by P. J. Fox
The men gasped as one; it hadn’t occurred to any of them that of course the demon knew where they were without seeing them, they were as loud as love-struck bears. Instead, it seemed to them that he had eyes in the back of his head. Which, really, so much the better.
And, taking advantage of the guard’s startled reaction, he pitched himself forward onto the heavier man. Like a striking snake, his hand shot out and grabbed the club. The guard yelled. The demon was tall and broad-shouldered but nimble on his feet and he danced back now, out of range. Then, using the man’s own club against him, he pointed it forward like a staff. The man started screaming as his skin turned white and ice crystals formed on the surface of his eyeballs. His hands froze halfway to his face, and he stopped. Just stopped. His voice, so loud before, cut off with the finality of a slamming door. The demon reached out and, ever so gently, tapped him on the shoulder with the club. He shattered into a thousand fragments on the ground, like glass.
The demon looked down. That same terror-filled eyeball stared up at him.
The demon looked up. “Yes?” he asked.
The remaining guards, made insensible from terror, rushed forward. There came a time in every man’s life, the demon supposed, when sheer emotion outweighed what he supposed could be called common sense. As uncommon as it apparently was. And that, he theorized, was when most men died. As these men would die.
Lifting the cudgel, he described a lazy arc. Almost a half moon. The guards froze as one. Some of their poses were almost balletic. The demon, who moved with an unusual grace for one so tall, let his hand fall to his side and paused to admire his handiwork. “Only ten men,” he mused. “So…unflattering.” His eyes met the priest’s. Brenna cowered beside him, clutching his arm while he ignored her. “Or perhaps,” he added, “you can’t count higher than ten.”
He walked forward through the maze of men, tapping them each with his club and watching them crumble. “The club is such an inelegant weapon, don’t you think?”
Neither member of his audience replied.
“I much prefer the dagger, or even the sword. A refined weapon, the dagger.” He thrust the club upward with a sharp jab, piercing one of the guards between the ribs. If he’d still been alive, and the demon holding a blade, it would have pierced his heart. The movement was swift and efficient, without the frills so common to tournaments. The frills were fun to watch, he supposed, for the audience, but useless in combat. The true mark of a fighter was speed; speed, and precision.
The demon almost seemed to drift forward through the snow, his movements lazy in their elegance, until without warning he struck too fast for the eye to follow. The guard had crumbled before his two person audience had time to register the fact that he’d moved.
And then he stood before them.
He and the priest were almost of a height. He shrugged slightly, as if to say, this wasn’t my fault. “I told them they could stay here,” he pointed out. Stay here, or leave with him. They wouldn’t have been the first thugs to switch teams after seeing on which side their bread was buttered. But as they’d most loyally decided to stay with the priest, to defend him against a man who hadn’t yet lifted his hand in anger, they could die with him too. And keep him company in Hell.
“You may plead, if you wish.” The demon kept the same, pleasant tone.
“Get it over with,” the priest growled.
Admiring the fact that he’d shown steel at last, the demon did. And then he turned to Brenna, who stood frozen in the snow. As frozen as the guards had been. This little picnic hadn’t gone quite as she’d planned, of that he was certain.
“Such a hypocrite, your friend the priest. He never believed that I had any real power, despite his claims of witchcraft. Or he would have brought more men—and, might I add, better. Instead he brought only what, given his understanding of the situation, he thought was necessary.” He trailed cold fingers down her equally cold cheek. Her skin was so soft. Like the downy skin of a peach. “He was a pawn in a political game that he, to his detriment, never fully understood.” He slid his fingers under her chin, tilting it up. “He wanted to torture me, a man he believed at heart was not dangerous. And you, dear, wanted to help him. How charitable of you. How truly, truly charitable.”
Brenna squeezed her eyes closed, trying to un-feel his touch.
He let his fingers drop. “I believe, dear, that our engagement is at an end.”
Her eyes flashed open, widened. She’d thought he was going to kill her. And he hadn’t. How little she understood him. He smiled. She must have seen something in that smile, something terrifying, because without another word she turned and ran.
The demon watched her go, stumbling clumsily through the snow. In his dreams, when he’d chased her and caught her and made her giggle, she’d bounded as gracefully as a dear. Who was this ungainly clod? Where had his perfect princess gone?
He stared at the same point in the trees for a long time, and then he lit his pipe.
ELEVEN
“Why didn’t you kill her?”
“It took you long enough.” The demon spoke without turning. He’d smoked the last of his tobacco and he was, if not precisely tired, then weary. He wanted to sit down, to rest. To not be outside in the snow, under a rapidly darkening sky. He might not need a fire, or a warm bed, but he missed his creature comforts. For what was a duke, and a knight, without them?
Brom, having finally arrived, set about to gathering wood and building a fire.
“Yes, yes,” he said, without looking up. He’d begun gutting the fish that Tristan had caught earlier. He flicked his knife with a practiced gesture and a small pile of entrails steamed in the snow. “Too late, boo and piss.” He reached for the next fish; he’d caught three, total, in the brook. “Stop complaining. You did fine on your own. Besides,” he added, “I came as fast as I could. What with all the priests swarming over the castle, I was a little delayed.”
Tristan arched an eyebrow at the soldier’s familiar tone. Still, here he was, half-naked in the woods while his former betrothed ran around telling everyone that he was a demon. And a murderer, to be sure. He supposed that, given the unfortunate nature of the situation, he couldn’t stand on formality. He hadn’t even any smallclothes.
And besides, he rather liked Brom. After his own fashion. He, at least, had no intention of killing the man at the present moment. Unless he grew truly famished, and no other meals presented themselves.
“Why didn’t you kill her?” Brom asked again, skewering a fish and holding it over the fire. “You know she’ll run off, tattling. Probably already has,” he added, more to himself. And then, incredulously, “you’re not still—sentimental, are you?”
Tristan turned. “No,” he said truthfully. “I have…other plans for the lady.”
Brom looked speculative. “Well, in the meantime….” He worked the thought out in his head. “Couldn’t you have carried out your, er, plans here? She’s like as not gone straight back to the church. Who knows, she might even have sent a letter to the bishop.”
Tristan doubted it; Brenna could barely read. “Thank you, Brom, for pointing out the obvious. We haven’t known each other long, but already I’ve come to appreciate that ability as your foremost talent. And, to answer your question, no.”
“Oh, well then…”
“Cook your fish,” Tristan said irritably. Men. He’d been one of them for only a few days and already he was growing sick of them. He wanted to be alone. To have time to think.
He did have plans for Brenna. But first, he needed to get to Jansen’s. Among his sole retainer’s obvious observations was the one that he wasn’t safe. Here, or anywhere, but certainly not here. He had no weapon. He’d defended himself ably enough, earlier, but doing so had taken a great deal out of him and he’d have to feed sooner than he’d intended because of it.
He cast a speculative glance at Brom.
No, Brom was too useful to eat.
“There’s a cave about a half-mi
le from here,” Brom said casually, “a couple of the outlaws use it. You know, that group you’ve been after since Grass Month?” He spoke as if he were discussing the weather. Under his ministrations, the fish was beginning to crisp.
Tristan turned sharply. “All this time, you knew?”
Brom shrugged. “One of them’s my brother in law.”
“And yet you tell me this now.”
“I hate my brother in law.”
A few minutes later, Tristan disappeared into the forest. If it was a trap, then, he could handle that. Even as tired as he was.
And as he walked, he thought.
The pain, that first night, had been terrible. The breakbone fever of his childhood had, in comparison, felt like the soft caress of a Chadian whore. He could most liken it, he decided, to being drawn and quartered. Slowly. While simultaneously being burned at the stake. And without the poppy draught that was sometimes given by sympathetic guards.
He wondered now if the sensation of burning hadn’t been his humanity burning away; and what did that make him now?
What was he, exactly? There was no analog to him in the fairy books. Perhaps the closest was the lich. The living dead. A corpse that fed upon its own for survival. He’d seen pictures of liches, growing up; or rather, artist’s depictions of them. As he doubted very much that any of the artists in question had seen a lich, certainly not and lived to tell the tale, the depictions had been fanciful. And in them, naturally, the liches had been terrible creatures: ugly, deformed, their flesh rotting off their too-white bones as they stumbled forward with hands outstretched. Mindless and pathetic. Even if, in the stories his nurse had told him as a child, back in his old room while he hid under the covers, the lich had always stumbled faster than its victims had run.
And to be sure, the lich was an it. It had no thoughts, no feelings. No free will of its own. It lived, if one could even call it that, to feed. Feeding was its only impulse. It had no needs; no urges; no feelings and certainly no friends.
Why then, he’d wondered, should liches congregate in groups? They were always shown attacking villages en masse, rising out of their graves or up from the battlefields where they’d fallen and converging in a herd. Almost like demented cattle. And the still-living shrieked and ran and argued amongst themselves while they were slowly devoured, one by one.
Was he a lich?
He wouldn’t decay. And yet he could reason, if not feel; something of which, at least according to his nurse, a lich was assuredly not capable. He thought of himself, he decided, not as some graveyard specter but as a man. He was a man, in a sense. He had Tristan’s memories, if not his mind. His soul. Tristan’s soul had died that first night; what he’d felt, or thought he’d felt, when he’d seen Brenna had been echoes. Like the light from a star that has long since gone out, there was an illusion of being. Nothing more.
He was Tristan, but he wasn’t.
Brenna had been right about that much, at least. He was Tristan’s body, and Tristan’s memories, and Tristan’s education and Tristan’s life experience. He’d gained all those things, when he’d gained his current form. But what he hadn’t gained, what was gone forever, was the essence that had made Tristan, Tristan. The church was right about one thing: the soul left the body after death. Even were a man’s corpse to be reanimated the second, the split second after he died, whatever light shone in those eyes would not be his.
Tristan, the original Tristan, was gone. It remained only to decide what the demon would do with his own life, now that he finally had a body of his own. As Tristan, at least, he had some measure of power. Of control. He could, if not heal this land then at least not abandon it. And he could learn. Learn who and what he was—and what he needed to do to protect himself. As any other man, it would take him years to gain the power, the security he so desperately needed. If he ever did.
No, he decided, he would remain Tristan.
He had to.
And he wanted to.
He saw the light flickering at the mouth of the cave. It was a much bigger cave than the one he shared with Brom, and the entrance was far more accessible. What made it hard to detect was that, from most angles, it was protected by a larger outcropping of the same granite. The cave was, evidently, accessed from the side. A man riding by on horseback wouldn’t notice it, unless he already knew where to look. Tristan only saw it now, because of the fire. And because his senses were not, he knew, those of an ordinary man.
He crept forward on silent feet. Inside, he could hear laughter. They were drunk; so much the better.
He was hungry.
TWELVE
They arrived at Jansen’s doorstep a week later.
Jansen, taking one look at Tristan, let him in. The manor house was a small one, but snug and tastefully appointed. Jansen’s family wasn’t rich, but they were more than comfortable and, more importantly for them, they knew how to shepherd their resources. No scion of this house had gone hungry during the winter months, or lacked for fuel.
Jansen’s wife kept the place in excellent repair, too. When Tristan came in, she was sitting by the fire next to Jansen’s revolting old grandmother. The crone narrowed her eyes at Tristan, and spat. Jansen’s wife, horrified, told her to apologize. The crone spat at her.
“Ah, family.” Jansen laughed, not in the least put out.
But as glad as he’d been to see Tristan, and as much as he’d welcomed him in with neither question nor comment, a measure of shock still shone in his eyes. Tristan’s appearance was, he knew, bad. But Jansen knew better than to ask questions in front of an audience, especially not this one. So he set about first making Tristan comfortable and Tristan, with Jansen’s permission, sent Brom to the kitchen for something to eat.
Still, questions burned unasked in his friend’s eyes. Jansen Trion might be easy, but he was no fool. He made no remark, either, on the fact that Tristan had arrived with neither horses nor luggage. Word of what had happened at the castle had, no doubt, reached them.
Calling for more wine, he gave some to the crone and then poured a second cup for Tristan.
They sat together in silence.
Jansen was a tall, blond-haired man with square shoulders and a square face. His jerkin strained over his barrel chest. He’d put on some weight over the years, but he was still as solid as a rock. That wasn’t fat under his jerkin, but slabs of hard muscle. He might be an earl, but Jansen liked to take his turn at the forge along with his men and was an excellent blacksmith. He’d grown a beard, too; it suited him. He rolled his eyes at the crone, who glared. “She came to live with us this fall. Which you’d know, if you ever visited.”
Tristan said nothing. This enforced small talk was painful. Jansen let the matter drop.
Tristan glanced at the crone; she was making the sign against evil. She’d lost most of her teeth at some point, and her lips puckered in a truly hateful expression. He returned her glare blandly. He could only wish that, covered in mud and standing in a puddle of melted snow, his clothing in tatters, he didn’t look quite so ridiculous.
Jansen’s pretty young wife stood up. “Mother Guenna, why don’t we go into the other room.” She smiled encouragingly. Mother Guenna spat again. Jansen, who was of an age with Tristan but looked older, had managed to marry the soul of patience. She was a thin, willowy girl—and truly a girl, at that—who wore her white-blonde hair pinned back in a simple bun. Her eyebrows, a shade darker, framed a delicate oval face. She had a, for lack of a better term, somewhat bovine quality about her. Her eyes, which were clear of guile, were also clear of suspicion. Or much else, for that matter. Still, she smiled at Jansen with a mixture of shared humor and simple devotion. She’d either gone into this marriage willingly, or learned to be willing.
Jansen smiled back. “Tristan and I will speak privately, now, and join you later for dinner. Please have refreshments sent to my study.”
“Mother Guenna,” the girl said, “wouldn’t you like to embroider with me in the solar?”
“That’s enough, Mother Guenna.”
“Evil!” the crone cried.
The girl put an arm around her shoulder and led her, rather forcefully, from the room. Tristan was surprised to see that she had such strength. Then again, she’d need it to survive bearing the kind of children that Jansen was apt to give her. He was twice her size, easily. Tristan wondered briefly how he mounted her without killing her. That she was still here stood as testament to his having found some way. Perhaps he was a tender lover. Perhaps she rode him. Tristan’s interest was academic; he didn’t care. The last thing he wanted to ponder, truly ponder, was love in any form. To think about love was to remember what he, himself, lacked. Would forever lack.
How, he wondered, could he miss something he’d never experienced?
“She claims she has the Sight,” Jansen volunteered.
“She is a sight,” Tristan replied.
“Indeed.” Jansen gestured. “Come with me,” he said.
He led Tristan into a small, plainly if comfortably appointed study. Tristan took a seat without being asked. Jansen fed more wood into the fire himself; he’d never, Tristan remembered, been the kind to stand on ceremony. Where some men would sit by a cold hearth until they froze to death rather than help themselves, so insecure were they in their stations.
Brushing off his hands, he sat down in the chair opposite Tristan’s. There were two chairs in the study, both placed at angles toward the fireplace. Behind the massive desk where Jansen did his accounts, he’d placed a bench. The tapestries hanging on the walls were plain, but well made. Jansen himself wore a jerkin and breeches that were plain, but well made: the jerkin of leather, the breeches of wool, and the blouse under the jerkin a finely woven flax. Tristan suspected the hand of the new bride.