Read Online The Black Prince: Part I by P. J. Fox - Free Book Online

from happening that she worried might happen. Things so terrible she couldn’t translate them from her imagination into words.
    He soothed her with soft words. Encouraged her to breathe, slow and deep. Bathed her fevered forehead with a cool cloth.
    Held her, at night, while the storm raged.
    Snow fell. And fell. Outside was a wind-stripped world of white.
    And then…something…had happened.
    The pressure mounted, and mounted, and mounted until—she gave up. The force raging inside of her was simply too strong to fight. And in that moment, she fell. Into a void. Of black, of white, she didn’t know. Her fever spiked and she thought for a time that her nose was pressed to the ceiling, spans above. She thought herself outside, in the snow.
    She woke the next morning, feeling calm and collected and much like herself.
    And ravenously hungry.
    And in need of a bath.
    The hunger hadn’t left, although several of her dresses had since had to be taken in. She was eating for two, in a sense. Her life force supporting Tristan’s. He needed to feed, to survive. A revenant, he created no life force of his own. She’d learned the truth of what this meant, the night he’d feasted on Alice in the glade—or thought she had.
    In truth, she’d known nothing.
    His existence intertwined with Isla’s, he could go longer without feeding. A keen tactical advantage, and one that allowed him to move more easily among men. To rule them. That he wasn’t a slave to hunger made her a slave to hers; she’d never eaten so much in her life. An entire chicken. A loaf of bread, each piece slathered in honey. An onion tart. And that for one breakfast.
    She’d never known the hunger with which he wrestled. But now she understood. Now, she understood so much.
    She came to understand, too, that her fighting it was what had made her transition so bad. A transition begun and completed within a single movement of the sun but that needed time to fully come to fruition. Like a sprout was really only the after-effect of planting. The changes she’d undergone in those two nights needed time to work through her system.
    There were so many things, now, that she just
knew
.
    She knew what Tristan knew. Comprehended the workings of things she’d never before knew existed, with no one having to explain them. Because she remembered learning them, even though she’d—Tristan had—learned them decades before she was born.
    Within Tristan was a hunger and a…cold. Such terrible cold. The ice storm raging inside of him was ten times worse than any, which could batter the walls of her new home. She didn’t know how he stood the forces, forces strong enough to crack glaciers, constantly opposing each other. Forces raging just beneath the surface of his ice calm exterior.
    She felt the cold, too. And knifing pains through her gut, when she’d tried to push it out. Tried to keep
him
out. She’d felt like she’d be smothered. Obliterated into a thousand motes of snow, never to come back together. To lose all consciousness of herself.
    Instead, when she’d finally broken, the opposite had happened.
    She’d breathed deeply. She’d felt no constriction. She’d felt free.
    There was still so much to learn. To work through. There were still moments when she felt like steel gauntleted fingers were digging into her windpipe, squeezing her heart. In those moments, she found herself stumbling. Sometimes falling. Pressed against the wall, or the floor, the chill cold of the tiles comforting as the world spun around her.
    Tristan helped her then: to breathe, to focus. To subjugate her will to his own. It was in those times when she fully opened herself to him that she felt most herself. Most at peace.
    It was when she fought him that she once again grew ill.
    She’d adapted, and she was adapting still.
    She returned the sponge to the water, bending over to wash her leg.
    Even a noblewoman’s bathtub was no great affair. Where communal baths featured deep pools, like