The Demon of Darkling Reach (The Black Prince Book 1) (3 page)

This sourness was unlike her, and she chalked it up to fear. The duke’s presence was like a constant weight, tugging on her, pulling her eyes in his direction. If she hadn’t known them to be utter bunk, she might almost have given credence to the whispered tales of mind control…and worse. Another gust of wind blew through the hall.

Those sitting below the salt, as it were, chatted on happily. The lesser personages who made up the household—everybody ate with everybody in the country, just farther apart—were having a fine time. The comings and goings of their betters mattered not a whit to them. Isla was, for a split second, jealous. Not that she wanted to spend her life in drudgery, or chained to some gap-toothed man who never bathed, but she did long for freedom.

Freedom that, she knew, was not a woman’s lot. She wanted the kind of freedom that Hart had: to go where he wanted, and do what he wanted, and make his own fortune in the world. Throughout their province of Ewesdale in the Kingdom of Morven, he had, if not a title, then the right to self-direction. He could stay here, or leave and take service with another lord. He could start his own mercenary company, an idea he’d toyed with off and on for years. He and Isla were of an age; she on the old side to begin her so-called
real life
and he far too young to do the same. Rare was the man considered full grown before he’d reached thirty-odd winters at least.

The duke, she mused, her thoughts returning to the man reclining negligently in semi-darkness, was unusual in more respects than one.

Of course, his brother was young to be king. Morven, after decades of civil war, needed a king and Piers Mountbatten happened to be in the right place at the right time. And with an army at his back, which helped. Having ensconced himself in the capital, he’d spent the next several years consolidating his hold on the immediate environs before expanding outward. The kingdom still roiled in turmoil and to call the roads
unsafe
would be a generous overstatement, but the king had a zeal for organization and men like his brother to help him achieve his goals. Men who, although ruthless, were more than capable.

She had no idea if Mountbatten looked like his brother. She’d heard that the king was handsome; the duke was not. She couldn’t say precisely what it was about him, though, that repelled her so. His features were regular enough, and on another man might even have been pleasant. And yet…wrong, somehow. She felt the instinctive revulsion for him that she had for her grandfather’s dead body, at his funeral.

The duke was tall, several inches taller than Isla, and broad-shouldered. His tunic and overcoat, both of which were cut from fine fabric, did nothing to disguise a form made robust and strong from hours in the practice yard. This was not some pampered lordling who lounged around drinking hippocras while he watched his men practice. He wore a sword at his side that he clearly knew how to use. His skin was pale, though, unusually so given his evident athleticism. His hair was as black as her own, but cut short and swept to the side in the northern style rather than worn long as was the custom among men in Ewesdale. His eyes were also black. He had a straight aquiline nose and a generously bowed—but not overlarge—mouth. His bone structure was pronounced. He was, in short, exactly the sort of man who normally brought blushes to the cheeks of ladies and sent scullery maids running off in fits of giggles.

And yet his mouth was cruel, his eyes cold. Even the reddish glint she saw in them from time to time did nothing to warm them. He’d remained quiet through most of dinner. But he sat, not with the poise of a man intent on absorbing his surroundings, but the unnatural stillness of a corpse. There was nothing alive there, nothing at all.

Her eyes flickered to his hands. Only one was visible, resting negligently at the base of his goblet. The appendage itself was normal enough, broad and strong. The toughened skin and sinews of a man who wielded weapons in combat, and who wrote letters, and who held a horse’s reins. Only a priest’s hands were soft, or a very young child’s.

But it was his fingernails that arrested her attention, and made the bile rise up in her throat. How she’d missed them before, she’d never be able to fathom. His fingers were long and thin and very strong, the fingers of an aristocrat. Hart’s fingers were similar and ended in short, square nails that he kept trimmed with a knife. He used that same knife to clean under them, claiming with good enough humor that no girl would let you touch her if your nails weren’t clean. Isla figured she’d have to take his word on this, having never felt the inclination to touch another woman in that fashion.

Mountbatten’s fingers ended in claws.

They were just on the cusp of what might be considered normal, which was what made them so upsetting. Isla had seen men less concerned than her brother with their personal grooming, of course, and who let their nails grow out to rather astonishing lengths. The eunuch who served her stepmother had nails as long as a woman’s. This was not that. His nails—if they could be called that—were much stronger than those of a normal man and curved from the tips of his fingers in a manner similar to what she’d once seen on a wolf’s paw. His fingertips had a bluish tinge, too, particularly around the nail beds. She wasn’t sure how long they were, not more than an inch or two, but they seemed enormous. They curved slightly into points.

She glanced at them now, and swallowed.

Then, mercifully, she got to leave.

Rowena, still laughing, led the procession out of the room. Isla followed her, across the flagstones and up the stairs to the long and narrow mezzanine known as the women’s balcony. They gathered here, the women of the court, around their own smaller fire to chat and sew or read to each other while the men sat downstairs and smoked.

Isla didn’t look at the duke when she left. More problematically, neither did her sister. Isla resolved to discuss with her sister the extreme lack of wisdom in ignoring this man. Especially if, as appeared plain, she was soon to be his—third? Fifth?—wife. Not that Rowena believed such a thing, even for a minute, despite the gossip. She’d never been brooked before—on anything—so why should she expect different now?

If Mountbatten minded, he gave no sign. Even at the foot of the stairs, Isla felt his presence beating against her back like a wave of heat from a roaring fire. He radiated an aura of evil; as dramatic as such a statement sounded, there was none better to describe the sense of crawling…
disgust
he inspired. That Rowena had ignored him, as much as anything, told Isla that there was something wrong. The duke was a well-made man after his own fashion and since she’d been about ten years old Rowena Cavendish had ignored almost nothing with a pulse. Including men twice her age and three times as fat.

Shivering again, Isla hurried after her sister.

“I
won’t do it!” Rowena shouted, her hands balled into tiny little fists at her sides as she stormed into the room.

Isla sat bolt upright in bed, adrenaline snapping her wide awake.

“Won’t do what?” she asked, clutching the covers against herself for warmth as Rowena yanked back the bed curtains, letting in the frigid air. Cold, antiseptic light poured in as the younger girl twirled and stormed back across the room. As she did so, she continued to rant.

Isla gathered, as consciousness slowly came back to her along with her wits, that the subject of this morning’s diatribe was Rowena’s planned engagement.

“I won’t do it,” she repeated for the tenth time, “and he can’t make me.”

He—their father—certainly could, but that was beside the point.

Isla’s bed was a large, square, canopied affair that had belonged to her great aunt. Furniture was dear and never replaced unless absolutely necessary. Even in the richest households, a few key pieces often formed the better part of a woman’s dowry. The heavy velvet drapes that formed the bed’s canopy kept out the worst of the chill but now, robbed of her cocoon, Isla decided to just take her lumps and get up for the morning. It was early, earlier than she normally rose, but still a perfectly reasonable time to rise. The sun was only now emerging fully from the treetops but most of the household had been up for hours.

Wrapping a robe around her, Isla padded over to the window where acre after acre of fallow fields served as a constant reminder of the poor harvest. And miserable winter to come, undoubtedly. Isla had seen famine before; she had no desire to see it again and knew that, for all his failings, neither did the earl. An alliance with House Mountbatten would mean relief, if needed—when needed—during the coming months of privation and hardship. The duke would be honor bound to do nothing else, to say nothing of the king.

No, this alliance was necessary. Isla saw it, even if her sister didn’t. The earl did, too.

She said nothing while Rowena ranted: about herself, about their father, about the charming and desirable Rudolph, her childhood crush, and the equally non-charming and non-desirable duke. It was Rudolph, Rowena was certain, that she was meant to marry.

“But Rudolph,” Isla said finally, “hasn’t even declared himself. Has he?”

Rowena turned, eyes flashing. This was a sore subject with her and one that Isla usually had the sense not to mention. But certain issues would have to be discussed, no matter how unpleasant, if this issue was going to be resolved. “Rudolph loves me,” Rowena said defensively, “I know he does. He hasn’t declared himself because he has to make his way in the world first. He can’t just come in and carry me off.” She sniffed, pulling her own robe about her slender shoulders. “He has time—or should. He’s young yet, you know, not twice my age like that revolting so-called duke.”

That revolting so-called duke
was the most powerful peer in the realm. Isla once again lapsed into silence, stymied by her sister’s intransigent refusal to see the realities of the world in which they lived. A world in which a woman’s choice was effectively to sell her body to the highest bidder or watch those under her care go hungry.

Rowena had ignored the duke, both the implications of his visit and the man himself, and their father had done nothing to stop her. She’d had her heart set for years now on the supposedly glorious Rudolph, the oldest son of a minor baron who paid homage to the Earl of Strathearn. Rudolph was also their next door neighbor, and the first real man that Rowena had ever laid eyes on. She’d been smitten with him since she was ten and he a few years older; now she was sixteen and he twenty-one. Not an unreasonable age for a man to consider marriage, Isla supposed, if he cherished no other ambitions.

That Rudolph
was
ambitious was part of his charm. And, Isla decided, there must be something almost like true love beating in her sister’s strangely vacant heart. Over the past year, she’d rejected any number of suitors while waiting for her intended to gain his courage. Whether he had in fact approached the earl was anyone’s guess, although certainly nothing approximating a formal contract had been suggested. The earl might, as Isla suspected, have received Rudolph’s suit and rejected it out of hand in the hopes that a better match might appear. He had
two
daughters to marry off, and so one might argue that one daughter’s marriage was no great loss, but he like everyone else considered Isla to be unmarriageable. Rowena was his one great hope.

Rowena assumed, naturally, that her father was holding off out of respect for her wishes and that dear Rudolph—who
was
painfully shy—hadn’t yet pressed his suit. She assumed, furthermore, that this dalliance with the duke would be like all the others: he’d come, make his advances, and leave when she told him to.

Shoring up her claims of genuine affection toward Rudolph was the fact that many of these rejected suitors had born greater rank as well as far heavier purses. Rudolph wasn’t poor, but he hadn’t the income to pull Enzie Moor out of its disasters. Few men did, save perhaps the king and a handful of his cronies. One or two merchants, maybe, but the earl himself refused to consider such a match. Despite his wife’s lowly origins, he believed firmly that the common folk were beneath him. At least the
male
common folk. The earl, as Rowena had never noticed, wasn’t much of a one for women’s liberation and viewed women far more as ornaments than legitimate people.

In truth, Rowena’s disinterest in the duke surprised Isla. Rudolph was impressive by country standards, but in Isla’s opinion held nary a candle to the parades of handsome and handsomely dressed men who’d come calling. The earl did, after all, possess a great deal of land. Rudolph might seem sophisticated here, amidst the rotting rafters and birds’ nests, but he’d be a bumpkin of the highest order in the capital. Or in Darkling Reach, the duke’s domain and her sister’s proposed new home. And the duke was…well, the duke.

“He’s not so bad,” Isla ventured, disbelieving her own words as she said them. She kept her face to the window, watching as the men whose turn it was tended the manor’s gardens. When dusk fell, they’d walk back to their own small crofts, wherever those might be, and till their own fields by moonlight. And within a fortnight, a new group of men would show up to put in their hours as the law of the land and the far more ancient bonds of fealty required. The relationship between lord and serf was a pact of mutual obligation and, above all, trust. Mountbatten would, she thought, be a good lord—if not a good husband.