The White Queen: The Black Prince Trilogy, Book 2

by P. J. Fox

  “Your church has laws,” Callas said, the faintest note of derision in his voice. He was generally even-tempered, but even his bland mien couldn’t completely disguise the hatred he felt for Hart’s childhood religion. “We have no laws. What we have are merely guidelines; guidelines that one should follow, should he wish to succeed. They are not set forth by divine beings, and there’s no expectation that some supernatural parent will come along and punish you for disobedience.

  “Your obedience, or lack thereof, is your choice; and you must deal with the consequences.”

  “So not, you’re a sinner if you do this but, rather, other people are going to make your life miserable if you behave in this fashion.”

  “Yes.” Callas reflected, his eyes on some distant point. They’d come out to the gardens, and were sitting on a wall. Hart could just hear the faint noise of the lake, large enough that the moon governed its tides. “Hedonism isn’t the same as immorality, although your church would have you believe so. Hedonism is seeking one’s own pleasure; one’s own self-interest. If one is smart,” he continued, “then one can do that without causing harm to others. At least, not harm that’s undeserved. Indeed, one can do that while gaining followers to one’s cause. Nothing succeeds like success.” His laugh was short and mirthless, and sounded like the waves against the cliffs. Hollow.

  “But you’re not anarchists.”

  “Order, to some extent, is necessary to survival. I—we—merely disbelieve that a man’s birth makes him noble.” He turned to Hart. His eyes gleamed in the moonlight. “Or do you wish that it were so? You, the bastard child of a prostitute?”

  Hart felt a flash of anger. “She wasn’t a prostitute.”

  “You’ve been taught to believe that prostitution—that a woman seeking pleasure, or seeking to govern her own body—is wrong. It’s not.” He spoke flatly, without emotion. These were simply facts to him. “A woman being married makes her no more or less valuable than any other woman; and a child being born out of wedlock confers no fate upon him.”

  “So there’s no such thing as sin, according to you?”

  “Bedding a woman isn’t a sin. Nor is bedding a man.”

  “And have you?” Hart asked. “Bedded a man?”

  Callas seemed surprised that this was a question. He shrugged slightly, the barest movement of his shoulders. “Sex is a sport, like any other. I don’t always have to feel an emotional connection with the participants. But,” he added, “I prefer women. At least, to talk to.”

  “But you have no intention of getting married.”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  Callas’ gaze was back on the horizon. “We believe in free will, which means that we don’t harm children as they have none. Or, even if they do, they’re not in a position to exercise it meaningfully so they might as well have none.” Hart agreed with him on that; he’d never told his own father no, although he’d wanted to.

  “When I walk into an open territory,” Callas said, “I bother no one. Unless and until he bothers me. At which point, I ask him to stop—as is only polite. However, if he does not stop, then I destroy him.” Hart said destroy as casually as Isla might say cheese making.

  Somewhere, an owl screeched.

  “Your family is leaving on the morrow,” Callas observed.

  “Yes.” Hart thought about how to frame his problem, realized he didn’t have sufficient mastery of the language to describe the conflict raging within him, and spoke anyway. “There’s going to be more fighting. I can sense it in my bones. And I know that if I stay here, I may very well end up on the opposite side of the field from my childhood friends.”

  “I’ve asked you this before, and I’ll ask you again: what have your Gods done for you?”

  “What have anyone’s gods done for them?”

  “A great deal, if you worship the right ones.”

  That different gods might produce different results had never occurred to Hart. He took his friend’s point, though, that the same men he regretted the idea of fighting against were the same men who accepted, blindly, that his opportunities should be reduced on account of his birth. On account of an accident of birth. In the West, men like Rudolph—useless men, weak and cowardly men who wore gigantic codpieces to compensate for what they lacked in the arena of true cods—would ever hold the upper hand.

  He felt a loyalty, he knew, for a people who felt no loyalty for him.

  “Join with us.” Callas didn’t just mean the duke’s personal guard. He meant the, some said cult, in which most of that guard belonged. A cult in which Callas appeared to hold some power. He hadn’t confirmed this yet, to Hart, but Hart suspected that the source of Callas’ importance at Caer Addanc stemmed from his position within that shadow world. A world between worlds, where men practiced magic.

  “I don’t want to change,” he said.

  “Change is inevitable.” Callas studied him in the darkness. “And you’ve already changed. You’re not the man who left Enzie Moor, who spent his afternoons bedding a chambermaid and rolling in the mud with pigs.” He paused. “You can’t un-know that there is more, to the prospects for your own life and to the world, once you’ve discovered it for yourself.”

  “As you did?”

  “As I did.”

  “And if, at some point, I want to leave?”

  “Then you can leave,” Callas told him. “But you won’t.” Another long pause. “I think that, if you remain here, and give us a chance, you’ll stay not because you have to but because you want to.” He was speaking to Hart now simply as a friend. “You could be happy, here.”

  “I’ve never been happy, anywhere.”

  “Sometimes the ugly duckling must swim through many ponds, in order to find the other swans.”

  Hart laughed. “Somehow, I never pictured you as the fable-reciting type.”

  Callas’ expression was one of mock insult. “I had a childhood, like anyone else!”

  “And your mother tucked you in with fables?”

  “Yes!”

  “And you grew up to be an evil enchanter?”

  Now it was Callas’ turn to laugh. “Yes! We didn’t all have rotten childhoods.”

  “I suppose not!”

  The two men quieted again. The silence between them was peaceful. Hart, too, felt at peace—as he hadn’t in a long while.

  He knew, and Callas knew, that he’d made his decision. Had, in fact, made his decision long ago; he’d just needed a bit of time to grow into the idea. Of anyone taking him seriously. Of he, Hart, taking himself seriously. Of abandoning the religion of his childhood, not even for the religion of the North, which was dark enough, but for something much darker.

  But Callas was right. Had been right all along. What had Hart’s gods done for him? What had his family done for him? What Callas, what the duke, what the North promised him was something he’d never had before. Something he’d never thought to seek, as it had seemed so out of reach. Something that, if he were truly honest with himself, in his heart of hearts he’d always craved: power.

  He didn’t want to be Hart, bastard son of the earl, good with his cock and good with his bow and ultimately ridiculous.

  He wanted to be more.

  He wanted other men to fear him, as he had once feared their disapproval.

  “There’s something else,” Callas said, as though Hart had spoken aloud. And perhaps he had. Or perhaps he didn’t need to, because perhaps his wants were writ clear on his face and had been all along, to a man with the wit to look. “Isla. I believe that, in the coming months…something is coming. A storm, although I have not yet glimpsed its full form.

  “She’ll need you.”

  FIFTY-NINE

  Tristan pulled back slightly, his hands still cupping either side of her face as his eyes searched hers. Isla waited, giving no outward sign of the turmoil within. Her heart beat wildly in her chest, like a bird throwing itself against the bars of a cage. She want
ed him, and she knew that he wanted her. But, even so, she knew that there was more.

  “Isla,” he said, “I want you to be with me. Forever.”

  “Forever?” she echoed.

  “You must have realized that I don’t intend to let you die of old age.”

  She just stared at him. She was mortal. She had no choice. Unless he meant…?

  “You and I are different,” he told her, replying to her unvoiced question. “Different species, of different natures. And I treasure you, for all that you are. I wouldn’t make you into…something like me, even if I could. I wouldn’t take from you what you are.

  “But even the strongest magic has…limitations.” He considered his words. “All things, however strange or fantastical, must follow the rules of the natural world. And a fox cannot become a porcupine.” And a demon could not become human. Nor a human being, a demon.

  “However,” he added, “the fox can learn to live beside the porcupine. To forge a…bond, which allows them to coexist where they otherwise might not.”

  “And you propose such a bond.”

  “Yes.”

  “This…this is the sacrifice, of which you spoke?”

  “Yes.”

  “But a sacrifice of what?”

  “Your mortality.”

  She chewed her lip, concerned. “So what…would I be?”

  “What I propose would join your life force to mine. Bond us, forever.”

  “And if something happened to you?”

  His expression, for a split second, was bleak. “You’d die.”

  “But otherwise…?”

  “You’d live as long as I did, never aging past this night. You’d be my partner, in truth. Forever.” He took her hand, his long finger tracing the curve of her ring. The ring he’d given her the night before, that had—or so she’d thought—bonded them as closely as two people could be bonded. “This,” he said, referring to the ring, “represents the start of a process that often goes no further. Two people can learn to use the bond and through it, to deepen other bonds.

  “Among my people, there is no deeper bond. But we are…all the same. There is no mortality, as you would understand the term. No aging. I am…unusual in that I’ve chosen to live here, on this plane. Among mortal men.” Most of his kind, she knew, preferred their own; and the ethereal existence they had there. An existence devoid of physical bodies, also as she understood the term. Tristan was indeed special.

  And had, she knew, grown to care for those around him—at least, after his own fashion.

  “I don’t—what will it be like?”

  “Isla, the last thing I would ever desire would be for you to hate me. Either now, for what I’ve done, or in the fullness of time; to grow, as the years passed, to resent me. To resent all that I’ve taken from you. With me, you will never have a normal life. But what you will have is me. All of me.” Her hand was still in his. With his free hand, he traced a line down the side of her face. The gesture was almost tender. “However much you hate me, I cannot bear the thought of seeing you age. Or sicken. Or pass from this plane.”

  Isla didn’t want those things, either. But she was only now coming up on her twentieth winter; she was still young. She’d never seriously considered the idea that she might age or, even more terrifying, become infirm. Lose her mind to the ravages of time. Some did, and prematurely; slowly falling backward into time as they forgot the events of their lives in reverse order. Until they were little more than babes in adult bodies.

  But—was it right? Was it moral? She didn’t know. And then an unwelcome voice spoke from somewhere deep inside her mind: had killing Alice been right, or moral? Alice, whose only crime had been a fasciation with a rich and handsome man?

  “There’s no going back.”

  “No,” he agreed softly.

  He turned, abruptly, and walked over to the sideboard. The room, Isla now saw, was a large one and luxuriously appointed. Rugs scattered the floor, all clearly woven in the East. She supposed he must have brought them back with him. Enormous stand lamps would provide brilliant light when lit; at the moment, though, only one was lit and that near the fireplace. The room was in gloom, most of the light coming from the fire in the fireplace. Which she supposed must be for her benefit; Tristan didn’t feel cold.

  She wondered if this would be her room, now, or if she’d continue to occupy the room she’d been given the night before and only visit her lord here. Such was certainly the more proper arrangement, at least in the South. Still, Isla didn’t suppose that many in Darkling Reach held with such proprieties. She thought, smiling, of Arvid.

  “Arvid is quite a man,” Tristan agreed. He stood with his back to her. “With the death of his father, he became leader of the most powerful tribe beyond the border. All the other tribes in this region pay homage to him.”

  “But I thought the tribes didn’t recognize inherited titles.”

  “They don’t. Arvid killed his father, and then proved his right to rule through what the tribes call a chief moot. A test of wit and strength where all of the would-be chieftains compete.” Isla sensed, rather than saw, Tristan’s smile. His back was still to her. “He killed them, too.”

  “He didn’t—seem that dangerous,” Isla blurted out.

  “They never do.”

  It felt odd to be having such a prosaic conversation, at a time like this. Odd, and not a little bit surreal. As though they were any other couple, and this any other night. She found herself watching what Tristan was doing. He wasn’t merely pouring himself a drink, as she’d first assumed, but mixing something: a collection of blown-glass bottles was grouped to one side of the sideboard, each bottle a uniquely beautiful shape and hue. Slowly, and with exacting precision, Tristan picked them seemingly at random. A droplet of one liquid here, a thumb’s measure of another liquid there.

  Finally, he turned. He was holding a small gold cup. Gold, Isla knew, because it wouldn’t cause a reaction with the cup’s ingredients. Some metals did, and the results could be lethal. How she knew, she didn’t know…she was suddenly so confused.

  “For the pain,” he said shortly.

  “What?”

  She walked over to him. He hadn’t moved. She took the cup, and stared into its depths. There wasn’t more than a mouthful of liquid, and it was black. Like ink, leaving a film on the cup’s sides. It smelled vile, too. “Pain?” she echoed. Surely he couldn’t mean the pain of losing one’s maidenhead. She’d heard that that was difficult, but not to the point of requiring medication. And, according to Rose, not difficult at all if one had a courteous lover.

  Her thoughts were racing; she was making no sense, even to herself. She tried to breathe, and count, and relax.

  “Once the ritual begins,” he said, “it cannot be stopped. Or you will die.”

  She looked up. “Oh.”

  His expression was unreadable.

  “And this…?”

  “Isla, you need to be conscious. Otherwise…I’d spare you this if I could.”

  That was not a reassuring endorsement. She again found herself staring into the contents of her cup. And then, as she had when she slipped the ring over her finger, she acted impulsively. Give herself time to think, and she’d lose her courage. She downed the awful concoction in one swift gulp, as Hart had taught her to down spirits. And she gagged; it tasted vile. Beyond vile. There were no words for what she’d just put into her body: the ichor of a thousand skunks, combined with the putrescent, sun-bloated bodies of a thousand more.

  Tristan took the cup. And then, moving as gently as if she’d been crafted of the thinnest porcelain, he pulled her to him. He began undressing her, his fingers nimble with her hooks and eyes and stays. First unlacing her bodice, he smiled as she breathed a sigh of pure contentment. Finally she could breathe. The satisfaction was indescribable.

  He eased her sleeves down over her shoulders, where they’d rested through some tailoring magic. Then his hands were on the sides of her bodice and she blush
ed as she realized that he was about to see her. All of her. There had been no room to wear a chemise under her gown.

  He touched her shoulder with a single clawed finger. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “There is nothing about which you need be ashamed, now or ever.”

  And then her gown was on the floor, a pool of green silk from which he helped her step. Like a water sprite from her pool. His eyes remained on hers, as his fingertips explored her. She was his wife, now, she kept reminding herself; she shouldn’t be nervous.

  His thumb brushed her nipple, lingering there. Her skin began to grow warm as it tingled in response to his touch. Tentatively, she reached out and began to undress him. She wasn’t nearly as familiar with a man’s garments as he clearly was with every manner of clothing that a woman might wear; but he didn’t mind. And neither did she. There was a strange intimacy in her fumbling, and in his acceptance. Patiently, he waited. He wanted this from her, was pleased that she was giving it to him.

  She smiled tentatively.

  She slid his shirt down over his shoulders, exposing a smooth expanse of muscled chest. This was a man who spent—or had spent—most of his life outdoors. He’d achieved what surely The Chivalrous Heart would describe as a state of physical perfection not through prancing around as Rudolph did but from years of practice with bow and stave and sword. And years, too, of campaigning. He had the broad shoulders and thick, trunk-like arms of a bowmaster. Which, of course, he was. Bow and sword both.

  She touched his belt buckle and pulled back, shy again. He took her in his arms, and kissed her. Her skin brushed his, warm against warm, for once. The tingling became a warm rush, as she opened her mouth to his. He pressed her against him, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. And then, somehow, her stockings were gone and so were his breeches. The strange tonic, which she’d discredited entirely at first, had begun to work and the room was beginning to spin around her.

  He picked her up and carried her toward the bed where, throwing back the coverlet, he laid her down gently. She gazed up at him, strangely quiescent. This was it, now, she knew.