Marozia dipped her delicate fingers into the mortar and removed one of the berries. Agnes opened her mouth, like a weaning babe. She let herself be fed the berries, one after another after another, until the black juice was running down her chin. Marozia wiped it clean withgreatest devotion. Agnes took her cousin’s fingers between her lips and sucked until they, too, were rid of that dark nectar.
Agnes closed her eyes, lashes fluttering against the red silk of Marozia’s skirt. The bitterness of the berries parched her tongue, but when she swallowed, she tasted the human sweetness of Marozia’s skin. It coated the inside of her mouth.
“Shhh,” Marozia whispered. She bent over Agnes, lowering herself until their foreheads touched. “Tonight I shall dine with the prince and the king. I shall tell them you were too fatigued from our journey to join us. They will not take offense. Do you agree?”
Icy perspiration had begun to bead along Agnes’s brow. It required momentous effort to nod.
Marozia arranged her body in the bed, on her side, close enough to the edge of the mattress that her fingers could brush the floor, should she let her arm hang down. The world was a swampy tangle of light and shadow behind Agnes’s eyes. Then Marozia lay the dusty coverlet over her, smothering the last embers of her consciousness.
The mists and vapors of the dream-world hung heavily in the air. Three Adele-Blanches fluttered down and landed before Agnes like crows. One held a spindle, red yarn unfurling from it and into a heavy pile at her feet. A dead serpent, limply coiled.
Another held a brass scepter, though the top had been broken off, whatever idol had adorned it now forsaken. There were small cracks running down the remaining length, as though the entirety of it risked shattering with a single indelicate movement.
The last held a pair of enormous shears, which glinted with great evilness, like the sneer of a striga. These shears were too large for any domestic task. They were meant for snapping weak branches from bothersome trees.
“Well, you have found your way here, though it took rather longer than I expected.” It was the one with a scepter who spoke.
I know. I am sorry. There were matters at hand—but now we are at Castle Crudele and Marozia dines with the king.
“That is the least of what you can do,” said Adele-Blanche with the shears. “Every wasted moment is a drop of precious death-blood.”
“Leave nothing up to your cousin,” chimed the spindle-clutcher. “Let her ply the prince in peace. She will draw his attention while you seek, seek, seek.”
I shall. I thought I might start—
“With the tomes,” the scepter-holding Adele-Blanche cut in dryly. “Indeed. Did I misuse my years teaching you strategy? Of course you will start with the tomes.”
You did not misuse them.The words, unvocalized, still somehow caught in Agnes’s throat.The tomes, and then the tomb. There must be a way inside.
“There will be.” This came from the Adele-Blanche with the shears. “The words will be in the tomes, and the bodies will be in the tombs. If you forget, take off your gown and read your own stomach.”
XIII
As the Prophets Did
A violent force wrenched Agnes from the murk of her dream. She felt the bed lurch up at her, as if she had been dropped from a great height. Her throat was ablaze with the taste of bile, and when she opened her eyes, she saw that she had vomited all down her chin and the side of the mattress, and it had dripped down her outstretched arm, puddling onto the floor. It was thin and rheumy and laced with the black dye of the berries. But because Marozia had laid her on her side, she had not choked.
Marozia’s arms were around her, pulling Agnes’s body against her chest. Her snoring was high and soft, like air passing through the reed of a flute. With greatest care, Agnes sat up and removed herself from her cousin’s grip. As soon as she rose, her vision turned milky and obscure and her head started to ache; meanwhile Marozia merely rolled onto her other side, clutching at a pillow instead.
Tiny needles drilled into Agnes’s skull, but she stood anyway. The light through the open window held a clarity that she had never witnessed before, unhampered by fog or the general damp grime that hung in the air around Castle Peake. It was already past dawn and the sky was a virtuous blue. There were no clouds to besmirch it.
When her vision sharpened and stabilized, Agnes noticed that there was a plate of food on the desk. Marozia must have brought it up for her. A goblet full of wine, watered down to its weakest pallor. Bread that had already been peeled of its hard crust. A wedge of crumbly white cheese.
Agnes dug into the bread with her fingernail and removed a bitfrom its center, where it was airy and light. She rolled it into a ball in the palms of her hands and then nibbled it slowly, grateful that she did not have to worry about any hard sharp bits finding their way into her mouth.
The cheese was not for her, but the wine begged to be drunk, so she drained the goblet. The sleeve of her gown was soaked through with bile. All of a sudden this was more sensation than she could stand, so she tore at the stays of her corset, yanking and ripping even when they smarted against her ribs, until it loosened enough that she could slip the dress off her shoulders and step out of it.
With the washbasin in the corner, she wiped her mouth and chin clean. Then she opened her trunk. Inside was a monochrome array of silks and satins, the shades only as distinct as stone at various levels of dampness.
Agnes did not tread near red; that was Marozia’s dominion. She kept to unassuming colors: skulking violets, dusky plums, occasionally a lavender wrung out like laundry, if ever Castle Peake was touched by an odd joyous moment. She selected the most taciturn of gowns today. It was a murky, nameless color somewhere between mauve and gray. She examined her fingers, to make sure there were no greasy smears of bile or black juice dried into the lines of her palms. She peered at her shuddery reflection in the bronze mirror. Her teeth were white, her tongue pink. Unless she was examined closely, no one would suspect her treasons.
The cruel glint of Adele-Blanche’s shears flashed through her mind. The scepter with its annihilated idol. The spindle and its endless red yarn. The images layered behind her eyelids until the real world was only a blur, something glimpsed vaguely beneath the surface of the water.
Agnes picked at the white ring of flesh around her fingernail until the nail bed brimmed with blood. The images dropped dead. The real world resurrected itself. She wondered if this was what the prophets saw in their caves, if their visions enveloped them like sticky swarms of flies. She wondered if it made them sick to their stomachs.
XIV
The Library Again
