Liuprand smiled. “I had trouble putting it on myself. I’m afraid I must beseech your help.”
“Oh,” said Agnes, and she had to bite her lip to keep from smiling broadly back, “then I shall happily grant it.”
He came to her—as close as they dared when in the company ofthe actors, even though their gazes were dull and not prying. Without a word, Liuprand knelt and bowed his head.
Agnes fixed the mask on him, fingers trembling at the illicit touch—against the nape of his neck, along the line of his jaw—which was as much as they would ever be allowed in front of strangers’ eyes. Their love was for the darkness, blooming only in the secret cover of night. Six years and it still struck her with an old jolt of pain to think of it.
She withdrew her hand, and Liuprand rose. Now from the feasting hall came only the low hum of wordless whispers. Agnes beckoned her actors to their places. And then she slid on her own mask.
The masque began with death, as this was the history of their island. The harps played an eerie, almost discordant tune as her reaper walked the length of the stage, trailing his gray robes. Agnes had chosen a very tall man for this part and ordered him to fast for two weeks, in order that he should have the emaciated look of a revenant. And indeed, his hollow cheeks and spindly limbs, along with the sheen of hopeless hunger in his eyes, gave very much the effect she had desired.
He did not entertain so much as he did haunt the audience, in his sallow, flesh-colored mask and the coarse white horsehair she had fashioned into a wig. The crowd murmured their unease; what sort of masque was this, they wondered, that began in so grim and treasonous a manner? But this was all according to Agnes’s design. Death’s shade made slow, lumbering circles about the stage, the ghastliness of the moment accentuated by his isolation. He was utterly alone as he circled.
At last, when the discomfort of the audience had reached its peak, just before it would be diminished by degrees into boredom, a passel of actors rushed the stage. They were dressed finely, if innocuously, in garb that befit a lesser noble house. Agnes—wisely, she thought—would not want to offend any of the houses in attendance, for the fate of these actors was calamitous.
They hovered at first around the edges of the stage, miming conversation, drinking from empty goblets. But one by one, death approached them. His walk was almost solicitous, and the nobles paused in their feigned ministrations, tilting their heads in exaggerated curiosity, as their expressions could not be seen behind the masks. The harp strings quivered to silence.
Death reached out. He had a dagger hidden in his sleeve and now it slid forth, gashing the air and the front of the nearest noble’s frock. The fabric fell away and there were gasps from the audience, but there were no red ribbons to stand in for blood, no hands clutching at a falsely slit throat. Instead only the noble’s clothes were pared away, revealing the shock of his naked body beneath.
And still it was terrible. The audience did not quite comprehend why the ordinary features and faculties of the human form suddenly took on a grotesqueness in the candlelight. Agnes had selected the most unremarkable of actors for these roles; they were neither fat nor thin, old nor young, fit nor ill. She had applied no cosmetics to them. What the audience saw before them were the same sights they saw when they looked in the mirror each night, yet somehow it made them all flinch and avert their eyes.
The lady Agnes was clever, and she knew the secret that most did not. The secret was that humanity is wretched in its essence, and we loathe to be reminded of our own rote repulsiveness. We hate to remember that we have bones that creak and grind at their points of juncture, blood that pulses wetly and turbidly through our veins, and muscles that distend and undulate when called upon to move. A man hates most of all his own heart, his own lungs, his own eyes and flesh and teeth, and he is grateful when he can displace this hatred onto another, when one is so openly, so garishly odious that it appears exceptional. The most blessed sights in the world are the most vulgar, and the most frightful are the most mundane.
Death does not transform; death merely reveals. And so death pacedacross the stage and disrobed each of the nobles, showing them all in their vile, banal humanity. There were sickened groans from the audience. Agnes could have done little more to excite them to sentiment.
The slain nobles rose and followed the reaper in his circling, like naked ducks in a row. Their footsteps dragged; their shoulders slumped; they seemed to have no will of their own, only what had been imparted to them by death. The audience shuddered and wept, more desperate with each passing moment for relief. They wished for something that would dress the world in the bright garments of romance once again.
And so then he came, robed in the finest fabrics of gold, in the shiniest of jewels, and lending his own pulsing aura of light to the presentation. If there were any in Drepane who doubted the grace and fairness of their prince, such qualms were now put to permanent silence.
He did no more than ascend the stage, the glimmering blue of his eyes showing through the holes in the mask, and the audience fell about with sighs and weeping. At last there was proof that the world held beauty. Here was such a glorious example of humanity that all could forget how hideous it was in its normalcy. What great heights humanity could reach! The prince was evidence of it. The crowd cried out in relief.
Liuprand was playing Berengar, and so with nothing but the wave of his hand, he vanquished death. The nobles reassumed their clothes. They fitted their plain faces again with masks. And then came the next group of actors, the cloud-sprites and the sunbeams and the seabirds and the lion cubs, showing what wondrous creatures the world contained when it was bathed in the House of Berengar’s golden light.
But what occurred next was a surprise, to the audience and even to the prince who had been well prepared for his part. Lady Agnes emerged quietly from the back room, and, while attentions were focused on the gamboling cubs and the fluttering seabirds, she tipped back the lid to a large wooden trunk. From within there was a great whirring sound, and then a mass of moths lifted into the air, their wings palpating like the beat of a thousand tiny, bravely stirring hearts.
The audience saw a lovely feast for their eyes, these brilliantly colored and variably sized moths forming a vivid tapestry over their heads. But the prince saw more. He saw that the features of the moths had been carefully chosen, and because he knew the language of rustling wings, he knew that the lady was sending him a coded message. A message of love. Black wings, white wings, iridescence gilding their membranes and their antennae. Love and resolve. The scattered flight of these moths was a vow, as true as words spoken, in a tongue that no other on the island had the privilege to know.
I will love you forever,said Agnes to the prince, voicelessly.
The mask could not hide the prince’s smile, nor could he be persuaded to keep his joy a secret as Agnes herself mounted the stage. She wore a gown of silver, with a low neckline that bared her shoulders and her collarbones and the cleft of her breasts. Woven through the silk were pearls and diamonds, and every inch was embroidered in glimmering thread, baroque swirls and patterns of flowers and reaching ivy. Her black hair was pulled half back, in a crown of braids laced with silver ribbons, and the rest hung loose and sleek to her waist. Her jewelry was modest so as not to distract from the glamour of the dress, or from the costume’s true spectacle: a pair of large, gossamer wings unfolding from her back.
As she strode toward the prince, moths perched on her bare shoulders or in her hair and then, at intervals, took flight again, giving her the appearance of constant movement, of a living, vacillating canvas. Liuprand reached out his arm. Lady Agnes reached back. Amid the swirl of moths and under the gleam of candlelight, their fingertips brushed.
What a beautiful sight it was for the audience, a rich and lively painting, rendered in the most exquisite strokes. It was as though the moon extended one of its silvery beams to meet the matching, outstretched shaft of the sun. They thought of it as such: theater, performance, art. They did not guess at the truth that undergirded the pageant. They were far too happy to be free of the hideous sight that was common humanity. Clever Agnes had foreseen this. She hadarranged it all, putting in place every piece so that shecoulddance with her beloved, just once, in the light.
The moths, trained and as intelligent as the raven perched on Lord Amycus’s shoulder, eventually retreated to the trunk where they had been concealed. The actors stood in a line and bowed deeply. Applause rained through the hall, with all the brash clamor of a summer storm, and Agnes and Liuprand, their hands joined, bowed as well.
But there was a single face that remained unmoved, a single gaze that had, despite the efforts of the lady Agnes, seen the truth that lay under the showy scene. Beauty could not disguise it. Not to the one who could perceive the world in such a manner that she easily ascertained the desires of others. It was a skill that she had not had the chance to exercise in quite a long time, removed as she had been from humanity in her lonesome tower.
Princess Marozia saw that dreadful and wonderful thing that was love. She saw it in every facet of her cousin’s form and every subtle movement undertaken. She saw it reflected back in her husband, the prince, even behind his mask. Years unspooled before her. A waking dream, in which she witnessed each secret meeting, each stolen kiss, each frenzied, passionate coupling, all of which had occurred within these cold halls while she had driven herself half to madness, alone.
She was watching Agnes and Liuprand so intently that she hardly even noticed that she had begun to pick at the skin around her fingernail, unwinding that white band of flesh in theprick-prick-pricking rhythm of pain. From her eyes fell a single tear. And from her hands, a drop of precious blood.
XIII
Happy and Dauntless, and Sagacious
The feasting hall was aroused with noise, all the pleasing, joyous sounds of celebration. Agnes sat at the head table to Liuprand’s left, and from this vantage point she could survey the scene before her completely. It was a happy one. Her masque had left so much exuberance and pleasure in its wake.
