by P. J. Fox
Asher didn’t know, as Tristan did, that Tristan was incapable of bearing children. He’d certainly never put such a thing out. He was a product of his age, an age where a man needed an heir to secure his line. The time might come when he needed to produce a child, via some means. So if people wanted to speculate, let them speculate.
Moreover, he had to admit that he’d developed a certain…kinship for the boy. A sense of shared understanding. Asher wasn’t the kind of child who pulled wings off of flies, but neither was he warm. Whether from natural inclination or the changes wrought in his nature by an early childhood no one would envy, he’d never have the sort of relationships with others—romantic or non—that most people expected.
He was…missing something. A warmth. In lesser hands, Asher might have been molded into something perverse. Or allowed, unchecked, to indulge his worst appetites. He needed someone capable of understanding him, someone with the strength to help him grow into—if not a kind man, then a decent one.
After Ullswater Ford, Maeve had disappeared. No one knew for certain whether she was alive or dead. If she were still alive, then she was a threat. She’d been the true intelligence behind Terrowin’s machinations, of that Tristan was sure.
Giving Arion his head, he thought about when he’d first met Piers. That had been a long time ago now. Piers was a child.
Tristan had come back to his home, once again becoming the Demon of Darkling Reach. Only now his influence was indirect and he, a figure of legend shrouded in shadow. For years he’d lived in a mountain stronghold that had long been owned by his family and long since abandoned. The stronghold had been old in his brother Morin’s time.
Rumor began to grow of a new presence there, whispers at first that mentioned an ancient evil. A specter from their grandparents’ time. Before. Among a people who kept few written records, time was a malleable thing. Before could mean anything. And Tristan’s presence in the tower developed an eternal quality. Whether he’d always been there, or merely returned, didn’t matter. He simply was.
He’d become more of a ghost than ever.
He watched over his house from a distance, a sort of black guardian angel that no one discussed. And then, on a late summer afternoon when the honeysuckle hung heavy in the air and the shadows had just begun to lengthen, Tristan had a visitor. His first, in a long time.
That visitor was Piers: young, full of life, and curious.
He wanted to know. He wanted to grasp. And he wanted Tristan’s help.
Caer Addanc had long since faded into darkness. That it had been a cheerful place, once, its halls bright and ringing with laughter, was as forgotten as Tristan. A feeling only, some bone-deep sense of what should be that pressed against the back of the mind.
Piers, leaving those cold corridors and abandoned turrets, had gone in search of the great and terrible wizard. The flesh eater, some said, whom the tribesmen feared. Even then, Piers had been fearless. He’d come to Tristan, not as a supplicant but as an equal. And Tristan in turn had accepted him as such, and overtime a partnership was born. Piers learned his studies well and in time he grew from the precocious young child to the young man and younger brother to, at last, the older brother.
They’d arranged a story between them, more a series of hints and questions than a true narrative, and gone forth to conquer the world. Piers in the forefront, golden and shining and Tristan, his shadow, lurking in the background. Tristan, the foil for his—now—brother’s seemingly effortless ability to inspire love. In his subjects and in the woman he’d eventually taken as his queen. A much younger, far more naïve girl whom he’d corrupted even as he’d seen her blossom. And who’d grown, at his side, into a much beloved queen.
Everyone loved Piers. No one loved Tristan. And that was how it should be; the king, ever blameless as his advisor moved unseen. His advisor, the left hand of darkness. The focus of all men’s rage, and a perfect foil.
His own wedding was coming soon.
His third.
The other women he’d killed had not been wives, although they’d shared his bed. He’d killed his last wife, because she’d developed ideas above her station. Oh, she’d been beautiful and rich and her holdings had increased his quite satisfactorily. But she was also ambitious, in the manner that Ariadne had been ambitious. And her ambition had made her, in the end, ungovernable. Unpredictable and therefore dangerous, like a rabid dog.
He might have enjoyed her body for longer, regardless—she’d been an adventurous and enthusiastic lover, needing little training in the finer points of pleasure—but he’d had reason to believe that she might hurt Asher. Which simply could not be allowed.
He wondered if Isla would find happiness in her new home or, at least, acceptance of her fate. A fate that, even now, she little understood. Isla, beautiful and fragile and innocent.
He’d known that she’d be late in arriving; he’d known where she was at all times, ever since giving her the ring. The connection was a general one, giving him nothing more than vague impressions of places and times and emotions, but it had grown stronger as the weeks progressed. Stronger, because her commitment to wearing the ring had made it stronger.
Magic was a thing of logic. Much like the world in which it existed, it operated on a set of fixed and determinable rules. If he dropped a plate, it shattered; likewise, if he exchanged a certain kind of token with another person, he created a bond. When he’d given Isla his ring, a thing created for him and meant to represent his House, and she’d accepted it, she’d accepted something of him. The intent he’d had, in making the gift, had effectuated the transfer: to protect her. To care for her. To own her and keep her.
She didn’t have to understand the spell, to make it work. All she had to do was to say yes.
And she had.
All that remained to be seen, was what that would mean.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Tristan arrived home late the following night.
The silence in the forest had concerned him. War was coming, he thought; the only question was from what quarter. Factions moved through the court like revenants themselves, smiling faces hiding the core of rot within. They plotted and schemed, against each other and against the king. He’d known that there would be an attempt to kidnap Asher during the hunt at Enzie, which seemed so long ago now. He had his sources. He suspected Rudolph’s mother but had insufficient evidence to make the charge stick. And he hadn’t built up his fearsome reputation by acting precipitously.
No. When Tristan Mountbatten set his sights on a man—or woman—that man knew that his days were numbered. Tristan never miscalculated, and he never lost. Which was because he knew how to wait. He struck when victory was sure, and only then. The steps he took to make sure that victory was sure, he took in darkness and in silence.
Asher would already be in bed; would have been for hours if his tutors had done their job. Which Tristan doubted. Asher had probably stayed up into the wee hours playing swords with the servants’ children and then passed out from exhaustion on the hearth bench.
Swinging down from the destrier, Tristan threw his reins to a groom and stalked toward the door. The moon was beginning to set and the courtyard was as black as the bottom of the lake. Flickering torches did little to illuminate the perfectly fitted flagstones or the walls that reared up around him. His cloak fluttered in the faint breath of wind and his boots rang out, surprisingly human sounds.
Tristan didn’t stand on ceremony. He didn’t need to. Men like the earl might need pomp and circumstance to remind them of who was who. Tristan, however, inspired fear in all he met. Fear, and awe. His retainers, seeing him, stopped and bowed. Their reverence was real and their desire to please him, unfeigned.
He ignored them.
He invited no conversation and received none. Some men affected a warm, almost folksy attitude with their retainers. Treated them like friends. Tristan was not one of those men.
Fearsome reputation aside, he’d only once thrown a man out of a
window and that hadn’t been—as rumor claimed—because the man had stopped him on the way to the garderobes. Tristan had no use of garderobes. Rather, he’d tossed the man to his death because the man had insulted his parentage. Which did nothing to detract from the rumors of him being illegitimate. In truth, Tristan would have swallowed the insult if the person in question had been of use to him. He wasn’t, after all, overburdened with the vagaries of emotion. But he’d needed an excuse to kill Wellem, as it happened.
He could’ve just eaten the man when no one was looking and, as Morin had been fond of saying, killed two birds with one stone. But by saving his…disposals for such public occasions, he’d greatly enhanced his reputation. Both as someone not to be crossed and as someone who might commit murder at any time—and for nearly any reason.
He liked keeping the mortals on their toes.
The corridors were empty, save for the few guards who patrolled them. Most of the guards were outside, on the walls, or patrolling the grounds. In addition to his regular standing guard, Tristan employed a large number of skilled rangers. An elite fighting and tracking force, they attracted top recruits—Morvish and non—from all over the North.
Torches sputtered in their brackets, casting weird shadows on the stone. The whole of Caer Addanc was stone, from keep to curtain to gatehouse. Lesser fortresses were made from a combination of stone and other, less costly materials. But Caer Addanc had stood sentinel against the mountains for time out of mind and had never been breached.
Even in the strongest noontime light, most of Caer Addanc brooded in a perpetual twilight. What windows there were, were little more than arrow slits: designed for defense, rather than to let in light. The walls were thicker than a man was tall, adding to the sense of being cut off from the outside world.
Still, as a child Tristan remembered his home as being a place of laughter and light. His mother, Sienna, had organized great feasts that she and his father hosted together. There had been dancing, and houseguests, and hunting parties. Candles burned late into the night almost every night, filling each room with a warm and scented glow. Every room had been inviting, then; including rooms that now, with the passage of time, his own servants feared to enter. Rooms where the furniture, once occupied by group after group of changing occupants, gathered dust under yards of canvas.
Caer Addanc hadn’t seen a true feast since before Borin died. What gatherings they’d had had been things of business, tense and unpleasant. There had, for a long time, been no reason to celebrate. First, there had been the war. And then there had been…the unpleasantness afterward. The specter of Tristan, back then, would have alone been more than enough to discourage visitors but Morin had proved spectacularly unpopular in his own right.
Like a certain ancient emperor, he’d had a tendency to consort with other men’s wives—whether they were willing or no.
And then…Tristan had returned, after his years of absence, into another period of terrible bloodshed. His family had kept their fire, not failing as so many of the old houses had, but the so-called Great Anarchy had taken its toll. Piers had come to him, climbing up through the bracken, from a house whose occupants were holding on—to everything—with their bare fingernails.
Even after the war ended, finally and hopefully for good this time, there had been no reason to celebrate. Winning a throne was one thing; keeping it was another. History was full of men with great plans for conquest, and not the faintest interest in administration. They lived to conquer, never perceiving that they might live past the final battle and be left with a kingdom. But Piers, like the long-ago Gideon the Conqueror before him, had both a flair for administration and a keen sense of its necessity. Both his time and Tristan’s, in the years since he’d ascended the throne, had been spent putting out fires.
The last of those fires had been Ullswater Ford.
Neither of Tristan’s previous marriages had been cause for celebration. In each case, he’d chosen his bride from political necessity. One marriage had lasted four months; the other, six. And even if he had seen fit to celebrate either union, which he had not, one took place at his bride’s father’s home and one in the capital. His second bride had been a creature of court. Beautiful, in a brittle sort of fashion. Thin, finely boned, and overly made up, her eyebrows and hairline plucked to within an inch of her life, she’d made a fine ornament. She truly had been fine in bed as well, far finer than his first wife.
She’d been both unloving and cold, at least to him. And although she had indeed died young the rumors were wrong on one score: he hadn’t killed her. She’d killed herself, unable to bear the thought of sharing his bed. Marrying her had been a mistake.
He’d thought, after finding her crumpled and lifeless form among the rose bushes, of that long-ago journal. Of the woman who’d loved a demon, and of his own dawning realization that love might be possible for him as well. Or, at least, the semblance of love. He hadn’t wanted his wife’s love—her name had been Cara—had, in fact, been indifferent to her. But neither had he especially wished her ill.
She’d been a requirement, and in acknowledging that he didn’t think that he was much different from any other man. Marriages among their class were not for love. Men and women shared each others’ beds, often equally repulsed by the idea, and made the best of it.
That Cara might be so repulsed as to end her own life…he’d honestly never considered the possibility. She knew her duty and he knew his. But he’d been forced to acknowledge again, then, what he’d first acknowledged in the East: that, however much he matured into his present situation, however capable he proved himself of playing the part, he’d always be different. He’d always inspire the same revulsion, in others, as a corpse.
He’d seen it. They drew back, just the slightest bit, without even knowing that they were doing so. As the meanest of animals did, in the forest, away from their fallen kin. Some instinct, deeply buried, warned them that the spirit had fled.
That this shell was now…something else. He’d often pondered, over the years, what the source of the dread might be. The silent clarion call that rang in the mind to avoid. A body was only that, surely—a shell. An object. Rationality dictated that there should be no fear, any more than a man shrank back in terror from a rock. Or any other inanimate object.
He’d come to the conclusion that men, at least, feared the bodies of their fallen comrades because those bodies reminded them of their own mortality. And men could only live if they closed that part of themselves off. They had to believe, on some level, that they’d live forever or fear would render them insensible and thus unable to function.
In a matter of seconds a living, breathing person became a lump of dead meat. It was an amazing transformation to witness, like watching someone turn into a doll.
Cara hadn’t wanted to touch him, any more than Isla had wanted to touch her grandfather. She’d been, in fact, repulsed by his touch and had spent their wedding night crying and shaking. As many far more conventional brides did, too.
Initially, he’d expected that same response from Isla. And had received it. She’d been terrified of him—and still was. But then something had…changed. He wondered if whatever she felt for him would survive the coming weeks and, if not, what he’d do.
Isla, although she was in ignorance of this fact, faced more than merely a maid’s loss of innocence on her wedding night.
THIRTY-NINE
The floors in this wing were tiled, an exotic red and blue design that had been imported from the East. As Tristan crossed them, cloak swishing, elongated faces peered down at him from the buttresses. They’d been carved right into the night black stone and each one was different. Some wept, some smiled. All looked like what they were meant to represent: the eternally captive souls of those whose bodies were buried beneath the foundations.
Men and women both. There had been many. No one knew precisely how many. The castle’s full origins were surrounded in mystery, even to Tristan. He glanced up briefly. Wo
oden panels had been cunningly fitted between the beams overhead and painted in a quatrefoil pattern. Red and blue and gold, now partly obscured in a haze of smoke. In brighter light, the ceiling would glitter.
The décor at Caer Addanc had been known to give its infrequent guests nightmares. Piers alone had remarked that he found the scenes of demons devouring maidens in the small hall rather charming. As had his queen, who’d remarked mildly that they gave one a range of new ideas for sexual positions.
Perhaps, he mused, Apple would find the frescoes similarly instructive. She could practice her newfound knowledge on Hart, before leaving him to his new life. Tristan fully anticipated a scene when Apple realized that Hart was staying; she’d grown rather more attached to her stepson than the boy realized.
Peregrine Cavendish would certainly find them instructive. Tristan had every confidence that the earl had, throughout his sexual career, worn the fitted bed sheet and adopted the system of thrusting timed to prayer that the church so heartily endorsed. Two habits intended—and indeed positively guaranteed—to rob the act of any enjoyment whatsoever. Enjoyment, after all, being the gravest of sins.
Tristan felt the closest thing he could to pity for Rudolph. Rowena was, in that respect as in so many others, utterly her father’s daughter. He could only hope that Rudolph’s own faith permitted him to adopt a mistress.
Speaking of which…
Two guards were stationed at Tristan’s own door, one on either side. The stout, iron-banded oak enclosed a large set of apartments. The same large set of apartments, indeed, that Tristan had once set on fire. The intervening years had seen this wing rebuilt, and rebuilt again and the door swung open to reveal a cozy space replete with every modern comfort.
