“I can assure you that this is a vow that has never been sworn before.”
Just as quickly as the bite settled in his belly, he was hungry again. Hungry for food and for plainer speech. “What is it then, Guildenstern?”
“That is not my name, but perhaps it is best that you only know me under this false epithet.” He stepped forward into the light and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Rosencrantz. “You spoke before of a forbidden delicacy. The only sustenance that truly sustains you. You despaired that you would never taste of it again. But put away this despair, creature. Do not mourn your belly’s emptiness any longer. I swear to you here, in the dark and filth, that you will taste this delicacy again. It will fill you as you have never been filled before. You will be sated—that I can promise beyond all remission. Loosen your tongue for me now, and you will be glutted, surfeited at last. This I swear to you, by the hands of the Most Esteemed Surgeon himself.”
The words poured over him, as sweet as water from a mountain spring. Drool began to gather at the corners of his mouth. He parted his wanting, sucking, slavering lips, and then his own words fell from his tongue, like flesh from a rotted limb—wretched and yet so very, very easy. In truth he had never been a loyal creature, at least not to the oaths and laws of men. He was always and only loyal to his own hunger.
XIX
One Speckled, One White
The moth never thought she would be called to such a task. She, like all the others of her kind, had grown complacent, safe in the blooming garden, the greatest labor of her days flitting from one flower or willow frond to another.
She knew that her ancestors had been message-bearers and heralds, but she did not imagine herself an heir to this legacy. The heroic winged envoys of Berengar were long dead; their stories were recalled with misty affection. This disrupted none of the garden’s serenity, for not a creature there had been alive to witness the plague and the pillaging, and it was inconceivable to think that war might ever come to the island again.
The moth was chosen not for her particular bravery or intrepidness, but for her coloring, though she did not know that. She only knew that a gray-clad lady had entered the garden and reached out an arm, beckoning. Her fingers were tipped with nectar, and the moth flitted down from her perch. Gratified, she sipped the nectar, and her antennae twitched and hummed as she listened to the lady’s rasping voice.
“You are a good and clever creature,” she murmured, stroking, very gently, the tip of the moth’s wing. “Will you serve me, as your kind once did the conqueror-king of Drepane?”
The moth was moved by curiosity, or perhaps stirred by an ancient, hereditary urge, passed down from those undaunted ancestors. As if sensing her acquiescence, the lady then fixed a small scroll ofparchment to her leg. She whispered her instructions and promised another taste of sweet nectar upon her return.
And so the moth took flight, leaving behind the garden for the first time in her life.
The winds were propitious, the hot summer breeze gusting her toward her destination. The moth was slightly unsteady, buffeted about in the air like a bee drunk on pollen. She passed over bone-white beaches and scorched plains, dead trees forking up at odd angles. She passed over a dry riverbed, a furrow in the land, and knew, with some unconscious certainty, that this was her path.
She followed it over an open field that bore the scars of a recent skirmish, tattered tents flapping and dented breastplates littering the parched brown grass. Rather than cowing her, these sights enlivened her; she became ever more conscious of the importance of her duty. This was precisely what her ancestors had done, steered by the war-wise hand of Berengar.
At last this gash in the earth led her to a place occupied by the living. She did not know, as she first glimpsed those shining gray towers, like pieces of shale pointing upright, that she was descending upon Ironmanse, the ancestral keep of the House of Eyes. She circled once the tallest tower, which at its peak was as narrow as an embroidery needle, and then fluttered down to a nearby window.
She perched there for only a moment, glimpsing the firelight and the other goings-on of a castle within, before a man appeared to block her sight. He was a craggy, rather loutish-looking man, cloaked almost unbecomingly in all the jewels and finery of a noble lord. His head was as bald and shiny as a shucked pearl, but his beard reached his waist and was a thick, lustrous, impassioned red. Yet for all this, his face was set and cold.
He stared down a moment at the moth, lips pressed into a thin line, devoid of color, and then clipped the parchment from her leg. He unfurled it, and his jutting brow descended like a storm cloud over his eyes as he read.
The moth waited, her antennae quivering.
His gaze scanned the page once, twice. The parchment crinkled in his hand. With a barked command, he summoned another man to his side, a figure too concealed in darkness for the moth to see.
“The miscreant wretch of a prince wishes to treat with me,” the red-bearded lord rumbled. “His words are beseeching; it is almost piteous. He writes like a supplicant. For all his brutish strength and pretending virtues, he knows what it is to kneel. I hear he has taken his father’s cock since he was a child.”
The moth was too much an animal to understand his words, and too much an animal to know that she was bearing a second, silent message, one that perhaps even the red-bearded lord did not comprehend. She did not know that the soft-voiced lady had carefully chosen her among all the moths in the garden for the color of her wings: one speckled, one white. This was a dead language, resurrected only in odd elements, and known by two alone.
Still she waited, and more words passed between the men, and at last there came another scroll of parchment fastened to her leg. She flicked off her weariness and flapped her wings, rising again into the blustery summer air. It had grown dark, and the sky was riotous with stars.
As the white monument of Castle Crudele appeared in the distance, the moth was glad to see her journey’s end. She lilted gently back down into the garden, where the lady was waiting. Her skin was pale and luminous in the dark, but her eyes were the faded gray of rain-drenched stone.
She took the note and fed the moth yet another helping of nectar in thanks. Then the moth flitted off, to ensconce herself in the petaled embrace of a white flower, heedless to the gravity of what she had done. She drifted to sleep and dreamed only a moth’s idle dreams.
XX
The Master of Eyes
Agnes marked the passage of days by the fading of the bruises on her throat, by the slow and painful reclamation of her voice. The burst blood vessels in her eyes repaired themselves—whether by Pliny’s tonics and poultices or by the simple progression of time, she did not know. But when she rose each morning, she felt a more puissant creature, more whole.
She went to her usual haunts, fulfilled her usual duties, yet all the while there was a prickling along her spine, an uneasy churning in her stomach. When she was with Tisander, she would often fall to distraction, trailing off in the midst of a sentence she was reading aloud. Frowning, he would turn in her lap and lay a hand gently on her cheek. He spoke no words, but the question was evident in his too-wise, too-knowing eyes.
“Apologies, my sweet dove,” she would say then, blinking away the film that had fallen over her eyes. “I am well. Let me begin again.”
Agnes came to understand that it was not her body that needed healing but her heart. And it was no shriveled thing, wrung like a sponge—it was strident and bragged more fiercely than ever. This was the perplexity of mortal life. The more alive she had become, the more she learned to ache. When she had been that small, shrinking, gray-clad maiden, she had put away her pain, along with her voice, along with her need, and in that she had hidden herself from love, too. The lack of it was not even near as agonizing as the surfeit.
