The Black Prince: Part I Read Online Free PDF Page B

discussed it.
    “There is no reason for upset, unless one doubts that the child is one’s own.”
    “There is, if the woman is unmarried.”
    “Marriage is no magic charm, forcing a woman to lust only for her husband.”
    “In the South it is.”
    Callas removed the rabbits from the fire and handed Hart his portion. The flesh was scalding hot and delicious. Hart sucked the juices from his fingers, feeling himself warmed from the inside out. He’d acquired a taste for rabbit. And those in the North were fatter and sweeter besides. A tastier morsel than their scrawny, sinewy cousins in the moors.
    “Perhaps the child never quickened.”
    Callas referred to the fact that, whatever Isla’s state when she’d set out for Darkling Reach, she certainly wasn’t with child now. She’d been sick for a time after arriving, and spent the better part of a fortnight holed up in her room. Hart had heard the rumors, of course: that the duke had ensorcelled her somehow. That she was now, as Rose had claimed, a demon just like him. But Hart had come to visit his sister often enough and found her, while drawn, to be much herself. Whatever spell the duke might have laid on her—one of protection, perhaps—she was still fundamentally the same person. And she was certainly no necromancer.
    “His Grace needs an heir.”
    “What about Asher?”
    Callas drank some wine, and thought. “He has yet to acknowledge the child, but this could be for political reasons.” Whatever Tristan’s reasoning—for anything—he didn’t discuss it with the likes of his guard. They were left to speculate. “Because,” Callas continued, “Maeve still claims that the child is Brandon’s and so long as the world believes this to be the case, Tristan still has a hostage.”
    “It isn’t the fact of his being illegitimate?”
    “He clearly favors the boy. As,” Callas added, “does your sister.”
    “But could Asher inherit?”
    “If he were formally recognized, then yes. The child of a man’s loins is still the child of his loins. And if Isla….” Callas trailed off, his gaze on the fire.
    “If Isla what?”
    But it was a long time before Callas spoke.
    Because there was greater import, here, than simply the sorrows of one woman.
    “It happens, sometimes, that after a woman loses a child she cannot have another.” He finished the last of his rabbit. “It was so with my sister, after her third. She and her husband took their other children in, after the woman who was supposed to be their mother abandoned them.” He stopped. The silence stretched again. He was right: Tristan needed an heir. Tristan’s brother needed an heir. The king, for all his reputed attachment to his wife, had yet to produce one—or even the rumor of one.
    And the kingdom was on the brink of war.



SIX
    A sher tramped around the stableyard, feeling used.
    He’d just finished his eleventh year at Solstice and here he was, still mucking around just like he had when he was a child! They wouldn’t let him use any
real
weapons, not yet. Practice swords and practice maces and other things that were stupid. He wasn’t even allowed to use his longbow without supervision. Supervision that mainly consisted of Tristan lecturing him. Or Brom. He couldn’t decide which of them was worse.
    His—Tristan wanted to lecture him about
technique
. Brom wanted to lecture him about
safety
. Neither of them would actually let him
do
anything. Why did it matter if he learned how bows were made? He didn’t see how sitting through one more droning lecture was going to help him actually
use
one. And lately Tristan had been acting so
odd
. Refusing to let him go out alone. Like anyone cared what happened to him.
    Well, Tristan did. And Isla did. But Tristan kept acting like—like what? An errant tribe of gnomes would magic him into the trees? He shook his head. And now he was supposed to be grooming his horse.
    He stopped, staring out at the white-gray expanse of his world.
    He’d