The Demon of Darkling Reach (The Black Prince Book 1) (30 page)

“Put your eyes out,” he replied in that same conversational tone. “No man will care about you then, and you’ll have a much harder time peddling your feminine wiles as one more drudge. Beauty,” he added reflectively, “is a curse.”

“But—please!”

He took another step toward her and she dodged, still trying to escape the chair where he’d so effectively trapped her. Her head still swam and she felt ill; she realized, in some abstract and still functioning part of her mind, that she must have a concussion.

Father Justin jabbed the poker forward suddenly and Isla raised her hand just in time, the burning tip scoring a deep groove in the back of her hand. The smell of crisping flesh filled the room and, underneath it, the coppery tang of blood. Isla shrieked again, in a mixture of pain and disbelief. She didn’t think she’d ever felt such bad pain and whatever happened, she would not let this man mutilate her. What he was proposing was a thousand times worse than the worst rape, it was the worst violation imaginable—which he knew, which he relished, which made it even worse.

“Let go of me!” she cried.

The tears flowed freely as he wrenched her hand away from her face with his free hand, still holding the red-hot poker in the other. He was much,
much
stronger than she and as hard as she struggled she couldn’t free herself from his grip. He kneed her in the stomach, pinning her into the chair with his massive weight and, pressing his forearm across her throat, leveraged the poker. Her vision began to dim at the edges, as he cut off her air supply.

“And now—”

“J
ust what do you think you are doing, priest?”

That voice was unmistakable, as was the arrogance behind it. Isla sobbed in relief and slumped against the back of the chair. The poker, inches from her eye, dropped as her attacker turned. He moved slowly, lifting himself off of her with all the deliberation he could muster—as though it had been merely his idea to abandon his little project for now. He held the poker loosely in both hands, tip pointing toward the floor, as casually as if he’d been roasting a sausage. His robes were unruffled.

Isla turned her head, finally remembering to breathe.

Tristan stood in the door. He, too, appeared perfectly calm. He wasn’t looking at her. His attention was fixed on Father Justin, and the tension in the air crackled. Isla felt it constrict at her throat, cinch iron bands around her chest and make her heart pound. As much as she wanted to run out of the room, she was too poleaxed to move. She knew, as surely as she knew anything, that she’d never feel safe in her own house again.

Faces appeared behind Tristan’s. His men; not her father’s.
His
men were glaring murder at the unfortunate fat man with the poker. Her father’s men were nowhere to be found. She’d called out; they hadn’t come. If Tristan hadn’t arrived when he did—

She couldn’t bring herself to consider what might—what
would
have happened. To spend the rest of her life in darkness, suffering…all of a sudden, she was afraid that she might vomit.

“Put it down, priest.”

“What business were you on?” Father Justin asked.

“My business,” Tristan replied, in a tone that brooked no further discussion.

He was dressed in midnight blue from head to toe, a blue so dark as to be almost black. He took a step forward into the room, and Isla saw that he was still armed. His sword was a beautifully made, beautifully proportioned weapon, but ugly for all that: the blade was unadorned, and the crosspiece had been fashioned into a grotesque likeness of the Horned God. Great curving horns made the guard, and rubies glowed dully from deep within a helmet fashioned to look like a skull. Unlike Rudolph’s weapon, which was designed to impress, this weapon was designed for one thing only. Isla glanced from it, back up to Tristan’s face. The look he was giving the priest was not one she ever wanted to see directed at her, but Father Justin didn’t seem to notice his peril—or care.

He was, after all, an emissary of the richest and most powerful organization in the known world; he and his brethren cared nothing for temporal power, because the playing of kings meant nothing to them. Kings came and went; the church endured. Tristan’s threats meant nothing to him and he obviously still believed that, royal sibling or no royal sibling, he could have Tristan tried on witchcraft charges. Father Justin didn’t need to believe in witches or demons to use the specter of those entities for political gain.

Isla gazed up at Tristan and knew that he knew. Everything. She was impressed but, then again,
she’d
figured it out and she had the benefit of neither Tristan’s education nor his intelligence. She wasn’t stupid, but she wasn’t…like him. Still, she planned to tell him what Father Justin had said about
the true king
and his obvious involvement in, if not a plot to outright put Piers off the throne, then a group of men who longed to see such a thing happen.

Because she realized that, now that Tristan was here, she felt safe. She knew that she’d actually have a chance to tell him these things—and that Father Justin wasn’t going to hurt her. Finally able to relax, she studied her adversary with new eyes. He wasn’t so frightening now; he was fat, and grasping, and womanish. The idea that someone like
this
should be in a position of power and capable of causing so much pain sickened her.

The priest was terrifying enough when terrorizing a teenaged girl who lacked the strength to fight him off, but sweat beaded on his brow as he studied the man facing him. The room had begun to stink of sour sweat that none of the priest’s unguents were strong enough to disguise.

“This woman,” he said, regaining some of his former arrogance, “is a whore. And you are no better.”

“Yes,” Tristan agreed blandly, “I’m sure that your relationship with your…page is an affair of the heart.”

Father Justin purpled at the insult to his virtue. “I was helping her to free herself from the knotted tangle of sin in which you’ve enveloped her!” he proclaimed.

“Oh?”

“Pain is cleansing,” he insisted.

Tristan’s expression, hard before, hardened further as he stared down the fat little man. Isla had never seen such a transformation come over anyone, and the duke truly no longer seemed human. He radiated, not wrath, but cold. A terrible, penetrating cold that seemed to nullify the heat from the now roaring fire.

Father Justin dropped the poker, where it clattered on the flagstones.

Another log popped in the almost total silence.

“Leave,” Tristan hissed. “Now. Within the hour. Or this ends tonight.”

“Your threats are hollow. If you had the cods to kill me, you’d do so now.”

Isla was surprised to hear such vulgar speech coming from the priest, although she shouldn’t have been; but she was far
more
surprised at the speed with which he was apparently recovering. He’d managed to convince himself, within a few short minutes, that there was nothing to fear after all—that Tristan was just an angry, blustering suitor making hollow threats on behalf of his betrothed. Or his own honor. Except Isla knew Tristan better than that, had known him better than that from the first time she laid eyes on him.

“I haven’t killed you before now, priest, because you’ve done nothing to earn my notice. And because my brother has tasked me with bringing peace to this kingdom, as irksome as I find the idea.

“But make no mistake, if you prove to me that you’re a threat to said peace, then I will do as I see fit. Now leave.”

The men locked eyes for a moment longer and then, gathering up what shreds of his dignity he had left, the priest departed. He drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t all that much, and stalked out. Isla hadn’t noticed before, but the door had been blown off its hinges. The massive oak panel hung crookedly from metal lumps twisted and misshapen almost beyond recognition. They looked, she realized uneasily, like they’d been melted.

Up until now, it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder how Tristan had gotten into the study so easily if Father Justin had locked the door. She’d been in too much shock. Now she understood.

She burst into tears.

“I
called for help,” she sobbed. “Nobody came.”

Tristan held her against him, her nose buried in his cloak as he stroked her hair in an almost absent-minded fashion with one of his frightening claws. Behind him, two of his men stood guard at the broken door. Despite the heat from the fire, Isla still shivered. She couldn’t seem to warm up. Every time she closed her eyes, even for a split second, images from her encounter with the priest invaded her mind’s eye. She couldn’t keep them out.

“I know,” he said, but not unkindly.

She clung to him, not even understanding why, only that she was finally safe and he was here and she needed someone,
anyone
, to make her feel safe and be on her side. The past few days had been unpleasant to say the least, their content vacillating between dreadful and mortifying. Cariad, her sister…and now Father Justin…another sob escaped her, just as she’d thought she had herself under control.

“I’ve been so scared,” she whispered, her words barely audible. “And he—and he was going to…”

“It’s alright,” he reassured her. “I’m here.”

Somewhere inside, a dam broke. She cried for what had happened, but most of all for what hadn’t happened: for the narrowness of her escape, for the hideous fate to which she’d almost been condemned, for the bitter realization that none of her supposed
loved ones
cared about her enough to defy the will of the priest—a total stranger to them, a no one. A tin pot god in an institution run by men and a minor one at that. She sobbed out all the emotions for which she didn’t have the words, and sobbed for the realization that she had no one. She was all alone in what felt like an enemy camp.

Eventually, her heart began to ease.

She didn’t know how long she’d stood there with her face pressed into Tristan’s chest, but she felt like it had been a very long time. He, throughout, had said nothing. Only held her.

Now, placing his hands gently on her shoulders, he pushed her back slightly so he could examine her. His gaze was searching. “Your hand,” he said, taking it in his own, “it must be seen to.”
His
hand, as alien as it was, bore the marks of an entirely too human life: small scars here and there, calluses from drawing a bow and pulling reins, from the thousands of jobs, large and small, that made up a man’s life. They must have been from…before. She studied them, needing something to hold onto. Something to anchor her.

She moved, trance-like, as he helped her onto the bench near the hearth and called for something—she didn’t understand what—to be brought. She didn’t care about much of anything. She was cold, and tired, and she wanted to sleep. Tristan sat down next to her and pressed a cup into her hand. He told her to drink it, and she did. It tasted bitter; she made a face.

Her skin was clammy and cold to the touch. For once, Tristan’s corpse-like hands felt like they were the same temperature. She absorbed this realization with disinterest. She didn’t even ask what had been in the cup he’d given her, or where it had come from. One of his men spoke a few words, then bowed briefly and left. They’d sounded like the droning of bees.

“Normally,” Tristan said, picking up her hand again, “I leave these sorts of tasks to my personal physician. Or my grooms,” he added, no trace of irony in his voice. “But you, I believe, deserve my personal attention.”

She smiled wanly, unsure of whether she wanted it or not. Except she
was
sure, wasn’t she? The burn was a red gash on the back of her hand, like the compressed lips of an angry mouth. The tissue on either side was livid, puckering and pulling away from itself. Seeing it made her stomach twist. Upending a small flask, he drenched a sponge in vinegar and applied it to the wound. She hissed at the stinging pain.

A minute later, he repeated the same procedure. Three times, he washed out the wound and each time it hurt worse than the last. She felt like her flesh was melting off her bones, and gritted her teeth to keep from crying out. He smoothed a paste of dark, clouded honey over the newly raw flesh and tears sprang to her eyes. “This will keep the wound from becoming infected,” he told her, as he wrapped her hand in a length of linen.