The Demon of Darkling Reach (The Black Prince Book 1) (5 page)

Woad grew in the North.
She found the North worming into her consciousness again, as much as she would have liked to think about anything else. But try as she might, no amount of hard work could entirely free her from the niggling sensation in the back of her mind that she had to do something.

That she knew what she had to do, even if she hadn’t yet admitted the truth to herself.

One of the dye vat tenders waved her over, asking a question about setting one of the carnelian dyes for which Enzie Moor had once been so famous. Back when the estate was kept in fighting trim. Isla would have liked to see her home regain at least something of its former glory, because she’d invested so much of her short life in trying to wrestle something out of nothing, but her hands were tied by the fact that she was still little more than a child and only a woman to boot. There was never enough of anything, money or otherwise, and Isla desperately needed the help of someone who knew what they were doing and who wasn’t, like Isla, discovering everything on their own for the first time—and, she sometimes thought ruefully, making it up as they went along and hoping that no one would notice.

At nineteen, Isla was older than someone of her same age would have been even a generation or two ago; the troubles plaguing Morven made everyone grow up quickly, if they grew up at all. Men like Rudolph, whose place was secure, fought to keep it so and men like Hart usually left. There was no shortage of jobs available to a man who could wield a sword, whether with any of a hundred petty lords along the border or in a mercenary company. The thought that Hart would leave—and he undoubtedly would, there was nothing for him here—made her sad. She’d have no one to talk to, really talk to, then.

Isla leaned over and smelled the fermentation vat. “Add more sheep’s urine,” she counseled. Urine was used to set the dye in the wool, and in order to function correctly a fermentation vat—which consisted of urine and other additives—had to be kept warm. The weather should have been warm enough still to keep the vats at the right temperature, but instead apprentices stoked smoldering embers beneath the raised stands on which they sat.

A squat, muscular boy poured more of the cloudy yellow liquid out from a jar and it splashed everywhere. Isla jumped back just in time, laughing. All around her, smells and noises competed for dominance. Even in a manor as down at the heels Enzie Moor, daytime was work time. No one could afford to sit idle, because ten minutes of idleness might ultimately mean the difference between food to eat during the coming months and death from starvation. It was ever thus, even at the grandest manors; even the king in his warm and well-stocked hall knew that only a hair’s breadth separated squalor from plenty.

Especially these days, there was no such thing as certainty—for anybody.

Knuckling her back, Isla straightened and surveyed the marching line of small and mostly well-repaired outbuildings. Sod needed replacing on several roofs, and tiles were loose on the steps. Whitewash had flaked off here and there, revealing the tough, fibrous wattle and daub beneath: a lattice of tightly woven strips called
wattle
that was covered in a sticky, foul-smelling mixture of soil, clay, animal dung, straw and sometimes sand. As building materials went, stone was best; especially for valuable outbuildings like the salt cellar and smoking shed. Wattle and daub kept the worst of the weather out, but could be cut into easily with a serrated knife. More than one householder in Ewesdale had woken up in the morning to discover his prized candlesticks gone after thieves ignored the stout lock on his front door and cut through the wall surrounding it.

But stone was expensive—too expensive for all but the wealthiest of lords and merchants. Isla thought about her father again. The earl had a certain low cunning beneath his vague exterior, and knew on which side his bread was buttered. Isla wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he’d contacted Mountbatten himself. Darkling Reach was a week or so to the North and problems came with controlling land that didn’t directly abut one’s own domain, but Enzie was a valuable possession nevertheless.

Isla left the paddock, treading the well-worn if not terribly well-maintained path down to what had once been apple orchards. They’d lain fallow for decades, and hadn’t been in anything that could remotely be called good heart since long before the earl was born. But apples still grew, and children still picked them. Isla tripped, almost falling into a rut.

She had mixed feelings for her father. On the one hand, she was realistic enough to understand his perspective. On the other, she was mad at him for being so weak. But, she reasoned, perhaps he was doing the best he could given the limited capabilities at his command.

Last night, lying alone in bed, the notion that Tristan Mountbatten was some sort of demon had seemed all too possible and, indeed, probable. Those eyes, those hands, that preternatural stillness as he watched the room move around him. The next morning, it had seemed ridiculous. Rowena, for all her complaints about the man, certainly hadn’t noticed anything untoward. She’d admitted, even, that he was handsome enough after his own fashion. What was wrong with her, Isla wondered, that she’d had such an immediate reaction to him? That she found him so repellent when no one else did?

She’d thought, when she’d first been introduced to him, that if he’d touched her she’d scream. But, strangely, he hadn’t. Instead of bending down to kiss her hand, as was the current fashion among their class, the duke had merely nodded as if he were greeting a servant, or retainer. At the time, she’d been too relieved to be offended.

A breeze blew through the stunted, gnarled apple trees and seemed to blow right through her. Shivering, she pulled her cloak closer about her shoulders and studied the clouds on the horizon. There was weather coming, unless she was mistaken. A farmer, and a farmer’s daughter, always knew how to read weather sign. So much depended on the whims of forces they could neither understand nor change.

Somewhere, a raven croaked. The idea that Mountbatten was some sort of demon had once again begun to seem reasonable, in this stark and windswept landscape and with rain hanging in the air. Every time Isla closed her eyes, or paused in her labors for even a minute, she saw a vision of his hands. Not hands—claws. His obsidian-dark gaze came clearly in her mind’s eye, too, and equally unbidden, tongues of fire flickering in their depths.

She shivered again. Isla knew, even if Rowena didn’t, why Mountbatten wanted to marry her. As lovely as Rowena was, Isla doubted that her sister’s charms entered into the equation at all. Whether he’d been married before or only kept the women locked up in his tower, the duke had an unsavory reputation when it came to matters of the heart. Or wallet, Isla thought with chagrin. The rumor was—and Isla had reason to believe the person who’d told her, one of her father’s oldest retainers—that Mountbatten had married each woman in turn and remained married for about six months before having her killed. In both cases, her death had been ruled a tragic accident. And then he’d inherited what was, in both cases, a sizeable tract of land.

Mountbatten would marry Rowena, perhaps enjoy her charms—if he even liked women, which Isla was beginning to doubt—and then help her meet with the same kind of tragic, unforeseen accident as his previous wives. Who, Isla was sure, had also been both young and pretty.

Isla sat down under one old, failing tree and wrapped her arms around her knees to keep warm. Low to the ground like this, hidden by the patchwork of frost heaves and ruts that covered the once-orchard, she was invisible to view. Isla wanted to be invisible right now, needed to be. She needed time to think, really
think
about the series of ideas that she’d allowed to form in her mind. About the plan that, even now, she was refusing to admit that she had.

Rowena had always been going to marry Rudolph; at least in Rowena’s mind, and in Isla’s, too. As to what Isla herself was going to do with her life, she hadn’t put all that much thought into the idea. Her options were, and always had been, limited. She was no one’s dream of graceful, retiring femininity and few suitors had darkened her doors. No suitable suitors, anyway. She’d pretended indifference, but inside where no one could see her heart had ached. Isla was a woman like any other. She wanted, no, craved love. To be needed. To be the object of unquenchable and unconquerable passion and to feel that same passion in return. That men rejected her cut her to the quick; she covered her hurt with caustic observations and absorbed herself in her reading, and her work.

What use was she, really? To anyone? The bitter truth was that the only person who truly cared for Isla was Isla. No one would be brokenhearted to see her go; to see her die. Not like if Rowena left, abandoning Rudolph. Rudolph would mourn her for the rest of his life.

Letting Rowena go to her doom, simply because Isla cherished some vague hope of some day being happy…was supremely selfish. And Isla had, she was forced to admit, lived a selfish life. She’d catered to her own tastes and interests, making herself the kind of child of which fathers despaired. Leaving Rowena to suffer. For all her pretense of being so hard-bitten and worldly, Isla had fought against the realities of her life just as hard as hard as Rowena was fighting now. Rowena, whose only crime was being lovely. Isla felt a sudden, intense stab of pain and drew a sharp intake of breath.

The same raven, or maybe its mate, croaked again.

Far away, the earl was sitting in his study, sipping at a cup of mulled wine and lying to himself. Perhaps in the company of the duke, perhaps alone. Hart was working up a sweat in the practice yard. Rowena was still sobbing, or had sobbed herself into an exhausted sleep. Isla knew all this without knowing it, she knew her family so well.

She always had.

By the time she stood, cold down to the marrow of her bones and aching in every joint from having sat unmoving for so long, Isla had made a decision.

I
sla sat at her seat on the bench, invisible as usual, waiting—needing—for dinner to be over. Now that her path was set, night couldn’t come fast enough.

Her father was drinking heavily, more heavily than usual. Hart meanwhile was gazing at Mountbatten with open worship, as the two men discussed something to do with horses. Mountbatten wasn’t much older than Hart, in the great scheme of things, but Hart clearly regarded him as something more akin to a father or an uncle than a peer. Rowena wasn’t present; she’d absented herself from dinner in a fit of pique, or despair, and had demanded that food be sent to her in her room. Preferably sweets.

If anyone remarked her absence, they gave no sign. Just as they gave no sign of noticing that His Grace the Duke of Darkling Reach was…different. Nobody mentioned his corpse-like pallor, or his hands. Mountbatten was second in power only to the king; even at the best of times, there was no suave means of drawing attention to the problem. But a lowly earl like Peregrine Cavendish wouldn’t dream of bringing down the king’s displeasure by insulting his own brother at table, a guest in his home.

Moreover, there was simply no way for anyone, of
any
station, to observe that,
my dear Sir, you appear to have claws
. Isla was fairly certain that the duke could turn into a werewolf in front of them all and the earl’s only response would be to ask whether the wedding was still on. He’d either trained himself not to notice the duke’s peculiarities or convinced himself that they were of no import.

Isla glanced over at the duke again and, indeed, she could hardly avoid doing so as he’d once again been seated directly across the table. He made a languid gesture, illustrating some point as he chatted with Hart, and his heavy signet ring winked in the firelight. She supposed it must bear his house crest, or perhaps his personal coat of arms; the light was too dim for her to get a good look. The stone in the center, some sort of ruby or garnet, perhaps, was the bright red of fresh blood.

Dinner was the same interminable experience as the night before, only three times as long. The time dragged with each course: trout again, and boar. There wasn’t salmon this year; the salmon runs had been all but empty, for all that the weather had been chill and salmon notoriously preferred such conditions. Were Isla the sort of superstitious and ignorant peasant as Rose, she might be tempted to believe the rumors that the drought and cold and other poor conditions were the duke’s doing. But, man or beast, Isla doubted that he—or any single entity—had the ability to control the weather. How could such a thing be possible?

And if somehow it
were
all true, and the duke was indeed a powerful sorcerer in a land that eschewed sorcery as superstition and an insult against the true gods, then all the more reason to give him what he wanted, and soon, so he’d leave them alone.

Isla sipped her wine, grimacing at the taste. She wondered if people would think she was being self-serving; that maybe her supposed concern for her sister was an act and her high-minded motivations extended no further than seducing a rich man into her bed. She hoped not. This was the last thing she wanted in the world—if she was even capable of securing it. Which was a big
if
; she was slender, and her features were regular enough, but she was no man’s ideal of feminine beauty. And she had, she’d been informed, a terrible tendency to open her mouth and express opinions. Often in direct contradiction to those of the men in the room. Which, as Apple had rightly informed her, would never endear her to anyone.
You must never appear smarter than a man
, Apple had counseled her.
Men like to think themselves brilliant; never contradict them, even when you know them to be wrong
.