A sheen had appeared on Marozia’s brow, like the misting of a fever. Her fingers trembled more fiercely. And her dark eyes flashed with half a dozen emotions within moments: hatred, terror, grief, revulsion, anguish—and then deepest, blackest hatred again.
And then the princess’s grip loosed. Her hand fell, and Waltrude was released. Silence came swelling like an orchestra’s chorus.
All Marozia said was, “Very well.”
Waltrude regarded the princess and was struck once again by her graces and her beauty. Even now, in her unimaginable turmoil, neither quality had abandoned her. Yet—there were horrors that she still was ignorant to. She did not know of her husband’s most perfidious indiscretion and her once-beloved cousin’s cruelest betrayal. Shecouldnot know. This great and terrible secret, this great and secret terror, which could tear apart the realm like a body at its desecration…no matter her sympathy for the princess, the truth would never fall from Waltrude’s lips.
In that same stiff, flat tone, Marozia said, “You may go.”
With a nod, Waltrude turned, but halfway to the threshold, she hesitated. Marozia was no longer looking at her; she was staring blankly into the middle distance, her fingers clutching at the necklaceof rubies around her throat. Fat, lush rubies, like the most exquisite drops of spilled blood. Waltrude’s old jaw opened, to speak, to say—what? Words fled from her.
She was only a wet nurse. She could not stop the gyre of time. As she pushed through the door and began her dismal, solitary walk down the stairs from the eastern tower, all she could think was that she had saved nothing, and avenged no one.
VI
Milk, Teeth
Agnes was alone in the library today. Tisander had gone with Pliny to the beaches outside Castle Crudele, where, barefoot, they would walk carefully along the sand and see what creatures they could find. Pliny knew of every plant and animal on the island, all carefully accounted in his encyclopedia. Agnes had pleasant visions of Tisander, crouching before a tide pool, tracing his finger gently over the piebald shell of a crab or pointing in delight as a cormorant took flight from the rocks. Smiling to herself at this thought, Agnes took a book down from the shelf and settled in at her usual place at the long oaken table.
But she read for no more than a quarter hour before she was disturbed. The library door opened, and there was Liuprand.
She half rose from her seat in shock. “You should not be here,” she said, in a thick voice that could not disguise her true pleasure. “It is a risk—”
“One I will take,” Liuprand said. He walked toward her through the path of a beam of sunlight, which lit up his hair and each gilded tassel and button on his jacket. Agnes knew every contour of his body beneath it, but even observing him covered completely, her breath caught at his beauty. An impossible beauty, fed from the blood of Seraph. “I must see you.”
“Will we not see each other tonight?” Agnes asked. “In our usual place?”
“No,” Liuprand said. “Not tonight.”
He reached the table and stood before her, and though their distance was small, it felt infinite in this unsafe place, where anyone mightenter at any moment. The library was not often visited, but it was notunknown,not like the chapel. To muffle the instinct to reach for him, Agnes instead stroked nervously through the ends of her hair. “Why not?”
“I cannot say,” he replied, “for I wish it to be a surprise. But when we convene there again tomorrow, I hope you are pleased. More than pleased.” He leaned forward, and the ghost of a kiss brushed her cheek.
Agnes’s skin prickled with both desire and danger. “Nothere,” she whispered, unconvincingly, for she could not bring herself to rebuff his touch.
“No, you are right.” Liuprand pulled away and Agnes instantly was bereft. “But I have come to you about another matter as well.”
She arched a brow. “Oh?”
Liuprand pulled out a chair and sat, while Agnes lowered herself back into her seat. They were just far enough from each other that she could not touch him, even if she extended her arms. She suspected it was for both his benefit and hers, that they might resist the temptation to fall upon each other, as they did in their secret meeting place.
“As you know,” Liuprand began then, “the other houses will arrive in sixty-four days to celebrate the marriage of Meriope. Preparations are already under way among the servants, of course; we expect to host retinues of twenty for each master, and more for the House of Blood. It will be the first time in near a decade that all the houses will be gathered beneath one roof. It would be a shame for this moment to pass without putting it to full use.”
Agnes frowned. “How do you mean?”
“All through my father’s reign, the royal family has held the nobility of Drepane at a distance,” Liuprand said. “Little effort has been made to promote true unity among the houses and the line of Berengar.Someeffort,” he admitted, a flush tinting his cheeks, and Agnes looked away, for she knew that he hinted at what they both dared never speak of aloud. His marriage. “But as we are witnessing yet another yoking of the Crown to one of the noble houses, I thought we might make of it a special celebration.”
Agnes looked down at her hands in discomfort. She did not know precisely what her cousin thought of this marriage, because they no longer spoke. Marozia kept to the east wing of the castle, and Agnes to the west. But it did not take great wisdom to guess. Her beloved daughter, summarily removed from her arms and carted off to a distant house to be made a strange man’s wife. Or—perhaps not entirely strange. Agnes remembered the boy Gamelyn had been, the green eyes she had gazed into while they stood in Fredegar’s cellar. She remembered, with a chill, how hateful those eyes had been.
She did not know, however, if or how he had changed in these intervening years. He was a boy no longer. Would he be as kind a man as his grandfather? Or as cruel a man as his father? And would he ever forgive the Crown, the House of Berengar, for what had been taken from him? The father slain, the childhood stolen?
Agnes looked up to find Liuprand watching her intently, brow furrowed with concern.
“I am well,” she assured him, swallowing hard. “Now go on.”
“I propose this only because I believe you are fitted to the task, and that it might bring you joy,” he said. “I thought perhaps you might be persuaded to write and prepare a masque, to be performed before our gentle guests. The subject of this theater would be, of course, the joining of the royal house with the nobility of Drepane. It would celebrate unity and promote a hopeful vision of the future.”
As Agnes looked upon her lover, she was suffused with pride and affection. Liuprand the Just, he had been named, but he could just as easily be called Liuprand the Good or Liuprand the Wise. Generous, he was, clever and kind. She was glad to be his wife, even in secret. A smile pushed itself onto her face.
