Castle Crudele was not silent as she navigated its halls. Through the wide-open arched windows, sound poured in. Voices and clanging anvils, heavy footfalls, the snorting of horses, the sea hushing against the rock. If the castle had seemed eerily lifeless when she had arrived, it was no such thing now. Smoke from newly stoked fires and the other odors of humanity floated up, all cut through by the brine of ocean air.
But perhaps there had been no great change at all except the change of her own perception, accustomed as she was to the overwhelming silence of Castle Peake. Her ears were as sensitive to the noise as a babe newly born. Yet—these sounds did not perturb her as Agnes had expected them to. She had anticipated being galled, rubbed raw by the sheer force of life around her—so different from her forsaken home—but it was not like that. The sounds filled her, nourished her, yet in a strange way that reminded her starkly of her own emptiness and hunger.
Agnes was not disposed to lingering. So she was surprised to find herself pausing before one of the large windows, placing her palms flat on the sills, listening in earnest as one might drink deeply of a cup of wine. She stood there until she felt very foolish. Then abruptly she pulled away and hurried down the hallway again.
Her grandmother had told her:They will keep the books deep down, in the remotest corner of the castle. Near the bodies. Like and like. Hoarding their power in one vault.So Agnes descended through corridors of white stone. If at any point she heard strange footsteps on the ground orstrange voices through the threshold, she stopped and waited, holding her breath and pressing her back flush against the wall.
The corridors drained down and down, but she remained undetected. Then abruptly she found herself staring down a long and narrow hallway with a bright mahogany door, and in front of it stood a gray-helmeted soldier of the Dolorous Guard.
She could not see his eyes, but by the way his head inclined, Agnes knew he saw her. She froze, then took one heedful step forward, then froze again. The guard did not shift at all.
If she could be put off by the presence of a single soldier, Adele-Blanche had indeed wasted her years in training her. It was this thought that at last propelled Agnes forward, her gait precise and serious. Her figure, of course, was too slight to intimidate him, but her status afforded her much to compensate for that, even if she did not speak. So she reached the mahogany door and grasped for its golden knob.
“Wait, lady,” the guard said. “This is the library.”
She merely looked up at him and nodded.
“You are not permitted to enter alone,” he said.
Agnes blinked. Surely King Nicephorus was not so petty as to deny her access to such a simple thing as a library. She wondered if Marozia had done something at dinner last night to gravely offend him. But as she worked it over in her mind, she realized that it was with not pettiness but prudence that he had made such a decree. Despite the imminent betrothal and the joining of their blood, she was still a lady of the House of Teeth. Still a granddaughter of Adele-Blanche. Of course she could not be trusted among the relics of Berengar’s power. Her grandmother’s memory ran cruel and deep.
To find herself stymied so early in her quest was dreadful. Agnes felt her insides twist, her empty stomach grinding against itself. The shears, the scepter, the spindle. Strength, tradition, craft. All of these qualities that had been so carefully inculcated in her since infancy seemed to abandon her now. The only thing she could do was keep her gaze on the guard, trying to peer through the grate of his helmet and glimpse his eyes. She saw only their jelly-like whites.
Her silence was a bluffer’s gambit. No matter how great in size or in stature, one eventually folded against its totality. Usually it was from sheer discomfort, but this in and of itself was no tool to be easily dismissed. She had spent a long time honing its effectiveness.
The silence filled the air like filthy smog, as sour and thick as what rose from the hovels of the Outer Wall. The guard shifted on his feet.
The longer her silence persisted, the greater its effectiveness. Agnes had not gotten here through weakness of will. Ordinary humans, she had learned, were so unaccustomed to silence that its endurance sooner or later became intolerable. And this guard’s spirit was made of no stern stuff.
“Well,” the guard said—at last, and Agnes could, without sight of it through the helmet’s grate, perceive the redness rising to his face—“I suppose I may permit you inside. But you must be observed.”
Agnes nodded fervently, trying to appear relieved. In fact, shewasrelieved, but this was far from the end of her trial. Would the guard restrict her from particular tomes? Would he keep notes of what books she selected and report back to the king? In truth she thought it unlikely that he could read, though she could not be sure.
He pushed open the door and held it so she could enter.
She did, and found herself in a room far taller than it was wide, which rose in tiers of bookshelves like the spiraled mound of rock jutting up from a cave floor. There was a single window at the very top of this columned chamber, like the aperture of a spyglass, and because the whole room was furnished in that same mahogany, the light that fell through turned amber, and the dust motes drifted slowly through its shafts like flies caught in resin. A single faint breeze, from an unknown source, lifted the smell of parchment and ink into the air.
All around, there were winding staircases to bear one to the upper floors, and rolling ladders to reach the topmost shelves. And indeed every shelf was crammed to its edges, the spines of the books gleaming in shades of emerald and indigo, deep burgundy and richest gold. Although Agnes was on the ground, she had the sensation of standing somewhere very high, the edge of a cliff perhaps, and she felt thatheight in the soles of her feet, her stomach swooping, gull-like, with astonishment.
The library held no dampness, no evil darkness, no putrid stench of fear. The candles on the walls were not lit because they did not need to keep any shadows at bay. The air was heavy, but it was a serene and pleasant weight, like being wrapped in a soft woolen cloak.
Agnes moved in an almost unconscious state to the nearest bookshelf. She ran her fingers along the spines, and the pad of her thumb did not come away smeared with dust. This library was not abandoned; it was kept lovingly, visited often. By whom, she did not know. It overwhelmed her, filled her in that same strange way that also illuminated her own desolation.
She turned to see the guard—true to his word—watching her intently. She did not fear his scrutiny, not now that she was inside. If anything, the cues of the guard’s eyes might help her navigate through the labyrinth of shelves. If she grew too close to a tome that contained unrealized treason, she assumed that he would stop her. But he merely stood there, an impassive sentry, his hidden face revealing nothing.
There was no indication of where to start. Even the voice of Adele-Blanche had been silenced, the images of shears and scepters and spindles evicted from her mind. Her grandmother’s posthumous existence seemed to have been shut out of this place, her memory emptied from Agnes’s consciousness. So Agnes pulled down from the shelf the first book she had touched and opened it.
At first, she could not even make sense of each word individually. What overtook her instead was a breathtaking realization that these were notherwords, not the words dictated by Adele-Blanche; they had come from someone else’s mind and been transposed onto the page. They were proof of a world that stretched far beyond the dark room in Castle Peake, past the forbidding black cliffs that breathed and swelled like a mighty beast with mountains on its back. The writing was beautiful, not for what it said, but that it existed at all. And Agnes was so overwhelmed that she could do nothing but drop herself into a seat ata nearby table, the book open in front of her, the epiphany bowing her head over the page as if in prayer.
When she did manage to read the story, it was not particularly remarkable. It was a story about the slaying of a hydra. A noble knight in green armor with a breastplate in the shape of a bearded head. It was something she might have written as a child, something without steep heights or great depths, but it captured her mind anyway. The image of the hydra’s many necks, stretching outward from its cave like vines, flashed brilliantly across the insides of her eyelids.
Agnes no longer had the sensation of being watched, though the guard had not moved from his post. His gaze, mostly blank, was as light as air compared with the steely sharp eyes of her grandmother. There was parchment and ink on the table—the ink was fresh, with a blackened quill nearby confirming it had been used recently—and Agnes found herself plucking up one sheet, dipping the quill, and putting it to the paper. The guard watched her closely still, but he did not intervene. Clearly she had not chosen a tome whose secrets would threaten the supremacy of King Nicephorus the Sluggard and the House of Berengar.
The library was still and quiet, and gold as the inside of a vault, and warm enough even with the narrow slanting of sunlight that Agnes could feel her muscles relax, her body going soft within the velvet arms of the chair.
And then—a sound. The door creaking open.
At the same time that her head snapped up, the guard’s head declined in a dutiful bow. So Agnes should have known, even before she saw him tread down the narrow walkway between two enormous heaps of books, that it was the prince who entered. She would have heard the king much sooner.
