The Black Prince: Part I (19 page)

H
is expression hadn’t changed when Callas reappeared from between the trees.

He’d ridden on ahead to scout and as he’d given no distress call, Hart assumed that all was well. Which indeed it was. After conferring briefly, they decided to call a halt for lunch. Hart would have preferred not to but understood that with their current baggage in tow a certain degree of consideration was required. Although Hart wouldn’t necessarily mind if his family showed up dead at Caer Addanc, Tristan might. He might want to question them. Hart knew he did.

Something about their story just seemed…odd.

“I set a snare for later.”

“And you want my approval?” Hart swung down from his saddle and knelt in the snow to hobble Cedric.

“Someone’s cheery.”

“I’m not your fucking nursemaid.” Hart ran his fingers through his hair. Which was greasy with accumulated sweat and dirt. He needed a bath. “Catch as many hares as you want.”

“You don’t need to practice for a new name,” Callas joked. “There’s none worse than the Viper.”

Rowena gasped.

“What,” Hart replied, “and risk losing my reputation as the most unpleasant son of a bitch in Barghast?”

“We’re not in Barghast,” Callas replied equably. “So you can afford to thank me for securing dinner.”

“And after dinner you’ll fulfill your wifely duty?”

“Every night, but you never visit my tent.”

“I prefer it when a woman’s a bit desperate.” Hart straightened. “Half an hour,” he said. “No more.”

As he strode off into the trees to relieve himself, Rowena stared after him in gape-mouthed horror.

He’d only gone into the woods to relieve himself, but kept walking after he’d done so on the pretext of scouting. Covering ground that Callas had already covered, and Hart was sure far better. He’d been even less pleasant than usual lately, a condition he knew his men attributed to his wounds. Which still pained him. In fact, it hurt like hell to walk.

He could have very easily ended up an eunuch. That would have been amusing. He wondered which he’d mind losing worse, his cock or his eyes. He doubted he’d get a chance to use the former much if he didn’t have the latter; and pity sex no longer interested him.

There was a time when any form of sex would have interested him.

There was a time when a great many things had been different.

He thought about Isla.

Things had been different for her, once, too.

She must have lost the baby. There was much Hart didn’t know and he’d filled in the meager amounts he did with guesswork, but even a fool could guess at the most likely cause of her situation. A situation Hart had observed before, in Enzie. More than once.

The duke had been infatuated with Isla from the first and she had, underneath that air of unwillingness that all women seemed to put on, been more than receptive to his advances. Had she truly been as indifferent as she claimed, she would have avoided him. Their manor hadn’t been so small that doing so was impossible. But instead she’d allowed him to court her, giving her presents and taking her for long walks through the grounds. And on one of those long walks, Hart was sure, she’d given him her maidenhead.

The angst, the confusion, her depression after he’d left. It all made sense. She was worried, no doubt, that he’d rejected her. Such things had been known to happen. Many a man professed words of love, words he quickly forgot after getting what he wanted.

And then, seeing each other again, they’d been like two strange cats. She must have dreaded telling him. Without the benefit of wedlock, he could have rejected the child as his and called off the wedding. But clearly he’d accepted her, and the child, for within hours of their arrival the situation seemed to have righted itself.

When had she lost the baby?

That she had was plain. Because no baby had ever appeared. Nor no sign of one. Hart might have so far avoided parenthood, but he knew that a woman was pregnant for roughly ten moons. Not like a boar, who was pregnant for only four. But still.

There was, too, the fact that she’d spent so much of the winter ill. Isla had always been thin and sickly; Hart had heard that it was sometimes difficult for such women to carry a child to term. But now she was positively gaunt. He wondered if she’d be able to quicken another seed. He’d heard, too, that after a miscarriage some women couldn’t.

The duke wouldn’t put her aside, though. Hart was confident of that. Tristan adored her. And besides, he had Asher. That Asher was the child of Tristan’s loins too was more than apparent.

At first Hart had wondered if Tristan was one of those men who favored children, in light of the special attention Tristan paid to his ostensible page, but then he’d spent more time with both of them and come to understand the truth of the matter.

Hart had heard that Maeve, Asher’s mother, was very beautiful. And that Brandon, his ostensible father, had been a coward and a fool. Who could blame Tristan for bedding her and who could blame Maeve, married or no, for seeking out a man capable of dominating the world as a man rather than relying on his pedigree for favors?

Then again, Rowena had chosen Rudolph.

He wondered if Lissa had children. And, if so, where they were. A woman could hardly bed men for a living without producing at least one, unless she had a defect of some kind. But few of those women kept their children with them, preferring instead for them to be raised in a more wholesome environment. If there was one. Hart doubted that the kind of woman who ended up selling her body for money came from the kind of home where a child could be happy.

A hard thing, for a mother to be separated from her child.

Whatever the circumstances.

He saw the gray-faced child from the pit in his dreams.

G
reta had gone to bed and Isla sat alone, curled up by the fire. Her feet tucked up under her, she stared into the flames as her fingers plucked idly at the fur throw. She was cold, but she was always cold now. It wasn’t the cold she was used to, either, from the winters at Enzie Moor but a cold that ran bone deep. A cold that seemed to ache in places she hadn’t known existed, and that she couldn’t seem to escape no matter how many pelts she buried herself under. Although the cold seemed to have eased in the last hour or so.

She flexed her fingers experimentally. She could feel her fingertips again. She hoped the sensation lasted.

A vision flashed before her, briefly, of a winter’s night spent in the old library. She’d had perhaps fourteen winters. She forgot, now, what she’d gone there to read but remembered quite clearly how she’d dragged old blankets up to the frigid room from all over the house and built herself a sort of nest. Her own body heat had warmed the air inside and eventually she’d been quite toasty. She’d fallen asleep there, her head by the half-burned candle, scroll in hand.

Had she been happy then? She didn’t know. She’d had her happy moments, to be sure. But there’d been an ache, a sense of something missing that had never quite departed.

And then she’d met Tristan.

Even now, there weren’t words to describe what he was to her, or her feelings about him. He was, quite simply, her other half. A dark and disturbing other half, to be sure, and one she didn’t always entirely understand. But wasn’t that the point of an other half? To be dark and disturbing? No shallow, simple consciousness could be that appealing.

Or have anything real to offer.

She struggled to understand Tristan as, especially lately, she struggled to understand herself. She couldn’t explain her own choices, although she knew that to some—like Rose—they were easily explainable. She’d been well and thoroughly demonized in many eyes. Including, at times, her own.

She’d known, when she stood by and watched Tristan eat Alice, that she’d been making a choice. Just as she’d been making a choice, again, when she agreed to wear his ring. How much had been a choice after that, she wasn’t entirely sure.

Making a choice and fully understanding the consequences of that choice were two separate things. Part of her knew that she’d been too shocked in that glade to do anything
but
watch. Yet part of her still hated herself for her weakness. For the fact that she
had
chosen him—no, for the fact that she couldn’t have brought herself to do anything else. She’d loved him too much. And still did.

Still, she’d had no idea what she was agreeing to, when she’d agreed to marry him and—later. That it wouldn’t have mattered if she had known didn’t make her situation any less overwhelming. Indeed, she could only conclude that she was grateful for her early ignorance. Not knowing might, in the end, have been what saved her sanity.

She was still struggling to accustom herself to her new existence. To the intrusive presence in her mind, pressing, pressing. Like hands on an air-filled bladder, just enough to hold it in a certain shape. Although the analogy, while accurate, was an uncomfortable one: press too hard, and the bladder broke. Her mind would break too, if Tristan wasn’t careful.

Like Katrina’s had.

Her mind would break, and there would be nothing she could do to stop him.

The lack of control made her fearful, even though her life thus far had been an exercise in lack of control. When she resisted the bond there was a strange kind of…not-pain that deepened as the minutes passed. Minutes that felt like hours, stretching on forever in her personal hell until she was all but immobile. That relented as soon as she gave in.

She was learning to let the bond flow through her, not to struggle for control but to let herself be nothing more than the tiniest twig born along by the strongest rushing rapids. At first the horror of knowing that her mind was laid bare to Tristan was revolting to contemplate. Humiliating. But there were times now when she all but forgot.

Like earlier, when she’d been talking to Greta.

She’d been her old self, laughing over the foibles of those around them. For all its dour demeanor, Caer Addanc was a simmering hotbed of gossip worthy of the most salacious bard. Grudges, love triangles…forbidden liaisons. Who needed a bard?

All castles were like this. As were all villages. Everywhere human beings gathered, noble and peasant alike. Winter meant living in close quarters, which in turn meant experiencing the best and worst of human nature. Huddled together and with nothing to do but drink and….

She smiled slightly to herself. There was a time when she wouldn’t have had these thoughts; wouldn’t have heard the word
fuck
whispering in her mind. But she’d gained something of Tristan’s…appreciation, she supposed was the term, for the vagaries of the flesh. Tristan…wasn’t afraid of his appetites.

And they were many.

She felt a stab of insecurity. How could she be enough for him? She’d come to his bed woefully unprepared, and with only the vaguest notions of what happened between a man and a woman. Many of the things that Tristan enjoyed, she hadn’t even conceived were possible. Which didn’t mean that she was precisely unwilling, just nervous. Of pain. Of humiliation. Of not knowing what to do. Of disappointing him.

He was a patient if unyielding teacher and what he let her experience through the bond confirmed that she gave him genuine pleasure. That he found her naïveté to be touching. He felt no true tenderness; his desire to protect her, and to guide her, was the closest he came.

She wondered if he’d been with other women. She’d have no way of knowing; he didn’t share with her as he forced her to share with him. What, if not his heart, bound him to her?

She loved him, but she didn’t understand him.

Greta wanted to be married. She and Isla were of an age; she was old enough. That she wasn’t married already surprised Isla, although on further reflection she supposed that Greta’s situation made sense. As eager as she was to find a man, she wouldn’t settle. She’d consciously avoided the trap that Isla worried Rowena had fallen into, of mistaking the best in a small group for the best available. Isla didn’t envy Rowena the first time she and Rudolph traveled, and Rowena discovered what else was out there.

He hadn’t been the most…loin-stirring of men within Ewesdale and its environs, although he might have been among the richest. Certainly he was compared to their father. And Rosie the sow had been manlier.

Any woman looking to be wed would do well to visit Barghast. Caer Addanc had its attractions in terms of single men but the city itself was full of soldiers, merchants of all kinds, and diplomats. Men of all races and backgrounds, many highly educated. The duchy’s indigo and woad made its capital one of the most important trading destinations in the known world. From Chad and the kingdom’s other neighbors to the East and even the Far East, men flocked. They flocked, too, to study with Barghast’s physicians and weapons masters. The church’s prohibitions on studying the body, which had so stifled medical advancement throughout both Morven and Chad, held no sway in the North.

Tristan’s personal physician was married, but there were others. And many in the North took two wives, Isla knew, a remnant of their tribal heritage. Some tribesmen had as many as three or four wives. Or more. The idea appalled Isla. Although, to be honest, more for the man than for the women.