The Demon of Darkling Reach (The Black Prince Book 1) (21 page)

As everyone adopted a more or less appropriate attitude for prayer, he began. His tone was hardly reverent as he poured out his displeasure on topics ranging from the state of the economy to the state of the king’s bedroom. That the king’s own brother and closest confidante sat directly across from him mattered not one whit. And in this, at least, Isla could admire the man. As fat and rude and malodorous as he was. “Gods above,” he thundered, “deliver us from fornication! And deliver us from the harlots and their men folk who invade our kingdom, nigh even from a ruler who treats his own queen as little more than a concubine—sharing her with his subjects on a nightly basis!”

Isla raised her head, aghast. By now, others too were staring openly at the priest. Admiration had slowly curdled into horror as Father Justin pushed past the boundaries of all propriety. Past audacity and into the realm of insanity.

The church was a powerful ally, to be sure, but the powers of the priesthood did not confer immunity from treason. And Father Justin’s personal life was hardly above reproach. Homosexual sex was, in the church’s view, an
act against nature
and thus a crime against the Gods.
Come into my closet, brother
, Isla thought bitterly, glancing over at the priest’s catamite. Who was currently engaged in a whispered conversation with one of the guardsmen. Sex between men using what Cariad had referred to as
the other passage
was punishable by death according to church law and such punishments, when carried out by members of the same church—the same church that waxed poetic on the all-encompassing nature of the Gods’ love—included everything from mutilation to burning at the stake.

When priests themselves were caught in the act,
their
punishment was carried out in the form of death by starvation: the offender was suspended in an iron cage barely large enough to hold him and left there until the Gods, in their mercy, saw fit to let him expire.

Tristan listened interestedly. He neither moved nor attempted to interject, but Isla thought she’d begun to know him well enough to know that he was angry. He and Piers were close. Whatever their true relationship was. And then, in a sudden turn of phrase, Tristan himself became the subject of the attack. “And, Gods above, deliver us also from those who would mislead their subjects with honeyed words and lead them astray, into worship of the Dark One. Gods, too, grant that such men be struck down in the fullness of their power as a lesson to—”

“Amen!” the earl said heartily.

That the priest’s speech had been a deliberate attempt to embarrass Tristan was surely obvious to all. The earl’s interruption produced an uneasy silence, as Father Justin repeatedly cleared his throat—no doubt wondering if he should finish his thought—and everyone else wondered what would happen next. A few sipped their wine uneasily, and someone called loudly for more carrots. Isla, watching the priest sip his own wine, felt the first stirrings of…she couldn’t put a name to what she felt. Was it…loyalty? That this fat, sweating, revolting man who turned his back on the tenets of his own church and who’d clearly only joined that institution for financial gain in the first place should dare to insult
her
husband….

Tristan might be a demon and his brother a lush but Father Justin was ridiculous. And a hypocrite. Isla didn’t think she hated anything more than she hated hypocrisy—perhaps because she, for so long, had lived at the mercy of hypocrites. Men like her father who prattled on about
honor
and
chivalry
, then lied to his neighbors by asking for loans that he had no intention to ever repay. Men like Rudolph, who’d talked of love for years but who balked at the idea of actually doing something concrete to honor his supposed affection for Rowena. Who, even after signing his name to the contract, had stared down at it with indecision writ clear across his brow.

No, she decided, no one else was making any attempt to run this kingdom. Least of all Father Justin. Abbeys had vassals; Isla wondered how well Father Justin’s were eating.

The second course was served, and conversation slowly turned to safer topics: the weather, the crops, who might be appointed the new Minister of War now that Piers’ original advisor had died of old age.

After the eel made its debut, onion and mushroom pasties were brought in. Those, at least, Isla liked. Tristan served her from his own plate, cutting the pasty into small, bite-sized cubes with a few deft strokes of his knife. Under normal circumstances, Isla hated sharing a plate with anyone—although doing so was the custom—because the other person invariably had dirt-grimed fingers. Much as one was
supposed
to wash one’s hands before dinner, few did. At least not in the West.

But Tristan’s hands, as odd as they were, were scrupulously clean. He cut up the coarse brown bread, served her herbed butter, and signaled for more wine. As carefully as he performed each procedure, he seemed disinterested. There was a perfunctory quality to his movements, and to his manners in general. Isla glanced up and saw Hart watching her. He was seated next to Father Justin, who seemed to view sharing his bench with a bastard as the next best thing to eating dinner at a leper colony. Hart grinned. Isla blushed.

The roast was brought out, and carved. Carefully, Isla picked up the bites of food off the wooden trencher and ate them one at a time. She’d heard that, in the East, people speared their food with pronged instruments instead of eating it with their fingers as was proper.

On Father Justin’s other side, Rudolph and Rowena were engaged in some kind of silly banter that was producing a lot of giggling on Rowena’s part. Probably discussing their wedding night, Isla thought dourly, if they hadn’t gotten there already. Not that they’d had the time, unless Rudolph’s was a disappointing introduction to the art of love indeed; they hadn’t been alone together for more than a few minutes all afternoon, and Isla knew from her previous conversations with Rowena that prior to this evening they’d never so much as kissed except once or twice and that very briefly.

Isla, who hadn’t kissed anyone, for any length of time, felt discouraged.

Rudolph made what was clearly a lewd suggestion and Rowena laughed outright, her blue eyes sparkling.

Father Justin turned his head ponderously, fixing the couple with his gimlet gaze. “Sex is forbidden,” he announced, rather rudely in Isla’s opinion, “for reasons other than procreation.”

Rudolph was in his cups, and had been since before dinner. Where he’d found the stuff, Isla didn’t know. Probably her father’s study; they’d undoubtedly stayed behind in there together after she and Rowena left to dress for dinner, drinking and bemoaning their losses. He gave the priest a pleasant smile. “Surely,” he said, “for pleasure also.”

“No,
not
for pleasure.” Father Justin glared. His catamite looked up interestedly from the other table, having evidently heard such speeches before. His…
page
, Isla corrected herself. She hid her smirk behind the rim of her cup. “Pleasure is a sin. As are garments that suggest its pursuit! The codpiece,” he intoned portentously, “is a fashion of the Devil.”

“I don’t wear one,” Tristan said blandly.

“No offense, old bird,” Rudolph replied, “but you
are
a bit old fashioned.”

Of course he is
. Isla bit her lip.
He’s a hundred and forty years old.
Tristan was dressed in the same costume she’d seen him in earlier, all shades of blue and brown. He looked well; the colors suited him. Isla couldn’t, quite frankly, imagine him in the sort of getup Rudolph favored. Tristan was too frightening to look ridiculous, and if anyone was capable of making a codpiece and those jester’s shoes look frightening, he was—but the effort of conjuring such an image quite simply hurt her head.

“The codpiece suggests an erect—”

“Yes, yes,” the earl cut in irritably. “We all know what it suggests.”

“In some cases,” Apple offered, “the
suggestion
is all there is.”

Tristan reached down and fed a bone to one of his hounds. Throwing one’s bones over one’s shoulder was considered bad form, as the careless missile might hit a servitor. The hound, an enormous black-coated thing almost as unpleasant looking as its master, took the offered treat with a surprisingly delicate bite and then retreated beneath the table to ravage it. Isla felt the weight of the beast settle on her toes. She shivered.

“He’s friendly,” the duke said.

“Like you?” Isla shot back, her words pitched low for him alone.

But Tristan only smiled. He hadn’t drunk much wine—he never drank much, at least not that Isla saw—and neither had Isla. But in her case, the issue wasn’t temperance so much as disgust. She
wanted
to be twice as sodden as Rudolph but she just couldn’t bring herself to drink the swill her father served. Isla had, from childhood, been cursed with expensive taste. In some things, at least. The hound shifted its weight. At least her feet weren’t cold anymore.

“His name is Maximus,” Tristan remarked.
Maximus
was a name culled from the oldest of the old tongues, and the name of a long-ago emperor who’d died gloriously on the battlefield. Or been poisoned, depending on which historian one consulted. “And his mate”—he gestured at the other hound—“is Claudia.” Apart from the fact that one of them was clearly male, the two hounds looked almost identical.

Isla gazed into her cup, wishing her wine were hippocras.

She’d never tasted the beverage, but she’d read enough recipes and longed to sample them. Wine, usually claret, was brewed with a mixture of spices and then filtered. Recipes varied widely, but tended to include some combination of cinnamon, cardamom, grains of paradise and pepper. She’d also seen recipes that included ginger, cloves and nutmeg, and sometimes even honey or sugarcane from the East. She’d never seen sugarcane up close but had seen an engraving of a sugarcane plant once; it looked a bit like a small birch tree and the sweetness was said to come from inside the bark. After the wine was mulled sufficiently, usually over a period of one or two days, it was strained several times through cheesecloth until no particles remained.

“And speaking of
your
attire, Sir”—everyone, including Isla, noticed the priest’s refusal to use Tristan’s title—“indigo is among the most expensive dyes, indeed products that there is! A pound of indigo costs as much as the average tradesman earns in a year.” His piggy eyes narrowed. “What say you to that?”

Tristan smiled slightly. “My response is that as you, yourself are wearing blue, I trust that your knowledge is correct.”

The priest became positively apoplectic, nearly choking on his wine as he thought furiously about what to say next. “You!” He slammed down his cup. “Your breeches, coat and tunic must have cost more to produce than the worth of this plate,” he cried, his sausage-like fingers indicating the pewter goblet beside him. His rings hung loosely on his fingers, lubricated from their normally firm position by a combination of sweat and grease.

“Don’t forget my boots,” Tristan said blandly.

“And I suppose all this luxury comes at the expense of your peasantry, in the form of taxes? Taxes that, I’d wager, for all you and your brother’s talk of
economic stimulus
, they can ill afford?”

“Actually,” Tristan replied, as though this had been a simple conversation and not a personal attack, “we grow the indigo ourselves. In hothouses.”

Isla had heard of hothouses, but had again never seen one. The theory had something to do with growing plants inside structures made entirely from panes of glass so that the air surrounding them remained warm even in winter. She couldn’t even begin to imagine such a thing.

“Hothouses are a sinful invention of the East,” the priest hissed, pleased to be back on firm ground. The church had very definite rules about what did and did not constitute sin. Almost anything to do with progress was a sin. “The Gods have, in their boundless wisdom, decreed that there should be seasons—four of them. Hothouses defy the seasons and, thus, the will of the Gods. If the Gods had meant for it to be warm at Solstice-time, it would be!”

“It
is
warm at Solstice-time in the East,” Hart pointed out reasonably. “And in the South.”

“Your church teaches,” Tristan said slowly, “that sanitation is also a sin; that anything, indeed, which improves a man’s life—or a woman’s—is a sin. Why?”

“My church?
My
church?” Father Justin stared at him, aghast. “It is
everyone’s
church!” He tried to draw himself up to his full height but, even seated on the bench and thus somewhat equalized in terms of stature, he was far shorter than the men sitting on either side of him. He was shorter than Isla, and about of a height with Rowena. And he
stank
. Droplets of nervous sweat rolled down his fat cheeks, pooling in the crevices in his neck. All the attar of roses he’d smeared on himself could do nothing to disguise the vile scents of body odor and sweated-out wine.

“You reject the Gods, then?” he demanded, his tone frankly disbelieving. “And you’d admit as much, before all assembled?”

“I do not feel obliged,” Tristan replied, “to believe that the same Gods who have endowed us with sense, reason and intellect have intended for us to forego their use. I have garderobes at my own manor, and feel that their use has greatly enhanced the lives of all within. My vassals grow a number of things, winter spring and fall and yes, using techniques that I learned in the East. Where I ate opium and paid for pleasure and bought a great deal of indigo.”

He made a dismissive gesture. “You call me monster but you, priest, are the one who preaches that the will of the Gods is for children to starve rather than for their parents to earn a reasonable living.” He stood up, and held out his hand for Isla’s. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I take my leave. This dinner is over.”