Agnes was not viewing the procession, nor could she be found in the entrance hall, greeting and making pleasantries with the noble guests. Instead, she was in one of the back rooms, checking the fit of a cloud-sprite’s costume. The actor who wore it had gorged himself these past few weeks, taking full advantage of his new position within the castle, and now the pale fabric strained about the paunch of his stomach. Agnes frowned, yanking the silk tighter, fingers quavering about the buttons. This was the fiddly sort of task that her damaged hand still protested, and she wished she’d had the foresight to enlist one of the castle seamstresses to aid her in these final moments.
“Standstill,” Agnes ordered through gritted teeth. “And let me not see you sneaking sweet rolls off the feast table.”
“Apologies, lady,” the cloud murmured.
At last she managed to fasten the buttons. She let out a breath and stepped back, raising a hand to wipe her forehead. The organization of this masque had required more labor than she had imagined, and in truth, she would be glad to see it done. But she would be even gladder to see how it impacted the guests, how it roused their spirits, how it filled their hearts with love for Liuprand and the Crown. Agnes no longer had any doubts. She had written with the full force of her own passion, and she knew her efforts would succeed.
All around her, the actors were in their garb, their masks fixed to hide their plain peasant faces. They stood stiff and at the ready, and if any of them expressed dolor or apprehension, it would not be noticed.Their exteriors had been transformed, like an old, weather-worn statue painted over again in bright colors.
Agnes smiled. In only a few short hours, the wedding would be finished, and the true spectacle of the evening would begin.
More than half a decade had passed since Castle Crudele had sustained such an assembly of illustrious guests, and the great hall had been transformed to more than adequately suit this momentous occasion. Every single candle within the castle, it seemed, had been marshaled to line the walls, to fill the arms of the candelabras, and to light the eight chandeliers that hung from the ceiling. The whole chamber gleamed with their languid brightness.
A great many flowers had also been plucked and arranged about the dais. White flowers, from Agnes’s private garden, though she doubted that any of their guests would understand their significance, save for perhaps some old retainers from the House of Blood. Within each bouquet was a long stalk of delphinium, its purple vertebrae climbing almost defiantly upward, straining toward the false sunlight.
The tapestry that hung behind the dais had been commissioned for the ceremony. Majestic and enormous, it covered the whole of the wall from the floor to the ceiling, and showed an abstract scene: In the center, the winged lion of Seraph stood in profile, one paw extended decorously.
The creature to which this paw was offered was not one that could be found in the pages of Pliny’s encyclopedia. It had the hind legs of a deer with the curling horns of a bull; however, it also had the sleek black feathers of a raven and a mouth full of very sharp canid teeth. Its snout, long and wolflike, ended in a heart-shaped nose. Its face had half a dozen eyes, and the shaggy fur on the rest of its body was a deep crimson red.
This exceptional and freakishly fashioned beast served a great purpose. Agnes could pinpoint the way that each feature represented one of the seven noble houses of Drepane, and she smiled to herself at Liuprand’s cleverness. Already she noticed many of the guests gesturing toward the tapestry. There was a surprised yet pleased tenor to their whispers. They understood what Liuprand intended them to understand. So far all was well.
And each house had made a plentiful, enthusiastic showing. The plots on either side of the aisle were full nearly to bursting, every seat in the pews occupied. The Houses of Hearts and Bones and Lungs were on the right side, and the Houses of Eyes and Blood and Flesh were on the left. The plot for the House of Teeth was filled by inhabitants of Castle Crudele: Waltrude and Pliny and several other of the more cherished servants, and of course Drepane’s golden prince. Sitting between Liuprand and Pliny, Agnes held a wriggling Tisander on her lap.
Indeed, the only empty seat in the great hall was the throne. But it would not remain so for long. Of all the tasks left to Liuprand before the wedding, this had been the most odious and the most onerous—yet he had, after many months, succeeded in it. The door to the left of the dais opened, and the rasping, gurgling respirations of the king could be heard.
He was carried into the room on an opulent litter, which was hefted by twelve of the Dolorous Guard, six on either side. Their armor clanked; their knees wobbled under the strain. Agnes felt her chest tighten as she watched this precarious undertaking—if even one of the men faltered, the litter would slip, and the king would roll to the ground like a boulder in an avalanche.
She could not recall the last time Nicephorus had left his chambers, and for good reason. In these past six years, he had grown huge beyond all conception. So large, in fact, that he was bound to his bed; he could not rise without assistance, and he could do little more than while away his days with food and drink and sleep. Occasionally, he had whores brought to his chamber and ordered his servants to couplewith them while he strained and strained to work himself over, but it was said that this only made him weep for his own deficiencies.
The worst had come two years ago, when his feet had begun to swell in size and turn black and gangrenous. The Most Esteemed Surgeon had visited his bedside and proclaimed that they would need to be amputated, lest the infection spread to the king’s vital organs. And so now he sat, footless upon his litter, his ankles ending in bandaged stubs. He wore no special regalia for the occasion; he could not be moved sufficiently for the seamstress to take his measurements. His naked form was instead draped with a large blanket, which slipped off his shoulders occasionally to reveal the endless, dimpled rolls of fat.
A heavy silence fell over the great hall. The mists of the revulsion in the air could almost be felt, could almost be tasted, like sour wine.
Slowly, tremulously, the Dolorous Guard mounted the dais. They had been instructed, on pain of death, not to utter so much as a groan of strain or exertion, and so they were silent save for the grinding of pauldrons against breastplates, of gauntlets against the litter’s wooden frame. Squeaking, grating noises that made Agnes flinch and want to cover her ears, but even that, she feared, would further shame the king, and would disgrace this entire enterprise with the filth of Nicephorus’s depravity.
The Sluggard, indeed. He could not fit the throne so, as instructed, the Dolorous Guard set the litter down on the dais, right in front of the chair, and he leaned back against it, head on the seat, arms flopping out to his sides like the useless tentacles of a beached squid. Berengar’s golden crown sat crooked upon his brow, too small to be properly worn.
The king inhaled deeply. Mucus rattled in his throat, making the sound more of a groan than a breath. The chamber was, otherwise, as still and silent as death.
“Now,” came the deteriorated, rasping voice of Nicephorus the Sluggard, “we may begin.”
XI
Gamelyn
He mounted the dais so agilely that it seemed an insult to the king, though surely it was not meant as such. It would have been impossible for a man, in the flower of his youth, to degrade himself sufficiently so as not to shame the hideous lump that sat before the throne. But there was a low murmuring of relief as the bridegroom took his place before the crowd; the assembled guests were glad to have their attentions diverted from the Sluggard in all his grotesqueness.
And a more diverting sight there could not have been than that of the Master of Blood, Gamelyn. He was a tall youth with long, well-formed limbs—more lean than muscular, though he was not lacking in vigor; Agnes could see the rippling robustness of his body through the crimson garb that he wore. The precise shade of his hair had evolved with age. Where it had once been bronze, it was now a darker, deeper red, like wine from a goblet. His face had also lost some of the softness of childhood, his cheekbones high and prominent, his jaw sharp and strong.
These were the glimpses of his grandfather in him, the late Lord Fredegar’s virile graces. Agnes could find nothing of Unruoching in his son’s features—the weak chin and the weaselly, shifting gaze. No, it was his mother who had gifted him the rest of his fine looks. He had the surpassingly green eyes of Ygraine, and by extension of Thrasamund, for he was the product of not one but two ancient and noble bloodlines.
The intensity of those eyes could not be unrecognized, though perhaps it was only Agnes who felt chilled to the bone beneath their stare.The eyes thrust her backward in time. She was not looking at the creature before her, at the man grown, but rather at the boy in the dungeon, the boy who had watched his father’s torment and seen clear through to its cause. The boy whose anger had been cold and silent, but still naked as day. The boy who had been taught, at only twelve, how to rage and how to hate.
To calm herself, Agnes began to stroke one of Tisander’s golden curls between her fingers. She was being overly suspicious, overly fearful; Gamelyn was not even looking at her. His unfeeling gaze was instead cast blankly out over the crowd, lingering on nothing in particular. His handsome face betrayed no sentiment. There was only a brief and very subtle twitch of his full-lipped mouth.
“They say he is the greatest swordsman since Berengar,” Pliny murmured, and Agnes startled to hear his voice. When the meaning of his words sank in, she was perturbed even further. He could only know such a thing if he had spoken to some of the retainers from the House of Blood. She had not thought he would dare approach any of his former compatriots.
Liuprand scoffed quietly. “A skill sharpened against squires and wooden targets,” he said. “He has never known the field of battle. He is no warrior, no Berengar come again.”
