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

by P. J. Fox

  Isla’s stomach grumbled at the thought. “Actually no,” she admitted ruefully.

  “Walk back to the house with me? I haven’t eaten, either.”

  “Alright,” Isla said, although she really did need to get down to the dairy. But she wasn’t going to miss out on this opportunity. That Rowena wanted to talk to her filled her with hope. Even now. As she walked back down the path, visions of them reconciling danced in her head. She’d be gone, soon, and so would Rowena. In a few short weeks, they’d only be able to communicate by letter. Perhaps for years.

  It was a fact of life that women married and moved away and men took service with foreign lords. That Isla had kept her family together this long was rare. Even if Hart did come north with her, she doubted that they’d see much of each other. Certainly not as much as they did now. Darkling Reach was a huge place, and he might be sent to any part of it. Moreover, as Tristan’s wife, Isla would have her own responsibilities—to him and to the castle. Even if Hart remained at Caer Addanc, depending on his rank, they might not even eat dinner in the same hall.

  She stole a quick glance at Rowena. No, their days of easy camaraderie—such as they were—were coming to an end. Families, like the manors they lived on, moved to the seasons. And her family was splitting up, perhaps forever. She turned her eyes back to the path.

  “I was coming to find you,” Rowena said. “But I found John and Silas instead. I went to the spinning shed next, but you weren’t there either.” There was a note of humor in Rowena’s voice, and for a few minutes the easy feeling between them returned and it was almost like old times. Isla smiled to herself as Rowena gave her opinion of Silas and John. The former was handsome but too opinionated; the latter, loyal but in strong need of retirement.

  Around them, voices called out and hammers rang as the manor worked. It was a hive of activity like Isla had rarely seen, and she felt again that strange-sweet pinch at her heart. She wasn’t needed here anymore. If she ever had been. The world of a Morvish manor was, of necessity, self-contained. The bandits that Silas had killed were probably decent men, after their own fashion; the woods were full of men, and women, and even sometimes children who robbed and killed just to get enough to eat. The high walls that enclosed Enzie Hall, and every manor, were as much for protection from them as from an actual enemy invader.

  No Chadian army or northern barbarian was as desperate as the man who’d lost his farm to war or taxes. And while the king was doing his best to see that those who deserved to be so were resettled, the kingdom was in turmoil and progress would take years. If it ever came at all. Many factions, including the strongest faction of all, the church, opposed progress and had no desire to see the manorial system change. The yeoman farmer, who owned his own land, was a threat; church revenues came, in large part, from church-owned land. Church-owned, and serf-farmed.

  They passed the blacksmith’s stall, the heat from the forge baking Isla’s skin from six paces distant. The blacksmith’s apprentice stood at the bellows, working them back and forth at a measured pace to keep the coals burning at a consistent temperature. The blacksmith labored, his hammer ringing out. Sparks flew, as he slowly flattened a lump of iron into a dangerous-looking plow blade.

  Sparks flew, and Isla gasped from the sudden increase in heat. She didn’t know how Adon, the blacksmith, stood a work environment that surely made the fires of Hell seem preferable. Turning, Adon yelled at his apprentice to keep the bellows steady. The bellows, a massive double-chambered contraption standing as high as Adon, were both the most vital part of the forge and the most difficult to manage. A complicated system of weights and pulleys kept each chamber open to a certain degree, depending on the air flow that was desired. Swords were forged at one temperature; plow blades another.

  The apprentice mumbled an apology and Adon turned back to his work.

  Isla and her sister walked on.

  There was so much to do between now and the onset of true winter. Just thinking of it all in her mind left Isla feeling overwhelmed. Food had to be preserved, so they’d all have something to survive on. Meat and fish would be smoked, dried, or salted. Vegetables would be pickled with vinegar; fruits would be dried or candied. On other, richer estates, meat was packed in oil or brine to preserve its flavor; dried meats were spiced, to compensate for the flavor they’d lost. Spices, too, helped to mask the ever-present tang of salt that Isla had grown to associate with the colder months.

  She’d spent more than one winter night gnawing on a leather-tough piece of meat in front of the fireplace while a storm raged outside and rain blew in through the window slits. Rudolph’s family’s manor, Cavanaugh Moor, was famous for its smoked meats. Smoking imparted a delicate flavor to both meat and fish, as well as leaving it tender enough to chew without fear of losing a tooth. But smoking required wood for fuel, a precious commodity in even the wealthiest of houses. Drying was a cheaper alternative, especially when trout caught in the river could be gutted and laid on the rocks at the shore to dry.

  But there had been little enough hot, dry weather this summer, a summer that had felt more like a fall—and now that had left them with a fall that felt more like a winter. Some in Ewesdale saw the poor weather as a sign of disfavor from the Gods; to others, it was a premonition of worse disaster. Still others claimed that nature herself was out of balance although these naysayers were largely ignored; everyone knew that the Gods, and not the winds, controlled the weather. Their talk of changing tides had been outlawed by the church as heresy. The good weather would return if and when the people of Morven became sufficiently pious. Or, barring that, when a new king sat the throne. The current king was no friend of the church; Piers Mountbatten, like his ostensible brother, saw it as nothing more than a hive of corruption and deceit.

  Enzie Hall had a roof made from overlapping slates, but its outbuildings were all wattle and daub covered with thatch. Birds nested in it; mold grew on it; squirrels and other rodents nestled in it, pissing and shitting and fucking. The manor grounds stank to high heaven, even in this brisk wind. A carter put down his wheelbarrow, unlaced his breeches and unleashed a stream of urine against the kitchen wall. A squirrel gnawed on a cabbage at his feet. Each, about his own pressing business, ignored the other.

  Isla and Rowena exchanged a look. And then, simultaneously, both exploded into gales of laughter. Around them, life continued on as usual.

  Rowena opened the kitchen door, and Isla stepped inside. She got herself a piece of bread and a mug of ale, and sat down at the currently unused kitchen table. Between breakfast and lunch, not much happened in the average kitchen. The cook was probably out back having a smoke in the kitchen garden, and his underlings were off doing other chores until they were needed. They might be serfs, bound to the manor by duty and law and sworn to serve, but nobody had told them that.

  Rowena sat down opposite, with her own breakfast. Isla was almost surprised to see her eat, after all Rowena had carried on about staying trim for her wedding. She had some crazy idea in mind for a dress, Isla was sure. Undoubtedly one of which their father would not approve.

  Isla nibbled her cheese. It tasted alright, but the ale was sour. She watched as a mouse ran across the floor.

  “I am sorry,” Rowena said.

  Isla looked up. “Thank you,” she responded cautiously, mindful of what had happened last time they’d had this conversation. Rowena’s apology had been nothing of the kind. She waited to see if this time would be any different and, of course, it wasn’t. Rowena had done a remarkably good job of fulfilling Isla’s worst expectations, lately.

  “I realize,” Rowena continued, oozing the kind of mock-honeyed charm that Isla had grown to know so well, “that not everybody can be as happy as I am.”

  “I hope that you are happy,” Isla said sincerely.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What?”

  “Your tone seemed awfully…pointed, just now.”

  “No.” Isla tried to smile, and fai
led. She felt suddenly anxious. “I was trying to be nice. You’re my sister and I love you and I do want you to be happy.”

  Rowena sniffed, unimpressed. She hadn’t touched her breakfast. “I suppose you think you’re very superior, now that you’re marrying the duke.” She tried her own ale, made a face, and put the cup down. Isla wondered if Rowena was realizing, now, that marrying Rudolph would mean several more decades of drinking the same thin, sour Highlands ale. “But he wanted me first,” Rowena added. “And he would have married me, but for your interference. You should remember that. If he really loved you, Isla, he would have picked you first.”

  “And if he’d really loved you, he wouldn’t have chosen me!” Isla cried, and far more loudly than she’d intended.

  She’d had enough. She knew she shouldn’t let herself get so upset, not over something so cursedly stupid, but Rowena’s constant nitpicking was like the biting of a particularly pernicious gnat: what began as mere annoyance grew, through simple process of repetition, into unbearable agony. Rowena’s vanity was hardly a hidden attribute; she was undoubtedly soothing her own wounded pride at having been passed over, and nothing more. And yet, in that instant, Isla wanted nothing so much as to hit her. She stood up, determined to leave the table and end this fight before it had a chance to escalate. Which it would, if she knew Rowena. And herself.

  Rowena sniffed again. “I just mean that maybe you should think about that, the next time you’re kneeling down in front of him like a common whore.”

  Isla dropped her cup. It hit the table and rolled off the edge, onto the floor where it hit with a clatter. Isla didn’t notice. “What?” she breathed.

  “I followed you.” Rowena’s tone was accusing. “That first night, after you told me that you needed some air. I knew you were up to something.”

  “I care for him,” Isla said in a small voice.

  “You disgust me.” And from Rowena’s tone, Isla knew that she meant what she said.

  Isla stared at her across the table, at a loss. “But you care for Rudolph, surely you see that….” That when people loved each other, they wanted to be with each other. That there was nothing unnatural or wrong about desiring a man with whom she was in love. That she intended to marry. Did Rowena truly share no such feelings?

  “Rudolph,” Rowena replied icily, “cares for me. And so he respects me.”

  “And you don’t think—”

  “He wants me without my having to suck his cock.”

  “Rowena!” Isla put her hand over her mouth. “I did this for you,” she whispered. “For you. Because you wanted to marry Rudolph. And now you’d begrudge me even a little bit of happiness? Why? You got what you wanted—why is it so important that I be miserable?”

  Rowena threw her cup at Isla’s head. “I hate you!”

  And with that, she was gone.

  Isla sat back down at the kitchen table, alone in the silent room. A few minutes later, the cook came back in from wherever he’d been. He grunted in acknowledgement, didn’t question her presence, and evidenced no surprise at finding the lady of the house sitting sobbing in his kitchen. Without further comment, he began preparing the night’s roast. After awhile, he handed her a ratty length of towel to use as a tissue. She blew her nose gratefully.

  They were held hostage to the seasons, all of them. People grew and changed and grew apart, sometimes. And changed into different people: from themselves and from each other. Hart and Isla, over the years, had discovered more and more in common. But Rowena, the sister she’d loved almost like a child, and for whom she’d given up so much, clearly couldn’t see her for dust. She resented Isla for the sacrifice that she’d made; but whether for the fact that she’d made it or for the fact that it hadn’t turned out to be much of a sacrifice Isla wasn’t sure. There was a phrase in the Highlands: the grass is always greener on the other side of the garden. Perhaps Rudolph had looked better from a distance, a knight from a ballad that she could dream about at night rather than a flesh and blood man standing right in front of her. And perhaps Tristan seemed more desirable now, now that she’d witnessed how he treated Isla.

  That it was all a sham wouldn’t matter nearly as much to Rowena as it did to Isla, a bit of irony that was not lost on her.

  The cook had propped open the door to the kitchen gardens to let in some air. The dog, wagging happily, trotted in its spit cage. The wheel moved beneath its paws and, by an elaborate mechanism turned the long, wicked-looking bar of iron bisecting the fireplace. The dogs, mongrels most of them, loved the spit cage and vied with each other for the chance to use it. Dogs, Isla decided, were strange. But not so strange as men. Dogs, at least, knew that they were trotting endlessly to no purpose. They did it for the sheer pleasure of trotting; they didn’t care that the wheel never moved. Only men pretended that their labors meant something.

  The seasons turned; the spit turned. The kitchen was beginning to overheat. In an hour or two, the air would be so thick with smoke and sweat that breathing it would be nigh on unbearable.

  FIFTY

  Isla went in search of her father. The kitchen was getting too hot and besides, she had to face him sooner or later. She found him in his office, surrounded by ledgers and looking exhausted. He was alone. She sat down in the chair opposite without waiting to be asked and regarded him thoughtfully. He eyed her back, a good deal more warily.

  The fire crackled. The silence stretched. Finally, realizing that she wasn’t going to leave, he closed the ledger in front of him and sat back in his chair. “Hello, dear. What a pleasant surprise.”

  It was the first time they’d been alone together since Isla’s encounter with Father Justin. The earl hadn’t come to her room to check on her, or asked her how she was. No mention of the incident had passed his lips within her hearing. Isla only knew that he did know because Hart had eventually told her about their conversation. Hart, whom Isla felt like she’d barely seen.

  “Hello, Father,” she said.

  The earl made pleasant conversation for a few minutes, commenting on the lovely boar they’d had for dinner the night previous and obviously working himself up to something. He pointed out that the wind had been quite chill; Isla agreed. He ruminated on whether the fall hunting season would prove a bountiful one; Isla suggested that, given the paucity of food available over the summer, probably not. The cold, wet weather had made berries and grass and other things that animals ate rarer than usual and in consequence many of the forest’s offspring had died. There would be few yearling bucks, or fatted beavers.

  “I, ah….” The earl trailed off. “I wish,” he said, sounding pained, “that you’d do more to get along with Rowena.”

  “That I’d do more?” Isla blinked, unwilling to credit that she’d heard him right.

  “Well yes.”

  “You can’t be serious. I’ve bent over backwards to be nice to her, these past few weeks, and to overlook how she’s treated me. But she’s been a—a malicious hag!”

  “She’s doing the best she can. You, on the other hand…if you were only a little sweeter to her, dear, I’m sure she wouldn’t have to get so upset. Just be a little sweeter, a little more thoughtful.” He smiled encouragingly.

  His advice was so insidious; it was so easy to believe, as Isla had indeed been raised to believe by her family, that everything was her fault. And, indeed, that everything was her responsibility. Her father’s words tapped into the core of her own insecurities: that the manor was failing because she, Isla, was inadequate. That she was responsible for how everyone treated her and for holding up the entire manor on her shoulders. He’d spoken these same words before, or versions of them, over the years; they wormed into her, leaving her frightened and discouraged and faintly nauseated. And, above all, frustrated beyond the power of words to convey.

  “No,” she said firmly.

  “What?” He blinked.

  “I’ve been nothing but kind to Rowena her entire life—these past weeks included. She, on the other hand
, has been nothing but a spoiled brat.”

  “But,” he countered, his tone wheedling, “you must understand her position.”

  “Her position?”

  “She’s marrying Rudolph, and he’s….” The earl made a dismissive gesture.

  Isla’s cheeks flamed with a fresh rush of hot, ungovernable anger. She controlled herself only with great difficulty and when she spoke, her tone was grating. “She wanted to marry Rudolph. She specifically told me that she wanted to marry Rudolph, and that she had no interest in any other man. I sacrificed my own future, my own happiness, so that she could have what she wanted—as I always have. And now you’re asking me to give up just a little bit more of myself. When does it stop? When I give up so much that I vanish utterly?”

  “Don’t be melodramatic.”

  “I don’t see why I’m supposed to feel sorry for her!”

  “And besides, ah….” The earl fiddled with his quill. He looked uncomfortable. “Rowena tells me that you’re, ah, quite content with His Grace.”

  This was insupportable. “She did not!”

  The earl, who had never wanted daughters, poured himself a drink. “Rudolph is a nice enough boy, but he’s not rich. Barring some extraordinary feat of courage of which I don’t believe him capable, the best he can hope for is to inherit his father’s manor and populate it with a brood of his own.” Meeting Isla’s gaze squarely, he blinked. Peregrine Cavendish had these rare, startling moments of honesty sometimes; moments that proved, to Isla at least, that there was more going on inside his head than he chose to let others believe. If he weren’t such a weak man, he might have been a great one.

  “She wanted to marry him,” Isla repeated.

  The earl sipped his brandy. “Sometimes, getting what one wants isn’t everything one dreams.”

  Isla wondered if he was speaking from personal experience. He, like most of her family, had spent so long obsessing over what he didn’t have that he’d never appreciated what he did. Isla’s mother had loved him, and Hart’s mother had loved him; neither woman had gotten the treatment she deserved. Isla’s mother, for all her flaws, had meant well. She’d gotten a good deal more bitter over the years, because she’d been denied the love she needed. Denied the chance to be appreciated, in her own right, for her own unique qualities. Hart’s mother’s expectations had been much lower, given her station and position in life; but she, too, had been more of a distraction to the earl than a partner.