With a sudden swiftness, Liuprand lifted her up into his arms. She uttered a small noise of shock. He carried her, in the style of a bride, toward the tub and stepped within it, lowering them both in increments into the water. It had been heated, and Agnes’s bare flesh burned pleasantly as she was submerged.
The petals of a white orchid drifted past. Her black hair spilled out around her, made even sleeker in its wetness, as shiny as a mermaid’s tail. Liuprand released her to perch gently upon his lap; one hand cupped her head and the other the small of her back. She felt him growing stiff against her thigh.
Agnes was recalling—as she knew Liuprand was, too—that night in the House of Blood, where they had committed their first act of lustful treason. When she had finally laid down her grief and given up her fear, and opened herself up to him like a night-blooming flower, shy inthe sun but glorious under the moon. That reminded her of what she wished to tell him, but before she could, Liuprand kissed her on the mouth, and all her reason and wisdom was forgotten.
She shifted her lips and seated herself upon him, moaning as he slid inside her, inch by inch. He was steel sheathed in silk, hard and soft both at once. He thrust up into her, tangling his fingers in her hair, jerking her head back to expose the column of her throat, which he then lavished with his mouth and tongue.
Her release built within her, a banking of coals in her lower belly, from which a heavenly fire rose and laced through her veins. He came with a lion’s roar, muffled against her shoulder, but there was nothing to deafen the cry of ecstasy that broke from Agnes’s lips. The sound lifted from her like an ivory-winged bird, soaring to the ceiling and fluttering there among the rafters. And then, in its absence, virtually no sound at all. Only the labored gasping of two lovers in the dark.
When Agnes recovered herself, she slipped off his lap and sat beside him, leaning her head back against the edge of the tub. Liuprand’s throat bobbed and his lashes fluttered wearily. Her own tiredness settled upon her like a velvet mantle, but she shoved it away, unwilling to surrender to sleep and to dreams. The real world demanded her attention. Turning to Liuprand, she said, “I have an idea to propose to you.”
He opened his eyes and looked upon her earnestly. “What is it, my love?”
“I have been writing my masque. I have the actors now, and the script, and I think it is going rather well.” The liplike petal of an iris bobbed through the water and caught itself in her hair. “But there are two parts I could not fill with the actors from the Outer Wall. They are…wanting of beauty and charm.”
Liuprand’s gaze was steady; he hung upon her every word.
“And you are the most graceful and glorious creature to ever touchDrepane’s shores.” Agnes lifted a hand to his face, brushing her thumb across his cheekbone.
“I am no such thing,” Liuprand said, “but go on.”
“Will you do it?” Agnes asked. She leaned closer, close enough that he could feel the whisper of her breath. “Will you take the main role yourself?”
Liuprand shifted slightly so that their eyes were perfectly level. He lay his hand over hers and gently prised it from his cheek, kissing her scarred palm and each of her fingers.
“I told you once that I am your disciple,” he said. “I follow every command you give me, and endeavor to grant every wish that so much as flits through your mind.” He smiled against her hand. “Yes, Agnes, of course I will do it. There is nothing you could ask of me that I would not debase myself to execute.”
IX
The Procession
The arrival of the guests began at the earliest hour of dawn, and was announced by the tolling of the great brass bells in the tower of the Outer Wall. Phylus, the bell-ringer, took the ropes in his callused hands and yanked with all the force that his aged body could muster. And as the reverberation shuddered through his bones, there was a desperate scrabbling at the base of the tower, beggars and paupers and scullions scattering in all directions, striving to be the first to share the news with the inhabitants, and hopefully earn a coin or a head of cabbage for their trouble.
First to arrive was the delegation from the House of Bones; their master, Amycus, was precise and proper in all things. Their banners were black and white, their sigil a pale raven perched on a skull, with a bleak field of ebon behind. There were no windows on Amycus’s carriage, no angle from which he could be glimpsed, leaving the inhabitants of the Outer Wall bereft. He was a curiosity, this boy-man who spoke with a bird’s voice. And yet his procession vanished through the barbican without offering even a peek of the diminutive lord.
Next came the delegation of the House of Lungs, and a more divergent spectacle there could not have been. Lord Hartwig’s carriages were emblazoned in garish colors, showing, in progression, a painting of a great hunt: naked youths with spears against a backdrop of gold and green, an ivory stag with an enormous coronet of antlers, gored, its wounds weeping dramatically. Rubies, not red paint, made up the blood, and the stag’s eyes were chips of sapphire. As the carriages trundled past, a few were bold enough to reach out and swipe at the gems,as if they could rattle them loose. But the jewels stuck fast, and the peasants were bereft once again. So distracted they were by the finery of the carriages that they missed the Master of Lungs himself, though he sat proudly upon a pure-white mount, in a glorious brocade cape of velvet.
The more worldly of the inhabitants were surprised to see the delegation of the House of Flesh appear next. They had the longest journey, from the remotest part of the island, an arid and sun-scraped territory separated from the rest of Drepane by forbidding black peaks. Perhaps the length and the many possible treacheries of the passage had caused the Master of Flesh to come with a sparse retinue: a single carriage, lacking any ornamentation save for the gossamer drapes that revealed only the silhouette of the lord behind them. He appeared as no more than a shadow on a wall, and the assembled peasants let out a long, disheartened sigh as he passed.
Was it so much to ask that these great lords came in the most sumptuous trappings of wealth and supremacy? The days of the peasant-folk were so dreary, so colorless, that they yearned for a vivid spectacle to tint, however briefly, the drab canvas of their existence.
Their hopes were modestly lifted by the arrival of the House of Hearts. Their colors were the tender pink of an infant’s earlobe and the muted red of the inner petals of a still-ripening rose; however, when taken together, these pastel shades made a lovely sight indeed. They suggested the soft beauty of a sunrise, and most of the peasants were not so lacking in sophistication that they could not appreciate a subtler form of glamour and of art. The Master of Hearts sat with his lady wife within one of these dawn-hued carriages, their hands joined in a faithful knot. The peasants sighed again upon seeing them, only this time it was a low, besotted sigh, as if the love of the lord and the lady had imbued them, in passing, with a similar satisfied fondness. They were, however briefly, at peace.
And so it was rather startling to see next the House of Eyes, though their retinue was certainly not lacking in opulence or spectacle. Lord Thrasamund’s carriages, colored sunset orange and vivid green, wereheavy, sturdy things, and they beat the earth with their wheels as they passed, stirring harsh clouds of dust into the air. The peasants gasped and choked, but when the dust cleared and they had Lord Thrasamund within their sights, they felt suddenly galvanized, shot through with gall and with purpose.
He was a craggy giant of a man, his shiny bald head compensated by the most exuberant ginger beard. His eyes were set low over his hooked nose, and his gaze was as fierce as an eagle seeking quarry. The peasants absorbed this ferocity, this drive, and their spines stiffened. Each one suddenly recalled a moment when he had been wronged, with no recourse, or an occasion during which she had been cheated and left with naught but her futile fury. A murmuring of jilted anger came from the crowd. Lord Thrasamund’s simmering ire had infected them.
But when his carriage passed through the barbican, his anger vanished with him. The peasants blinked, as if newly roused from slumber, and wondered what had happened. The once-powerful sentiment was now no more than a half-remembered dream.
And then at last, at very long last, came the House of Blood. Their carriages were crimson, and so were their banners. A dozen carriages there were, twice as many as the next-largest retinue, and they were oddly silent as they passed through the crowd of peasant-folk. A hush fell over the assembly, and it made the gonging of the bells feel obscene, an affront not only to etiquette but to nature itself. The retinue had turned the world into a grim place—not gray or drab, but black with dread and wretchedness. Even the wind ceased its gusting. The air was still and suddenly thick with the tang of copper.
Maleagant stood at a distance from the tight knot of the crowd. She saw, over the tops of the peasants’ heads, the carriages in procession, in their fleeting rainbow of colors. And she felt, as the other inhabitants of the Outer Wall did, the noxious disease of emotions that the nobles inflicted. She felt love and outrage and loathing and even the cold prickle of nearing death.
The wise woman shuddered. Yet here, in the horrible mass, thefeelings imposed upon the peasants were not so appalling as what she could glimpse beyond grotesque and miserable reality. In her mind’s eye, the future unfurled like a tapestry: threaded here with gold, and there with silver, veins of blue and cross-stitches of purple. But most of all, it was stained gruesomely and appallingly with red, for blood.
X
The Sanction of the Sluggard
