by P. J. Fox
SIXTEEN
And time passed.
Weeks turned into months, and months turned into years. Years turned into decades and, eventually, lifetimes. Still, Tristan remained the same.
He regained his stronghold and, in time, grew more fully into the name that he’d first earned in the glade: the Demon of Darkling Reach. He’d been ferocious then and he was ferocious when he stormed Caer Addanc. He killed with impunity, and sometimes with his bare hands. Stories spread of him ripping a man’s head near off his shoulders and drinking the blood that fountained forth. His men followed him, because he won. He was a brilliant tactician; more brilliant, even, than he’d been before. He seemed to have gained some near-miraculous insight into the thoughts and feelings—and, one dared say, movements—of his enemies. There were rumors of witchcraft.
His own people were terrified of him. But, like the soldiers he led into battle, first to reclaim his home and then to eradicate the hills of Southron incursions, they stayed in their homes and under his long shadow because he won. He, through a combination of planning and preparation and sheer ruthless cunning, built Darkling Reach into a secure and prosperous duchy. He expanded its borders. He made alliances with the tribes in the north. Dark rituals were spoken of. And worse. But whatever the tribes got out of the bargain, they kept it. Women were still carried off into the hills, but both sides learned to adapt.
The alternative was to face His Grace.
People whispered his name, if they spoke it at all. And as fact became myth and myth, in turn, became legend, his legend grew. In the early years, he’d been a more or less constant figure about the duchy. He led his own men into battles both large and small, dismissing those who crouched behind the lines as cowards. He hunted, and he feasted. His table was a good one, if his guests were sometimes afraid to join it.
He kept no mistresses, and he never married. There were rumors of certain…dark practices, but they were so dark as to be easily dismissed. Still, no women attempted to court his attention and no would-be fathers in law proposed matches. There was just, for lack of a better term, something off about the duke. Something that, however handsome and personally compelling they found him, repelled people.
He had, as Jansen had remarked once, the taint of the grave.
He wanted no company. There were women, willing women, if he was interested. Their willingness was immaterial to him though, and so were their caresses. Embittered, Tristan thought back on his onetime fascination with the fairer sex and felt nothing but scorn—scorn, and perhaps self-loathing as well. Humanity had truly become nothing to him except food, and that was exactly how he wanted things to remain. These so-called people, these blood-filled sacks of flesh were just liars and cheats and masters of disguise. Their love was a pretense, their loyalty based on greed.
And so he retreated into his castle, rarely venturing out except by night. He could go abroad in sunlight, of course. He just disliked to. He disliked the sun, and all that it stood for. He felt most comfortable in the dark; he was a creature of the dark, more and more.
He presided over dinners in the great hall, still, dinners he did not eat. There were whispers about his seeming lack of interest in nourishment and, increasingly, of how he didn’t age. The scars and paunches that afflicted his comrades passed him over. More and more, he seemed like a man out of time. A silent man, a frightening one. His eyes glowed with a faint, feral light as he watched the room. Nothing escaped his notice.
There were rumors, too, of prisoners kept in the basement. Of experiments…and worse. Much worse. No one ever knew what had become of Brenna, and more than one crone cast in Mother Guenna’s mold had asserted that it was Brenna in the basement. But of course that was ridiculous. No one would do such a thing…would they?
Meanwhile Tristan had ruled Caer Addanc with an iron fist, from the shadows. Where he stood now. He watched the inner bailey below, from his window, one pale and well-formed hand resting on the sill, and he thought. About his duchy, and his people, and his life.
And himself.
Eventually, he’d turned Caer Addanc over to Morin. Morin had married, a timid and unwilling bride from the South. Their union was meant to cement an alliance and had produced heirs. Tristan doubted that the girl, Alice, thought much of her position as either sacrificial lamb or brood mare, but she seemed to love her children well enough. He was glad, once again, that he hadn’t been born a woman. Sometimes, he found himself wondering if Brenna’s weakness hadn’t been, in the end, so much weakness but a desperation born of too few choices. A woman’s lot was a hard one.
But, then again, so was a man’s.
And Tristan, for all his evil reputation, had been a good lord in his time. As Morin was, after him. He understood, as Morin did, the necessity of continuing his line. But, unlike Morin, he took no particular pleasure in the idea of raping a woman. He did what he did to survive and to, on occasion, sate equally base and carnal desires. He was ruled by instinct and, in that respect, he was little better than an animal. Morin, meanwhile, viewed his bride’s—all women’s—unwillingness as a challenge.
Even so, Morin’s people tolerated him. Neither he nor Tristan indulged in the practices that so amused their contemporaries. They didn’t avail themselves of local virgins on their wedding nights, the so-called right of the lord that the peasantry despised. Molesting a man’s wife and then killing him for objecting seemed pointless. Where was the victory in asserting one’s obviously superior power? There was no challenge, there, no fight.
Both Tristan and Morin respected the authority of their local sheriffs, allowing them to dispense justice as they saw fit. And Tristan, as he had since he was a child, performed his own executions. People respected this about them. Respected the fact that he wasn’t weak—and then, later, that his brother wasn’t weak. Most men, if they were truly being honest with themselves, would rather fear their leaders than love them. Fear was bred from the certain knowledge that a man would do something; there was trust, there. Whereas a likeable man was often a changeable one, given to rethinking things and wondering what was best. Even, sometimes, as his castle fell down around his ears.
Men wanted security. And if Tristan had certain…proclivities, and if certain of the ancient rights were allowed to flourish within his domain, then so be it. The cost was little enough to look elsewhere. Darkling Reach was a place where a man, were he willing to leave other men alone, could live out his life in peace.
Migration to the North was common, especially now that the war had ended—or, if not ended, then at least ground to such a firm halt as made no difference to the end result. Both sides had exhausted their resources to the point of impoverishment and there were fields that wouldn’t produce again for decades—if ever. Blood had been churned into the topsoil until it ran off in runnels. Darkling Reach was a place a man could go to be free. From everything. There was work. There was safety, or safety enough.
And men wanted safety, most of all.
Tristan turned from the window, staring into the gloom that was his chamber. In a place the size of Caer Addanc, much of the interior was never bright. Rather, lit only by small windows and the occasional stand lamp, it hovered in a state of perpetual gloom. Which suited Tristan well; he could see as well in darkness as in daylight. Better, even.
He thought back to the man he’d been. He did, sometimes, when the light was at its brightest and a certain fell mood struck him. That…was so long ago now. That night when he’d first realized that he wanted to be human. And that night when he’d finally become human. Or something like it. That night when, in truth, he’d become a revenant. A lich. An abomination. He hadn’t known himself to be one then, had only thought of his love for Brenna and his hope for the future. All that was gone now, had been for a long time.
Brom had stayed with him.
He’d been promoted, eventually, to captain of the guard and he’d married. His son, once a squalling little thing that looked like a prune, was a strapping young
lad of near marriageable age himself. He’d be a knight, come this Solstice when he took his vows. Brom was retired. He enjoyed sitting in his comfortable chair, a chair his other son had made for him. The less martial son, the one who’d chosen to become a cabinetmaker. He’d crafted the chair during his apprenticeship, as part of his grand opus: the selection of pieces that would be judged and juried by fellow masters, in determining whether he’d won the right to join them.
And he had, of course, and that was a long time ago now. He had apprentices of his own, and a fine cottage with a sod roof. On a morning like this one, chill but fine, Brom would be by the fire. His mind had begun to wander, a little, but he still enjoyed a good joke. His children would be working—all of them. His daughter had married a brewer the previous year, and worked alongside him. She was with child, but she never let up even so.
Brom would die soon. He was, Tristan realized with a start, an old man. He was a good man, after his own fashion, but mortal even so and he’d more than lived out his fair span. Lived a good life, too, by any definition. And now once-black hair had gone white, and his eyes sat in rheumy pouches while he thought of the past. Brom, who’d been so strong.
Tristan tensed, his nails scoring the stone of the windowsill. His eyes were black in the low light, and his expression was fixed. He’d put off the inevitable for far too long.
Why, precisely, he couldn’t say. He wasn’t given to emotional vagaries; he didn’t have emotions at all. Denial, perhaps? Fear of the unknown?
He couldn’t remain here. He had to leave. He’d been older than Brom when he’d retaken the castle and now Brom was an old man. Meanwhile he, Tristan, hadn’t aged.
Morin was old, too.
Tristan had gone from being the lord of the manor to being the whispers in the night and the scratchings in the walls. The squeaks of rats. The terror of the unknown. And as he’d slowly faded from view, his legend had grown. Where before his title of demon had merely been poetic, now his people wondered. Was he even still alive? He was seen so seldom that no one was really sure. And, of course, if he were alive he’d be so old. And yet those few who’d claimed to see him claimed as well that he was almost unchanged. His pale face, glimpsed in occasional flashes beneath his hood, was unlined.
Some said it was indeed the same man; that he was some sort of demon cast up from the nether regions. Perhaps he always had been or perhaps, as rumor suggested, he was a changeling. Others countered that no, such a thing was impossible. Particularly in their modern, enlightened age. Men fashioned steel sword blades; the new science of the trebuchet was sweeping the kingdom. Such antiquated ideas as ghosts and liches had no place in this brave new world. He must, they reasoned, be a son or even a grandson. Or perhaps simply a friend of Morin’s. Morin had ever been known to be strange.
Tristan still killed and fed with impunity. And why shouldn’t he? He turned back to the window, and stared down at the practice yard. No one could see him from up here. He wasn’t one of these sheep. Was the wolf wrong, for hunting the hare? The boar wrong, for goring the man who tried to hunt it? And if his prey was scared, then so should they be. The people of Darkling Reach lived under his shadow, and they knew it. Sometimes, at night, he overheard the fireside discussions of hunters: about what he was, and whether in truth he even existed. Had he been a man who’d lived, and died, but whose legend lived on? Or was he, in fact, some sort of monster? An evil thought made flesh?
Under his reign of terror, Caer Addanc had more than earned its name: the Castle of the Monster. And he was the monster, still. After all this time. An addanc was, like the lich, a creature of legend. A sort of bog sprite, it lured innocent men and women to their doom. Its voice was said to be mellifluous as it promised safe passage through the bogs, urging the hapless traveler that it knew a better path. The bogs were treacherous; a good many had perished in their depths, bog sprite or no bog sprite.
Tristan, too, had lured men and women—mostly women—to their deaths with a host of false promises. More than one woman had met him for what she supposed to be a midnight tryst, slipping away from her unsuspecting husband’s side as he slept. And while Tristan didn’t feel the purely human joy of conquest that his brother Morin so craved, he did enjoy the sense of power. Of knowing that he was the superior species.
Of feeding.
Men called him monster, but they were the ones who’d destroyed the kingdom in their madness to possess it. Who spent their short lives raping and stealing. He’d seen a generation now, rise and fall and go to their graves. They’d lived with so much hope, thinking themselves so full of promise. But for what? Their grand plans had amounted to nothing, fathers forging lands together only to have them ripped apart by their sons. The kingdom had grown so different and yet, in some respects, it was exactly the same. Like Tristan, himself. Here he was, lurking in the gloom, a man out of time. A man with no true family and no true home. Not even a man—a thing. A creature. Unloved and unwanted.
He had to leave.
If he stayed, there would be questions. Morin’s influence couldn’t protect him forever. And his own influence, as painful as he found the admission, had waned. He’d been locked up in his tower for too long. Men no longer knew him as their former duke, if they knew him at all. The church was gaining in power, too, expanding to fill the void left during the war. Eventually, the church would come.
Morin wanted Tristan gone, although he’d never speak the words. Morin was an old man now, and afraid. Once or twice Tristan had caught his brother looking at him, the question writ clear in his eyes: did Tristan desire him, not as a man sometimes desired another man, even his brother, but as food? If pressed, would Tristan rip through the thin skin of his throat and plunge his tongue into the pulsing artery beneath? Savor Morin’s life force as it drained from him?
The truth was, Tristan didn’t know.
There was a time, very long ago now, when he’d wanted to be human. When his host had been a young man made old by his experiences and he a demon. A spirit. Now, his young man’s skin had hardened into a shell that had the pale translucency of alabaster and his once-blue eyes were as black as night. Even were he granted mortality tomorrow, the chance to live out a normal span and a normal man’s life, he wouldn’t want it.
He’d seen too much. Been through too much. With Brenna, with Brom, with Jansen, with all the people who’d once mattered so much to him. Who’d been his life. And he’d outlived them all, or would in time. Brom had perhaps another winter, maybe two. What point was there to life, he wondered, when all of a man’s struggles amounted to nothing?
And when that man was forced to live alone?
The price of immortality, it seemed, was solitude. The curse of living on, even as he slowly became irrelevant. Watching everything he’d wanted to become human for crumbling into nothing and leaving him behind. So what if he wanted to feed? What else was there?
SEVENTEEN
Given the leisure to do so, Tristan’s first course of study had been himself.
After the war had ground to a halt and he’d retreated into his castle, he’d spent the long nights of his solitude reading. No one molested him, even back then. No one dared.
He had to know what he was and, more importantly, why he was. Despite being a demon, he knew very little about them other than what the church taught. And the church taught—with some justification, he supposed—that he was evil. And certainly, in those early decades, he had been. There were others like him, he knew that also. A handful, perhaps more. He wasn’t certain. Demons were a solitary lot, and territorial. Those he’d met revealed little, to him or to each other. A demon was, he’d learned, just as likely to turn a fellow demon into the church—or kill him outright—as a man. Neither species, it seemed, cared much for competition. The discovery of which had disillusioned him even further.
And still he’d sought answers, because he had to.
More than ever, he had to know what drove him. He couldn’t explain the source of the compulsi
on, even to himself. He didn’t care, then, about the things he’d come to care for later—if care was even a term that could be applied. However enlightened he became, he would always remain a demon. He still felt no tenderness of expression, although he could ape it well enough when doing so suited his purposes.
He supposed, in retrospect, that he’d been cruel in doing so. He wouldn’t come to this conclusion for decades, not until long after his victims would have died of natural causes regardless. But he pondered the idea, even so. Along with the idea that he was, perhaps, evil.
Evil was a human term, of course. But he lived in a human world. And, in time, he supposed that it had rubbed off on him. A thought that was both amusing and sad, he supposed. Were he capable of being sad.
His studies had been, if not terribly revealing, then at least fruitful enough given the limitations placed upon him. He’d learned, at first, what he already knew: that after taking on a human form, a demon’s mind stagnated. Which shouldn’t be surprising to contemplate: the creature he’d become was, after all, dead. And the dead did not grow; they merely waited. The growth and change that characterized human life belonged, of necessity, to a species with a finite lifespan. Tristan had read, and had himself experienced, the phenomenon where by a demon’s mind remained at roughly the same level of maturity even decades after its—death or birth, depending on how one viewed the experience.
Tristan had met one demon, inhabiting the body of a child, who at well past one hundred years of age still gorged herself on sweetmeats and liked to draw foxes. He’d been both fascinated and repelled. Would he be like this, too, eventually? A creature out of time? The older the girl got, the girl who wasn’t a girl, the less capable she was of functioning in the world around her.
