The Black Prince: Part I (25 page)

“I could kill her,” Tristan offered conversationally, his voice pitched low for them alone.

Not that it would have mattered. No one was paying attention to anything but Rowena. History repeating itself.

Hart’s expression blackened.

“No,” Isla replied absently, “that wouldn’t be nice.”

“Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” Although Hart had a fairly good idea, and a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He’d seen who was here, and who wasn’t.

He was also growing rather jealous of Apple’s wine.

“Oh.” Isla seemed to gather herself. “Oh. You don’t know.” She turned toward him and then back. “But how could you.”

Was there an unspoken accusation there? “Isla, I had pressing business in town.”

“I…I know. I just, I missed you. That’s all. It’s been very hard without you.”

He put his hand over hers. “I’m sorry.” And he was. He knew how lonely she was. The most devoted husband in the world couldn’t make up for family. Or friends.

Or a lost child.

“It’s father.”

Hart expected her to tell him that the earl was dead.

But instead, “he…had an accident. He fell. Tristan helped him.” She lapsed into silence again. Rowena was still ranting, but neither of them paid attention. “He’s sick, Hart. The doctor is with him now.”

And Isla appeared to be the only one who cared. Hart couldn’t say that he cared, but at least he had the good manners not to draw attention to that fact. Rowena might be single-minded when it came to her own affairs but this was tasteless, even for her.

“You can’t leave,” Isla said with a tired patience. This sounded like a point she’d made before, to Hart’s ears. “Not until father is well enough to travel.”

“And who knows when that might be?” Rowena stamped her foot. Actually stamped her foot. Her eyes blazed. She looked possessed, although that might have just been the light of the fire. “What about my wedding?”

“Rowena, now is hardly the time.”

Isla turned to Apple, a sudden, brittle energy animating her movements. “At least she’s being honest. Unlike you.”

“Excuse me?”

“You never cared for him.”

“That’s a terrible thing to—”

“You should have stopped him from drinking!”

Isla’s words fell into a stunned silence. Even Rowena quit her antics and stared. Isla
never
raised her voice.

“Then I’d have had no one to drink with.”

“How dare you.” The words were a hiss.

“Drinking was all that kept him bearable and you know it!”

“And now he’s dying!”

“What?” Apple’s tone was caustic. “You think he would have been different, if he were sober? Kinder? Gentler? You think he wouldn’t have tried to sell your sister to Tristan and you to that pig Father Justin? Well let me tell you something, you little chit.”

Hart saw Tristan’s hand, on Isla’s shoulder, tense.

Insulting her around him was a very, very bad idea.

“He was sober as a judge when he pushed his mistress down the stairs!”

And just like that, time stopped.

“The mistakes, the accidents? Who did you think was responsible?”

“You.” Rowena’s eyes were wide.

“I
protected
you.”

“You did no such thing!”

Apple had apparently realized something, because her own eyes widened slightly. But she addressed, not Rowena but Isla. “No one ever told you how your mother died.”

Amanda. The true wife. Hart’s mother, Jasmine, had only been the maid turned bed warmer.

“She was sick.” Isla sounded small then and very, very young.

Apple shook her head. In frustration, but not, Hart suspected, at them. She was very drunk. Not drunk enough that she was no longer lucid, but close. Hart wondered, now, how long she’d known. From the beginning? And how long, in turn, she’d debated telling the truth.

If they’d caught her after a few more cups, she wouldn’t have remembered. Too few cups, conversely, and she would have maintained her usual composure. Hart thought of all the times they’d laid in bed together, after. Talking. It was she who’d introduced him to several of the more…unusual arts of love. Had shaped his appetites for many things.

Including pain.

The sensation had always held a fascination for him, both in the inflicting and the experiencing. But she’d shown him how delightful it could truly be, how pain could both deepen and transform pleasure. Tied between the bedposts, feeling the fiery lick of her riding crop on his most sensitive places, for the first time he’d known true release.

They’d shared an intimacy, after their own fashion, but there was so much she’d never told him.

Would it have mattered?

He didn’t know.

He’d always privately blamed Amanda for the hurts of his childhood, although he’d never let that confuse his feelings for Isla. She was, and had always been, his only true family. The only person who’d ever showed him any meaningful or lasting kindness. And yet what Apple was saying made a strange, sick kind of sense.

“Amanda didn’t die of sickness. At least not in the conventional sense.” Apple’s tone took on a hard edge. “She died after giving birth. To a boy. The boy himself died a few weeks later.”

Hart blinked. Of course. It all made sense.

“Peregrine didn’t want another child, another boy, spoiling things for his legitimate heir. He who of course, hadn’t been…the most loving father to begin with. So he and Jasmine fought; she said that if he loved her, he’d love their son. She threatened to leave him. To expose him for the liar and fraud that he was.

“So he pushed her down the stairs.”

Hart remembered finding her on the flagstones, her head bent at an unnatural angle. Her eyes, green like his, had stared at nothing. They were already glazing over.

“When he drank,” Apple continued, “he didn’t hit you.”

And then the old man must have realized that he wasn’t getting any boys, at least not any real boys, after all and lost interest. In Hart and in his daughters as well. The last pieces of a complex puzzle fell into place.

Hart had few enough memories of his mother, and those very general: her laugh, her smile. How it felt when she held him. He’d associated her, then, with warmth and safety. And then she’d gone and there had been none of either for a very long time.

“I loved you,” Apple said. “
I
loved you.” She addressed Hart alone, as though there was no one else in the room.

His eyes narrowed. “You taught me to come when you beat me.”

Callas’ cup slipped from his fingers and landed on the carpet, rolling in a circle as its contents spilled in an arc across the intricate design.

No one noticed.

“Hart—”

“How old was I when it started? Fourteen?”

“You were man enough.”

“I was a child. A child you used.”

“You wanted it. You wanted me.”

Isla was staring at him, too. She’d known something, of course. She wasn’t stupid. She was the only member of this family besides him that wasn’t. But she hadn’t known the full extent of it. No one had.

He glared at Apple. The old hag. How could he have ever thought her beautiful? Even for a moment? She wasn’t, in truth, old. Barely old enough to be his mother, if even that. But she
looked
old. And she had a heart as black and shriveled as the oldest, most rotted tree stump. Whatever lurked inside of it, her perfect porcelain skin and fine features could only hide it for so long. Eventually, at some point, it had begun to eat its way through.

Gods, how he wanted to kill her.

“But,” Rowena cut in, “what about my wedding? Rudolph doesn’t even know where to find me.”

Hart stood up and, without another word, turned toward the stairs.

Five minutes later he was in his bedroom, alone.

Not even bothering to get undressed, he threw himself face down on the still-made bed and let oblivion take him.

I
sla sat next to Tristan on the couch in the upstairs gallery. They were alone save for Tristan’s personal physician. Late morning light streamed through the windows. She’d only been up about an hour, having finally fallen asleep as the sun broke over the snow-capped firs.

She’d quit the carnival of despair that was her family gathering shortly after Hart had. Hart had ever been, she reflected to herself, the wise one. After her husband, she was closest to her brother; yet, still, there was so much she didn’t know. Hadn’t known. Until the night before. She felt a surge of rage toward Apple. That horrible, horrible woman. Isla wanted nothing more than to cut her down the middle like a ripe fruit and pull her organs from her, slowly, one by one.

Tristan, his arm protectively around her shoulders, knew this.

As she knew, in return, that the only reason Apple was still alive was that Tristan might yet have a more inventive use for her. And if, he’d pointed out through their bond, they could actually use her to help Hart then justice would be so much sweeter. Tristan had, if no true emotions, a beautifully cultivated sense of justice.

She blinked. She’d drunk two cups of the strong, bitter brew Hart favored, a supposed delicacy that Tristan had imported from the East. She was more exhausted, she thought, than if she hadn’t slept at all. When she’d woken after her those few restless, dream-filled hours, Greta’s hand on her shoulder as she advised her that the doctor would see them now, her eyes were all but gummed shut.

No one had attempted to wake Hart.

No one had dared.

Where Apple and Rowena were, Isla didn’t know and didn’t care.

“There is…a darkness.”

Tristan’s personal physician was Morvish like themselves, but had studied medicine at one of the famous universities in the East. Where most church-trained physicians viewed ailments of all kinds as merely the products of sin, and thus curable with prayer, those outside the church investigated the workings of the body itself. They saw disease not as a series of curses meted out by the Gods but as a logical process that could be understood through, not pilgrimage and fasting but study.

“In his abdomen.” The doctor pressed a hand to his upper stomach. “Here. On what we call the liver.”

Isla had no idea what that was. He could have been referring to the food on her plate or the stars in the sky. The art known as dissection, looking inside the body, was forbidden by the church on pain of death. There had been no books on it in her father’s library.

The doctor—his name was Quentin—seemed to sense her confusion. “The liver produces bile. It is one of the three essential organs. Avicenna, the grandfather of modern medicine, referred to it as the seat of all nutritive faculties. It can be…damaged by excess alcohol.”

“So if he stops drinking…?” Isla trailed off.

The doctor shook his head slightly. “I am afraid that no.” As he considered his next words, noise drifted up from the courtyard below. Of people shouting. Laughing. Of carts rolling along. Of life continuing, as it always had and always would. “The word we use for what ails him is translated from the Attic for crab.
Carcinoma
. For the finger-like tentacles. It begins to grow in one place and then, like the crab, it sends out these tentacles that pull it into a new place.” He paused. “Soon it consumes all.”

Isla absorbed this news in silence.

“My condolences. There is no cure.”

“Oh.” She couldn’t have said, precisely, at that moment, how she felt.

Tristan turned slightly, his eyes on her. “This is an old man’s disease, Isla. One that would be more common, if more men lived as long.”

But her father had spent his days hiding in his tumbledown manner, half in his cups. And then, in later years, more than half. He’d spent his inheritance, spent more than his income, spent his health and his courage and for what? He’d never fought for his kingdom nor provided aid for those who did. He’d never done anything, except crow over his own good fortune for having been born to a title.

She found herself staring at the doctor. He was pale, like all Northmen, with coloring similar to Tristan’s. Dark hair, dark eyes. The blue of the bottom of a lake. He had a family. A wife and three children. He was young, for his position: perhaps forty winters.

His robes, like his eyes, were blue. Almost black. Well tailored and slim fitting. He had muscular hands. Squared off nails capped long fingers. He wore no rings.

He was handsome. In another lifetime, Isla might have found him attractive. Or, rather, acted on the knowledge that she did.

Strange, what one found oneself thinking about in times like these.

“How long?” Tristan asked.

“A few weeks. Perhaps even as long as a few months. Perhaps much less.”

“I see.”

“The body decides these things in its own time. What happened earlier…his heart was overworked. He has not been receiving enough air. Which leads me to believe that the sickness has spread. Upward. Into his lungs. Perhaps even further.”

Isla had felt like she’d been alone, like everyone in the room had just stared at her while she begged for help. But Tristan had been right beside her and had fallen like a shadow over her father’s still form. He’d done something with his mouth, almost like kissing. Giving, Isla had realized, his air.