by P. J. Fox
Could people be…too different to love?
There was nothing out there, beyond the valley. Nothing but gnomes and dire wolves and fierce tribesmen who filed their teeth to points and who roasted and ate the flesh of their dead. Nothing but men who worshipped the dark gods with fire and worse.
Rose had told her a story, the night before, about how she’d once pleasured a man with her mouth and his seed came out her nose. She’d laughed and laughed, equally appalled and thrilled with her own wit. Isla tried to tell herself that people in the North laughed, too; that they were people, just like everyone else. But so far, she’d seen no evidence of this. Not in Hardland, not at the few inns where they’d stopped for dinner, and not here.
Still ahead of them, Hart and Callas were laughing. Which should have made her feel better, but didn’t. “Really,” Callas asked, “is having drunken sex in front of the entire barracks the most embarrassing thing you can do?”
“Do it again,” Hart counseled, “and I’ll tell you.”
Isla glanced at Eir, whose expression was studiedly indifferent. “Eir,” she ventured, “can I ask you a question?”
“The answer is…no,” Eir hissed. “The most embarrassing thing that one can do is not…completing the act. And once,” she added, “I was with a soldier who…couldn’t have found his own cock with two hands and a map. Much less where he was supposed to put it.”
Isla had never met anyone—any woman, anyway—who talked so openly about sex. Eir, clearly, saw no shame in the act nor in admitting her enjoyment of it. Rather, she seemed to embrace this aspect of her life with the same open enthusiasm as she embraced the others; discussing her enjoyment of a particular man as she might her enjoyment of a particularly well-cooked joint of beef.
Even Rose, who’d been with any number of men, regarded herself as naughty and her exploits as something to be hinted at but—at least to the general public—ultimately denied. But Eir…Eir was refreshing, and Isla found her example to be more than a little encouraging.
Especially given her new title, among her own people, of Tristan’s whore. That Rowena had seen—or thought she’d seen—them together had sealed Isla’s fate among the churchgoing crowd as the next best thing to the Dark One himself. That she’d eventually submit to his embraces was a given; that was what married people did. But for her to seek him out…there were more than a few, even within this caravan, whose sympathies were firmly with Father Justin. And Rowena.
Then again, if everyone here whiled away their hours in whorehouses then perhaps Isla hadn’t made such a coup after all.
She sighed, feeling particularly hopeless.
And here she was, a bride on her way to her wedding. This should have been the happiest moment of her life so far, barring the wedding itself, and yet all she could think about was how disgusting she looked and how disgusting she felt and how alien she felt even among her own supposed best friends. Her family members. Hart, even Callas, Rose and Eir: the only people who wished her well in the entire world, and at that precise moment she loathed them all. She felt traitorous for even thinking such a thing, but she’d begun to wonder if her misgivings didn’t signal the fact that she’d made a terrible mistake.
FORTY-FOUR
Nothing prepared her for the sight of Caer Addanc.
The mountain ended in a windswept tor, as though the same giant whose foot had made the valley had sliced the top off cleanly with some great knife. And Caer Addanc dominated the tor, a great spreading bulk that seemed nothing so much as to be crouching. Waiting.
Enormous round towers marked each corner of the outer wall; beyond, Isla could see the sloping roofs of the towers within. A main keep, and other buildings as well. All at least as large as the entirety of Enzie Hall. But the outer wall itself wasn’t merely a blank expanse of stone; smaller towers, versions of their larger cousins and each with the same rounded, peaked turret, had been built out from the stone. Each featured a series of small windows, little more than arrow slits, and each commanded a panoramic view of both the tor and the city—and valley—beyond. Between the towers, tiny figures moved behind the crenellations. Men, but seen from such a great distance as to be rendered ant-like.
Isla felt insignificant in comparison.
This—this was her new home?
She’d heard the rumors, of unexplained deaths and curses and worse, and thus had expected something dark. Overtly sinister. Like the usual descriptions of magicians’ homes given in bad epics. But Caer Addanc—which was built of the same gray stone as everything else, not black like she’d been told—looked, instead, like Prince Charming’s castle in Bronwen’s tale. Pennants snapped in the breeze, green and gold announcing that the chief potentate was in residence. The repeating pattern of turrets and crenellations was elegant.
No, what made Caer Addanc so terrifying was its sheer normality. The fact that, outward loveliness aside, the place was blanketed by an aura of sheer evil. Isla felt her throat clench.
She tried to swallow, and couldn’t. She blinked. The good queen’s castle, taken over by the black prince. She was standing, now, on the other side of her second barbican. Before passing through this even larger, and more sinister tunnel the angle of the road had been such that her view of Caer Addanc had been obscured. All she’d been able to see was the high, sloping wall of the outer bailey. And that wall had been featureless, an unending march of gray stone punctuated only by arrow slits. Approaching from below, as all comers were forced to do, the wall had seemed even higher—and it was easily twice as high as the walls at Hardland, which then had seemed enormous. But then she’d reached the barbican and the guards, while courteous after their fashion, had seemed to track her with their eyes. Like the still, silent paintings in her own family’s great hall that, as a child, playing alone in their shadows, she’d convinced herself were watching.
Caer Addanc was the same. She felt its presence pressing in on her, to the point where she almost swore she saw the shapes of eyes in the stone. And then she blinked and everything was fine again, the illusion ridiculous in retrospect.
There were no dragons perched on the roof, no wreathing mists as she’d been told. Although there might be, she reasoned, in different weather. The stories of ritual slaughter should have been difficult to believe. Especially standing here, in the sunlight, surrounded by other people and her ears filled with the noises of animals. There was nothing more mundane than a donkey, braying its discontent, while a cat howled its discontent from a cage strapped to its side.
She swallowed again, forcing saliva down her throat.
Between the barbican and the castle, a long bridge ran. Not a drawbridge, properly, that could be raised and lifted but an actual permanent bridge built of stone. Great support pillars rose up from the depths of an artificial moat. The castle appeared to rise up straight from the water, like some sort of apparition. Isla thought again, uncomfortably, of magic. Of Rose telling her that enchantments had been woven into the very stones themselves, preventing enemies from entering—or leaving.
The depthless black of the water was in sharp contrast to the cheerful vision of the castle itself. Like the aging, mottled skin of a murderous crone peeking out from beneath her young maiden’s mask. Isla shuddered.
She urged Piper onto the bridge. It seemed very narrow, all of a sudden, and very long. She didn’t blame Piper’s hesitation. Ahead of her, Hart and several of the others had cantered out easily. With a nudge, Isla urged Piper forward. She hated the fact that she kept being outdone by her brother—and by these other oafs! Men. Eir glanced at her, almost as if she’d heard Isla’s thought, but said nothing. She waited for her charge to move forward, only then bringing up the rear.
Eir, like she did everything else, rode easily. Almost lazily. Only her sharp eyes belied the act. They were everywhere and nowhere, resting on no one thing for more than a split second but seeing everything. As much as Isla found the gnome’s presence comforting, at least on occasion, she also scared her.
>
She felt Eir’s eyes crawling over the back of her neck, and wished devoutly that she’d insisted on the gnome going first.
But it was too late now, and she was on the bridge. Piper’s hooves rang out loudly on the flagstones—too loudly, Isla thought. The walls were also far too short, especially from the height of a horse. They looked miniscule, barely tall enough to contain a child of two let alone a grown man. With every step forward, Isla felt perilously close to plunging over the edge. And while she could swim well enough, something told her that this was one pool of water she didn’t want to visit.
A moat served several functions. Despite the imagery presented in the bards’ tales, however, most moats were revolting. Rather than repositories of fresh, lake-like water they were really just giant latrines. The entire castle’s garderobes, or chamber pots if it didn’t have garderobes, were emptied into the ditch. Along with the entire castle’s cooking scraps and who knew what else. Sometimes, the only water in the moat was from such dumpings. Many moats were what were called dry moats, deep ditches built for the purpose of defense and lined with angled wooden staves meant to impale a charging horse. There were several such moats in the Highlands, including those belonging to some of Isla’s—former—neighbors and she’d often thought that actually living in such homes must be the worst form of torture.
Savvier keep-dwellers built their moats by capitalizing on local resources, usually by diverting rivers. Or, sometimes, they utilized preexisting geography by building on islands. Much as ducks did, she thought with a small smile. At least then, the water moved and the smell wasn’t quite so foul.
There was no smell, here—at least not of sewage, or offal. Just the overwhelming and strangely heavy scent of minerals. Of lake. Of earth. Never was Isla so aware of the earth as a living thing as she was when she visited a lake. A lake, fed by countless springs that pumped out straight from the earth’s heart, was like its life’s blood.
The purpose of a moat was to guard the keep it surrounded. Most moats were at least fifty hands deep, some more. Too deep to wade through, even given the accretions of time. Peering cautiously over the edge of the bridge, Isla couldn’t see the bottom.
She sucked in a breath. And then, to calm herself—and distract herself from the encounter to come—she reviewed what she knew about moats. About castles in general. She hadn’t been taught siege craft, as a man of her station would have been as a child, but instead had taught herself by poring over volume after volume in the library.
Crossing a moat—even one filled with water, as opposed to raw sewage—was difficult because doing so put whoever was crossing in an utterly vulnerable position. One couldn’t swim, and defend oneself, at the same time. Moreover, few men could swim as fast as they could run; their time in the water, very effectively, made them sitting ducks.
But the main purpose of a moat, truly, was to prevent tunneling by sappers. This most innocent-seeming form of attack was actually the most dangerous; teams of men would, usually under cover of night, dig beneath a wall until part of that wall collapsed. Sometimes they sped along the process by lighting a fire in the furthest part of the tunnel and then hastily retreating. A favorite tool for this purpose was the rotting corpse of a pig, especially useful because pigs were so rich with fat. Fat burned quickly, and hot, releasing clouds of noxious gas that, itself heated to a certain point, ignited.
Isla forced herself to look up at the castle. Close up, the stone resolved itself into hundreds of delicate carvings: around the windows, crouched in the eaves, on each of the many drain spouts. Gargoyles and other fantastic creatures, along with simple yet elegant geometric designs. This castle had assuredly, first and foremost, been built for defense; but a cunning hand had taken the tools for defense and, without reducing their effectiveness, reshaped them into something magical. And terrifying. Up close, Isla understood how Caer Addanc had earned its reputation. Anyone who’d shape stone into such things had a warped mind; anyone who’d choose to live with them, month after month and year after year, would be driven insane. What kind of person had commissioned them?
Who had built this place?
Isla guessed the stone used to be some sort of marble, although she couldn’t have said for certain. That mind-bending mash-up between beautiful and terrible was even more affecting now, and growing more overpowering with every step until Isla felt her head spinning. The carvings were so perfectly executed, so real, that they almost seemed to move.
“Don’t,” Eir hissed into her ear, “fall into the water.”
Isla forced a weak smile, even though Eir couldn’t see.
They were almost to the end of the bridge, now, and the gate loomed. This third barbican was of a scale with the second although the gate was much narrower, reflecting the fact that if an invading army had trespassed this far then times were grim indeed. The focus was solely on defense; whereas the other gates were designed to accommodate the issuing of armies, the sole purpose of this gate was to keep people out.
Or in.
High above, a sort of enclosed balcony had been built out from the main wall. It looked like a small room and it, too, was sculptured into ornate bas relief. A sort of half-gargoyle, half-demon crouched above the window, its marble claws gouging the lintel as it leaned forward. A long, grotesquely fat tongue lolled from its sausage-like lips as it leered down at her. And Isla realized what the problem was: the stone itself appeared to be alive.
Even from a distance, before she could actually see the individual carvings, she’d sensed that something was…off. And now she was expected to ride through this last gate and into the belly of this beast. The image, once conceived, couldn’t be erased; high and narrow, iron spikes pointing downward like meticulously filed teeth, Isla felt like nothing so much as a mouse creeping into the open maw of a mountain lion.
Mistaking it, perhaps, for a gate.
The window above was glass, a hundred hundred diamond panes carefully fitted together in a lead grid. In the strong afternoon light, they reflected white and featureless. Giving no hint, she thought, of what was within. Like the still surface of a mountain lake, the illusion of serenity hiding what lay beneath.
Or like the glazed, staring eyes of a corpse.
White orbs, like fish eyes, empty and yet horribly aware.
She took a deep breath, and forced Piper forward.
FORTY-FIVE
And then she was through the last tunnel and back into the fresh air and daylight.
And into the world of Caer Addanc.
Enzie Hall’s courtyard was a muddy, noise-filled place where men competed with livestock for space. Basket weavers wove baskets while chickens picked at the strips of waterlogged pine that were used in their craft. Children drove unlucky dogs back and forth with sticks and everyone, within reason, did pretty much as they chose.
Caer Addanc’s courtyard, in comparison, seemed deserted.
Judging by the noise, men were drilling—but somewhere else. She couldn’t see them, only hear the crack of stave on stave and the occasional shout. The air smelled of lake water and fermented hops; somewhere, someone was brewing beer. The evidence of labor was all around her: in the clean-scrubbed walls and the weed-free flagstones and in the pitched roofs of the interior halls where not one slate was out of place. Another smell assaulted her nostrils: the acrid-sweet tang of smoking meat.
A man crossed his path, a bowyer’s journeyman by his dress, carrying an armload of staves. He looked neither right nor left and did not greet them. He was, so far the only other human being that Isla had seen. The courtyard itself was enormous, dwarfing him so that the feeling of emptiness was heightened tenfold. Broad colonnades ran the length of each wall, each column separated by about ten paces and joined to the next by a pointed arch. Overtopping them was another series of colonnades, and yet another. Some of the arches, Isla saw, on the second floor and even more so on the third, were actually windows. Three arches had been fitted into the space of one, below it, and the same
meticulous diamond panes stared down at her. Those must be guest rooms, she reasoned, or perhaps the windows to a lady’s gallery. So much natural light would be good for close work.
And then a horde of grooms appeared and the spell was broken. This wasn’t a ghost’s house after all, merely a well-ordered one where no one lounged about without reason. Eir swung down, her boots ringing out on the pavement, and offered Isla her hand. Isla took it, dismounting Piper with something less than her usual grace.
Callas was speaking to one of the grooms, who then began directing people. Isla watched, with a pang, as Rose disappeared with the rest of the servants. Soon she was alone with just Callas, Eir, and her family. Rowena, sniffing, crossed her arms over her breasts. Apple looked about curiously. The carvings here were more understated than those on the outer walls, but still frightening for all that. Still, Apple didn’t appear to be frightened. She appeared, rather, to be cataloguing what she saw as a merchant might catalogue the contents of a storeroom.
Her father burped. The earl hadn’t been sober since they’d left Enzie. In truth, since well before. Isla had decried him as a drunk before she’d ever met Tristan, but his love of the bottle now made his former interest seem nonexistent. She could date his decline almost from the morning of—her incident—with Father Justin and she’d have liked to believe that he was drinking out of guilt. In truth, though, she knew that he was drinking because he’d lost. Whatever he’d gained in gold from Tristan, she was certain that the church had promised him more. Absently, she touched the ring on her finger. Unlike Tristan, who could only offer gold, the church could offer the one thing that Peregrine Cavendish truly wanted: remission of his sins. The assurance that, regardless of what choices he’d made, he was perfect in the Gods’ eyes and guaranteed the spot he—at least believed that—he so richly deserved.
