The White Queen: The Black Prince Trilogy, Book 2

by P. J. Fox

  His boot heel came down on the second candelabra, the wrought iron pole held upright by three feet cleverly shaped to look like gryphons’ legs. And with a second and equally loud crash, the candelabra fell. Only this time it didn’t fall to roll harmlessly across the floor; it landed against the edge of the map table, an enormous edifice made of old, dried wood that had just that morning been oiled. A fine eastern carpet covered the scarred and pitted surface. Wax flew and flames raced across it, consuming first the wool and then the wood beneath. Simon managed a high-pitched, wet screech.

  Fists started banging on the door as raised voices demanded entrance. Someone spat an oath and called that it was barred; seconds later, the demon heard the chop of an axe. Tristan’s own men were breaking in to rescue him. The demon glanced up at the door and bit off a muttered curse of its own. It had so little time and Simon, for one so old, was strong. He bucked and writhed like a wild horse and almost broke free.

  Tristan wore the knee-length tunic and fitted breeches common in the North, if a finer version of same. His tunic was loosely belted at the waist and from that belt hung a finely tooled sheath. With Simon still in a choke hold, the demon reached down with its free hand and grasped the hilt of the knife that protruded. It didn’t know the first thing about knives, but Tristan did, and something of bodily memory kicked in. It acted purely on instinct, without thinking, as though it had been training for this all its life. Which, in a sense, it had. Tristan had, and Tristan knew. Tristan, buried somewhere deep inside of him.

  He held the knife out at an angle and thrust it at Simon’s chest, angling it up so that it punched in just below the ribcage and into the old man’s heart. Simon continued to thrash for another minute—what seemed like an eternity—and then slumped down.

  The door flew open.

  The sight that greeted the men was terrifying. For a moment, no one moved. One of the men, afterwards, would remark that he felt like he’d caught a glimpse of Hell. The fire raged; somehow, the wood paneling had caught fire and the flames were just licking the ceiling. The furniture looked like it had been trampled on by an army. Reflected light glittered in the pool of wine on the floor. The fire in the grate still crackled merrily. And in the center of this crouched their lord, his hand on the dead body of his tutor.

  Except he wasn’t—didn’t look like their lord. Already, the demon knew, it was beginning to change. It could feel the changes, if not see them. Before long, if it wasn’t already, it would be obvious and the demon would be doomed. It was at its weakest now, its most vulnerable.

  If it didn’t escape, and rest, and feed, it would die.

  “My Lord!” It was one of his guardsmen, Brom.

  The demon opened its mouth to answer, to reassure the men that all was well, and realized it couldn’t. Its voice, its voice was wrong! They’d hear it and know. Trapped, the demon stared back at them. “His eyes,” one of the men hissed. “Look at his eyes!”

  “Who are you?” Brom demanded. “What are you?”

  The demon fled.

  EIGHT

  How it escaped the castle, in retrospect, it would never know.

  It knew only that some benevolent spirit had smiled upon it that night and that somehow, after what seemed like hours, it found itself stumbling through the woods with the burning keep behind it. The fire had spread, despite all efforts at containment, and barring some miracle the whole north wing might be lost. Which was, it realized as it tripped and landed hard against a fallen log, what had created sufficient confusion for it to escape.

  Tristan might be lord of Darkling Reach in all but name, but even the most dim-witted of men could see that something was wrong. That the lord wasn’t…quite himself. At the very least, under normal circumstances he would have been stopped and questioned. Someone would have demanded that he submit himself to his personal physician. Or, far worse, someone might have turned him over to the church.

  Even before Simon’s arrival, Tristan had started to darken. To change. But until that winter, he’d gone to church and paid homage to the gods as diligently as any man. If he had…other allegiances, then he’d allowed his subjects to ignore them. Made it easy for them to, in fact. There might be rumors, but there was no direct evidence. And rumors could be dismissed, especially when men wanted to dismiss them.

  This night, he knew, that direct evidence had been all over the room. His summoning circle had still been on the floor and plainly visible, despite the soot and mess that covered it. The candles he’d used in each quadrant were there too: beeswax dyed black with vinegar, crushed acorn paste and iron filings, sinister-looking and only used by practitioners of the dark arts. His athamae, a wicked-looking dagger with a black blade, had been in plain sight as well. Tristan’s men could hardly help but confront the evidence now, however loyal they were, and it only remained to be seen what they would do.

  The demon thought briefly, achingly of Brenna. Even now, some part of Tristan was still alive inside it and it knew that these were Tristan’s emotions it was having. The demon felt no emotions on its own—or, at least, not what a human being would recognize as such. It needed. It craved. But soon thoughts of Brenna, and of the fire raging behind it, were blocked out by that most basic need. A need shared by all creatures. Survival.

  It forced itself upright and pressed on.

  Somehow, it had to get to a place where it could rest. Recover. It could feel the changes working inside it, and knew it didn’t have much longer until it grew simply too overwhelmed to move. If that happened before it reached a safe hiding place, it would die.

  The demon understood the law of the forest; the demon might not be of this world but all worlds, in the end, were the same. The strong preyed on the weak; the weak died. Were man or beast to attack it right now, it would not survive. So it forced itself to put one foot in front of the other, even as it felt its legs begin to collapse beneath it.

  The moon had begun to set when the demon found the cave. Tristan’s fine robes were in tatters. Crouching, like an animal, the demon worked itself through the crevice in the rock. Some memory had surfaced, from deep within, of playing here as a child—and, later, of trysting here with Brenna. The demon reached forward to push back the curtain of lichen, knowing without knowing that a warm and dry space lay beyond. And indeed there it was: a narrowish tunnel opened onto a wide, bowl-shaped cavern that looked like a room. Could almost have been one, for how cleanly the rock had broken. There was no detritus, which would have warned of animals; but Tristan had left a jug of water and a wine skin.

  The demon broke the seal and drank thirstily, aware as it did so of how disgusting it must look. How broken. The water wasn’t recent, and tasted flat and somehow sour. Idly, the demon wondered if the sour taste was lead; it might have leeched into the water, from the glaze on the jar. However, such things wouldn’t bother it—wouldn’t bother this body—now.

  Because Tristan Mountbatten, heir to the duchy of Darkling Reach and first of his name, was no longer strictly human. And once this night had passed, and the demon had made its first kill, Tristan Mountbatten would never be human again. Possession was a risky process, to be sure, all the more because it was so poorly understood. Those few demons who’d successfully made the transition hid themselves well and were reticent to speak, for obvious reasons. This world was an intolerant one.

  Contrary to what the church taught, a demon did not simply investigate its host and depart. The purpose of possession was not to corrupt the soul; demons were not, in fact, henchmen of Satan and did not exist solely to do that being’s bidding. If there was a Satan; the demon wasn’t sure. Demons were creatures like any other; they had their own agency and each demon was different. Some were “good,” as human beings understood the term. Some were not. But none, good or bad, acted according to human mores and values; those were as alien to them as they were to the bobcat, or the wolf.

  Demons, when they took human form, did so because they wanted to be human—to live as human men and w
omen, in this world. Their own plane, such as it was, offered none of the same attractions and a demon only had to serve a necromancer once, taking human form, to be seduced. Drinking wine, eating sweetmeats. The lure of the flesh.

  And above all, power.

  Demons craved power, even more so than men. And this was a world that rewarded that craving. Encouraged it. Ennobled it. Chivalry, ridiculous concept that it was, revolved around power: over other men. Over women. Over oneself. The demon hadn’t been the first to see its master’s dumb fumbling and think on how very unfair it was that so much should be denied it simply because the rules of the universe—rules it little understood, for all that it could manipulate them—denied it a concrete form.

  When a demon first possessed a human host, it took the initial step in a difficult and complex process that ultimately ended with the creation of a hybrid: a half-human, half-demon capable of regenerating and maintaining its form almost indefinitely. So long as it fed. The man-demon did not age, as mortals understood the term, although with time it could learn to grow and adapt. Some succeeded at doing so quite well while others never did. They grew to resent their human counterparts; despise them, even.

  To live as a demon in a human world was to live as an outcast. The demon didn’t understand that yet, but would come to. It would learn to live alone, to disguise its true nature from one and all. It would learn to hate, and to distrust. It would become both bitter and disillusioned with both men—and women—and with their so-called chivalry.

  And as time went on, it would turn inward. It would experiment on those around it, exercising its will simply because it could. Because it wanted to. Because it wanted to see what would happen. And whatever agenda it pursued, if it even pursued one at all, would be its own.

  But as it huddled in the cave, all that was in the future.

  As the demon curled up on the cave floor, its back pressed to the cave wall and its eyes closed as it tried to breathe through the pain—breathe at all—it wasn’t thinking these things. It was young, and new to the world, and it was hopeful. The stone felt cool on its overheated flesh, like a balm. There must have been a back vent to the cave somewhere, up in the darkness, because a breeze blew through that tasted fresh. It wicked away the sweat on the demon’s brow like it was drawing out a poison. And the demon, exhausted, slept.

  Inside it, changes were taking place. The demon was unaware of most of them, for the moment, because it was asleep for the first time in its life and because in truth it had little idea of what to expect. The demon had possessed Tristan in a moment of panic. It had considered the idea before, to be sure, but only in the abstractest of terms.

  What the demon did know was that the host could still reassert control—at least in theory—until the first full night had passed and the demon had fed. The demon wasn’t certain as to why these things, either of them, were so important. It didn’t make the rules under which it labored, any more than its human counterparts did.

  But once that threshold had been passed, the possession would be permanent.

  The demon would have to figure out how to live among men.

  The idea should have been daunting but, until exhaustion finally overtook it, all it could think about was how much pain it was in.

  When it woke, the pain was worse. And it smelled. It smelled disgusting. It never knew that any living being could smell so disgusting, and in that first moment of consciousness it hated itself. It struggled upright and then, head swimming, fell back against the floor of the cave. When it had fallen asleep, the breeze blowing through the cave had felt cool. Now, it felt like the blast of a furnace. The demon was drenched in sweat. And beneath that newest layer were others, dried to a film that stank of stress and fear. It wanted a bath desperately, but felt like no matter how hard it scrubbed at itself it would never be clean again. Its clothes hung in tatters, ruined beyond repair. Its hair was as grease-coated as if it had never been washed.

  It ran a finger through the matted tangle, and hissed in surprise. Without meaning to, it had somehow scored open its own scalp. Wondering, it lifted its hand up before its eyes. Its fingers, at once numb and tingling and wracked with bolts of agony had changed. It had grown claws. Actual claws, like a wolf’s, that curved down from its fingertips into short but wicked points. And those points glistened with blood. It turned its hand over, and over again, wondering. What was happening to it?

  Another spasm of pain wracked its body and it doubled over, spilling the contents of its stomach on the stone. Smelling the stench of its own effluence, it vomited again. In all its life it had never been so repulsed; had never imagined being so repulsed. This body was a torment! It wiped the back of its hand across its mouth without thinking and was doubly disgusted to see a film of bile and spittle there. Like a snail’s trail. It had shit itself, too.

  Was this what it meant to be human? Mucking around in a sink of its own filth as it hid from the outside world?

  The demon struggled to the mouth of the cave, hoping to be sick outside, and hissed in surprise. Its sensitive eyes narrowed. Bright, punishing sunlight streamed in through the underbrush. The demon pulled back. It had never been out in the sun, before. It was frightened of the sun. Necromancers, according to their own understanding of the universe, conducted their activities at night. It was believed that, with the coming of the sun, whatever bindings had been conducted lost their power. Ghosts raised from their graves were…erased, was the only word that came to mind, their consciences wiped clean like chalk from a slate. They lost their memories of their former selves.

  Demons lost whatever physical form had been granted them by their masters. The only way to protect oneself from such a catastrophe was to hide in the safety of a grave. One’s own grave, ideally, if one were a ghost. But any grave would do, in a pinch; a grave acted as a type of sanctuary. The demon, again, wasn’t sure why this would be. Although it would learn.

  It would learn a great many things, in the decades to come.

  It retreated into the shadows.

  With nothing else to do, it sat down next to its puddle of vomit and thought.

  It was hungry. Thirsty, too. It drank some more of the water and felt a little better, but was painfully aware that it had to feed—and soon. It needed the life force, the energy, of another living being. Typically all creatures, great and small, produced this life force for themselves. It radiated from them in an aura that the sensitive eye could see. Or See, if one was a necromancer and possessed the ability to use that—to most—hidden sense. Some auras were beautiful, reflecting the health of the beings they cloaked. And some were tattered, thin, signaling the onset of disease or some other problem. There were maladies of the heart and mind as well as of the body; both could be, in their differing fashions, equally deadly.

  The demon hadn’t seen these things, but Tristan had; it knew about them, because Tristan did.

  Tristan had been horrified, the first time he realized that one of his retainers was going to die. The man hadn’t shown any signs of sickness, in fact had given every indication of health, but the blue-green of his aura was tinged at the edges with a strange and unwholesome yellow. Gradually, this strange interloper began to eat into the rest until the man’s normal aura was all but gone. He’d begun complaining of stomach pains, and had difficulty holding down his food. And then he’d died. At Tristan’s request, his personal physician opened the man up—in direct violation of church law—and found a growth in his stomach the size of a grown man’s fist.

  But a demon was, to all intents and purposes, dead. Like a ghost. It had no aura of its own; it generated no life force. Rather, it had to feed on the life force of others, to constantly replenish its supply of what its host had produced naturally or it would wither and perish. Or, rather, its host would. It didn’t know what happened to the possessor, and it was in no rush to find out. Besides, the demon liked this body. This body, and the life it represented.

  It only knew what it knew from what it had read i
n books and overheard from its previous masters’ conversations. Demons were not encouraged to learn the science and art of possession, for obvious reasons. Although now, the demon realized, it could read all it wanted.

  If it could survive that long.

  A rodent of some sort darted in front of it and the demon acted without thinking, its claws sinking into the brown fur as it lunged forward. The rodent squealed and thrashed. The demon brought it, still struggling, to its mouth and began to eat. Joy warred with acute self-loathing as hot blood squirted into its mouth. It tasted wonderful.

  Minutes later, the demon sucked the marrow from the last of the tiny bones before spitting them out. It ate the entrails, too, savoring the salty flavor. And it thought to itself, I am repellent.

  Gone was the elegant man, ruler of his castle and all he surveyed. In his place was a slavering beast, crouched over a pathetic pile of fur and bones as mixed blood and spittle dripped from the corners of its mouth. It had no reason, no logic; it had only need. And fear, horrible fear. It had never been fearful before. It had been cautious, certainly: of Simon, and of the men like Simon who’d come before.

  But while it had thought itself a prisoner for decades—for its entire life—it had never before understood the term. Not truly. It was a real prisoner now: of its needs, of this wretched body. The physical form was so limited. The demon had never before understood how cramped, how small, it was—or what it felt like to only have four limbs. To only be able to see in one direction at one time. To have to turn around to see in a different direction. This new body was limber enough, from countless hours in the practice yard, but it could still only do so much. It was still…awful.