The Demon of Darkling Reach (The Black Prince Book 1) (17 page)

These attributes were, Isla knew, supposed to simulate the arousal of sex. Which, if the old wives’ tales were to be believed, attracted men. At that point, Isla wondered, why not just unlace your dress?

Witches like Cariad used belladonna as an hallucinogenic. In small quantities, the poison gave them the illusion of flight. In large quantities—and
large
meant as little as a single leaf, in some cases—belladonna caused death. Mandrake, a hideous-looking root that also grew abundantly in this part of the forest, was used as an emetic when someone had swallowed
other
poisons, like nux vomica.

Isla hurried up the path.

“Demons don’t have horns,” Cariad said, without turning. She’d somehow just known that Isla was now behind her, even though Isla’s slippers were quiet on the mossy carpet. “At least as far as we know,” she amended. “The truth is, no one’s entirely sure what a demon’s natural form is—or how many different natural forms there are. Mostly, when demons choose to appear, or are summoned, they take on the shape most upsetting to the summoner.”

“They want to appear fearsome?”

“Yes.” Cariad paused again. “A demon is an otherworldly being; there are many different kinds of demons, and many different theories as to their source. Some believe that demons are unclean spirits; religious-minded types call them fallen angels. Those naturalists among us consider them to be neither good nor evil but simply different.” She bent to pluck another toadstool.

Isla waited.

Cariad straightened. “And some believe them to be the spirits of the dead.”

“And you believe…?”

Cariad turned. “Isla, much of what people think of as magic isn’t. When I deliver a baby, the priest says I’m performing magic. But midwifery isn’t magic, just something the church doesn’t understand. The church hates women, and seeks to control them for that reason. But then”—she gestured—“there’s what scholars call
high magic
. Which is all around us. Manipulation of the elements.”

“What you do when you use your…mirror.”

Cariad nodded in acknowledgment. “I’m no archmaga,” she said after a moment. “I never wished to be. I never wished to be anything more than I am. Which, believe me, is enough.” She flashed Isla a wicked grin. “But high magic, now, that’s what your duke does. He’s an archmagus of some significant power, perhaps the most powerful of any alive today—if
alive
is a term that can be correctly applied.” She fingered another leaf as they moved up the path, almost absentmindedly. “All things, good and evil, exist inside the natural order. That a gooseberry is
good
and a mandrake root
evil
is a human perspective. There is no inherent good in a gooseberry and no inherent evil in a mandrake root, only that we like the effect of one better than the effect of the other.”

Isla nodded; she thought she understood.

“But demons, or whatever they are, exist outside of nature. They’re not meant to be here. The church teaches, and necromancers believe as well, that demons can be used by man for gain: conjured and controlled.” She paused. “Which explains how your duke got here, but not what he is. As to that question, the honest answer is, I don’t know.”

And then she told Isla what she did know.

Tristan Mountbatten, son of Borin Mountbatten and his wife Sienna, was once a man.

He was born near the beginning of the decades-long epoch that would be known as
the Troubles
, a time of restiveness when greedy eyes began turning on House Terrowin and the throne. Years of inbreeding and infighting had made House Terrowin weak and the other houses—first in a thin trickle, and then in a flood—began to descend on it like jackals. There was nothing of honor or high-mindedness in their attack; men didn’t take the field for honor, despite what the bards claimed.

They fought for personal gain, and for glory, and for wine and women and song and great halls with comfortable fireplaces and well-stocked woodsheds. They fought for food, and land, and time. Tristan and his younger brother, Morin, had grown to manhood in a breathless hush of anticipation.

When the storm finally broke, in the first of a series of battles that would mark the official start of the Troubles and presage the eventual outbreak of a full-blown civil war, many lives were lost. Among them were those of Tristan’s parents. Cariad didn’t know the details, doubted that anyone alive did save Tristan himself. Records were spotty at the best of times and even the best-preserved vellum required someone to make it. Many, for whatever reason, preferred to leave no log of their deeds.

Both Morin and Tristan had trained at arms from a young age and both were, by their sixteenth winter, considered excellent bowmen. Morin, too, possessed spectacular skill with a sword. But where Tristan, too, knew swordcraft, his main focus always lay elsewhere. Increasingly, he found himself turning inward: to his studies, to the workings of the world around him and, finally, to the occult.

Tristan had questions; some said, too many questions. And for all that he’d always been peculiarly bright and quiet, even as a small child, his curiosity retained an innocent quality even in adulthood. For nature and all her mysteries, he possessed a genuine fascination—and respect.

Where the church had no answers and, indeed, discouraged questions, the occult had many. The priests he consulted, and the tutors his parents had hired told him to pray. If the Gods hadn’t seen fit to reveal an answer, then surely Tristan shouldn’t care about the question. Who was Tristan to question the Gods?

Tristan, who didn’t see the search for knowledge as questioning the Gods or even relevant to the Gods at all, continued to seek his answers elsewhere.

No one knew exactly how he’d first met the man who became his tutor in the dark arts, or the exact nature of whatever relationship they may have had. There was speculation at the time, and Tristan’s parents disapproved strongly. But then war came and everyone had other concerns. Morin went off to fight and Tristan stayed behind to guard the castle. His was an important job, if he chafed at its constraints. Then, as now, Darkling Reach produced materials vital to the war effort. Its riches couldn’t be left undefended.

Something happened then. No one knew what. As the war raged, Tristan began to change.

He grew increasingly secretive in his actions, although he ordered the castle’s defense as ably as ever and his men still trusted him. He began to startle at loud noises. At dinner, he claimed he heard scratching in the walls. He had had, at that time, twenty-seven winters. He wasn’t married, but he was betrothed to a girl he’d known and loved since he was a child. A girl who loved him in return, a beautiful maid called Brenna.

She, too, had been perturbed when his behavior changed; alarmed, even. But she’d done her best to put a brave face on and regard the situation with equanimity. Tristan was very bright, after all, and had always been…eccentric. From highest to lowest, everyone in the kingdom was under a great deal of strain and she was sure that this, too, would pass and all would be well.

But all was not well.

Tristan, at first a magus and then an archmagus, growing his skills under the tutelage of his mysterious sorcerer-teacher, turned next to necromancy. At first for the answers he sought and then for the power he needed to protect the people of Darkling Reach. The not-yet-war was going badly for House Mountbatten, and for all of Morven.

The problem with summoning demons, as Cariad pointed out, was that even the strongest archmagus was fooling himself bitterly if he believed that he could control them. To summon a demon was like summoning a hurricane, or a flood: all were forces that, once released into the world, quickly developed a life of their own. Power built upon power until everything became too utterly unpredictable for even the keenest mind—and disaster, inevitably, struck.

When exactly Tristan had begun summoning demons, nobody knew.

But in the winter of his twenty-ninth year, right around the time of the Solstice and a bare three months before he was to marry Brenna, or so the story went, Tristan became involved with one demon in particular. Involved…how, again, no one knew. Was theirs a friendship, an exchange of mutually beneficial information? More?

Demons didn’t possess definite gender, at least as human beings understood the term. Those of the highest order could appear in any form they chose. Cariad had her own speculations on this subject, which she hinted at but ultimately kept to herself.

And then two things happened simultaneously: Tristan’s camp was betrayed from within and Tristan himself vanished.

His life, from that point until fairly recently, was a blank. There were rumors, as there were always rumors. But virtually nothing was known concretely and most of the information that
was
known had been supplied by Tristan, himself. And accounted for only his last three decades. He was, after all, only celebrating his thirtieth winter this year. Or so he claimed. He was young and fit and strong and charismatic and no one asked too many questions.

Tristan, Cariad told her bluntly, had been possessed.

She turned again, meeting Isla’s eyes. “He called forth something—my guess is that he called forth the same demon he’d been summoning for months, if not years—and it took him. Demonic possession is the control of a human being by a preternatural being. Usually a malevolent one. Demons, true demons, don’t have corporeal bodies like we do. And they want them. They crave the sensations we take for granted: the taste of something bitter on your tongue, the feel of silk against your skin. The scratching of coarsely spun wool. The thrill of a lover’s embrace.”

“They…want to be like us?”

“Foolish, aren’t they?” Cariad’s brief bark of laughter contained no humor. “The original man died that night. The Tristan Mountbatten who was born to Sienna lived for a short but nevertheless reasonable span of years during wartime. His body should long ago have decayed and returned to the earth. But instead it hasn’t aged, hasn’t changed, in any respect for
over a hundred years
. It’s perfectly preserved—a shell for its host. And so it will remain so for as long as its host chooses to inhabit it.

“No true life animates that body,” she finished, “only the demon’s spirit.”

“So he’s…?” Isla’s eyes widened. “But how? And why?”

“As to the how, trust me, you don’t want to know. And as to the why….” Cariad trailed off, and shook her head.

“What happened to his betrothed?”

“Look at you, always the romantic.” They were almost back to the cottage now, and late afternoon sunlight filtered weakly through the leaves. The air was growing chill again. “No one knows,” Cariad said. “She disappeared off the face of the earth, totally and completely.”

There was a mystery there, and Isla wanted to know what it was. “Is…whatever he is truly evil?”

“He did kill his last wife, who was by all accounts a lovely young thing.” Cariad snorted. “But in all fairness to him, she
was
plotting against him with his enemies. He used strychnine, I believe. Sat at the table, eating his roast venison and watching her die. Then served himself another piece.”

“How do you know so much about him?”

“I’m afraid of him,” Cariad said bluntly. “And you should be, too.” They were at the door to the cottage, now.

Isla knew that she had to go home, and didn’t want to. She was even more afraid now than she had been before, and the idea of riding home in the gathering twilight did nothing to add relish.

“My skill is with herbs and midwifery and with counseling the bereaved and the ill of mind.” Cariad’s brand of counseling involved a lot of tough love and pointless manual labor, but it worked. “Tristan Mountbatten is a powerful sorcerer and a sadist. I’m no weakling, but I know the extent of my strength—which is part of what makes me strong. And I’m no match for him.”

She sighed. “Evil? I don’t know, child. But he’s not human and that means more than people think. He might
look
like a man, might have many of the same wants and needs as one. He must, after all, enjoy some aspects of his charade. He’s inhabited that same body now for a long time. And he’s certainly learned how to appear human. But he’s not.

“Remember that,” she urged. “He’s not. However he appears, he doesn’t have any of the same sensibilities as a man; any more than a wolf does, or a mountain lion. A mountain lion doesn’t see anything
immoral
about picking a struggling calf out of the herd, any more than a hunter sees anything immoral in killing a mountain lion for doing the same.” She paused, choosing her next words with great care. “Normal is an illusion. Moral is an illusion. Whatever else happens, never lose sight of those two facts. What’s normal to the spider, is after all, chaos to the fly.”

“I don’t want to go home,” Isla whispered, realizing as she said the words that in the back of her mind she’d been hoping for some sort of escape.

“I can’t help you,” Cariad replied, but not without empathy. “And not because I don’t want to. But because I can’t.”

And Isla knew that, because Cariad had told her so, she was telling the truth. Cariad was hard, but she never lied. “You’ve made a devil’s bargain, and no mistake. You don’t like yourself and so you don’t expect anyone else to like you, either and in consequence you’ve done something foolish and noble for a feckless young girl who, mark my words, won’t appreciate your sacrifice.

“You’ll both live to regret this choice,” the witch added, “and not for the reasons you think.”

Her last words had the ring of prophecy to them. Isla felt chill fingers press into her spine.