The Black Prince: Part II (5 page)

He hissed.

She bit harder.

“You’ll draw blood.” His voice was hoarse.

“Good.” She looked up without moving. “I want to.”

And then she was on the floor, staring up at him. He’d cushioned the blow with his hand, which was fortunate. Otherwise her skull would be in pieces. Still, as she recovered herself, all she could do was blink. He stared down at her, the fire in his eyes unmistakable. His chest was bare, his breeches partially unlaced, and she was on fire. Even in her stunned state.

“Tell me again.”

She took a hesitant, shuddering breath. “I want to feel what you feel.”

I feel nothing.
“Then drink.” That hard edge was back. Reaching up, he extended a single finger and pressed it against the side of his neck. Just a finger or so above his collar bone, in the soft hollow there. And then, with a single quick movement, the claw plunged in.

Isla gasped. A drop of blood welled up, growing larger and larger until the surface tension broke and it trickled down onto his collar bone. She hesitated a moment. What did blood taste like? She remembered almost nothing of their first night together. Only the pain, and the feeling of falling…falling. There was a natural human aversion to blood and some vestigial part of the girl she’d once been whispered that this was revolting. That
she
was revolting.

She raised herself up slightly, and he crushed her to him. Her mouth came down on his neck. She tasted copper and sweetness and the strange, low, secret tang of lake water. She choked and, reflexively, she swallowed. Tristan’s breath caught, like she was sucking his cock and not his neck.

She flicked her tongue across his wound. His sigh was almost a moan. The bulge pressing against her was rock hard.

“You have to stop,” he breathed.

But she didn’t want to. He, usually so in control, was powerless in her hands. Before the torrent raging through him. She’d had no idea that she could unleash this and wondered if he had.

He forced her head back. Her lips, still parted, were coated in blood. He was breathing heavily. The wound, without her attentions, was already closing. With a few short tugs he’d freed himself from his breeches and he didn’t bother to undress her, only push her skirts up.

A single thrust and he’d sheathed himself to the hilt. She gasped, her fingernails raking his back as he vented his passions. Passions she matched, thrusting her hips up to meet him, as desperate for release as he. She wrapped her legs around his waist, clinging to him as his efforts grew ever more violent. And then she cried out, a faint noise muffled by his mouth on hers, and went limp.

Seconds later, she felt him spasm deep within.

H
e sat there, leaning against the bookshelf, smoking his pipe.

“A man,” he said, rather meditatively, “who smokes, smokes after he’s enjoyed himself with a woman.” He released a smoke ring into the air. “If he doesn’t, but he says he has, then he’s a liar.”

Isla was still on the floor, using Tristan’s rolled up surcoat as a pillow. She’d rearranged herself, but she was content to rest. To watch him, and to listen to him. The mood had changed, becoming calmer and warmer. They were just enjoying each other’s company now, the tension of the night behind them. They were, Isla had to remind herself, still getting used to each other. There was so much that both of them didn’t know. Because the truth was, while she felt like she’d known him forever, their love was still new.

“It’s funny, to me, that you still smoke.”

His smile was a flash of teeth, there and gone. “Old habits die hard.”

“Could a woman,” she asked, “ever be that bad?”

“Indeed.” The bowl of his pipe glowed red. “Some just lie there, like dead frogs.”

Isla giggled.

“Or when she takes a man’s cock in her mouth, but it’s clear that she finds the act—and the cock—repulsive. She doesn’t see the act as the expression of power it is but, rather, as something degrading. Or, possibly worse, she gives one every reason to believe that she’s a consummate lover and then turns out to be both limp-lipped and dead-eyed.”

“Oh, Gods.”

“Arousal starts with the mind. A fact which most women seem not to realize.”

“I find it difficult to believe,” Isla said seriously, “that any woman could suffer from lack of interest when it came to you.”

“Which makes me a supremely lucky man.”

Isla wanted to ask what Maeve had been like, but didn’t.

Tristan answered her question, regardless. “Terrible.”

She couldn’t help but smile. “Really?”

“A man wants a woman to, if not tell him what she enjoys, then at least show him. But taking Maeve felt like forcing myself myself on a fellow corpse. Only one,” he added, a trace of humor to his tone, “a good deal less animated. For all her studies in seduction, she showed about as much interest in the act as I believe you’d show, dearheart, at the suggestion of taking up permanent residence with Rowena.”

“I don’t know what to do about her,” Isla said.

“Well.” Tristan showed a flicker of what could best be termed as—enthusiasm. The only type of enthusiasm he had for Rowena. “You know my proposed solution.”

“You can’t eat her,” Isla replied.

For awhile, they shared a companionable silence. Isla couldn’t have explained the whirlwind of conflicting emotions she’d felt that night, even to herself. She’d been furious at Tristan and terrified of losing him all at once. Terrified of not being enough for him; furious at him for not feeling what she felt. For not being able to give her children. When did one emotion begin and the other end? She thought, in the end, that she was just terrified. Of more war. Of more loss. Of a future she couldn’t even begin to envision.

Tristan patted the floor next to him. “Sit with me.”

She sat up, and crawled over. She laid her head on his chest, and felt the weight of his arm encircling her. Making her feel safe.

“Next time,” Tristan said, his tone musing, “I should make you suck it from my cock.”

“Next time?”

He looked down at her. “Are you telling me you don’t want to do that again?”

She did, of course. Although she was a little sickened at herself for admitting so. She was familiar with her own rhetoric: that what two consenting individuals did amongst themselves for pleasure was no one’s business but their own. And that, contrary to the church’s teachings, there was no list of acceptable practices. But believing a principle in the abstract, and applying it to one’s own life, were two different things. Isla worried sometimes that she was losing sight of herself.

Not becoming more something else, but simply becoming less and less.

“I couldn’t feel anything through the bond.” At dinner. That was what had upset her the most.

“I know,” was all he said. He didn’t continue for a long time, only smoked his pipe and stared into a distance she couldn’t see. “What that did to me…seeing how sad you were. Feeling it. I couldn’t bear knowing that that was how you felt and, even worse, knowing that I was the cause. I thought—if I unleashed even the smallest part of the blackness that created, onto you, that I’d kill you.”

“Oh.”

“I would never hurt you, Isla.”

“I…didn’t mean to upset you.” The words sounded lame in her own ears. Pointless.

“I want you to be honest with me. I know there is…an imbalance of power. But Isla, I never intended this to be a relationship where I only learn things by picking them from your mind, because you’re too afraid to share them with me.” He stroked her hair. “I don’t want to steal from you.”

“Sometimes I’m scared.”

“I know.” He was still stroking her hair. “Tell me. Trust me enough to let me decide for myself how to respond.” Instead of holding them inside, came the unspoken addendum. Like she’d been doing. This night, and others before it.

“I don’t….” She trailed off. She didn’t know how to begin. “I don’t want you to think that I’m…to be offended that….” She chewed her lip. It was hopeless. She simply couldn’t bring herself to say what she needed to say. What he wanted her to say. How could she give voice to the concerns in her heart, without making it seem as though her heart were changeable? As changeable as the winds, blowing first in one direction and then another—equally strongly and with no warning beforehand? Without suggesting, whether she intended to or no, that he wasn’t enough? He might know of her concerns, as she did, but as long as they remained unvoiced she at least could pretend that they weren’t real.

She’d pledged herself to this man. She didn’t want to lose him. But neither did she know how to move forward.

“Then tell me.”

“What?”

“Ask for my help.” Tristan’s expression was serious. “I am your husband. Whatever trials we might either of us face, together or separately, we can—and should—face them together.”

Isla didn’t respond.

“I know that I’m not human. Drawing attention to this fact is, therefore, hardy offensive.” There was just the slightest trace of—something—in his voice. Humor? Yes. Humor. “I know, too, that we aren’t the first couple in all of Morven to face…barriers to conception.”

When reduced to those simple terms, it all sounded so…fixable. So minor. Just one problem of many. Other couples
did
struggle to conceive and bear children. Just as they faced other challenges. Some had children they couldn’t feed. Others couldn’t keep a roof over their heads, whether from lack of work or from the war.

“I own you like I own my heart, Isla. You’re part of me. I can’t imagine myself functioning without you.”

He was right. She needed to trust him, not turn from him. There was a darkness in him, yes; but there was a darkness in her, too.

A darkness that hidden, small and silent, for years before they’d met. That he might have awakened, but only because he’d awakened her to her true self. She wanted him, and she wanted this life with him. What held her back was, truly, fear: of what she was becoming, of what she’d already become. Of what she’d gained and, yes, of what she’d given up. That the warnings she’d lived with her whole life might turn out to contain some kernel of truth. That his seemingly irrational hatred of her had been prophetic somehow. From her earliest memories onward, her conversations with her father had focused on what she lacked. On how she was thoughtless. Uncaring. Unwilling to lift so much as a finger for others. On how she’d failed him, time and time again. Part of her couldn’t help but wonder: had he sensed some evil in her all along? Had she proved him right?

“Isla,” Tristan said, “you are the most generous, loving woman whom I could ever hope to meet. When I’m with you I feel, sometimes…almost human again.”

Reaching up, she slid her fingers through her husband’s hair.

And then she kissed him.

W
hen Hart was a child, he contracted water elf disease.

It was a terrible bout, and he’d almost died. Water elf disease was, for the most part, a disease of children. And not, for most of them, serious. Only about one in twenty children died. For those adults unfortunate enough not to have contracted the disease as children, the mortality rate was much higher. Water elf disease produced a gruesome end: convulsions and swelling of the brain that eventually subsided into paralysis. The patient appeared dead long before he actually was.

First, he’d watched one of the grooms die.

The man, who wasn’t old, had been fine. Just a runny nose, common enough for spring in the Highlands. But then he’d developed a headache. Simple enough, and not frightening. But which, despite his being given willow bark to chew, had only grown worse. Soon he was stumbling about the stable yard, screaming at things that weren’t there and claiming that he smelled rotted meat. At first there had been some concern that he’d contracted the water-fearing sickness, but there were no visible bite marks. Nor had he reported, to any of his associates, being bitten.

Still, Hart had been kept away by their old nurse. He’d watched fearfully from behind the fence as the man began to shake violently and then pitched forward face-down into the mud. By the time anyone had dared approach him, he was dead.