Liuprand wore only a sky-blue doublet, no cape, no epaulets, and he looked just as surprised to happen upon Agnes as she was to encounter him. It would have been proper to stand, of course, perhaps curtsy, but Agnes was far too stunned to move.
Incredibly, however, Liuprand merely nodded and said, “Lady Agnes,” and then sat down beside her.
He had been carrying a book under his arm and now set it on the table. Agnes tried to glimpse the title on the cover, but she could not. Liuprand’s presence was still too perturbing; she could not resettle herself. Although she was obviously the intruder, she could not help but be shocked that the prince was the one frequenting this place, thathekept its tomes lovingly free of dust, that he handled them regularly and gently. Liuprand the Scholar?
“You were missed at supper last night,” he said.
She nodded slowly and tried to assume a weary, dour expression. It did not take much effort on her part. There were dark circles carved deeply beneath her eyes, and in the mirror, her face had looked particularly waxy and wan.
“Your cousin said you were too worn from your journey. I hope you have recovered your strength.”
He said it so sincerely that it seemed almost funny to Agnes. It painted a gloss of absurdity upon the entire scene. If she spoke, she would have been tempted to ask him, quite bluntly, why he concerned himself with her condition at all.
Instead she merely nodded again, blinking in an attempt to brighten her eyes.
Then, to her greatest astonishment, Liuprand looked up at the guard. “You may go,” he said.
“Surely Your Highness has greater matters to attend,” the guard replied, sounding uneasy.
“And surely you have better sense than to question the directives of your prince.”
Agnes could nearly see his face redden behind the grate of his helmet. “Of course, Your Highness.” He dipped his head once more, and then he was gone.
Now they were alone, and neither of them spoke. Was he borrowing her tactics? The idea flustered her. Agnes wondered if the princemeant to conquer her, too; if he thought of her silence as a motte and bailey, as a siege wall. If he thought he could starve her silence out.
But Liuprand was not a conqueror. None of these Seraphine nobles were, not since Berengar. Berengar’s son, Widsith, was so well known for his complacency that he was namedthe Precious.And of course there was Nicephorus the Sluggard, so idle that he left even his own form unguarded, allowing his body to grow indolent with flesh, swelling beyond the borders of doublets and trousers.
She guessed the prince at only one-and-twenty. He had not yet been given his epithet. Agnes regarded him.
He watched her back intently, gaze measured and steady. Liuprand the Constant?
If indeed he meant to mirror her silence, the strategy was wasted on her. No matter how strong his will, Agnes had years on him, years to craft her silence like the thickest and most ponderous of battlements. He could never triumphantly besiege it.
As she expected, he broke his own silence within minutes.
“It has been many years since I’ve had company in the library.”
This, however, was not at all what she had expected him to say.
“My father is no scholar,” he went on. “It was my mother who fed me on books. She had many of these tomes imported from Seraph. My father said, if he had known, he would have offered books as her dowry instead of gold.”
Queen Philomel had died in Liuprand’s youth, though of course the precise date was not documented. The circumstances of her death were still lusty food for rumormongers and talebearers even so many years later. The most flavorsome morsel of all was the story that one night, during their coupling, and when he had already been titledthe Sluggard,the king had crushed her into their marriage bed and smothered the life out of her. The longevity of this gossip was remarkable. Agnes had heard the kitchen girls in Castle Peake whispering about it mere days before their departure, although they could not have been more than babes when this unpleasant and lurid tale first emerged.
Even if Agnes did speak, she would never be so crass as to ask whether this accounting was true. But she was intrigued by the notion that the old queen had been a reader. Such a thing was rare in Drepane, given the annihilation of their ancestral texts by Berengar. A century later, the quality of inquisitiveness was not especially prized. If they did title Liuprandthe Scholar,it would not be an epithet of reverence.
Perhaps this was why Liuprand posted a sentry at the library door. Not to keep others out, but to hold his secret safe inside its walls.
All this time she had been occupied in her own thoughts, Liuprand had not taken his eyes off her. Now his gaze skimmed downward and settled on the piece of parchment on the table.
Luckily she had not written anything damning. In fact, she had not written anything valuable at all. She had scribbled banal little notes, testing whether the story had any heights or depths, and if she could scale or plumb them.The hydra lures but also terrifies. The knight is brave but also lusts for glory. The pursuit is selfish. The hydra has inflicted no harm upon humanity.
He stared at the paper for a moment, then lifted his gaze again to meet hers. “You wrote the letter,” he said.
There was a gap between the speaking of his words and Agnes’s comprehension of them. But once the understanding had lowered its weight upon her, she snatched up the parchment, crumpled it in her fist, and shook her head furiously.
“No, I did not mean to alarm you,” Liuprand said quickly. “I merely recognized your penmanship. It was not a recrimination. Marozia is a lady of great power and esteem, and one in her position cannot always be expected to perform such tasks. I take no offense to it. As you proposed in your letter—the betrothal will proceed.”
So already it had been decided, likely last night at supper. Agnes should have felt joy; at the very least, relief. But an odd feeling invaded her instead. It was some hazy echo of what she had felt when Marozia had clutched her firefly in gentle, uncallused hands while Agnes was smearing the sticky remains of hers on the grass.
