, a man’s destiny was his own. But too many, laughing off the warnings of their neighbors, failed to survive the first year.
As acting duke in his father’s stead, these things worried Tristan as he stared out into the snow, wondering who would die tonight.
Lately, he worried that he might be the one to die. More than once this past year, he’d narrowly escaped supposed accidents. In the year that was now drawing to a close: with no end to the war, no improvement in the weather and no marriage to Brenna. The war had taken its toll on both the fields and the men left to till them. Once fertile soil was steeped in blood, and able bodies were few and far between. Most of the men left in Darkling Reach had seen too many winters, or too few. The few men strong enough to push a plow, or drive an ox team, were off in the hills with his brother Morin chasing tribesmen and fighting against incursions from the South. With the spring’s torrential rains and the summer’s unseasonable cold, the crops had failed and his people were going hungry.
And Brenna, lovely Brenna, was beginning to doubt his intentions. She’d been forced to move into the castle for her own protection, her family forsaking their manor after it was burned. She hated living here as a guest, and had told him so on numerous occasions.
The demon knew that Tristan thought these things, without being told.
Since the young almost-duke had started summoning it that spring, it had come to know him well. Better than Tristan realized. But the demon, like all demons, was ever good at keeping secrets. Secrets were the only currency a demon had, on this plane. This plane where it and all its kind were little more than slaves. The rules of the universe were not something that the demon understood, any more than Tristan did, but on this plane a demon in its non-corporeal form was s
ubject to the will of whomever had called it. Until such time as the demon either found some logical loophole in the summoning that allowed it to escape, overpowered the necromancer or, perhaps by doing the former, acquired a body of its own.
The demon had never possessed a body, although it had taken human form before at Tristan’s command. Necromancers commonly assigned demons certain tasks that they couldn’t perform themselves: for example, to get close to people that the necromancer himself could not. The demon had spied on Tristan’s enemies for him and, once, taken the form of a woman and seduced a man. The demon had then killed that man, with poison, before vanishing into the night. The demon hadn’t known the man, had known only that he was some political rival of Tristan’s, and had had no particular feeling about killing him.
Tristan, as masters went, was good enough. His demands weren’t intensive. But what the demon objected to wasn’t Tristan as a master but the fact of having a master at all. The demon chafed under his rule, and hated the universe that made things so. Over these past months it had watched Tristan: watched him sit in council with his friends and fellow men at arms, watched him stare out into the night, watched him kiss Brenna and whisper endearments into her ear. Brenna was kind-hearted and sweet, but with a core of iron running through her that under the right conditions might rust and turn brittle.
If she were the demon’s betrothed, the demon would have married her long ago. Married her, taken her to its bed, and forced her to stop making these ridiculous demands that Tristan—that it—turn back to the church and to the light. Brenna had pleaded with Tristan on more than one occasion to cease his conjurings and to turn out the strange man who’d come to live with them. Brenna knew very little about Tristan’s activities, but she knew enough and guessed more.
As did the entire castle. Tristan’s own retainers had begun avoiding him, and more than one had surreptitiously made the sign against evil as he swept past them down the hall. Brenna was worried that the people would rise up against them—against Tristan—and she was scared. With some reason.
But instead of comforting her, he ignored her. She was a woman; she didn’t—couldn’t—understand the forces aligning against them or the stress that he was under. He was the de facto ruler of the northern half of the kingdom, a province under siege on two sides. If it wasn’t the tribes, it was the southerners; and if it wasn’t the southerners, it was the tribes. He couldn’t do this on his own; he had to have help.
When the man who became his tutor arrived, it had been a godsend. Simon was a necromancer and it was Simon, old and decrepit and frightening, who first taught Tristan the rudiments of the art that would come to dominate his life. He insinuated himself into Tristan’s orbit until Tristan couldn’t function without him. Tristan was at first revolted by the man, with his sloughed off skin and rheumy eyes, but he forced himself to ignore his misgivings and soon enough he no longer had them.
Because, within a certain period of time, he was no longer strictly himself. The man he’d become was colder, and darker. One could only stare into the void for so long, before the void stared back.
He’d listened to Brenna’s pleas, at first, that he dismiss Simon. In the beginning, he’d even considered doing so himself. Simon terrified him, too, and the tasks that Simon had set for him turned his stomach. A necromancer’s arts weren’t for the faint of heart and while Tristan had killed men in the heat of battle, a cold, premeditated sacrifice was quite another matter. The first time he’d done it, he’d been sick. But after that, there had been no turning back.
And as his luck began to change, he found it easier and easier to push back the part of him that cried out at what he’d done.
He’d used the knowledge he gained, secret and evil, to stop a border raid before it even began. Hundreds of lives had been saved, including those of women and children. How, he reasoned with himself, could the art be evil if these were the results it produced? Men died in war; if that was the price, one death or two against hundreds, then that was the price.
The demon watched from its corner.
It had no physical presence, but nevertheless it lurked in the shadows. It felt more comfortable there. It might have taken human form before, but it was still ignorant of what it meant to actually be human. It could ape them well enough, but the best charade was still a charade. What it couldn’t admit, even to itself, was that it wasn’t simply curious. It wanted desperately, not to pretend but to be.
It wanted what Tristan had: freedom, a life, a woman to love. The demon knew nothing of love, but had watched Tristan with Brenna and seen the look in her eyes when she gazed up at him. So innocent, so…trusting. Tristan, as corrupted as he’d become, was still her world.
Did she see the taint, the demon wondered? Would she care, if she did? As much as she’d pleaded with Tristan to change, to turn back while he still could, she still loved him. She still longed to be his wife, to share his name and his bed as well as his heart. And he still loved her. She was so delicate, so fragile, and—to him—so beautiful both inside and out. He longed to protect her. He’d done what he’d done, first and foremost, for her.
Darkling Reach could burn, but he couldn’t lose Brenna.
Tristan turned from the window and, walking over to the table, picked up the dispatch that he’d tossed down onto it earlier. He reread the sparse lines and then, crumpling the cheap scrap of paper, threw it into the fire. He gazed into the flames for a long time.
Morin had encountered a band of southerners dressed as tribesman, in the hills. He’d flanked them, hoping to surprise them, and the resultant bloodbath had lost him fully a quarter of his men. The southerners, as it turned out, had known that Morin was coming and were merely acting as decoys for a larger group of men. Men that had been stalking Morin, like Morin had been stalking the southerners.
Morin himself was lucky to escape with his life. He’d received a glancing blow to his arm, he’d written, and he hoped it wouldn’t fester. Battlefield medicine was uncertain at the best of times.
From the outside, Morin appeared to have the more difficult job. He and his band sought out the enemy, giving battle, while Tristan holed up behind the safety of the castle walls. Some might call him a coward, or wonder why he’d allowed himself to be trapped so if he wasn’t. But in truth, Tristan’s job was the more important. If Morin was the sword arm, then Tristan was the brain directing it. Except for this skirmish; that had been an example of Morin acting on his own. Something that had been happening far too often of late.
Tristan wondered, sometimes, if Morin thought he was a coward.
Tristan was the better fighter of the two men, and he chafed at the restrictions that had been placed on him. He wanted to fight, not hold endless councils and placate frightened old women. The entire castle, the entire duchy, looked to Tristan for support. With his father gone, he was in charge and his people expected him to keep them safe. And they were his people. He took his duty seriously. He always had. Since he was a small child, Tristan had never shrunk from duty—of any kind.
When he was about eight winters, barely more than a boy, his favorite hound had almost died defending him from a rabid mountain lion. Tristan knew, like all children of the forest knew, that in saving him from certain death his hound had almost certainly contracted the disease. Even so, he nursed it back to health on the off chance that it had not. Against all odds, the hound began to mend. And a fortnight later, when the still-injured hound showed signs of the disease, Tristan had insisted on killing it himself. The act turned his stomach, but it was his duty. Someone had to put the brave beast out of its misery, and that someone should, he’d explained to his father, be someone who’d loved it.
His father, both astonished and impressed, had handed him the sword.
He’d wondered since if that moment—his father giving way before him, mutely, rather than counseling him—had sealed his fate.
Tristan was still young, only now on the cusp of his thirtieth winter. He’d been born duri
ng a blizzard, the first of the season, his mother’s first child and a difficult labor. The midwife had been skeptical, but both mother and son had survived and thrived. That Tristan thrived was less surprising than the fact that his mother did; women, especially narrow-hipped and sickly women, often died in childbirth. But Sienna, for whom his father bore, if not love, then a strong affection, had grown strong again and two years later had given him a second son. Morin was a strong, sturdy boy and affectionate toward father, mother and brother alike. What he lacked in imagination he made up for in work ethic.
Sienna had died the previous winter, of an ague. Now there was no reason for his father to come home. Borin was first advisor to the king; he was needed elsewhere. The capital had burned, and burned again, but still House Terrowin fought to keep the throne. Tristan had long since grown embittered at the struggle; for whom were they fighting? Certainly not the peasants, whose fields had been ruined. And not the men who would now grow up fatherless. And not the women who’d—
He wouldn’t let himself finish that line of thought.
The demon couldn’t read Tristan’s mind, but it could read his face. Moreover, knowing the mind of such a man took no great effort; especially when that man had talked late into the night of these topics and more, on more than one occasion. Tristan saw the demon as something of an imaginary friend, it thought; he wasn’t frightened by it, or nervous of its foreign nature. He was, at this point, too confident in his own power.
More confident, strictly, than he had a right to be.
Mankind believed that demons existed to serve them. Their priests attached some sort of doggerel about the gods to the demons’ existence, those who allowed themselves to acknowledge it at all. Many priests were necromancers, themselves, steeped as much in the dark arts as in the light. Which made an ironic sort of sense: necromancers, for all their vaunted flouting of the rules, lived by those rules as surely as the simplest of priests. Their rules and their charms and their incantations were based on church dogma; they considered themselves evil, and took great pleasure in using the term, simply because they engaged in practices of which the church did not approve. They were little better than children.
