“Then let me wish. Wishes come to nothing in the end.”
The stout leech flicked his coin. It turned so many times in its ascent that it seemed no more than a flash of silver, winking in the corridor’s crude darkness. As it rose and then began to fall again, the leech said, “Call face. Call lion. Do it now,do it.”
Waltrude was too bewildered to speak.
The coin landed back down on his open palm. The three of them peered over at it. And the thin leech smiled.
XXIV
Flowers at Bloom, Cut Too Soon
One by one, Agnes lit the torches on the wall and basked a moment in their burning warmth. She could scarcely believe now that she and Liuprand had for years accepted the cold and the dank of the abandoned chapel when all along they could have improved it, and so easily, too. The torches suffused the chamber with a heady and golden light. The altar was a lovely thing underneath the wax and grime, shining white like the brightest and most intact shell on the beach. The tub had been emptied and filled again, the water refreshed and scented with new flowers and oils.
A hyacinth drifted across its surface, as lazy as a lily pad in a pond. Purple were its petals, and lush despite the passing of its blooming season, which was early spring. It was summer now, and a hyacinth should not be so vividly colored. Agnes still knew the whims and the temperaments of all these flowers, knowledge that had been imparted to her since she was old enough to follow her grandmother through the gardens of Castle Peake.
Frowning, she approached the tub and knelt at its edge. Her fingers skimmed the water’s surface until she was able to coax the hyacinth into her palm. She lifted it and held it to the light. Dampness made its petals an even darker violet, and it glistened with droplets like morning dew. Beautiful, fragile, and contrary to reason. Agnes would have expected to see phlox or coneflowers, a daylily or a dianthus, all summer blooms.
She was stunned, momentarily, by its impossible loveliness, which was against nature’s laws. If anyone were to learn the trick of inducingflowers to bloom out of season, of keeping their petals florid and open all year, it would have been Adele-Blanche. But as with the secrets of raising the dead from their graves, the determination to uncover it had died with her grandmother. No other creature would be so resolved to defy the fundaments of nature.
Agnes sniffed the hyacinth. It had an even sweeter scent than she remembered, perhaps made all the more potent to her by its perversity. A hyacinth needed the fullest exposure to the sun; she recalled her grandmother carefully adjusting the placement of the stalks, peeling open the petals in the direction of the daylight. It was the only time that Adele-Blanche would ever be seen on her knees.
She cupped the delicate bloom in both her hands and stared intently, as if she might persuade it to give up its secrets. It would be wrong to say that the sight and the scent of the flower engendered a fondness in Agnes, a longing for times that were now forever gone. When last she had held such a flower, she had been a silent and gray, shrinking creature, less alive than the plants in her grandmother’s garden. If anything, Agnes’s fondness was for the fact that thiswasthe past, that she could recognize it as such, that those times would never be here again. The flower reminded her that she had swelled and flourished and bloomed.
Hyacinth girl,said a voice from the low part of her consciousness, though it was not her voice. It felt as if someone else had snuck the thought into her mind.
Agnes let the flower fall from her hand and drift back into the water.
She had passed the rest of the day deep in thought, contemplating her now-injurious position. She had made the offer to Lord Thrasamund, and it could not be rescinded. So desperate she was to restore Liuprand’s reputation and honor that she had cornered them both like treed foxes.
Her only hope now was that Thrasamund would find some reason of his own to refuse her. Agnes had run through every option in her mind, from the subtle to the flagrant, from the clever to thewhimsical, that might make Thrasamund spurn her. She envisioned herself feigning madness, perhaps falling into a mimed fit at the dinner table. But the idea left the taste of bile in her mouth. She could not think of it without thinking of Ygraine, wailing and weeping and tearing at her clothes. Thrasamund would not wish to see such a scene played out again before his eyes. And Agnes could not bear to make a mockery of the woman’s real pain.
Perhaps the marriage might be annulled after some time, when it failed to produce a child. But she expected such a thing would be blamed on the impairments of Childeric’s condition, not hers. His defect could be seen.
Yet even that plan would take years to see its profit. Her stomach began to churn and her skin began to rise with gooseflesh, and Agnes laid a hand on the altar to steady herself. She would have to believe that Liuprand had come to a solution of his own. She had utmost faith in him; it was as imperturbable and irrevocable as her love. He was wise and noble and good. He was driven single-mindedly to please her. The strength of his devotion would prove itself in this; he would not allow harm to come to her, and he would not allow her to be absent from him. That she knew above all else.
He would be here any moment now.
Agnes paced about the altar, waiting. Her heart was humming and her blood was running hot in her veins. Soon, soon she would feel his arms around her, his lips on her lips, his hands on her breasts, and his hardness nudging her entrance. She started to tug at the laces on her bodice, loosening them so that she would be ready, at once, for him to take her.
The gown slid further down her shoulders, baring more of her skin to the torchlight. Her thighs were wetted now with her own slickness, her own anticipation. Agnes considered a moment letting her fingers slip beneath her skirts, bringing herself to the edge of pleasure as she waited. She bit her lip in contemplation.
But before she could make up her mind, the chapel door scraped open.
Agnes lifted her head, searching for Liuprand in the gloaming half-light. Yet there came only the flash of steel, and the sound of clinking armor.
Terror seized her. She stood fixed in place, clutching her loose gown to her breast, the other hand gripping the edge of the altar. She did not utter even the smallest sound as the precious, sacred air of her chapel was cleaved apart with the bodies of strange men.
No, not strange—not all of them. At the head of the troupe was Lord Thrasamund, Master of Eyes, his red beard made redder by the amber glow of the torches. His gaze, under that powerful brow, was set and fierce.
Agnes could not speak. The men, some wearing his house’s colors and others the crimson garb of the House of Blood, spread out and arrayed themselves around the altar, closing her in.
“He left you alone here.” Thrasamund’s voice was rough and low. “Ah, or he has tarried too long.”
Even her mind could not form words, much less her tongue. Her very breath seemed to die within her throat.
One of the men turned and said, “Should we stay to our course, my lord?”
Thrasamund himself was silent a moment, as the torchlight danced with the shadows upon his craggy face.
