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

by P. J. Fox

  “The great Saint Gerund de Paul, whose psalm we sang earlier, tolerated marriage only because it provided the world with more virgins! Virgins, as we know, are brides of the Mediator! Hence it follows”—and here he studied the younger men in the room with a gimlet eye—“that he who seduces a virgin is not merely committing fornication but is in fact committing adultery with her against the Mediator! Is cuckolding the son of the Gods!”

  Which, Isla thought, was a bit extreme—despite it being common church dogma and an idea she’d heard discussed a thousand times before. Virginity was a better state than marriage, marriage was for the weak, and if one had to, for whatever reason, submit to that vile and bestial institution then a sexless marriage was best. The next best thing to remaining a virgin forever was denying oneself to one’s husband as much as possible. As Amanda had done. Which, given the environment in which she’d been raised, was really no surprise. Isla imagined that her mother must have regarded the sex act with something very much akin to horror. Certainly, having been raised with such crushing guilt and fear couldn’t have been good for the libido.

  “I never want to have sex,” Rowena whispered in her ear. “It hurts.”

  Isla, too, had heard the horror stories about painful initiations into the supposed mysteries of love. But she wondered, a bit jadedly, if the misery might have something to do with a lack of expertise on the part of the man. He was generally the more active partner, especially given that the church allowed for sex in only one position. Having the woman on top was a perversion of the natural order, as was entering the woman from behind or clasping her while upright. Or kissing her while performing the act, or in any way acknowledging her presence in the room.

  Isla decided not to explain to her younger sister that sex was a fairly unavoidable part of married life—and that sooner or later, she’d have to let Rudolph take his breeches off while in the bedchamber. That they’d share a bedchamber, and indeed a bed. None of these things seemed to have occurred to Rowena, whose favorite books had taught her only that love consisted of sighs and longing glances.

  Even so, as both Rudolph and Rowena were fairly religious, any opportunities for a liaison would be rare. The church prohibited sex on Dies Scrol, because it was the first day of the week and the Sabbath, Diu Iath, the fourth day of the week, because it was in the middle, and Diu Triach, because sundown on Diu Triach began the weekend. Which meant, if one calculated it out, that fully five months out of each year were ideally to be kept celibate. Furthermore, sex was forbidden on the high holidays, the weeks before the high holidays, and for three days before one attended any service. Which meant that the truly penitent couple could have sex on the first or second day of the week only.

  “In some penitentials,” Father Justin continued, “and with good cause, fornication is declared a worse sin than murder! The great Theodore Bede recommends a penance of one year’s flagellation and fasting, but increases this mild chastisement according to the frequency of the act and the discretion of the parties.”

  Mild chastisement?

  “But nor is it the intention alone that makes the crime! Some men—and women, too—are guilty of”—he held his breath—“nocturnal pollutions. However involuntary they might be, they are a sin! They are how the Dark One enters the body!” Which must, Isla mused, be why he needed to sleep with a catamite. “The offender must rise at once and, immediately upon learning of his transgression, sing seven penitential psalms followed by an additional thirty before he prepares to leave his bedchamber for the day. And if the sin occurs while he’s fallen asleep in church”—during such a riveting sermon as this—“he must sing the whole Psalter.”

  Isla, at that point, did the unthinkable: she burst out laughing.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When Father Justin cornered Isla after the service finally ended, their interchange was everything she’d been dreading since his eyes first fastened on her. She’d known, immediately after her outburst, that she was in for a verbal thrashing. Even under the kinder tutelage of their regular parish priest, such a blatant lack of respect was nigh on unforgivable.

  So Isla waited through the rest of the service, contrite but at the same time fully aware that there was a certain need to observe the formalities. She certainly wished she hadn’t laughed, however funny she found Father Justin’s comment. But she’d frown and nod in all the right places and plead forgiveness and do her penance. Father Justin, she was sure, was as bored by the whole exercise as she.

  Which meant that, regrettably for her, she’d taken the situation no more seriously than if Father Justin had been her regular priest. She hadn’t, indeed, sensed so much as the possibility of danger. If she had, if she’d perhaps thought back to the vehemence of Father Justin’s outburst against King Piers—and his brother—at the dinner table a few nights previous, she might have acted differently.

  And her future might have, therefore, turned out very differently.

  But instead she’d walked in blind, thinking, as any girl in her position probably would have, that she had nothing to fear from a few minutes’ interchange with a choleric priest and in her own home at that.

  She smiled briefly at Rowena, who looked worried. She, like most of the women Isla knew, was in awe of the priest and, indeed, all male authority figures. That someone was male or female, however, mattered to Isla not at all. She was a great deal brighter than most of the men she knew, and put no special stock in the idea that a man was her natural superior simply by virtue of being a man. If that were the case, her father would have been running the estate instead.

  “I’ll meet you upstairs, in the gallery,” she told her sister, “and you can tell me all about your most recent tryst with Rudolph.”

  “Don’t say tryst in a chapel!” Rowena hissed.

  Isla winked and, turning on her heel, walked down the aisle to join Father Justin in the chapel’s vestibule. A tiny space, it was unadorned and austere. It smelled vaguely of mold, from the lichen that had formed in thin lines between the cracks of the stone. Somewhere overhead, something dripped.

  Father Justin, who had been staring out the main door into the hall, turned.

  His expression was surprisingly pleasant. “Hello, child. I thought that, given…your little outburst, it would be appropriate for us to have a talk.”

  “Of course. I am sorry,” Isla said. An errant gust blew, and she shivered.

  “No doubt.” Father Justin’s tone, unlike his pleasant expression, was difficult to interpret. “I thought we could use your father’s study,” he said, leading her out into the hall. Isla nodded, and let herself be led.

  She wondered where her father was; she realized now that she hadn’t seen him in the chapel. Apple had been there, half asleep and with dark smudges under her eyes from a night spent carousing. The young, strapping bowman sitting next to her had looked equally worn out. He was one of Tristan’s men, one of the large contingent that had stayed behind when Tristan himself had left.

  Well, Isla mused, she was glad that her stepmother was having a good time. No wonder her father had made himself scarce; he’d probably spent the night in the stables with his horse and wouldn’t have the courage to show his face before dinner. Or maybe he’d slept with the pigs, in their sty; they were friendly enough creatures and he’d done that before, too, emptying his flask as he regaled them with his various woes. Sometimes he sang.

  “What, child?” Father Justin asked, seeing her change in expression.

  “I was merely wondering what had become of my father,” she replied.

  “He did, I believe, imbibe a powerful draught last night for his stomach ailments.” Later, Isla would wonder how Father Justin had known that. At the time, following him down the shadowed main hall, she took his explanation for granted.

  He stopped at the door to her father’s study, a great iron-banded thing. Producing a key, he fitted it into the equally massive iron lock that protected the room within. She stepped inside.

  T
he Church of the Renunciates, as their faith was officially known, taught that there were two gods: the Light One, and the Dark One. The Light One, or the good god, was the force for good described in scripture and the creator of the spiritual realm—and of the soul. The Dark One, meanwhile, was the creator of the physical realm. Which meant that, therefore, the physical realm and everything in it, including the human body, was tainted with sin.

  Thus, the belief that the sexual act in all its forms was irredeemably evil: it stemmed from the urge of lust, a wholly physical urge and thus one stemming from the Dark One’s influence. The most devout members of the church refused to even eat anything that might exist as the byproduct of sexual reproduction, such as meat. They lived instead on a vegetarian diet, some even eschewing things like dairy products and honey due to their association with the tainted animal. In order for a cow to produce milk it must first give birth—and have been given birth to.

  The church taught that all human beings, even women, contained within them a divine spark: an element of the Light One trapped within their fleshly prisons. While the Dark One sought constantly to tempt them away from realizing this, the Light One fought to save them. Through some kind of agreement between the Gods, the precise nature of which was not understood, they produced an offspring: the Mediator. Made from spirit and flesh, he was sent down from the heavens—or up from Hell, depending on how one looked at it—to help mankind realize his true nature and, in so doing, achieve freedom from the cycle of rebirth and thus salvation.

  The Prince of the Gods, the Mediator, was worshipped both as principal god and savior, a combination of spirit and flesh who, for a brief time, had served as the Light One’s emissary on earth and whose teachings should be regarded evermore as essential to salvation. The church further held to a doctrine of reincarnation, whereby human beings were born into this world of pain, suffering, and corruption over and over until they achieved total liberation—liberation coming, naturally, in the form of renouncing one’s connection to the world.

  An especially helpful form of renunciation was giving all of one’s property to the church. If one felt that there might be a better recipient, or that one wished to provide for one’s children rather than provide worthy men like Father Justin with new robes, then one clearly wasn’t liberated. Occasionally, some poor fool claimed that following the Mediator’s teachings had led him to a different result than whatever the church taught. Such individuation was…discouraged.

  “Sit down, please.” Father Justin gestured toward a chair.

  Isla sat.

  Father Justin, however, did not sit but continued to pace around the room. Isla listened as he laid out the importance of listening respectfully during services, of appreciating the vital nature of the Mediator’s teachings, and so forth. So far, this was exactly what Isla had expected to hear and she felt comfortable enough.

  She found herself examining her father’s study: the old, pitted desk, the bookshelf with its row of ledgers, most of which she’d filled out for the past few seasons, the flagstone floor, the massive fireplace. Someone had set a fire, which surprised her; she didn’t think anyone had been in here yet this morning. Wood was dear, and people didn’t light fires for no reason. Even in the wealthiest households, fuel—for cooking, lighting, heating, and all manner of other things—was carefully rationed. But this fire burned merrily and had, judging by its well-established nature, been burning for some time.

  Isla found herself mesmerized by the leaping flames as Father Justin lectured on, about the importance of prayer and contemplation—especially for women, who were the original temptresses. Isla had never understood how that was supposed to work. Rarely in her life had she seen a woman throwing herself at a man, but practically every time she left her room she saw some poor woman being chased around. She thought about the barmaids at the tavern in the village, serving tankards of ale with fixed smiles on their faces.

  The lock on the door clicked shut with a loud snap. Isla’s head shot up, and her eyes met the priest’s. They were watery, and rimmed with red. Deep within their gray depths, fire lurked. She saw it now, as she’d never seen it before: the fanaticism. The insanity.

  “And now,” he said, the sheer calmness of his tone searing terror into her heart, “you’re going to do your penance.”

  But he doesn’t even like women, was Isla’s fractured thought.

  She tried to get up and, striking as quickly as a snake, he slapped her. Her head snapped to the side as she fell back into the hard wooden chair. He slapped her again, hard enough to make her ears ring. No, she realized, hit her outright. She tasted blood inside her mouth, and one of her molars was loose. She tried to call out, but no sound came.

  The priest smiled. “Even if there were anyone to hear you, child, which there is not, and even if there were anyone in this house with enough spine to defy me, which there is not, no one could get in here fast enough. They’d need to break down that door with an ax and by then”—his smile deepened—“we’ll be done.”

  He was right—that was the worst part. She knew, in her bones, that Father Justin spoke nothing but the truth. She was trapped in her father’s study, in her own home, with a madman. And she had no one to blame but herself. Blithely, she’d assumed that the priest had only wanted to lecture her. After all, what else could he possibly have wanted? She was no one! And priests…didn’t do things like this!

  “What…” she managed finally, the words coming painfully through swollen lips, “do you want?”

  “For you to tell me what I want to know, you disgusting little whore.”

  She just stared at him.

  “About your lover. The demon.”

  “He’s not—”

  The priest hit her again. Isla was perilously close to losing consciousness, and she fought against the gray haze that threatened to envelop her. The Gods only knew what he’d do to her if she passed out. Isla had never been so scared in her entire life; she was too scared to even register how scared she felt. All this time, she’d thought she’d known what fear was: when her mother died, when Jasmine died, when her father remarried a mysterious and much younger woman. When Tristan Mountbatten turned his dark gaze on her for the first time. When he’d glamoured her. She’d had her heart in her mouth then, but none of that—none of it—could hold a candle to this.

  And only the day before, she’d thought she’d never be scared again.

  At that precise moment, she would have done almost anything to see Tristan walk through the door—and she didn’t even know why such a thing should be, when she hated him so. She couldn’t explain her feelings, even to herself. All she knew was that Tristan, if not a known quantity, was at least…himself. Nothing intimidated him.

  She touched her fingers to her lip, shock warring with disbelief. As much pain as she was in, some part of her couldn’t actually believe that this was happening. She felt like she was floating near the ceiling, staring down at herself. This priest, this authority figure, had her trapped in her father’s study and there was nothing she could do about it.

  She’d always felt safe in her own home, growing up, even when the people around her had begun having accidents. It had honestly never occurred to her that she might be hurt, that she might die. But, gazing across the room at Father Justin, she understood for the first time that dying was a real possibility.

  He turned his back to her, stoking the fire with an iron poker until sparks shot up. The poker was a wicked thing with a pointed hook on the end, meant to catch at the logs for ease of moving them around.

  Isla swallowed.

  His tone, when he spoke, was conversational. Pleasant. Almost cheerful. “Don’t dissemble,” he advised, his eyes still on the fire. “If you would be a Good Woman”—the church referred to its members as Good Men and Good Women, respectively—“then you must follow the rules.” He turned, his pale eyes fixing on her. “You’re very bad at following the rules, Isla. Very bad indeed. You laugh out loud in the middle of serv
ices, you find humor in inappropriate remarks at dinner. Now, all of this might be forgiven, seeing as how you’re young and naïve and a woman”—he sighed in mock regret—“if it weren’t for the fact that you’re also consorting with hellspawn.”

  He’s not my lover, she thought. “I’m not a whore,” she said quietly.

  Father Justin ignored her. He kept his place by the fireplace, toying idly with the poker as he talked. “That tells me, child, that your disregard of church doctrine is quite intentional—and that your place in Hell is assured. But you can save your soul if you tell me what I want to know: where your lover is now, what business he’s on for the king and what his plans are for his hostage. The nephew of our true king,” he added, “the rightful heir to House Terrowin.”

  With those last words, Isla understood. This wasn’t about witchcraft, or demons, at all. This was about power. Father Justin might or might not believe in his church’s teachings on the nature of demons, might or might not believe in their existence, but he certainly believed in the divine right of kings. And in the gifts they bestowed on their favorites.

  “I don’t know where he is. And I don’t know anything about Asher.”

  Father Justin’s eyes widened fractionally at this mention of the boy’s given name, and Isla realized that she’d made a mistake. “You’ve spoken to him, then. You know him. Does he assist in whatever rites the duke practices, in his worship of the Dark One? In your lovemaking, perhaps?” he asked suggestively. He went on, in a honeyed tone, to make several suggestions so lurid as to be stomach-turning. Isla suppressed the urge to gag. That anyone could think of such things said, in her opinion, a great deal about their character.

  But she refused to give him the satisfaction of a response, only listened in silence and watched as he twirled the poker in the fire.