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

by P. J. Fox

  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.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Somehow they ended up outside again, the same as they had the previous night. The wind had picked up, dispelling the last of the afternoon’s vague warmth, and Tristan once again gave Isla his cloak. A gesture that was beginning to take on the overtones of habit.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly, noting again the strange and exotic smell of the wool. She wondered if he got cold. She was afraid to ask. Just like she was afraid to ask why they were out here. Was he angry? Upset? He didn’t seem it, but then again he never did. He must have some feelings, however inhuman, but if he ever revealed them it wasn’t to her. She followed him through the garden, taking a different route this time, toward the kitchen gardens and the orchard beyond. She stepped carefully, unable to see the pitted ground in front of her and worried about breaking an ankle. The moon was a slender crescent in the night sky, and there wasn’t much light to see by. Somewhere, an owl hooted.

  He slowed his pace; more for her benefit than his, she suspected. Although he appeared to be lost in thought and unaware of her presence. She was surprised, therefore, when he spoke.

  “I suppose that’s what you think, too.”

  “That hothouses are an invention of the devil?” she asked, unsure of his meaning. There was an embittered, tired tone to his voice that she’d never heard before. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have said that he sounded almost…human.

  “That it’s everyone’s church—or should be.”

  “Father Justin is an imbecile,” she replied, “and a hypocrite. I doubt that he gives his vassals one day in ten to farm their own fields and, hothouse or no hothouse, he certainly didn’t grow those diamonds covering his hands.” Father Justin wore more jewelry than anyone Isla had ever seen—man or woman. With hands so weighed down by wealth, she had no idea how he lifted them to his mouth to eat.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Tristan pointed out.

  Isla made a dismissive gesture. The last thing she wanted was to discuss theology with this man, but dinner had been stressful—her whole day had been stressful—and she needed to vent. To someone, anyone. Tristan just happened to be who was here.

  And up until this exact moment, she’d never realized how lonely she’d felt before on all those other nights when she’d come back to her room wanting to discuss something important and ended up discussing lace trim. Hart spent his nights carousing and Rowena, although bright enough after her own fashion, had no patience for affairs of state. She preferred to dissect the minutiae of who had said what to whom, in the hopes of determining if they were having an affair. And they almost always weren’t; where Rowena got some of her ideas, Isla couldn’t begin to understand. That a man failed to turn as white as a bed sheet when a lady entered the room signified nothing.

  “I don’t believe in heresy,” she said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  She went on to describe something of her relationship with Cariad. She’d never so much as mentioned the witch’s name before, not even to Rowena; Cariad, like almost all witches, lived under the constant threat of death and while Isla honestly believed that Rowena would never willingly betray anyone, least of all to such a horrible fate as being burned alive at the stake, Rowena had been known to speak out of turn simply because she’d forgotten that things were supposed to be a secret.

  But of all the men, women and children in Morven, Tristan Mountbatten was undoubtedly the least likely threat to Cariad. He, too, was a witch. No, a sorcerer, she corrected herself. The only other practitioner she’d ever met.

  “Cariad is a good person,”
she said emphatically, “the best I know. No institution that condemns her while raising men like Father Justin up as some sort of example is one I support. Heresy?” Isla was upset now, and couldn’t have stopped the flow of words even if she’d tried. That her audience was her least favorite person in the world didn’t matter. At least she had an audience, for once, someone who wanted to listen.

  “Physicians do more harm than good.” She shook her head. “Bloodletting is considered a cure for almost any ailment, and pregnant women are told to prepare their shrouds! Any intervention that might actually save the woman is forbidden—as is contraception. Not because it prevents pregnancy but because it encourages sex for mere pleasure! Imagine that! As if pleasure were the worst thing in the world.”

  She didn’t even mention the more revolting treatments, like the clyster. She was, after all, at least theoretically in polite company. Mixed company, to be sure, although she remembered Cariad’s assertion that demons were neither male nor female.

  The clyster was, according to the church, a miracle of modern medicine: an instrument for injecting fluids into the body through the now infamous other passage. Which, given the church’s prohibition on its use for just about everything else, struck Isla as ironic. The clyster was a long tube made of metal. The end used by the physician had a small cup, into which fluid was poured. The end used by the patient had a dull point, somewhat like the tip of a jousting lance, which was drilled with a number of holes. The point was inserted, and fluid poured in. For extra efficacy, a plunger was used to push the fluid further, up into the colon. The pumping action made an absolutely grotesque sucking noise; she’d heard it used once, on her father.

  The most common medicine was lukewarm water, although occasionally various concoctions of a supposedly scientific nature were used: thinned boar’s bile or vinegar, for example.

  “So you don’t believe, as your church teaches, that suffering serves a purpose?”

  Stopping, Isla turned to face him. They were near the orchard now. Her tone was tart. “Anyone who thinks so hasn’t seen suffering. I have,” she added bluntly.

  And then, “babies sobbing for want of food, parents sobbing for want of means to give it to them. Once, during the famine”—the famine had been three years ago—“Hart and I were riding from village to village, checking on our tenants, when we came upon a woman sitting under a tree. She was cradling her child, crooning to the little thing. It couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old. Seeing us, she got up and, when Hart dismounted, thrust the little bundle at him. We’d stopped, because even from a distance we could tell that the woman was most unwell.

  “Help my baby, she said, and disappeared into the hedgerows. Laughing.” That noise had been, beyond a doubt, the worst Isla had ever heard. “When we examined the child, we saw that she’d been dead for some days. A week at least. And it was hot out.” That summer had, in fact, been one of the hottest that anyone could remember, even their oldest citizens. Isla turned, staring out at the orchard. Tall grasses waved gently in the nighttime breeze. The truth was, Isla hated the church. She doubted very much that Father Justin had gone hungry that summer, or that any of his ilk had.

  “In some cases,” she added slowly, “people have no choice but to ask the local witch—herbalist, really—for help. Very few so-called witches have actual magic.

  “I don’t believe that it’s better for a child to die, or a woman to go mad from grief, than to ask for help. And I’d like to hear Father Justin repeat his tired doggerel about what a blessing it is to die with the belly empty but the soul intact when he’s been denied his meals for a fortnight. Or about how suffering cleanses the soul, while he’s dying from a festering arrow wound to the gut.”

  The giving of pain medication was also condemned as heretical by the church. “If suffering is such a beautiful gift from the Gods,” she finished, her tone quiet, “I’d like to share it with him.”

  Tristan’s low chuckle was like rustling leaves.

  “You say your religion,” she continued, unsettled and made defensive by his response, “but I very much doubt that yours is so different, Your Grace. All religions are about following some master, and substituting his experience for yours—adopting his supposed revelations as your own and proving that you’ve done so through obedience to his arbitrary rules. What does it matter, the name of the god one prays to? To claim that one version of the same thing is better than the other is merely vanity.”

  And to Isla, all religions were the same: frauds, tools of control. She’d lost her faith in the church, and in all churches, the day she’d met that woman. One salient fact that she’d chosen to omit, when she’d told Tristan the story, had been that she and Hart were on church-owned land at the time.

  “To some,” Tristan replied, “man himself is the highest god. People should seek their own goals and find their own satisfaction.”

  She shook her head. “That’s just an excuse for hedonism.” He made it all sound very glamorous, but in truth he was describing nothing different than Father Justin’s preferred mode of life; the fat, unpleasant priest sought his own goals and found his own satisfaction, too, with his catamites and at the expense of parishioners and vassals alike.

  “Is hedonism wrong?” Tristan asked, tone curious.

  “Do what you will sounds very pleasant and all, until you’re the one facing down a stronger predator.” She met his gaze challengingly. They were both saved from further comment, however, by the joint realization that they weren’t alone. Or at least, by Isla’s realization; she was fairly certain, judging from the composed manner in which Tristan stood, that he’d known all along. He had an uncanny way of knowing things that made her skin crawl.

  She stilled, instinctively merging with the shadow of a tree for cover. Beside her, Tristan was as motionless as ever. Seeing him move was always a surprise, just as seeing a corpse move would be: something that shouldn’t move, that wasn’t alive, did. However much longer she lived, Isla doubted that she’d ever get over the shock.

  And now, she had the additional shock of realizing that she was listening in on her sister and Rudolph.

  They weren’t, as the peasants said, having a forest marriage. That had been Isla’s first concern—that she’d walked in on something private. But a flash of movement in the grass showed that both parties were upright and fully clothed. Rudolph’s words were pitched too low for Isla to hear clearly, but his tone was pleading. Rowena, as usual, was laughing with reckless abandon. “No I won’t, silly!” she protested. “It’s not proper.”

  “The contract has been signed.” That, at least, Isla had no trouble hearing—or interpreting. Her lip curled in a faint expression of disapproval; she didn’t consider the orchard to be a terribly romantic assignation spot. Or Rudolph to be doing an overly masterful job of wooing. Let me take what’s mine by right set no woman’s heart aflutter.

  “He has the hopeful tone,” Tristan said, his lips brushing her ear as he spoke for Isla alone, “of a hungry puppy.”

  And not a terribly intelligent one, either, Isla added to herself with a small smile. She’d never realized, before tonight, that she genuinely disliked the gallant Rudolph. Found him ridiculous, yes, but listening to him now she wanted nothing so much as to box his ears and send him up to his room without supper. That such a man was viewed as capable under the law of carrying a sword and had, moreover, captured the heart of her sister baffled her. At least, she consoled herself, Rudolph had money enough that his stupidity shouldn’t prove too much of a handicap. Rowena wouldn’t starve. Or so Isla hoped.

  “I have a question,” Rowena said, turning to face her suitor. They were now just on the other side of the hedge, Isla and Tristan hidden from their view only by it and the stand of trees they stood behind. The shadows were very deep and Isla knew that even if Rowena had been more observant and Rudolph less preoccupied—and in his cups—they would have been hard pressed to detect intruders. Moreover, Isla doubted that Tristan allowed himse
lf to be seen when he didn’t wish to be seen.

  “Yes?”

  “What,” Rowena asked, deftly changing the subject, “issue could the church have with bathing? My sister bathes all the time—I mean, really, all the time, and yet she’s the biggest prude there is.”

  Isla colored in the darkness. She didn’t think of herself as being a prude. But as much as she wanted to believe the words kindly meant, they still stung. As did the fact of Rowena’s greater happiness. Even if Rudolph was the silliest man alive Rowena loved him, and tonight should have been the happiest night of her life. She’d secured her own future happiness, hadn’t she? Isla felt a stab of jealousy, and sadness, followed by a deep and abiding sense of guilt. Perhaps what she wanted most of all was the easy sense of camaraderie between the two, that they knew each other well enough and trusted each other enough to make sport of their families like this. Or at least of Isla. Isla had no one with whom she shared such an inner life, and never had.

  And this was what she’d wanted for her sister, from the first. She had no right to begrudge what she’d given freely.

  Rudolph, for all his bravado at dinner a deeply observant man, actually knew the answer to Rowena’s question and explained the church’s position in a passably literate fashion. “Bathing in smallclothes is more acceptable than bathing in the nude,” Rudolph pointed out. “Bathing in the nude leads to immorality, promiscuous sex, and diseases. My father’s personal physician, who studied at the royal college in the capital, taught us as children that water carries disease into the body through the pores in the skin.” He went on to explain that immersion widened the pores, allowing water-born humors to slip through into the internal organs. Moreover, once the unlucky patient left the bath, he was that much more susceptible to airborne humors due to the same enlarged pores. “So you see,” Rudolph finished, “the danger isn’t simply immorality but death—the death of the body and of the soul,” he clarified.