Read Online The Demon of Darkling Reach (The Black Prince Book 1) by P. J. Fox - Free Book Online

all accounts, a happy one. Piers notoriously shared his queen with his friends and his queen, if the rumors were to be believed, was more than willing to be shared. On the one occasion he’d seen them together, when he’d gone to the capital to plead for relief of his debts—and been denied—Peregrine had been impressed by the depth of devotion between the two. Piers had smiled at his wife in a way that Peregrine had never smiled at any woman.
    Nor, he doubted, had Tristan. He studied the duke now, noting the evidences of his…unusual condition. The duke could kill him where he sat, claws or no claws, and the realization made him feel foolish and impotent and old. He’d made a right balls up of his life, and now he was paying the price. He
did
love his daughter, very much, but what kind of life could she live if she stayed here? He was, in a sense, doing her a favor: by sending her North, he was rescuing her from the life of hardship and shame that came of sharing his blood. Whatever she might think to the contrary, she had no other prospects.
    Better dead than ignominious, and he had debts. Terrible debts, far more terrible than anyone knew. Certainly not his wife, or his daughters. Or his son. Peregrine had, by slight of hand and outright deceit, kept the true extent of his failings hidden for years. But even he knew that he was coming to the end of the time where such subterfuge was possible.
    “The king…?” he asked.
    “Sends his regards.” Mountbatten’s voice was sibilant, like a snake’s. Peregrine repressed a shiver, and Mountbatten smiled slightly. Peregrine half-expected to see him show fangs, but the duke’s teeth were like any man’s. Better than most, perhaps: white and even. His canines were slightly pointed, but no more than usual. Peregrine himself had such teeth although his had long been stained and discolored with age.
    No, in the morning light he looked like any other man. A hard man, and cold, but a man nonetheless. Peregrine clung to that thought. Things would be well. And the gold was…he picked up the quill and, dipping it in the ink, signed his name to the contract with a flourish.

EIGHT

    “D aughter, I’d like a word.”
    Isla looked up from where she’d been reading by the window to see her father in the door to the women’s gallery. This was, in and of itself, an unusual occurrence, as his habit was to avoid the place at all costs. Apple, too, seemed surprised to see her husband but managed to smile pleasantly. Rowena, still sullen, sat hunched in front of the fire. She’d been ignoring them all since breakfast and was ignoring her father now.
    Isla pointed to herself, surprised.
    The earl nodded.
    “Oh,” she said faintly. There was no indication, in her father’s posture, of what this interview might be about. Was he displeased with the progress in the spinning shed? Was he going to berate her again for spending funds on salt? Funds they never seemed to have when it came to the purchase of household goods but that they always seemed to have when it came to the purchase of silks for Apple?
    She stood up and, smoothing her skirts down over her hips, came to join him. She was sad to leave the room, if only because she’d only just coaxed sufficient heat out of the fire to make the chill air bearable. The hall outside would be frigid, as the rest of the manor was. A damp, raw wind had been blowing all morning, heavy with the promise of a storm that never broke; a rain they’d needed desperately earlier in the season, but that now would prove nothing but a nuisance. What crops they’d managed to grow would be flattened and the culverts, as absorbent as stone from months of drought, would overflow and flood the humbler of the cottages and perhaps even wash them away.
    Replete with these cheery thoughts, Isla went to join her father.
    Trailing him first down the broad stone steps of the central staircase and then down the narrower corridor that led to her father’s study,