by P. J. Fox
Were Asher truly Tristan’s son, he could have occupied no more celebrated a position.
And Isla wasn’t entirely certain, as she once had been, that Asher wasn’t Tristan’s son. She still remembered that afternoon in the glen, when Tristan had nearly killed Rowena. He’d referred to Asher, then, as his child. Might it not make sense for a man in Tristan’s position, beset on all sides by danger and only recently the brother of the king, to hide his son? To protect him from danger? Piers was still a new king, and before he’d claimed the throne he and Tristan had been rebels. If they’d lost their gambit, then they’d have been executed as traitors.
She knew, of course, that Asher was supposedly the son of Brandon Terrowin; but children, as Tristan himself had pointed out, were often mistaken for one another. And while the child’s—at least theoretical—paternity had never wavered, the identity of his mother had ever been in doubt. A rather unusual reversal of circumstances, to be sure.
She looked up, and caught Tristan staring at her. His eyes were like glowing coals. He knew what she was thinking, of course; he shared her thoughts. And here she’d been, woolgathering in the middle of her own wedding feast. A feast at which, admittedly, she seemed to be the least important participant.
“You would be pleased,” he asked, “if he were?”
Isla considered the question. “Yes.”
“He’s fond of you.”
“And I of him.”
“What are you two whispering about?” Arvid demanded. “There’s been entirely too much talking at this wedding, and not enough kissing!” Banging his fist down on the table, he began to demand a kiss. Another Northern custom that Isla found confusing. But, like Arvid, oddly endearing. The North was, slowly but surely, beginning to reveal itself to her.
Tristan kissed her, chastely, on the lips.
“Well come on, that’s how I kiss my grandmother!”
“Use your hand,” Hart advised.
“I’ll use you.”
The earl cleared his throat. “Ah, yes, well.”
Asher bent down between them, refilling their shared cup. It was a massive thing, the cup itself held aloft by two intertwining dragons. Tiny rubies had been set in their eye sockets. Asher was a tall child, for his age, and strong from his practice with bow and sword; he held the large ewer easily. He seemed to enjoy, too, the act of serving.
Isla didn’t understand his enthusiasm; she’d waited on others her whole life and never felt anything but miserable about the experience. But then again, she’d never been treated with either dignity or respect. A woman in a man’s world, she’d always been an outsider. A pariah, at points. Not like Asher, who occupied a secure and definite position within his own world.
Rowena met her gaze. She, having no servant of her own, was sharing with Callas. “Don’t you wonder who his mother is?” she asked acidly.
“What do you mean?” Isla felt stupid, caught off guard.
“Don’t you worry that he’s still keeping her, whoever she is, in some hamlet somewhere? Or perhaps in an apartment in the city, where he can visit her at his leisure? Or perhaps”—Rowena grinned wickedly—”even in this castle?”
“No,” Isla said.
“She could be anyone.”
Asher fixed Rowena with the full force of his child’s glare. His words were clipped, in an effort to suppress his own rage. And, no doubt, shame. “I know who my mother is.”
“Ah, yes, that your father slipped into the queen apparent’s bed and—”
“That is enough, Rowena.” Isla would spare the child this if she could, although it was already too late. And for Rowena to do this now, marring an otherwise joyous occasion with her venom…was she trying to hurt Isla by hurting Asher? Using an innocent child as her dupe? Had she really sunk that low?
“Oh, come on,” Rowena snapped, “no one really believes that Brandon Terrowin is—or was—his true father.” Her gesture in Asher’s direction managed to convey realms of disgust. “I mean look at him. A hostage who serves at his captor’s table? Who has a bow finer than the average earl’s and a pair of hunting dogs to call his own?”
“What he has, and does not have,” Tristan said acidly, “is no concern of yours.”
“In the South, a bastard would not be seen serving at table. It wouldn’t be fit.”
Arvid turned to her. “In the North, a child is legitimate when he’s claimed by his father. We need no fat priest, waving his hands in the air and chanting, to know the truth of things.”
This stopped Rowena in her tracks.
“Ah,” the earl began again, “yes, well, this brings me to the thought I had earlier.” He hadn’t spoken to Isla—hadn’t spoken to either of them, at least not directly—since the wedding. Since he’d told them both that he’d washed his hands of her. “I’ve discussed the situation with Apple and decided that the best thing for us would be to leave early on the morrow.”
Arvid nodded slowly. “I can see why you’d want to, after your daughter has embarrassed you so badly.” The earl bristled; clearly, he didn’t consider that it was Rowena who was in the wrong. “If I were you, I’d want to beat her into unconsciousness, hurl her broken body in the lake and then jump in after her. But what you’re proposing is foolish. Did you not study the skies earlier? There was a ring around the sun; that means ice crystals are forming.” He paused. “The snow god is coming.”
Isla, too, had observed the cloud of haze. The skies had been clear, with nary a cloud in sight, but she wasn’t from the North and this man was. If he said that snow was coming, she trusted his judgment.
“Arvid is right,” Tristan said, surprising them all. “You should wait. However uncomfortable you find the experience. That is,” he added, “if you want to survive.”
“Survive?” The earl seemed to have trouble crediting the idea. “Survive?”
“Aye.” Arvid had put down his cup, and spoke in sober tones. Indeed seemed, with the advent of this discussion, entirely sober. Which frightened Isla most of all. “It’s simply too late to travel more than locally. Far too late to chance the mountain passes.”
“But we need to get home.” The earl looked aggrieved.
“Then you should have left on schedule, and made better time.”
Apple touched her husband’s arm. For the first time, she looked nervous. Which made perfect sense: nothing had ever interested Isla’s stepmother so much as her own comfort. Anyone, Isla reflected sourly, who’d go so far to secure it as to lie down with a wretched waste of life like the earl, letting his old man’s hands paw her as his sour breath blew hot on her face, must truly be devoted. “Perhaps we should listen to them,” she said.
“I’m not staying here, in this accursed place, one moment longer than I have to!”
“If you’re caught out when a blizzard comes, you will die.”
“Then I’ll die,” the earl replied, clearly not believing a word of these warnings. “Better to die, out of doors and with the Gods, then remain cooped up here with the likes of you.”
And then, right on schedule, another course arrived.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Tristan turned his head, his eyes meeting hers. An unspoken communication passed between them. Not because of the ring, in this case, but because they knew each other well. Well enough to understand each other at times like these.
His expression was…while never gentle, softened somehow. “You should have eaten,” he said.
“I couldn’t. I was too nervous.” Was still nervous. About everything.
Their conversation was pitched low, for themselves alone. No one else was paying attention, anyway: too many cups of wine and samplings of rich, spice and fat-laden food had taken their toll. Roast suckling piglet stuffed with minced pork, egg yolks, cheese and chestnuts, venison in pastry crust, roast chicken glazed in wine, chicken in pastry crust topped with sugar and rosewater, salmon roasted with pine nuts, apple-raisin pudding, a soufflé made with pureed peas, pears in wine and spices, elderf
lower cheesecake.
And more. She’d forgotten all the dishes. Some she’d recognized, if only vaguely; she knew what a cheesecake was, although she’d never seen one made with elderflower. But some were as foreign to her as if she truly had fallen down a hole and ended up in Boll the Goblin King’s realm.
Tristan smiled slightly, more a ghost of the expression than the thing itself. “Am I so repellent to you, that you’d dread my touch?”
He was half-teasing, half-tormenting her. They’d never entirely escaped the cat and mouse dynamic of their first few interactions. He couldn’t help himself; like Mica, it was his nature.
“I don’t—know what to expect.” She didn’t just mean as a maiden on her wedding night.
“No one does.”
She touched the ring on her hand. Not the ring he’d given her the night before, but the ring he’d given her at their betrothal. She wore it still. Because he’d asked her to; all he’d ever had to do was ask. And now here she was, married to a man who’d killed his previous wives. Who might very well plan on killing her, tonight. All she had to go on was trust: trust of a man who’d never revealed his true motives. For anything.
Who by his own admission felt no tenderness toward her.
Felt nothing at all.
He held out his hand, palm up, his fingers unfurling in a curiously graceful gesture. She stared down at his waxen skin. His claws. Curving and wicked, the skin surrounding them tinged with blue. She’d seen such a color, once: on the old blacksmith, who’d died. At Enzie, years ago, before their current man was hired. He’d been famous for his temper and his heart had given out, finally, after spending an afternoon yelling at his apprentices. He’d gone back to his rooms, which were above the forge, and there he’d died. Because he was unmarried and lived alone, his apprentices lodging in the forge itself, he hadn’t been found until the next morning.
And when he’d been rolled over, the skin on his face, where he’d lain all night, was like this.
“You know what I am,” Tristan said.
She nodded slightly, the barest movement of her head. “Yes.”
She placed her hand in his.
He stood in one smooth movement, pulling her up with him.
Rowena looked up from her plate; she’d spent the better part of the past hour glaring at her bread and cheese, as if willing it to turn into something else. There was the faintest tightening around her eyes, there and gone. Isla wouldn’t have seen it if she’d blinked. And what was it? It had looked like—worry? But that couldn’t be right.
Apple nudged the earl, who turned from the conversation he’d been having with another of Tristan’s guests. “What, then? Time for the bedding?”
Apple whispered in his ear.
“What? No bedding?” He snorted. He’d arrived at the feast already in his cups; that he could still form sentences was a miracle. “Uncivilized,” he muttered. And then, “time to go home. Home, I say; away from these pointy-toothed savages.”
Apple, at least, had the good grace to look embarrassed.
“You’re leaving rather early,” Hart observed. “The last dessert hasn’t even been served.”
“If I had a bride like that,” Arvid informed the table, “I’d have rushed her into my bedchamber before dinner!” He laughed, well pleased with his own joke. “Sadly for me, though, none of my brides ever looked like that. Sigrid—who, bless her heart, died in giving me my fourth son—looked like a mule and was twice as obstinate.” He transferred his leer to Rowena. “I like ’em obstinate.”
Rowena looked like she was about ready to crawl out of her skin.
The earl regarded Isla with his rheumy eyes. They looked paler than she remembered, like two pools of dishwater. Her father had had a difficult year; that his difficulties were of his own making made them worse to bear, not better. For, in the end, he had no one to blame but himself. And on some level he knew that. With the consummation of this marriage—the act that made their vows legally binding, in the North—he’d lose the title to his own estate. Of course in truth, he’d done so long ago; for years now, he hadn’t been lord in any but name. But name was everything to Peregrine Cavendish.
“Goodnight, Father,” she said. It was the last time she’d call him that, she knew.
“Goodnight, Isla.”
“Call us if you need anything.” Hart grinned. “Or, on second thought, don’t.”
Arvid raised his cup. “Wake up pregnant!” he toasted them joyfully.
Callas laughed.
Rowena said nothing.
Isla smiled wanly. In truth, she was exhausted. She wanted to go upstairs, but the irony of one’s wedding night was that by the time it arrived one was—she’d heard from her friends, over the years, and now discovered for herself—far too tired to appreciate the experience it promised. As attractive as she found Tristan, all she wanted to do right now was sleep. And she did find him attractive. But she was also scared.
Her gown fit her so beautifully in part because the bodice was as heavily reinforced as if she’d gone to the chapel in armor. The corsetry supporting the silk was stiff, and the wooden stays dug into her ribs. Her chest muscles ached. She wanted to divest herself of this thing and breathe. Her feet hurt, too; her slippers had been specially made for the occasion, and she’d worn them for the first time this afternoon. The mass of braids on her head pulled painfully at her scalp, which itched. Her eyes itched, too, from the smoke.
Tristan bid the table goodnight.
And then, turning, he led her across the dais and down the steps, and then out of the great hall. She felt the eyes of their guests on her back, as they watched her go. Now, with their lord gone, Isla knew, the celebration would begin in earnest. Come morning, these men and women all would be sleeping like the dead. Many where they’d dropped, insensible from drink. Flies would investigate their open mouths and dogs would piss on them, and they’d wake up unrecognizable as the carefully coiffed ladies and gentlemen they’d been the night before.
But for now they still gossiped, and laughed; for now the spell still held.
Tristan’s carriage was perfect, his every movement exquisitely formal. He, too, knew that he was putting on a performance. Isla couldn’t help but think of the other women he’d led from this room, the other women he’d bedded on their—his—wedding nights.
She put one foot in front of the other, careful. Too careful. Her eyes were on the floor. Inside of her, a storm raged: of confusion, and of terror. What was Tristan going to do to her? To be a maid on her wedding night, with little real knowledge of men, was bad enough; to have lived through the hints, the warnings, the talk of sacrifice was far worse.
Tristan, beside her, said nothing.
They ascended the steps, and then traversed first one hall and then another, until they stood at the door to his private apartments. There were guards there, guards who stared fixedly ahead. They wouldn’t embarrass Isla, Tristan’s own wife—wife—by acknowledging her presence in her lord’s bedchamber.
Silently, one of the nameless men opened the door.
She followed Tristan inside.
And then the door was shut and his mouth was on hers, claiming her, as he thrust her against the wall. She didn’t have time to speak, or react, so overpowered was she by his assault. She’d never been inside Tristan’s rooms before and even now had no idea of what they looked like; her entire focus was on him, on his hands on her and on his bruising kiss.
She opened her mouth to his, exhaustion forgotten.
FIFTY-EIGHT
“You’re not merely the son of a blacksmith, are you.”
Callas didn’t respond for a long time. “No,” he said. After which, he lapsed back into silence.
A simple word, but it confirmed Hart’s suspicions. They’d left the feast some time before, not long after Tristan and Isla had retired to their bedchamber. Generally speaking, Hart felt sorry for women on their wedding night; women who, if they’d been raised properly according to Morvish
custom, had little idea of where to even locate a cock on a man’s body. Not that, he reflected, Isla had that problem. He wasn’t convinced, still, that she hadn’t arrived at Caer Addanc pregnant. She hadn’t begun showing but, then again, many women didn’t until almost the moment of birth. And she and her lover had certainly acted strangely toward one another; more like a pair of circling cats, wary of infringing on each others’ territory, than two people in love.
But then, tonight, they’d seemed fine. He eased a shoot of grass, mostly dead now, from its sheath and began to chew it idly. She’d probably told him, and he’d accepted. Well, that would be a burden off for any woman; and Tristan, in turn, had every right to be pleased. Assuming he agreed that the child was his, and why wouldn’t he?
A man in Tristan’s position needed an heir, which he did not yet have.
Oh, there was Asher, certainly. Hart, being a bastard himself, recognized the signs. It was true what the wags said: Tristan did show his—page—an unusual interest. Not the unwholesome interest, either, of some men. Had Tristan been one such, Hart would never have even considered taking service with him. There were a great many crimes that Hart could overlook, being, by some lights, a criminal himself. But that…was not one of them. To steal a child’s innocence…there was no greater crime against the Gods.
He tossed the stalk aside and plucked another. Callas still hadn’t spoken. He was in a strange mood; both men were.
They’d come out here, both of them, because they needed some fresh air. Hart supposed, idly, that their doing so might have caused speculation. Particularly within the garrisons, men practicing the arts of love on other men was hardly uncommon. But while Hart had no especial objection to the idea—he, after all, liked his own cock quite a bit and so could easily imagine liking another man’s just as well—he didn’t lean in that direction. Not even remotely. Still, he reflected, a man could do worse than Callas.
“How can those who worship the Dark One,” he asked, after a long moment, “have rules if they—you—encourage self-indulgence?”