The Black Prince: Part I Read Online Free PDF

ahead.
    Dinner was rabbit. He’d learned the art from Callas of skinning a rabbit without a knife, something that most Northerners apparently learned in infancy. At the rabbit’s knee, one pushed the joint out until it separated from the meat. Which took a bit of practice, and the first few times had left Hart swearing. But eventually he’d mastered the trick, which punctured the hide. He’d learned, too, to follow that up by working his fingers around the leg until the hide separated from the entire knee and slowly freeing the meat from the hide like he was pulling off a woman’s stocking.
    Because, as Callas had pointed out, a knife was optimal but sometimes a knife was lost. After battle, or elsewise. A man still had to eat.
    And Hart knew from firsthand experience that a man who relied on weapons to survive, wouldn’t.
    He turned the stick that held the rabbits. The rest of the men were either pitching tents or gathering firewood. He had trouble crediting the idea that he’d only been lying with Lissa that morning. His departure from the inn seemed like it had taken place a thousand years ago. He was bone tired, but he’d volunteered to take the first watch because it was easier to remain alert than to find the state again after a taste of sleep.
    Callas, beside him, seemed content.
    Hart breathed deeply, savoring the taste and scent of the air. Fir trees and cold. And with them, that sense of peace that could only be experienced in the forest. He’d dreamed of such a place, growing up. But he’d never expected to actually be there.
    Callas turned. “What’s on your mind, brother?”
    “That someone wants to destroy this.”
    “Wants to, yes.” His friend’s implication was clear.
    But to Hart, who’d grown up in the South, the rugged beauty of the North was infinitely more precious. He knew, as Callas never could, what it was like to slog through inches-deep troughs of human waste to reach the butcher shop, or any other shop in the center of town. To feel that same waste trickle down the inside of his collar, because some housewife hadn’t bothered to call out before dumping her night soil. To know that these and other indignities were the result of local leadership too weak to enforce the law and too disinterested in all but their own enrichment to remedy that situation.
    Men like his father controlled the South, if
controlled
was the word to use. They inherited their positions, while men like Hart were left to rot. What mattered one’s intelligence, or work ethic? Such things paled in comparison to knowledge of one’s forebears.
    He was safer here, on the eve of battle, than he’d ever been riding into town in Ewesdale.
    No. The North couldn’t become as the South. Hart would protect his new home.
    “I am also,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “concerned for Isla.”
    “The cold is no great thing.”
    “She must have lost the child.”
    His friend’s eyes widened fractionally. “She was with child?”
    “Not that she admitted.” He turned the rabbits again. They were becoming nice and crispy. “But it was well known at the time that her husband hadn’t waited until their wedding night to take her virtue. She came to him often in those first few weeks of their courtship, a fact that Rowena advertised to all who’d listen.”
    “A woman bedding her betrothed is hardly news.”
    “In the South it is.”
    Callas made a noncommittal sound.
    “One minute they were thick as thieves and the next they were circling each other like cats.” He shook his head. “Then things were fine again. She must have found out, and worried about telling him, and—”
    “But the arrival of a child is a joyous occasion.”
    “Not in the South.”
    They shared this acknowledgment in silence. Callas knew of Hart’s past. Was so far the only person Hart had ever met, with whom he felt comfortable admitting the hard truths of his childhood. Isla knew, because she’d been there. But they’d never