Liuprand opened his mouth to reply, then snapped it shut again. A glazed look came over his face. He released Agnes and stepped back, drawing himself up to his full height, casting his eyes about the great hall. He fixed his gaze for a moment on the throne, empty for years, ever since King Nicephorus had grown too fat to fill it. He let out a long, tremulous breath.
“And why should I prize their well-being so?” he murmured, almost to himself, in a voice strangled with bitterness. “Why should I toil endlessly for their advancement, for their happiness, at the expense of my own? They are capricious and dull, crude and witless. I killed one man and they called me just. I near to killed another and they called me cruel. Yet they will say that my greatest crime is loving you.”
Agnes could scarcely bring herself to look at him. A single tear ran a path down her cheek, and spilled to stain the velvet of her gown.
“You have undermined yourself again and again in my defense,”she whispered. “Can I not repay such devotion with a sacrifice of my own? Would you take this choice from me?”
Liuprand’s head dropped. He squeezed his eyes shut, then raised a hand to press hard against his temples, obscuring for a moment his visage. His shoulders rose and fell mightily, and his breathing grew rapid and short. Agnes was terrified that she might, for the first time, see him weep.
“No,” he said, the word muffled by the cover of his hand. “I cannot accept it. Any other torment I could endure, but not this.”
A sob rose in Agnes’s throat, but it did not spill past her lips. Silence reigned again in the great hall. Nothing could impinge upon it; even the distant, rote noises of the castle’s daily drudgeries seemed to have gone quiet. It was as though there were no servants, no scullions, no guards, as though Castle Crudele were empty of all but two. And in this silence, in this emptiness, the cord stretching between them swelled and thickened. Its straining seemed to make it only stronger. Under threat of snapping, it fortified itself.
Agnes sensed this, and finally, the sob tumbled from her mouth.
“So you cannot bear it,” she choked out, through her tears. “I was a fool to think that I could, either. But what can we do? I have made the offer to Lord Thrasamund; it would be perfidy to rescind it now.”
Liuprand let his hand fall from his face, and he looked up at Agnes again. He did not weep, but the anguish was plain in his eyes.
“I do not know,” he said quietly. “We must hope that Thrasamund rejects the offer himself. Perhaps—perhaps we can, in a subtle manner, sway his mind, yet make him believe the decision was his own. I must think on it.”
Still tearful, Agnes nodded. “I will think on it as well. And I am sorry—I am sorry that I have tried to protect you yet only caused you more grief.”
Liuprand drew in a breath, and his great chest swelled. He moved toward Agnes and grasped her by the shoulders again, this time with utmost gentleness. He lowered his head until their faces were close, their noses near enough to brush.
“My grief is a condition of my love,” he said softly. “It is the abject law of humanity, that one cannot exist without the other.” He leaned yet closer, touching his forehead to hers. “Do you love me, Agnes?”
“Yes,” she whispered back. Her heart bragged with the inexorable truth of it. “With every fragment of my being, forever.”
“Then,” he said, and kissed her briefly but tenderly on her brow, “all will be well.”
XXIII
A Wet Nurse’s Sorrows
Waltrude paced the length of the princeling’s chambers, wringing her bony hands. Hers were not the hurried, frantic footsteps of someone a quarter or even half of her age; her gait was slow and burdensome, but nonetheless it betrayed an unsettled mind. Indeed she could not recall the last time she had been so ill at ease. And it had begun even before the arrival of the contingent from Ironmanse.
It was her mistress’s disquiet she had sensed, and it had seeped into her, like mud into a peasant’s cloth slippers. She could always tell when the lady Agnes’s nerves were bad, because she retreated into silence, that old trick, long since abandoned but resurrected occasionally as it was needed. These past days she had been so quiet, her gray eyes so distant and dim. The matter had not been helped by the temporary loss of her voice.
Waltrude had learned, at long last, its cause. Pliny had not been forthcoming but she was not such a one to easily relinquish her curiosities. And thus finally the leech had recounted all he had witnessed at the wedding feast, and all that Agnes had endured after, relayed to him by the lady herself. These recollections grieved him; Waltrude could tell from the quality of his speech—far from stiff and formal, as was his ordinary manner, but instead thick with emotion. Bitterness and ill portent. It had sent shivers along Waltrude’s spine.
So many more questions she had as she looked out the princeling’s window to the courtyard, where a further group of men waited before the closed barbican. They wore the colors and banners of the House of Eyes, and though all were armed, their weapons remained sheathedand they had scarcely moved at all for hours. They only shifted and murmured among themselves—complaining, Waltrude imagined, of the heat, of the stench from the Outer Wall, of their master’s tarrying. Since his arrival at dawn, Lord Thrasamund remained yet within Castle Crudele.
It is a good omen,Waltrude thought, fingers dancing along the windowsill.He is considering the prince’s entreaties, whatever they may be. He has not stormed out in righteous fury.
She wished to share these thoughts aloud, to pick the leech’s mind, but she could not, for Tisander sat just beside Pliny at the table, having his lessons. Such a clever boy he was, wise far beyond his years. This was occasionally unnerving to Waltrude. There was a steadiness to his gaze that no child of his age should possess. Where his knowledge was lacking, his perception made up for it. He seemed almost frightfully adept at reading the hidden thoughts and secret desires that did not show plain on a person’s face.
Now—as though he could indeed read Waltrude’s thoughts, precisely—the boy looked away from his book and up at her. “I’m weary of this,” he said, just the hint of a whine in his voice. “I want a story, Waltrude,please.”
Waltrude exchanged a glance with Pliny, whose expression was clouded and unreadable. After a moment, he gave a single, brittle nod.
“Come here, then,” Waltrude said—and the boy leapt from his seat and ran to her arms. She lifted him and settled him on her hip. “What sort of story would you like to hear?”
He was quiet a moment, toying with the collar of her frock, his brow puckering in deliberation. Then he looked up at her and said, “Tell me about my papa when he was a child.”
“Ah, so you want a true story,” Waltrude said. She crossed the room and sat down in Tisander’s abandoned seat, balancing the child on her knees. “But first, can you guess? Do you think your papa a cuckoo bird fallen from its nest?”
“No,” Tisander said, giggling.
