Read The Black Prince: Part II for Free Online Page B

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.



SIX
    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.
    Water elf disease
, came the whispers. He hadn’t, as it turned out, been bitten; his body was examined, revealing nothing but the vestiges of a rash. His things had been burned, for fear of contagion.
    Hart had watched that, too.
    And then, despite having never touched the man, he’d gotten sick.
    That was the really terrifying thing about the disease: a man passed it most easily before he even knew himself to be sick. Hart had developed a runny nose, too. And then a sore throat made worse by a deep, hacking cough. His neck had swelled. His eyes had watered. And then the rash had appeared. He’d been nauseous, and then weak, and then delirious.
    His nurse had feared that, if he did recover, he’d be deaf. Or demented. About a quarter of the children who did recover suffered some sort of lasting defect. From the high fever, it was believed. Such raging fires could leave even a grown man, hale and hearty, a shadow of his former self.
    But Hart had recovered, his faculties intact. His things had been burned just the same and he’d watched the servants loading that bier, too, rags wrapped around their faces. Like a burial, he remembered thinking. His bedding. His toys. Anything that could be taken, had been.
    He’d been upset, of course, but he’d tried to face the loss stoically. His little sister was still little more than a baby, and babies rarely survived. But she’d toddled over to him, her feet hidden in the bottom of that stupid sack she’d worn, that all babies seemed to wear, and stood next to him. She hadn’t said a word; she couldn’t speak yet. But after a minute, she’d reached up and grasped a single finger in her chubby hand. And that had been the true beginning of their friendship.
    Knowing Isla had given him a deep respect for women. For what they suffered, and for how unfair their lives sometimes were. Isla was just as smart as any man—smarter than most men, in truth—but she was limited by, not her actual sex but the perception of it. As though women were meant to be weak and those women who weren’t, rather than suggesting that a culture’s shared belief about the nature of womanhood might be wrong, were rejected as pariahs.