The Black Prince: Part I (13 page)

Indeed men fought
on
corpses, crushing their fallen brethren underfoot as though they were no more than shells. Underneath the din of clashing swords and men screaming and moaning in pain was a terrible
crunching
sound. Hart thought, in that moment, that he might be sick.

But then he had no time to think as the first sword hurtled toward him.

Bjorn, beside him, cut down his first opponent. In the longhouse, Bjorn had held back; there was little enough room for two men to maneuver, and Bjorn could scarcely engage their common opponent without cutting down Hart. But here, he was in his element. Calling on his gods to aid him, he set about with a vengeance. He was, Hart thought, like a whirlwind. A whirlwind of death.

Hart, doggedly, fought on.

He knew his own worth as a warrior but there were so many of them. So many. However many he cut down, more came on. A never-ending swarm that, try as he might, managed to get a few stings in. Hart felt them, felt the blood trickling down from his scalp. Down the inside of his leg. Along his flank. His forearm. His shoulder.

And he was growing tired.

Bjorn took his first direct hit.

Gasping, he took a step backward. Blood fountained from the open wound, a deep cleaving of the shoulder that gaped open. “Betrayers!” he gasped.

Bjorn took another hit, this time in the gut. The sword snaked out of nowhere, before Hart could intercept it. Bjorn’s entrails spilled from him, hissing in the snow, and yet still he fought. Hart struggled to reach him, forcing a path through the press of men with his sword before Bjorn was swallowed entirely.

Bjorn was still swinging about him, like a giant.

And then he toppled, and fell.

They’d neither of them made it a few strides from the longhouse.

Hart stepped in front of his fallen friend.

Their opponents pressed in.

He swung furiously, determined to keep them from Bjorn. He didn’t dare glance down, for fear of losing both their lives. Could Bjorn survive? He didn’t know. He’d seen men recover from worse. From injuries so horrific, so disfiguring, that they should have been fatal. But the Gods had spared them. For what purposes, only They knew.

All around him, chaos ruled. The stench of blood and guts and piss and shit was overpowering. Hart’s gorge rose as he swung and parried, now mechanically. He could no longer feel his arms. He thought not of the future, nor of the past, but only of one more swing. One more parry. One more swing. One more parry.

Swords cut him, but he didn’t feel it.

Men lay face down in the snow. Or moaned, clutching their innards to them. One held his severed arm like a child. Some were from the South, others Northmen. Did it matter? All men were the same, in death. Or so Hart had come to believe.

But the worst came from those still standing. Ragged bands of men, their tunics cut to rags and smeared with their own blood and filth, moved among the fallen like wraiths. One, a Southron by his coloring, stopped astride a man and, grabbing a fistful of his hair, yanked his head up. Then, as coolly as if he were slicing potatoes, he sliced the man’s nose from his face. The man howled. He was still alive.

All over the field, men were taking trophies: noses. Ears. Fingers. Eyes.

Hart saw another tribesman fall, his jaw sliced from his face.

And still he fought on.

He was hungry and tired, physically and emotionally drained. At some point, he’d passed the point of exhaustion. He didn’t remember when. There was no point in a man’s life when he thought,
I know, I’ll go to war
. No morning when he paused from his labors, surveyed his still fields and thought,
I know, I’ll leave these to rot
. Never did he imagine those same fields churned under a thousand feet, under a thousand pounds of piss and shit and entrails. Of his barn burned out, his home abandoned to the animals.

Only in the bards’ tales did men seek glory, or risk their lives for honor. In truth, men fought because they had to. In Ewesdale, Hart had fought brigands because there’d been no one else willing to bother. And accounted himself seasoned, idiot that he’d been.

A man was always alone in battle, even with his comrades beside him. Whatever cause joined his lot with theirs, his life was his own. And his death, too, he faced alone.

Hart had gone North for a chance: to matter. He’d discovered within himself in those final weeks before their departure for Barghast a side he hadn’t known existed, a side that had only grown on their journey north until by the night of his sister’s wedding it had consumed him entirely. He wasn’t the man who’d bedded Rose in the barn, he knew that. He’d never be that man again. Couldn’t be, even if he wanted to. He’d never laugh as he once had, never wile away the hours relaxing with his friends. Or the men he called such. He’d ceased to be Hart the lover, Hart the joker, and become the Viper.

A viper that was now cut and bleeding, surrounded by foxes.

He’d killed before, in hot blood and in cold. He’d tortured the man he’d ordered burned, not as a Chosen but as a guardsman. Tortured him for information and because he’d deserved to be tortured. The man had raped small children. Male and female both; they looked the same, when they were young.

But Hart didn’t consider himself a truly evil man. A man of circumstances, as all men were. A man who’d made what choices seemed best, for himself and those he loved.

He wondered who would protect Isla.

He saw the sword thrust before he felt it, a flash of reflected light.

He glanced down, and then up.

Into the eyes of the man who’d just killed him. An older man. Grizzled, with the scars of battle writ clear across his face. A survivor of Ullswater Ford, perhaps. They existed.

Staggering, Hart tried to raise his sword and found that he couldn’t.

What…had happened?

He blinked, and the world swam.

There was—no pain but
something
. The strangest sensation. He blinked, and the world swam. The blade pulled free and he staggered again. Was night falling so soon? Minutes before, the sun had been bright. Too bright, the reflection off the snow stinging his eyes.

He blinked, and blinked again. He could see so very little. What had he…?

And then night fell.

T
ristan moved silently through the forest, leaving no trace of his passing.

A modest magic, truly, but one that impressed the simple-minded. Men were, in his experience, mesmerized by those tricks, which seemed to manipulate the natural world: wind, fire, snow. Cause wind to rise, cause fire to light. Cause the crust of the snow to remain pristine. Party tricks, in simple point of fact. Things any hedge wizard could do. Convincing men to agree with each other; convincing men not to kill each other. Running a kingdom so that the market stalls remained full and the roads provided safe passage to them, this was true magic. Magic that all could learn, yet that interested few. Rare, indeed, was the man who cared one way or the other save that his own plate was full.

A grim smile twisted his lips, and was gone.

He was on another errand now, his position as duke temporarily forgotten.

Around him the fir boughs dipped low, laden with snow. Hares moved through the undergrowth, coming out into the open to feed now that night had fallen. In winter, this meant eating twigs, and the bark from trees. Sometimes the still-forming buds from flowers, which would otherwise bloom in the spring. Rarely, in cases of extreme desperation, they stole meat from baited traps.

Desperation…indeed. Tristan knew something of the feeling. He paused then as a lynx darted past him, kicking up the fine white powder. His cloak billowed briefly and settled.

Somewhere, a hare screamed.

The lynx killed as he did, by biting the neck and breaking the spinal cord. Or, if the prey was particularly large and tough, by biting the throat until it suffocated. It was an athletic animal, well adapted to life in the mountains. And, like Tristan, it was patient. Lynx were known to wait in trees, often for hours or even days, until their chosen prey passed beneath them. They rarely killed…just anything.

He glanced right, and then left, his eyes luminous with reflected light. Far above, the moon was full. A silvery, heatless orb, the subject of a thousand thousand tales. All featuring lovelorn men, led astray from the paths they knew.

The information he’d received from Cariad had proved quite useful, but he wasn’t ready to share it yet. Not even with Isla. He trusted her, but she was…fragile. And she had already undergone much. That her past should be in the past for now was best. She would have time enough, in the future, to learn the full and continuing extent of Cariad’s transgressions.

Isla…his beautiful, fragile Isla.

Moira, Isla’s childhood nurse, was correct: he had had more than two wives, before her. Wives he hadn’t loved. Couldn’t have loved. Hadn’t wanted to love. They’d been, in short, expedient. Two he’d married for land. One of those had been before he’d gone east, while he was still entertaining himself with Brenna. He’d killed her, a sallow and mean-spirited thing called Avis, because she’d questioned his manhood in not providing her with children. Children she scarcely wanted, to begin with.

Even so, killing her had been a mistake. Her parents had been in an uproar over the notion that he might demand back the bride price, with her not having lasted even a full year before her unfortunate fall from the battlements. He’d graciously allowed them to keep their money, and hadn’t married again until some time after he’d returned home.

His second wife, he’d been prepared to let live out her natural term. She was a pretty, quiet thing named Emoni who’d been betrothed to him through parental contract. They never spoke alone until after the wedding. Not such an unusual situation, for a bride. Emoni came with land that Tristan wanted and he offered a measure of protection, as an overlord, that her parents needed. But Emoni…wasn’t prepared for her husband.

She sobbed endlessly after their first night together, and resisted him thereafter. He, for his part, was content to treat her well if indifferently. He’d married her for her land, which he now possessed. What she did on her own time was up to her. And in this approach, he knew himself to be no different than the vast majority of human husbands. Certainly of his station, where marriage was solely a political act. One didn’t need marriage to love, a need for which one kept mistresses and which they were most suited to fill.

Had Emoni taken a lover, Tristan would have let her. Instead she hung herself in her bedroom. Her brother found her. Tristan dispensed with the evidence, allowing him to inherit. Elsewise, Emoni’s goods would have been forfeit to the crown. As the goods of all suicides were, suicide being a mortal sin in the eyes of the church.

Why the crown—or the church—should punish one’s arguably blameless relatives for one’s own actions was beyond even his ken. But Tristan had long ago accepted that men were moved by greed. He meanwhile needed…certain things to survive. And for that he was accounted evil. The man who shot a deer was feeding his family and the man who speared a boar, protecting his village. The man who hoarded gold he didn’t need, successful. What human construct was it, to place such value on one life over another?

All lives had value, did they not?

Tristan wasn’t the one who’d sent ravens, inquiring about the bride price over his daughter. He wasn’t the one who’d offered either girl in the first place. He’d accepted, and for this he bore some blame, he knew, but what man in his position would have done elsewise?

His third wife was a court beauty called Eloise. She was older than he, at least in appearance, and had taken numerous lovers. Unable to bear children after a botched abortion, she appeared to suit his purposes. Their marriage, unlike his first two, was one of mutual benefit. There was no love on either side, nor impulse that could be construed as love, but in Eloise he’d found a meeting of the minds.

She hadn’t been the first. Cariad was the first. And like Cariad’s, Eloise’s loyalty had proved fleeting. Eloise might have still been beautiful, even past thirty winters, as dewy and fresh as any virgin on her wedding night, but her heart was as black as coal. She’d come to Tristan as an ally, personal as well as political, and given him no cause to doubt her. And for awhile, things had gone smoothly enough. Tristan knew her to be cold and calculating, if not yet evil. He was looking for an ally in the war against Maeve, not a best friend.

He’d bedded her, yes, because she was lovely enough and because she was there, but theirs had been openly an arrangement of convenience from the first. And would have continued on as such, save for Eloise making one dread mistake: she’d taken money from Tristan’s enemies to rid him—and herself—of the boy.

That Asher didn’t like Eloise was apparent from the first; but children were fickle and took ill to change. Eloise, for her part, had seemed indifferent to his existence. But in assuming that Tristan, too, was indifferent she’d gravely mistaken him.

He’d stumbled across her plan quite by accident, only intercepting a message intended for her by the purest of luck. And it was then that he’d come to first truly understand how gravely Asher was in danger. He’d expected some sort of intrusion into their world, of course, eventually. But underestimating Maeve’s need to see Asher accounted for—either captured or dead—would remain one of his few miscalculations.