by P. J. Fox
“They make good cheese in the North,” Cariad said conversationally.
Cariad served good cheese, too. And Isla, despite having rushed here as fast as Piper could take her, was in no rush to broach the topic that had been on her mind these past few hours. Days. Indeed, now that she’d managed to reach what she at least thought of as a safe harbor, all she wanted to do was relax. “What was that woman here for?” she asked again.
Cariad looked up briefly before resuming her work. Her fingers were deft with the twine as bunch after bunch appeared in a rising pile. Isla tried to speculate again on her age. Her skin was smooth, but thin. Her eyes were old. Her hair was white, but still soft.
“She doesn’t want more children,” the witch said bluntly. “She’s got ten already. But her husband, who can’t afford to support half that number as it is, refuses to take precautions.”
“What…are those?” Isla hadn’t been aware that there were precautions available.
The witch put down her bundle, half tied. Her eyes met Isla’s. Where Isla’s were green, Cariad’s were a watery blue. “What are they teaching girls these days?”
Isla blushed. She knew…generally what happened between men and women. No lady ever learned about such things directly, unless an enterprising suitor took it upon himself to teach her. Isla had seen a stallion mount a mare once, in one of the paddocks, but she knew that things weren’t…quite like that between human beings.
Cariad, who didn’t like the fact that—to her mind—women lived at the mercy of men, made a face. “I suppose,” she said dryly, “the idea is that if you marry the right man he’ll teach you. Whatever it is he thinks you need to know, at any rate.”
She helped herself to a piece of cheese. Isla waited.
“He can pull out,” the witch said matter of factly, “before the end of the act. Or the couple can pleasure each other…other ways.”
“Other ways?”
“With the mouth,” Cariad clarified. “Or the other passage.”
“But that’s—gross!”
“If done correctly, it can be quite pleasurable for both parties.”
Isla wondered how Cariad knew. “Which?” she asked, unable to help herself.
“Both.” Cariad finished her cheese, licking her fingertips delicately one at a time. “What about your duke?”
“He’s not my duke and—and I’m sure I don’t know!” Isla’s face felt so hot that it might have been on fire.
“As to the latter, that’s not what I meant. As to the former….” Cariad arched her eyebrow. “You should know these things, if you’re going to get married.”
“I’m not—how do you know?” Isla glanced at the bowl on the pedestal. “Wait,” she said hurriedly, “I don’t want to know. Just…finish what you were saying?”
And, blessedly, Cariad did. Isla was safe for the moment. “There are herbs that the woman can take, to keep the man’s seed from quickening. Or,” she added, “end the process if it has.” She returned to bundling her herbs, and Isla gave a sigh of relief as the witch’s limpid gaze released her.
“Men like to think with their cocks and women too, really,” Cariad mused after a moment. “Then they each blame the other for the consequences of their pleasure.” She snorted.
Isla was still back on the notion of the other passage. That didn’t sound like very much fun. At all. Still, neither did the other, but Rose raved about it enough. Feeling a bit perverse, Isla wondered if Rose had…with her mouth. Or the other! She wished she had the courage to ask. Apple would probably be all too willing to talk about sex, but that meant hearing about sex with her brother—or, worse yet, her father!
Cariad, who remained unmoved, was an enigma. She knew things that she had no right to know—like that Isla was engaged. Despite her unladylike snorting and tendency to swear, she spoke with the cultured accents of an aristocrat. There were rumors in the village that Cariad, or whoever she’d once been, had begun life as a glamorous maiden for whom many men vied. Somehow, she’d ended up living in a cottage in the woods and, as far as Isla knew, eschewing the company of all men.
Her tone seemed to evidence a grudging respect for the duke, but while Cariad had nothing but compassion for even the lowliest woman she’d cheerfully kill the first man she came across regardless of who he was, and Gods damn the consequences.
“I know,” Cariad said slowly, without looking up, “because I Saw it in my scrying mirror.” Isla heard the capital in Cariad’s words.
“I need to know who he is,” Isla found herself explaining. She hadn’t meant to be so blunt but…she was afraid. She could admit that to herself now. She was believing things she’d never have thought she’d believe, ever, because she was seeing things she thought she’d never see.
Or See.
“Your lover,” Cariad replied calmly, “is a demon.”
SEVENTEEN
The bread turned to sand in Isla’s mouth as Cariad’s words sank in.
“What?” The word was barely a whisper. And then, almost as an afterthought, “and he’s not my lover.”
“That’s all you can think about?” Cariad sounded disgusted. “Really?”
“But….” Isla trailed off, miserable.
Cariad stood up. “Come on. You’re going to come outside, little girl, and you’re going to help me gather some herbs that I need, and you’re going to learn a few things you need to know—that I think you need to know. Because soon you’ll be gone from here and we’ll never see each other again.”
“Never—what?” Isla repeated, aghast.
“What, you thought you’d be home every weekend for a visit?” Beneath Cariad’s derision was real pity, which was what upset Isla most of all. This crotchety old hag who never had a kind word for anyone and who’d made certain highwaymen disappear felt sorry for her.
She stood up, because she had to—no one said no to Cariad—but she was shaking all over and her legs felt like they’d been transformed into twin lumps of a particularly unappetizing gelatin. A demon? But there were no such things as demons. And demons couldn’t stand the sunlight and had glowing red orbs for eyeballs and—
She sank back down again.
“Demons,” Cariad said, not reading Isla’s thoughts but guessing them, “don’t tend to follow the rules set forth in storybooks.” Her tone was dry. For all her normally high opinion of Isla, this time she clearly thought the younger woman was being stupid.
She gestured toward the door, this time more impatiently. “Come on.”
Reluctantly, Isla followed her out.
As they moved deeper into the forest, leaving the little house behind, Cariad gave Isla a lecture on demons. She laid out what she knew, pausing now and again to examine a seemingly innocuous plant or rub her fingers over some moss. A few times, she bent to pluck a toadstool. Soon the brightly colored, spotted caps lined the bottom of her basket. Isla didn’t know much, but she knew them to be poisonous. She asked about this.
Cariad bent down to finger the leaves of a medium-sized shrub. They looked a bit like bay leaves, thick and with a slight sheen. Clusters of tiny orange fruit, three together in each cluster like oddly-colored holly berries, clung to the tips of the branches.
“This,” she said, “is nux vomica. In small doses, and when prepared properly, it can elevate the heart rate and help reestablish circulation. In large doses it can kill—and painfully.”
“Oh.” Isla swallowed.
“And hemlock,” the witch said, pointing to a pretty fern-like plant, “paralyzes the body while preserving the mind. A tingling begins at the extremities, spreading inward until the heart stops and breath ceases. Death comes from waking asphyxiation.”
“Gods above.” Isla stepped back.
“Hemlock also aids in the control, if not the cure, of acute mania.”
“But….” Isla turned, staring at the forest around her. Everything took on a new and fearsome aspect, in light of the witch’s tutelage. She was surrounded by death—in
the form of poison, in the form of natural selection. Nature was a harsh mistress. Were there no happy endings? Was a happy ending only a convenient stopping point in a story that always ended in tragedy?
“Monkshood,” Cariad continued, evidently forgetting her promise to tell Isla what she knew about demons—and about one demon in particular—“causes vomiting. And, I hear, a highly acute distress of the bowels.” She smiled unpleasantly, her eyes glittering in the gloom. “One woman, a long time ago, poisoned her abusive husband by serving him monkshood in a plate of stewed mushrooms. His favorite.” She turned and walked up the path.
After a moment, Isla followed her.
They passed a belladonna bush, a towering thing that curled over the path forming an arch of sorts and had gotten tangled in the sumac on the opposite side. Belladonna got its name from its use as a cosmetic: girls who couldn’t afford expensive cosmetics but who were nonetheless vain rubbed it in their eyes to make their pupils appear wider or on their cheeks to give the skin a rosy flush.
These attributes were, Isla knew, supposed to simulate the arousal of sex. Which, if the old wives’ tales were to be believed, attracted men. At that point, Isla wondered, why not just unlace your dress?
Witches like Cariad used belladonna as an hallucinogenic. In small quantities, the poison gave them the illusion of flight. In large quantities—and large meant as little as a single leaf, in some cases—belladonna caused death. Mandrake, a hideous-looking root that also grew abundantly in this part of the forest, was used as an emetic when someone had swallowed other poisons, like nux vomica.
Isla hurried up the path.
“Demons don’t have horns,” Cariad said, without turning. She’d somehow just known that Isla was now behind her, even though Isla’s slippers were quiet on the mossy carpet. “At least as far as we know,” she amended. “The truth is, no one’s entirely sure what a demon’s natural form is—or how many different natural forms there are. Mostly, when demons choose to appear, or are summoned, they take on the shape most upsetting to the summoner.”
“They want to appear fearsome?”
“Yes.” Cariad paused again. “A demon is an otherworldly being; there are many different kinds of demons, and many different theories as to their source. Some believe that demons are unclean spirits; religious-minded types call them fallen angels. Those naturalists among us consider them to be neither good nor evil but simply different.” She bent to pluck another toadstool.
Isla waited.
Cariad straightened. “And some believe them to be the spirits of the dead.”
“And you believe…?”
Cariad turned. “Isla, much of what people think of as magic isn’t. When I deliver a baby, the priest says I’m performing magic. But midwifery isn’t magic, just something the church doesn’t understand. The church hates women, and seeks to control them for that reason. But then”—she gestured—“there’s what scholars call high magic. Which is all around us. Manipulation of the elements.”
“What you do when you use your…mirror.”
Cariad nodded in acknowledgment. “I’m no archmaga,” she said after a moment. “I never wished to be. I never wished to be anything more than I am. Which, believe me, is enough.” She flashed Isla a wicked grin. “But high magic, now, that’s what your duke does. He’s an archmagus of some significant power, perhaps the most powerful of any alive today—if alive is a term that can be correctly applied.” She fingered another leaf as they moved up the path, almost absentmindedly. “All things, good and evil, exist inside the natural order. That a gooseberry is good and a mandrake root evil is a human perspective. There is no inherent good in a gooseberry and no inherent evil in a mandrake root, only that we like the effect of one better than the effect of the other.”
Isla nodded; she thought she understood.
“But demons, or whatever they are, exist outside of nature. They’re not meant to be here. The church teaches, and necromancers believe as well, that demons can be used by man for gain: conjured and controlled.” She paused. “Which explains how your duke got here, but not what he is. As to that question, the honest answer is, I don’t know.”
And then she told Isla what she did know.
Tristan Mountbatten, son of Borin Mountbatten and his wife Sienna, was once a man.
He was born near the beginning of the decades-long epoch that would be known as the Troubles, a time of restiveness when greedy eyes began turning on House Terrowin and the throne. Years of inbreeding and infighting had made House Terrowin weak and the other houses—first in a thin trickle, and then in a flood—began to descend on it like jackals. There was nothing of honor or high-mindedness in their attack; men didn’t take the field for honor, despite what the bards claimed.
They fought for personal gain, and for glory, and for wine and women and song and great halls with comfortable fireplaces and well-stocked woodsheds. They fought for food, and land, and time. Tristan and his younger brother, Morin, had grown to manhood in a breathless hush of anticipation.
When the storm finally broke, in the first of a series of battles that would mark the official start of the Troubles and presage the eventual outbreak of a full-blown civil war, many lives were lost. Among them were those of Tristan’s parents. Cariad didn’t know the details, doubted that anyone alive did save Tristan himself. Records were spotty at the best of times and even the best-preserved vellum required someone to make it. Many, for whatever reason, preferred to leave no log of their deeds.
Both Morin and Tristan had trained at arms from a young age and both were, by their sixteenth winter, considered excellent bowmen. Morin, too, possessed spectacular skill with a sword. But where Tristan, too, knew swordcraft, his main focus always lay elsewhere. Increasingly, he found himself turning inward: to his studies, to the workings of the world around him and, finally, to the occult.
Tristan had questions; some said, too many questions. And for all that he’d always been peculiarly bright and quiet, even as a small child, his curiosity retained an innocent quality even in adulthood. For nature and all her mysteries, he possessed a genuine fascination—and respect.
Where the church had no answers and, indeed, discouraged questions, the occult had many. The priests he consulted, and the tutors his parents had hired told him to pray. If the Gods hadn’t seen fit to reveal an answer, then surely Tristan shouldn’t care about the question. Who was Tristan to question the Gods?
Tristan, who didn’t see the search for knowledge as questioning the Gods or even relevant to the Gods at all, continued to seek his answers elsewhere.
No one knew exactly how he’d first met the man who became his tutor in the dark arts, or the exact nature of whatever relationship they may have had. There was speculation at the time, and Tristan’s parents disapproved strongly. But then war came and everyone had other concerns. Morin went off to fight and Tristan stayed behind to guard the castle. His was an important job, if he chafed at its constraints. Then, as now, Darkling Reach produced materials vital to the war effort. Its riches couldn’t be left undefended.
Something happened then. No one knew what. As the war raged, Tristan began to change.
He grew increasingly secretive in his actions, although he ordered the castle’s defense as ably as ever and his men still trusted him. He began to startle at loud noises. At dinner, he claimed he heard scratching in the walls. He had had, at that time, twenty-seven winters. He wasn’t married, but he was betrothed to a girl he’d known and loved since he was a child. A girl who loved him in return, a beautiful maid called Brenna.
She, too, had been perturbed when his behavior changed; alarmed, even. But she’d done her best to put a brave face on and regard the situation with equanimity. Tristan was very bright, after all, and had always been…eccentric. From highest to lowest, everyone in the kingdom was under a great deal of strain and she was sure that this, too, would pass and all would be well.
But all was not well.
Tristan, at first
a magus and then an archmagus, growing his skills under the tutelage of his mysterious sorcerer-teacher, turned next to necromancy. At first for the answers he sought and then for the power he needed to protect the people of Darkling Reach. The not-yet-war was going badly for House Mountbatten, and for all of Morven.
The problem with summoning demons, as Cariad pointed out, was that even the strongest archmagus was fooling himself bitterly if he believed that he could control them. To summon a demon was like summoning a hurricane, or a flood: all were forces that, once released into the world, quickly developed a life of their own. Power built upon power until everything became too utterly unpredictable for even the keenest mind—and disaster, inevitably, struck.
When exactly Tristan had begun summoning demons, nobody knew.
But in the winter of his twenty-ninth year, right around the time of the Solstice and a bare three months before he was to marry Brenna, or so the story went, Tristan became involved with one demon in particular. Involved…how, again, no one knew. Was theirs a friendship, an exchange of mutually beneficial information? More?
Demons didn’t possess definite gender, at least as human beings understood the term. Those of the highest order could appear in any form they chose. Cariad had her own speculations on this subject, which she hinted at but ultimately kept to herself.
And then two things happened simultaneously: Tristan’s camp was betrayed from within and Tristan himself vanished.
His life, from that point until fairly recently, was a blank. There were rumors, as there were always rumors. But virtually nothing was known concretely and most of the information that was known had been supplied by Tristan, himself. And accounted for only his last three decades. He was, after all, only celebrating his thirtieth winter this year. Or so he claimed. He was young and fit and strong and charismatic and no one asked too many questions.