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

by P. J. Fox

  In truth, Rowena’s disinterest in the duke surprised Isla. Rudolph was impressive by country standards, but in Isla’s opinion held nary a candle to the parades of handsome and handsomely dressed men who’d come calling. The earl did, after all, possess a great deal of land. Rudolph might seem sophisticated here, amidst the rotting rafters and birds’ nests, but he’d be a bumpkin of the highest order in the capital. Or in Darkling Reach, the duke’s domain and her sister’s proposed new home. And the duke was…well, the duke.

  “He’s not so bad,” Isla ventured, disbelieving her own words as she said them. She kept her face to the window, watching as the men whose turn it was tended the manor’s gardens. When dusk fell, they’d walk back to their own small crofts, wherever those might be, and till their own fields by moonlight. And within a fortnight, a new group of men would show up to put in their hours as the law of the land and the far more ancient bonds of fealty required. The relationship between lord and serf was a pact of mutual obligation and, above all, trust. Mountbatten would, she thought, be a good lord—if not a good husband.

  “His prowess is legendary,” Rowena said, echoing Isla’s own thoughts.

  “But isn’t that a good thing?” Isla asked, smiling in spite of herself. Turning, she walked over to the fireplace and added more wood before removing her nightclothes and beginning to dress. Over her shift she donned sleeves, dress, and kirtle. All wool and all in good repair; Isla was an accomplished seamstress. She had to be, living in this place.

  “No!” Rowena made a face. “He has—some kind of harem or something!”

  “That’s his friend,” Isla corrected absently.

  “He takes women,” Rowena emphasized. “And does Gods know what with them up in that castle of his. His people are loyal to him, and never say a word; they take the disappearances as a matter of course, I suppose. After all, in return he’s made them the richest people in Morven.” Rowena lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I heard, from Sarah”—Sarah was one of the chambermaids, and a notorious gossip who could be counted on to make things up if she didn’t hear them firsthand—“that he stole some woman and her fiancé was upset about that, naturally, so he gave him a more beautiful woman instead as some sort of—some sort of sick compensation. And that was that,” she added disbelievingly.

  Isla didn’t see what the fuss was; women were interchangeable to most men. Rowena hadn’t noticed, because she was pretty. A woman like Isla, however, whom men talked to as a person, saw a different side of things entirely.

  She put on her slippers and stood up. “You make it all sound very romantic,” she said dryly. She wished she didn’t believe a word of the tale, but she did. She remembered those eyes…and those claws. Another flash of horror seized her, temporarily banishing a cold that seemed to have seeped into the walls overnight. Rowena was imagining that the duke, having selected only the most lovely of his citizenry, had them locked away in some tower where he subjected them forcibly to all manner of erotic delights. When, in truth, he probably just ate them and tossed their bones down a well.

  “But you don’t understand,” Rowena said plaintively. And quietly, so quietly that she immediately had Isla’s attention. It was unlike Rowena to be quiet, and right now her normally cheerful, vapid sister looked as miserable as someone’s forgotten puppy sitting by the side of the road. She shrugged, a hopeless-seeming gesture that squeezed at Isla’s heart.

  “I can’t marry the duke,” she said, “because I love Rudolph.”

  FOUR

  I love Rudolph.

  Rowena was a stupid chit who didn’t realize that her heart couldn’t rule her head forever. Her head, or her life. Isla caught herself grumbling, and tried to relax. Being so upset was, once again, pointless—and unlike her. That she was acting so out of character was, in and of itself, upsetting. She couldn’t understand what ailed her. Yes, she was upset about her sister but Isla, unlike Rowena, had always been a realist. That this day would come, with one man or another, she’d always known. And yet, now that it was finally upon her Isla found herself unprepared for the conflicting stir of emotions within her breast. She loved her sister, and wanted her to be happy. And, until now, she’d given little thought to marriage for herself. After all, why should she?

  She was no man’s idea of a desirable woman—or so she’d always been told. But if she were to marry, as the older sister, that would leave Rowena free to pursue her heart…Isla left the thought unfinished as she stepped out of the midmorning sun and into the shade of the dairy building. The air in here was cool, and smelled of lake water and cheese.

  Enzie Moor was a self-sustaining estate, with dairies and gardens and smoke houses and spinning houses and storerooms and smithies and a dozen other buildings, each with its own specific function. And Isla, like all women of her class, was tasked with the job of overseeing them all. While men undertook the supposedly more important challenges of patrolling their estates and hunting—venison and brigands—and generally yelling and waving around swords, women acted as overseers.

  Reading and figuring were considered unmasculine activities; every bookkeeper, brewer, and steward Isla knew was a woman. And they all, like Isla, worked hard for hours on end before going home and being told that a woman should be seen and not heard and that their heads were undoubtedly filled with empty nonsense about flowers. By men who thought they’d had a hard day.

  She drew a deep breath, and tried to feel more cheerful.

  The dairy was a long, low structure that had been constructed of dressed stone and was kept scrupulously clean. A sod roof kept out the worst of the heat when, indeed, the weather got hot. Which lately seemed to be never. An over-wet spring had been followed by a short, cold summer, and Isla could barely remember the last time she’d felt warm in her bedroom.

  Outside, the dairy was almost featureless and inside, the whitewashed walls were lined with two sets of shelves: wide, countertop-type ones at waist height for working and narrower ones above. Those were used for storage. Making any kind of dairy product was an arduous chore, but cheese especially required hours of backbreaking labor. The first step was to strain the milk to remove detritus like cow hair and dead flies. Then the milk was poured into wide, shallow pans that were, in turn, left alone to sit for a day or so. Isla preferred to leave them overnight, returning to check on their progress first thing the next morning while it was still reasonably cool. The smell of sour milk in the close, poorly ventilated dairy was not pleasant.

  The cream having—hopefully—risen, it was skimmed from the top of each pan with a flat spoon and stored in an earthenware crock. To make butter, the fat was worked in a plunge churn for several hours. To make cheese, the fat was mixed with a thin substance called rennet: the mucus lining of a calf’s stomach. Isla herself had slaughtered several unweaned calves and scraped the smelly goo from inside the sac with the flat of her knife after cutting it open and emptying its contents down the drain of the slaughterhouse floor. After another night left to its own devices, the fat and rennet mixture was cut into cubes and pressed to remove moisture. Then the cheese was ready to be formed.

  She stepped over to the young dairymaid, Rose, who was working the churn with muscled arms. Dairymaking took almost as much strength as the practice yard.

  Seeing her mistress, Rose smiled broadly. “Good morning, ma’am,” she called cheerfully. And then, “I had the presses cleaned, like you asked, and Dan scrubbed down the counters so they smell less bad.” Dan was Rose’s brother.

  Isla nodded her approval. “Excellent work, Rose.” She cocked an ear, listening to the churn. Slop, slop…slush. That thin, watery sound meant that the first clumps of butter were beginning to form. She pointed out as much, careful that Rose, who was new to the work, learn not to over-churn. Rose nodded thoughtfully, hearing the sound.

  As Isla inspected the dairy—the rising cream and the forming cheese and the pans of new milk—she found her thoughts returning to their earlier topic like a horse to a well known
path. Women bemoaned their lot in life but in truth men had it no different. Not really. Among the higher classes, they were no freer to marry for love. Political and economic considerations, which amounted to the same thing, dictated who married whom. The earl would have married Hart’s mother and been the happier for his choice, and probably the stronger, if such an option had been available. Which to the earl’s tradition-entrenched mind, it wasn’t. Jasmine Snow had been a commoner and illegitimate, herself.

  Isla yawned. She’d gone to bed late, after an exhausting night of listening to the other women of the manor drone on about nothing. Who’d borrowed whose dress, who’d borrowed whose husband, who cared.

  She’d left Rowena sitting in her room that morning, staring out the window. The younger girl had managed to look as lovely as ever as Isla left, despite eyes puffy and red-rimmed from the tears she’d shed during their conversation. Or rather, during Isla’s attempts at rational conversation and Rowena’s frenzied and almost incoherent pleas that someone—anyone—change their father’s mind before it was too late and happiness was denied her forever while she was locked in some man’s keep and forgotten about. Happiness that Rowena was sure she could only find with Rudolph, the man she’d loved since she was a child.

  And who she knew, and Isla suspected, loved her in return.

  Rowena was, Isla thought sadly, still a child. If one dressed in peach-colored linen and with a woman’s curves. And a woman’s needs: for love, and the touch of a man who wanted her. Needed her. Isla herself knew nothing of love, only what she’d imagined in bed at night after listening to a particularly lurid ballad at dinner. She’d read the novels, of course, too, and the poetry. Unrequited love was a major theme, and one that often seemed to end with the lovers committing suicide rather than facing life apart.

  Isla wanted to be in love, thought being in love sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world. And she wanted that chance for Rowena, who was not only her sister but also her best friend. Rowena, who was in love and with a man who’d shown every indication of being a fine specimen of manhood and a decent human being to boot. He was tall and dark and very, very good looking. And thoughtful, and kind. And while he hadn’t pressed his suit as fervently as he might have, he clearly doted on Rowena to the exclusion of all other women. He didn’t seem quite so much unaware of her faults as uninterested in them. He accepted Rowena for who she was—and wasn’t.

  And for Rowena to give all that up, simply because their father couldn’t keep his hands out of his own purse…? Rowena was right; it was unfair. Isla felt another rush of anger at the world.

  Everything had been fine before that wretched man had ridden into the courtyard and ruined their lives!

  Tristan Mountbatten, His Grace the Duke of Darkling Reach, the man who wasn’t a man.

  With a final word to Rose, Isla left the dairy and set out across the packed earth for the spinning shed. Shearing happened in spring, but spinning went on all year long. The sun had, if not warmed the air, then taken the worst of the chill out of it. Isla walked briskly, nodding and waving and returning the calls of greeting that she got. She was popular enough among the men and women who truly ran Enzie Moor. She only wished that she’d achieved the same esteem among members of her own family. If Rowena left…

  Rowena was close with their father and even, after her own fashion, with Apple. She was, moreover, young for her age; just as Isla was old for hers. Isla sometimes felt like forty winters instead of twenty. Or sixty. Rowena would wither in the North, like a flower plucked off the vine. She belonged here, among her hordes of empty-headed friends and her followers and with Rudolph. Who was, after all, her next door neighbor. And had, as far as Isla knew, no desire to be otherwise. Rudolph’s ambitions trended in the direction of pacifying the West—a dangerous place at the best of times, and intolerable since the last round of border incursions—and thus making a name for himself with the king. And, hopefully, gaining more land in the process. He’d make a good husband.

  Across a small paddock sat the spinning shed. The smell was appalling: urine and rotting meat and the Gods knew what else. Enormous hides were stretched across frames to be tanned, the tanners scraping them down with rocks. Vats of dye stood by for the wool, apprentices stirring them as the colors were perfected. Madder root produced tones ranging from light orange to deep maroon; goldenrod produced yellow. Rose madder, of course, produced rose. Isla would have loved to make green cloth, as green was perhaps the only color that truly became her, but the prepared dye was dear and they didn’t have the pigments on hand to make it themselves. For all that most plants were green, plants that produced the color green were rare. Most greens were made with woad, which grew in the North. Woad overdyed with greenwood, or dyer’s broom, produced a vibrant green the color of grass. Woad mordanted with alum and overdyed with greenwood produced a deeper green the color of oak leaves in August.

  The most beautiful greens, however, were made with the imported indigo: a plant worth its weight in gold, or more, that only grew in the tropics. Isla’s favorite color, the delicate green of a new grass shoot or a just-unfurled leaf, was made from woad dyed with indigo and fustic. She knew this from her reading; she’d never actually seen cloth of such a color in her life, although she’d often imagined the fun she’d have working with such exotic pigments.

  Isla liked pretty things; most girls did. But, rather than its beauty, what she truly loved about fabric was the science and craft of its creation. She ran her hand over a line of carded wool, appreciating its rough feel under her fingertips. She’d lived here her whole life and, like Rowena, had no particular desire to leave. She liked it here; she had her own friends, and her hobbies, and her dreams for the future. As a child, she’d always imagined that if she did leave, she’d do so for love—falling, she realized bitterly, into the same trap as her empty-headed sister. Only she, at least, was intelligent enough to know it.

  Woad grew in the North. She found the North worming into her consciousness again, as much as she would have liked to think about anything else. But try as she might, no amount of hard work could entirely free her from the niggling sensation in the back of her mind that she had to do something.

  That she knew what she had to do, even if she hadn’t yet admitted the truth to herself.

  One of the dye vat tenders waved her over, asking a question about setting one of the carnelian dyes for which Enzie Moor had once been so famous. Back when the estate was kept in fighting trim. Isla would have liked to see her home regain at least something of its former glory, because she’d invested so much of her short life in trying to wrestle something out of nothing, but her hands were tied by the fact that she was still little more than a child and only a woman to boot. There was never enough of anything, money or otherwise, and Isla desperately needed the help of someone who knew what they were doing and who wasn’t, like Isla, discovering everything on their own for the first time—and, she sometimes thought ruefully, making it up as they went along and hoping that no one would notice.

  At nineteen, Isla was older than someone of her same age would have been even a generation or two ago; the troubles plaguing Morven made everyone grow up quickly, if they grew up at all. Men like Rudolph, whose place was secure, fought to keep it so and men like Hart usually left. There was no shortage of jobs available to a man who could wield a sword, whether with any of a hundred petty lords along the border or in a mercenary company. The thought that Hart would leave—and he undoubtedly would, there was nothing for him here—made her sad. She’d have no one to talk to, really talk to, then.

  Isla leaned over and smelled the fermentation vat. “Add more sheep’s urine,” she counseled. Urine was used to set the dye in the wool, and in order to function correctly a fermentation vat—which consisted of urine and other additives—had to be kept warm. The weather should have been warm enough still to keep the vats at the right temperature, but instead apprentices stoked smoldering embers beneath the raised stands on which they s
at.

  A squat, muscular boy poured more of the cloudy yellow liquid out from a jar and it splashed everywhere. Isla jumped back just in time, laughing. All around her, smells and noises competed for dominance. Even in a manor as down at the heels Enzie Moor, daytime was work time. No one could afford to sit idle, because ten minutes of idleness might ultimately mean the difference between food to eat during the coming months and death from starvation. It was ever thus, even at the grandest manors; even the king in his warm and well-stocked hall knew that only a hair’s breadth separated squalor from plenty.

  Especially these days, there was no such thing as certainty—for anybody.

  Knuckling her back, Isla straightened and surveyed the marching line of small and mostly well-repaired outbuildings. Sod needed replacing on several roofs, and tiles were loose on the steps. Whitewash had flaked off here and there, revealing the tough, fibrous wattle and daub beneath: a lattice of tightly woven strips called wattle that was covered in a sticky, foul-smelling mixture of soil, clay, animal dung, straw and sometimes sand. As building materials went, stone was best; especially for valuable outbuildings like the salt cellar and smoking shed. Wattle and daub kept the worst of the weather out, but could be cut into easily with a serrated knife. More than one householder in Ewesdale had woken up in the morning to discover his prized candlesticks gone after thieves ignored the stout lock on his front door and cut through the wall surrounding it.

  But stone was expensive—too expensive for all but the wealthiest of lords and merchants. Isla thought about her father again. The earl had a certain low cunning beneath his vague exterior, and knew on which side his bread was buttered. Isla wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he’d contacted Mountbatten himself. Darkling Reach was a week or so to the North and problems came with controlling land that didn’t directly abut one’s own domain, but Enzie was a valuable possession nevertheless.