The Black Prince: Part I (37 page)

“What if the fabric gets twisted together?”

“Then I suppose their virtue is safe.”

“Or they’d be stuck together permanently.” Lissa found the idea quite amusing. She nibbled on some cheese. It was quite strong, with a nutty flavor. Almost too strong, but she liked it. There were candied pears, too. Candied, dried, or otherwise preserved fruit was all that was available this late in the winter. Or early in the spring, depending on whom one asked. Lissa avoided them; she didn’t much care for sugar.

“Does it bother you that I’m not…that I wasn’t?” Pure. The furthest thing from. She would have liked to have been. Although with Hart, at times, she did almost feel like the terrified maiden she hadn’t been since she was little more than a child.

“No.” He seemed surprised that she’d asked. “Not at all.”

She finished her cheese.

“There isn’t much fun in bedding a maiden. It takes so long to teach her what you like. Although,” he mused, “I suppose that’s true of every woman. As each man is different.” He studied her in the low light. “I’m enjoying teaching you what I like.”

She blushed.

He patted the covers next to him and, taking her cue, she moved the plate to the nightstand and curled up in the crook of his arm. She felt comfortable there. And safe. As she hadn’t since she was a little girl, when she’d lie awake at night and stare up at the underside of the thatch. Sharing the loft of their small cottage with her sister, she’d felt like they had their own little world. A world filled with make believe, and games, and laughter.

“What was your first time like?” he asked.

She didn’t usually talk about these things, at least not seriously, but she could talk to Hart.

Her parents had been desperate. And, judging from the look on at least her mother’s face as she was led off, had miscalculated the emotional cost—to themselves—of selling their daughter’s body to raise some cash. She’d come to Barghast and Marcus had set about arranging to sell her maidenhead. There was a trade in these things, a fetish built around deflowering the pure and in some cases unwilling.

The man himself had been alright. He hadn’t smelled, or been fat. Lissa had since lain with men who were utterly repulsive but by then she’d had a thicker skin. She was glad that, her first time at least, he was—if not someone she would have necessarily chosen on her own, then at least not enough to give her nightmares.

She’d been dressed up, her hair done, and sent to his room. Where she’d spent the next three days. He was a captain in the city watch. She learned this because he talked to her, about that and other things. Treated her like…almost like someone he was courting. And she’d begun to hope. That he really might care for her; that he’d take her away from this place and save her from this life.

But then his time was up and he was gone.

“I think he grew bored, by the end. He took me several times a day, even while I was still bleeding, but no one remembered to feed me so I grew weak.”

“What was his name?” Hart’s question was casual.

“I don’t know. He asked me to call him Oliver, but the men there asked me to call them a lot of things. He could have been anyone. He might not even have been with the city watch.” She’d certainly never seen him again. Although the watch hadn’t frequented Marcus’ establishment, at least not with any regularity. It was a little outside their pay grade.

In truth, by the end, she’d been delirious. But after two days’ rest and some soup she’d felt better, and Marcus had put her back to work. By then her hope had gone with her innocence so it wasn’t as bad. Or so she tried to tell herself.

“What about you?”

“My stepmother. She liked to spank me. And then it was spanking me while she made me do things to myself, and then it was spanking me while she made me do things to her friends.”

The way he divulged this, so calmly, made her blood run cold.

“I would have been…what I am, regardless. The pain, the humiliation, it didn’t create something inside me.” He paused. “It awoke it.”

For awhile, there was silence.

“I hope, for my sister’s sake, that Rudolph does like women.”

“Or perhaps, for her sake, that he doesn’t.” From what Hart had told her of Rowena, it seemed likely that his youngest sister wasn’t terribly interested in men. As friends or as lovers. There were such women, who only saw men—to the extent that they remembered men existed at all—as tools. Sometimes these women preferred the company of other women, but mostly they seemed interested in neither sex.

“Although,” Hart continued, “I think the best that can be hoped for, realistically, is that Rudolph enjoys the company of both equally.”

“Like Callas.”

“Like Callas.”

“And you’ve really never…?”

Hart looked down at her. “Have you?”

“Well he’s very good looking! Not,” she added, “as good looking as you.”

And then Hart’s lips were on hers again as she sank down into the pile of blankets and she was giggling and the second time that night was much, much sweeter than the first.

R
owena looked lovely, standing before the altar. Her gown fit her perfectly, the gradations of blue bringing out her eyes. Her hair was piled high on her head and wreathed in a crown of hothouse flowers. White and peach, like her skin. The pearls in her ears had been borrowed from the jewel house, with Isla’s permission.

Rudolph looked somewhat less lovely. He, too, was wearing blue. Although in place of flowing skirts he’d chosen leggings so tight that, according to Asher, who’d gone around peeking in on people before the ceremony, it had taken fully two people to pull them on. His codpiece resembled a grossly erect member, protruding to the sides nearly as far as it did to the front. It jutted out proudly from between his pantaloons, blue slashed with a lighter blue and cinched in a pair of garters mid-thigh. He wore a doublet instead of a surcoat and that, too, was slashed to reveal the same contrasting colors. His sleeves nearly reached the floor.

Isla had heard that his chosen style of shoe, to be correct, must measure fully twice the length of the encased foot. She wondered how anyone at the Chadian court could walk. And supposed they didn’t, much; the king had a specially appointed footman whose sole job it was to clean him after he’d used the garderobes.

Rowena was beaming out at the assembled guests. Rudolph was eyeing the officiant nervously. A red robed priestess whom Isla didn’t recognize.

She was naming and invoking the objects on the altar.

It was not going to be a short ceremony.

Isla, for her part, was wearing a simple gown of gray linen embroidered at the seams with a darker gray. Bands of embroidery decorated her collar and shoulders, where her sleeves attached, the pattern repeating again at the cuffs. The matching kirtle was subdued. She wore no jewelry save for the two rings that Tristan had given her. Her hair had been pulled back into a braided bun.

Tristan wore a long tunic and, above that, an overcoat. As usual there was no ornament and, as usual, he looked anything but plain. He commanded a room simply by entering it, needing nothing to draw attention. Or to accentuate a beauty that was almost too perfect.

Could a man be beautiful? Tristan was. Dangerously so. Isla was aware of more than one woman in the chapel gazing at him with longing and, occasionally, her with envy. Or, in one or two cases, outright hatred. Isla didn’t blame them, although they made her uncomfortable. She might have felt the same, in any of their places.

Asher was dressed as a miniature of Tristan. He was doing his best to appear as adult-like and serious as possible, but Isla could tell that he was bored. As bored as she was.

“Three represent air: the besom, the censer, and the bell. The besom symbolizes the sweeping away of negative energies….”

Asher yawned.

“Hart,” Isla whispered to her brother, “have you slept?” He looked like he hadn’t. In moons. He’d barely arrived at the chapel in time to be escorted in with the rest of the family, and when he was seated to Isla’s left on the first pew she’d been worried that he’d start to snore.

They were now learning about how the cauldron, a tool of the element of water, represented the womb of the Goddess.

“No.”

Isla almost asked if she’d get to meet the woman in question, but didn’t.

“I can’t believe they’re going through with it.”

Isla shot her brother a look.

“Marriage is like a strong box: you put it in, you take it out, you lose interest.”

If Hart made her laugh, she’d kill him.

And then both she and Hart forgot their conversation, as the ceremony took a turn. Unlike in the South, where all weddings were conducted according to a single church-approved script, Northern weddings varied according to the season and who was conducting them. Different priests and priestesses hailed from different lines of thought.

“Marriage,” the priestess said, her tone dark, “is not a simple social contract but a magical process that recognizes a crossing in the threads of the fabric of fate.” Her gaze fell on the bride and groom in turn. “Many strands bring the lovers, and their families, together and many more strands spin their lives into the fabric that is woven onto their children.

“Thus, beware. Rituals are performed to effect change, which the simple ceremonial of daily life must be employed to sustain. Or else.” That last word hung in the silence, before she continued. “Both parties must be of sound mind and agree to this binding of their own free will, that they fully understand the consequences should they mock the Gods they once invoked.”

Rowena was beginning to look distinctly uncomfortable.

Rudolph looked poleaxed, but whether more so than usual was open to debate.

The priestess raised the bell above her and struck it, slowly, three times. “In the name of He Who Shall Not Be Named, the Watcher in Darkness, the Lord of the Flies, I call upon the unseen forces to consecrate this place, to this couple and to their intentions. “By Bragi and Freja, Ishtar and Tammuz, Frimost and Syrach, by these and other names are the divine lovers known. We ask of them to join us now, bestowing their blessings upon us.”

Rudolph actually looked around.

There was a long further invocation to the Lord of the Flies.

She took the candle from the altar and lifted it aloft. “We call upon the element of fire to be here now and to serve us! To enflame the passions between this representative of the Goddess and her consort, that he may come to her like the Horned One and fill her with lust!”

Rowena squeaked.

Isla glanced at Tristan. Who informed her through their bond that Rowena had been perfectly clear: all of the officiants to be had throughout the North were equally horrible, and so she did not care. Isla settled back into her seat, staring fixedly ahead. That, or she really would start laughing and she had no wish to offend this priestess.

“I want a wedding like this,” Asher whispered.

Isla did not deign to respond as the other elements were invoked.

The priestess held out a length of rope, and requested their hands. Rudolph did as he was told but Rowena just stared. The priestess arched a single plucked eyebrow. Time stretched. Uncomfortable stirrings began to grow in the audience. Had the bride changed her mind? Isla knew perfectly well that the truth—that Rowena was horrified by the ceremony itself more than her intended groom—had occurred to precisely no one.

And then, thankfully, after what seemed like hours, Rowena held out her hand.

The priestess wrapped the cord one, two, three times.

“Bride and groom, up until this moment you have been separate in thought, word and deed. Now you come together as one.”

There were vows.

The priestess held aloft her dagger. “This bond I draw between you: that you are truly one of thought. Truly one of word. Truly one of deed. That when you are parted, there will be a call in the core of each of you, a call which can only be answered one by the other.

“A curse be on the party who seeks to break this bond, whether within the union or without.”

Asher was grinning broadly, now.

“May the Lord of the Flies be witness to their promise, and to this; for we call upon Him, in His justice, to honor the works of man with their proper consequence. Hail to Him!”