The Black Prince: Part I by P. J. Fox

another. Or another might come to them, as Asher had. Tristan found the reticence that some men felt toward adoption illogical. Provenance was no guarantee of acceptance, and one had only to see Hart interact with his supposed father to understand that.
    Hart, or indeed Isla.
    Sometimes, around Asher, he caught himself experiencing a glimmer of…perhaps the correct term was a stirring. Not an awakening but not a memory, either. Not quite that removed. He felt, somewhere deep within, the lost mind of his host. And he knew that the original Tristan, the man he’d become, had imagined himself having a son like Asher. Had dreamed of such, in his fondest dreams.
    And Tristan, the man he was now, agreed.
    Asher was quiet. Not timid but reserved. He’d grow into himself in time, those traits suiting ill a child but well a man.
    “A formal acknowledgment, should you wish it, can be made soon enough. But,” he continued, framing his words carefully and with some deliberation, allowing them time to sink in, “would necessarily involve Isla.”
    Morvish law was strange. To formally adopt Asher as his heir meant acknowledging his current wife as the boy’s mother. A fiction, of course. But the kind of fiction important to Southrons: that he have a mother and a father, and that the two be married at the time of the acknowledgment.
    To Northerners, the whole thing was foolish. Clearly the boy had a mother. He hadn’t fallen to the earth from some tree. And since no woman ever looked at the child she’d just given birth to and wondered if it was hers, the father’s acknowledgment was all that was required. Surely that man knew whether he’d been present at the crucial moment and, more importantly, whether a bond was felt.
    Asher nodded. He was hunched over the first real adult beverage he’d ever been served, having the first truly adult conversation of his life. After Brandon had died, they’d talked. And honestly. But not as equals.
    “She thinks of you as her own.”
    Something flashed in Asher’s eyes and was gone. Hope. He’d never had much of a mother.
    Isla, being scarce older, was more of an older sister than a mother. Or should have been. But her warmth had helped Asher come alive. It was all the things Asher needed: steady, predictable. Something on which he could rely.
    But still, she wasn’t his mother. And Tristan suspected that Asher himself wasn’t entirely sure of how he felt about Maeve. The glamorous, captivating woman who’d first sold and then abandoned him. Who even now was working to reclaim the throne.
    This time, for herself.
    And he hadn’t yet answered Asher’s question.
    “Maeve was married to Brandon.”
    Asher waited, his large eyes solemn. For this transition into adulthood. For Tristan had only spoken the truth: there could be no going back. Recognition as Tristan’s son would mean new responsibilities. New difficulties. Difficulties that Asher couldn’t even yet imagine.
    Asher had long possessed a gravitas beyond his years. The result of too much pain. Tristan understood. There were those in the castle who mistook this gravitas for a sharing of Tristan’s nature. Which Asher did not. But their twin expressions, solemn and still, made them look even more alike than their snow-pale skin and raven’s wing hair.
    Tristan supposed that Asher got his looks from Maeve. She had ever been a beauty. And intelligent, too. Unlike her husband.
    “She came to me, at court. I was there to petition for increased funds, to guard the Northern borders. Funds that were not granted, as our then-king disagreed that there was a threat. He’d long adopted a policy that reality never extended past the limit of his vision. If he couldn’t see it, it didn’t matter. He couldn’t see the devastation wreaked in the North; ergo, I was a fool and a liar.
    “After an unsatisfying interview followed by an equally unsatisfying dinner, I’d taken to the cloisters. To walk in the night air, and to be alone.