No matter how crude the king’s affect, Agnes knew this was notselfish, quotidian greed. The news had traveled to the remotest parts of the island, even winding its way up to Castle Peake: The power of Seraph was faltering. The once-luminous city-state could no longer afford to finance the occupation of Drepane. No more Seraphine nobles could be prevailed upon to send their daughters across the sea to marry into the royal family. It was whispered that Liuprand’s mother, the long-dead Queen Philomel, would be the last Seraphine lady to set foot upon the white sand of this heathen island. It would be a domestic bride for Liuprand, or no bride at all.
And with its bursting stores of ancestral wealth, the House of Teeth was the most desirable alliance for the royal family. Adele-Blanche had held fast to this power, waiting for the proper moment to deploy it, when she could hope for the greatest return. With each passing year that no blushing maiden from Seraph arrived on Drepane’s shores, with each ducat that was spent with no return, the desperation of the House of Berengar became more dire, and the House of Teeth stood to gain even more by answering their need. Adele-Blanche had bided her time, to immense profit.
“It is a gift,” Marozia said. “To honor Your Highness and to endear our two families. I believe there is much to be gained for us both in a partnership. Should you wish to proceed.”
The king was silent for a long moment, the golden light dancing across his tumescent face.
“Hm,” he said at last. “Show the ladies to their chambers.”
X
Waltrude
It was the chamber of the wife of Widsith the Precious, the sweet and pious Iphigene, who decorously turned her eyes away while her husband impressed himself upon squires and serving boys. Iphigene had the look of the most ancient, most noble houses of Seraph. Golden hair, cerulean eyes, skin as luminous as a pearl. She embroidered tapestries of wolf hunts and played both the flute and the viol.
Waltrude had sat many a time in this chamber, nursing the future king Nicephorus at her breast. In his infancy, he was anything but Sluggard; in his adolescence, he had jousted with such reckless fervor that he broke apart his leg bone on a post in the tiltyard, and the splinters of wood remained buried in his thigh to this day, beneath a pulsing, black-blooded sore. This wound had led him down the path of Sluggardry, and Waltrude’s heart still ached when she saw him limp onerously up to the throne, remembering the lively suckling babe he had been.
After dear Iphigene had taken ill and perished placidly in her sleep, as if she did not want to inconvenience anyone with her dying (as in death as she was in life,a forbidden phrase, meant to be struck from the collective memory of Drepane), the chamber had lain empty for years, with only Waltrude visiting each day to brush the dust from her beloved mistress’s bedspread. And then Nicephorus took Philomel to wife, another quintessential Seraphine beauty, though lacking the polite reticence of her predecessor. She dared to raise her voice to her husband, to keep his son from him when he had displeased her, and the king and queen’s scrapping was often so loud that it seemed to tremble the walls of Castle Crudele.
Yet within this vortex of detestable misery, Liuprand was the most placid child Waltrude had ever encountered. He wept only rarely, and even then, it was a series of little gasps, not Nicephorus’s profane screams and gurgles to which she was accustomed. Perhaps it was because of the wretched circumstances of his infancy, the war that had waged so ruthlessly between his mother and father, and not despite them, that even as a babe Liuprand had learned to make himself unobtrusive, to maintain peace, at the cost of his own innocence.
Waltrude had not felt near enough loyalty to return to the chamber after Queen Philomel died—shrieking, protesting (as in death), if the stories could be believed—so now she climbed the steps in a hurry and began to dust off the covers, fluff up the pillows, and stoke the hearth for the first time in years. Her back ached terribly when she bent over. Her fingers, when gripped around the metal poker, looked like the pale, gnarled tentacles of a squid. There were moles on her face that had not been there when Liuprand was a babe, and many of them were growing long, gossamer white hairs. Her eyebrows had become denser. She could not stop the dried spittle from gathering in the corners of her mouth.
There was some scuffling from the corridor. Waltrude stood up and heard her bones crunch.
The door opened and spit out the spawn of the House of Teeth. The first came like a rush of blood, red skirts spilling over. She had crow’s eyes, black and flashing, though they could not be convinced to rest in one place for very long. They darted all around the room, skimming right over Waltrude.
The second came with hardly even the sound of footsteps. She stood back with her hands folded at her waist, hair braided into a very dark crown, only a few strands fluttering free to graze her jaw. Her eyes were the gray of rain-dampened stone, her flesh utterly colorless, her body narrow and dry. She had overall the look of a statue, dour and frozen in time, and she was as silent as one, too.
“Hello,” the first said in a pert voice. “Are you Waltrude?”
“Yes, my lady.”
“I am Marozia, Mistress of Teeth. And this is my cousin, Agnes.”
Mistress of Teeth, indeed. She wore that ancestral necklace, held at her throat like a string of delicate pearls. Her face was ruddy, impassioned. If she had not known, Waltrude would not have guessed she had ridden down from the black, hideous mountains of Castle Peake, where every tower was draped in dismal fog. There was too much life to her—exorbitant, aggravating life.
“It is an honor to meet you, my lady,” said Waltrude.Ladywas the term her status afforded her, but she and her cousin both looked more like girls. They were of age to Liuprand, who was just barely straining out of boyhood. Or perhaps Waltrude was merely too old now to perceive the delicate subtleties of youth.
Marozia nodded, and her gaze spasmed about the chamber again. “Where are the trunks?”
“The trunks?” Waltrude’s wrinkled brow wrinkled further. “They are here, my lady. The Dolorous Guard delivered them.”
“Mytrunks, yes. But where are Agnes’s?”
Waltrude chafed at this impatient tone. “They have been put next door. In the lady’s chamber.”
“No,” Marozia said forcefully. “That won’t do. Bring them here.”
“Lady,” Waltrude said, feigning a placidness she did not feel, “Castle Crudele has ample room to accommodate you both. The prince concerns himself with your comfort. You need not be so familiar with each other—”
The shadow that fell across the face of the Mistress of Teeth bewildered Waltrude into silence. Marozia’s chest expanded as she gathered her breath.
Then Waltrude feared she had been too easily stifled. After all, had the king not ordered the peasants within the Outer Wall to go into the huts and their workshops, to darken their windows, to muffle the mouths of their children and the braying of their animals, so that the ladies would not feel overly welcomed? Had he not schooled all his servants to treat the ladies less as guests and more as interlopers? The king may have capitulated to the desires of that hoarymistress of the black peaks, but he would make his revulsion and antipathy known.
And now, already, Waltrude felt the imprudent memory of Philomel engulfing the chamber, rolling off Marozia like smoke. Philomel, too, had come to Castle Crudele with such imperiousness and vigor, though it had not spared her a cruel fate. Perhaps this Mistress of Teeth would be luckier.
And Agnes, the statue-girl, was unfortunately no resurrected Iphigene. The old queen would have smiled, laid a hand tenderly over her cousin’s arm, endeavored to soothe her vexation and rid the room of its hostile mists. Waltrude was thus made to consider the difference between quiet and silence. Agnes did not speak, but there was nothing demure or self-effacing in her. And though she had not known her longer than a few moments, Waltrude somehow had the sense of her silence as total. Even her eyes communicated nothing at all.
