The black prince part ii, p.1
The Black Prince: Part II, page 1
part #4 of Hraban Chronicles Series
THE
BLACK PRINCE
PART II
P. J.
FOX
Book Three of The Black Prince Trilogy
This novel is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed herein are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places or events is purely coincidental.
THE BLACK PRINCE: PART II
Copyright © 2015 by Evil Toad Press
All rights reserved.
Cover art: Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent, Henry Fuseli, 1790
Cover design by Evil Toad Press
Published by Evil Toad Press
ISBN: 978-1-942365-46-4
First Edition: December 2015
Acknowledgements
I couldn’t have written this series without the continued love and support of my family and friends. Not much can be said, other than that, because a attempt to describe love, perhaps more than any other venture, confirms the limits of language. If, as Walter Winchell observed, a real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out, then I have truly been blessed with friends. I count, chief among them, my husband. He is my love, my laughter, my straight on ’till morning. But I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention other friends, family, family who are friends and friends who are family. Mel and Maddy. Sherry. Siw, Leanne, Jason, Shane, Renee and Mark. You all make my whole heart smile and you all are here, within these pages, along with me.
I also owe a special debt of gratitude to my fans. You let me write for a living. There is no greater gift than that.
P.J. Fox
To my husband, without whom I would not know romance to write it
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Epilogue
Afterword
About the Author
ONE
If an archer’s horse died, he walked.
They’d lost several horses in a mudslide the week before, but thank the Gods no men. They had no men to spare. Although it was only by the Gods’ intervention that disease wasn’t ravaging the camp. Hart had half expected that, by this time, they’d be collapsing by the side of the road from the bloody flux. Not that they could find the side of the road; all the roads in Morven seemed to have dissolved into great, sucking pits in the constant, punishing rain. Pits that turned, without any warning, into great, sluicing rivers of men and animals and shit.
Still, they pressed forward.
They had sufficient provisions for eight more days. The last town they’d passed through had supplied them in the hopes of forestalling an assault. The town council knew, as Hart knew, that these men had to eat. And would. The only question was whether the town would receive recompense. Or be robbed. If they were lucky.
Hart had paid. Gold was less dear than the wheat and salted meat that now filled their supply carts. Which would still have to be supplemented with forage, if the men’s teeth weren’t to rot and fall out of their heads.
Sighing, he put down his pen. A thin glass rod with a twist at the end, it had been a gift from Lissa. Along with some cologne. He rubbed his temples, leaning back in his camp chair. These men required one hundred and fifty quarters of grain per week. They also needed peas and barley, which they didn’t have. And the horses. Dear Gods, the horses.
They were still four days out from House Salm. He had to halve that. Even were they in the bloom of summer, all the fields within walking distance wouldn’t produce enough to feed them. And the warmer the weather got, the greater the chance that plague would strike the camp.
The rain hadn’t lessened, and drummed against the roof of his tent. He knew the men were miserable, and wondered too if he had cause to fear defectors. Although he suspected not. From what he’d overheard, their individual miseries had only intensified their collective hatred of the woman who’d brought them here. They blamed Maeve, not Hart. And not the king.
The flap opened and Arvid’s head appeared. He had to bend at the waist to fit through, and his head brushed the canvas above when he stood. Hart studied him across the desk, which matched his chair. Both were lightweight and both were portable, folding for travel in one of the supply carts.
He shook the rain from his beard, reminding Hart of nothing so much as a giant dire wolf drying off in its cave. “The men are grumbling, because you won’t let them have whores.”
Camp followers were a distraction.
And they ate.
And worse: they talked. About what they’d seen, and what they’d heard. Any woman who left the camp would do so knowing something.
An army could hardly expect to arrive at its destination unannounced, he knew this. But that didn’t mean they had to broadcast their exact location to those few locals who might not have heard the earth shake as the column moved through. Nor allow prying eyes to examine their stores, or their weapons. To count the number of blacksmiths, or farriers repairing horseshoes.
And, quite possibly, report these findings.
Women had politics, too. A fact that the average man, with her breasts before him, seemed to forget. Which was why Hart had ordered that any man found sneaking one in would be flogged and any woman, in turn, would have her arm broken. The men might grumble, but at least they’d live to do so.
“They know the rules.”
Hart resumed studying the documents before him. A commander didn’t explain himself. And shouldn’t. Once he started agreeing with his men that he owed them justification for his decisions, he stopped being their commander. Mutiny and desertion followed.
“There’s more.” Arvid sounded pained.
Hart looked up. “Yes?”
“The Southrons’ sergeant. He forced himself on a local woman, after she caught him in her shed.”
The Gods only knew what he’d be doing in there. “Have him hung,” Hart said.
“We can hardly afford to lose more men.”
It was a measure of their friendship that his lieutenant questioned Hart at all. And of how seriously he took that position, and their cause. Arvid was no simpering wretch, to go along with Hart out of fear. He spoke his mind, however unpopular that might make him. Which was the principal reason Hart had wanted him along. Most thought that men like Hart needed less truth. If they could tolerate any at all. When, as men like Arvid knew, they needed more. And sometimes, men like Arvid—warmer men, kinder men, more forgiving men—were right. They saw, and understood, things that men like Hart didn’t. Couldn’t. Which made their perspective valuable and their less, ah…human counterparts wise to heed them.
But in this particular situation, Hart was right and he knew it.
“Well then.” His tone was sharp. “Maybe the next time someone in this camp is tempted to spread ill feeling in the king’s name they’ll recall that fact.” The people of Chilperic could hardly be expected to support Hart against Maeve if he brought with him a band of marauders. He could sing the king’s praises all day long and have them do the same but people judged what was in front of them. Here, Hart represented the king. And the king’s justice.
He meant to have them see that the king was fair where Maeve was not, and that the king’s justice was truly blind. There would be no favoritism toward his own men. Which they knew; they’d heard the warnings read.
“I mean to have this woman, and her family, feel that reporting crime to the king produces results.”
“This is only one woman, and one family.”
“Who will talk. To other women, and other families.” About how the king’s justice was supe
rior. Hart knew that Maeve’s followers operated under no such set of restrictions; Maeve’s entire claim to the throne was that a king—or queen—was some sort of demi-god, exempt from those restrictions placed on normal men. And expectations, too. Such as that of bare competence.
“And perhaps,” he added, “this will encourage the men to police each other. One can alert his friends, for example, that he feels the urge to assault someone and they can tackle him to the ground. Or jerk him off. I don’t care.” So long as they all understood that one man’s decision to break the law affected them all. For not only would one man die but, in the weeks to come, his friends might also die for lack of him having been there to raise his sword beside them.
“We’ll be short a sergeant.”
“Have his men elect another from within their own ranks.”
Arvid disappeared back into the rain.
Hart went back to rubbing his temples. Was it really that difficult to understand? Should he have another list of warnings made up to be read, this one also reminding the men that they should tie ribbons around their cocks if they intended to wreak havoc or the women of Chilperic might inadvertently feel safe? Or maybe he should simply have all their cocks cut off, if the command to find relief in their own hands proved too difficult to follow.
The last man he’d executed had wailed that self-abuse was a sin.
Celibacy, Hart had reminded him, was not.
They’d lost ten men, now, since joining the Southrons in Hardland. One to disease, one to a brawl, six to accident and now two to execution.
He knew that the maps before him were useless, almost as useless as the various lists of supplies. All of which, regardless of their contents, conveyed the same dire warning: not enough. But they were something to look at, while he thought. About the information brought in earlier by his scouts, and about what he meant to do next.
If Lissa were here, she’d urge him to rest. And he needed rest. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d really and truly slept, without one eye open and his hand on his weapon. But he could rest after he’d won. Or when he was dead.
In the meantime, he had work to do.
The good news was that, while he might not have the world at his disposal, he was still an educated man. He’d read a great deal about the tactics—successful and otherwise—of the great leaders. And, too, since coming to Caer Addanc, about the leaders of the East as well. One of whom in particular he’d found inspiring, and whom he found himself considering now.
Along with the first inklings of a plan.
He wondered what Lissa was doing, and if she’d enjoyed her present. He only wished that he’d been able to present it to her, himself. And, in return, enjoy her expressions of gratitude.
He felt his cock stir. He, too, was going without. A man should never ask more of his men than he was willing to ask of himself. And Hart, if the truth be told, had no interest in the kind of women who sought employment with an army such as his. For employment it was, although these sad remnants of women were paid in food as often as coin. Food, or sometimes drink. Or any one of the myriad preparations, made from plants, that the miserable took to ease their suffering.
They were the lowest of the low, robbing from men while they lived and then robbing them again after they died. They could be spotted after most battles, picking through the personal effects of the corpses. Relieving some, even, of their flasks and daggers and personal mementos, while they still moaned and cried for aid. For the men themselves, war might represent opportunity—if only for revenge. But for the average camp follower, bent and broken by years of self-abuse in the form of drug and alcohol addiction, it was the end of the road.
He wondered if they knew.
Was anyone given a sense of their own demise or were they all cursed to forge on, believing themselves on the side of right, until they collapsed?
TWO
The queen was with child.
All around Isla, the castle was celebrating. And of course she was pleased. This was what the kingdom needed and, according to those who knew her, what the queen had so desperately wanted since almost the first night of her marriage. Her union with Piers had been a love match, as well as a fortuitous one. Uniting North and South, it gave the promise of peace. A peace that was now threatened. Which explained, Isla supposed, the frenetic quality to the revelry: people needed to forget.
Did war still loom, or had war come?
Maeve still denied involvement in the skirmishes that picked up and died off over the land, like so many isolated brushfires. Claimed that they were just that: isolated. If Piers inspired discontent as a king, then whose fault was that? Certainly not hers; she’d retired, she maintained, to her estate.
Tristan had urged Piers to kill her when he’d had the chance; but then she’d escaped and, after Ullswater Ford, there had been peace. And with it, a general amnesty issued for those who’d taken up arms against the crown. Because Piers understood that without it, old resentments would fester forever. There had to be an end. A definitive end, after which everyone—on both sides—could rebuild. After Maeve had reappeared, he’d argued that it was too late: executing her now would seem like breaking his own truce. If she swore fealty, he’d let her go.
And she had, although all—including Piers—knew that her words meant nothing. She had no sense of honor, no belief in the ancient traditions that were her own best claim to the throne. She wanted, not to protect Morven, or the church, as she claimed, but power.
Piers could only hope, as all right-minded men and women could only hope, that his own administration of the kingdom proved deft enough that none would have cause for complaint. But rebuilding took time. Too many farms still sat abandoned, their fields turned fallow. And while Piers sought to create new economic and social initiatives, fighting tooth and nail with a hidebound aristocracy that refused to initiate them, Maeve promised everyone—noble and peasant alike—the world. And overnight, if they’d only take up arms for her.
She never explained how she’d achieve these miracles, and she didn’t need to; she had priests from the Southern Isles to Barghast singing her praises, sometimes literally during the mass. Not all the church supported Maeve, of course, but enough did that many felt she all but represented the Gods.
But Piers had brought peace. If only for a time. Many, still mourning their losses, had no desire to lose even more. And Piers was king. And now, if the Gods were good, Piers would have an heir.
Maeve had no heir. Rumors still persisted about Asher, but if he was her son then why had she let him go? The average mind couldn’t grasp such a concept. And Tristan had legitimized him, making no claims as to his maternal parentage. Now, the susurrus of rumor went, Asher’s mother must have been a serving girl. Or the daughter of a merchant. Not Isla’s; she was too young. Although Asher had her coloring. And Tristan’s.
Not Brandon’s. Brandon had been fair. Perhaps, some argued—and Isla had overheard this, herself—the boy had merely been confused for Brandon’s son. If a true son had ever existed. And wasn’t Maeve’s claim to the throne through Brandon? What mattered it who Asher’s mother was, if, as seemed so clearly obvious, Brandon had not been his father?
Isla wouldn’t be surprised if Maeve claimed that her union with Tristan had come of a forest wedding, reframing her claim as to flow through him instead.
She stared at her goblet. A beautiful thing, intricately carved from fine pewter. Each of the four framed panels featured a different scene.
Tristan had lain with Maeve. She knew that. Although she knew, too, that it shouldn’t bother her. Tristan was no celibate, and never had been. And she’d been—she’d been barely above seven or eight winters when their affair had begun. Both of which facts she reminded herself over and over. Hoping that, this time, logic would win out over fancy.
Tristan loved her. Except he didn’t—not really. Didn’t, couldn’t, love anyone. Which, a soft and unpleasant voice informed her, meant that his loyalty was purely a thing of theory. How could she trust his heart, when he didn’t have one?
She felt his gaze on her, and looked up. A burning cold, like ice against one’s skin. A killing cold.
He couldn’t keep her warm at night, save with the blood of other men. Couldn’t truly promise her that he’d never feel for another what he felt for her, because he felt nothing. And couldn’t give her children. She’d never feel what the queen was feeling right now, never know the pain of childbirth or the even more exquisite pain of holding her child in her arms and knowing she’d gladly give her life in exchange for—hers? His? Who knew.
