“My lady,” she said. “The ceremony is nearly upon us.”
Agnes nodded.
Waltrude did not prod further. Instead she crossed the room until she was standing before Agnes and held something out in the open palm of her hand.
“Here,” she said. “I was instructed to give this to you. A gift, from the prince.”
It was a ring: a thin silver band with very fine engravings, so delicate she could have spent no small amount of time examining them to see every detail. And in the center, two modest white pearls enclosing a larger—black, but iridescent when it was turned to catch the pale shafts of sunlight. She had never seen one with this coloring before.
She looked up at Waltrude in bewilderment.
“I was not given to know the prince’s reasoning,” Waltrude said. “But perhaps he meant it as something like a dowry. You are the bride’s only family, after all.”
If that was so, it was overly generous, beyond what propriety demanded. If he had meant it as a gift for her, unconnected to her kinship with Marozia, it was a clever one. Nothing so opulent as to disgrace his wife, yet still solicitous enough to flatter, showing he knew the color of her gown and had perhaps even noticed her preference for silver over gold. It sat just within the boundaries of decorum, pressing at their limits but not infringing them.
That was too absurd for Agnes to entertain. Liuprand must have seen this as some way of fulfilling his bridegroom’s duties, nothing more. She had tried to evict the memories of their encounter in the library from her mind, and it would not help, in such efforts, to wear a reminder of the prince on her person.
Still, it would be a garish breach of etiquette to refuse, so Agnes took the ring and slipped it on her finger. The pearls did not glint powerfully in the light as a precious stone would, but their chameleonic sheen showed a soft rainbow of colors, subtle and almost secret.
Then, quick as the bite of a viper, Waltrude reached out and grabbed her wrist.
Numbed by shock, Agnes did not protest as Waltrude took her other wrist as well, yoking them together and pulling them toward her. Waltrude turned Agnes’s hands over in hers, eyes narrowing as she inspected them.
“Why do you destroy yourself?” she asked.
One of Agnes’s nail beds was bleeding. She must have picked at them just now, unconsciously. She tried to tug her hands away, but Waltrude would not let go. She was then forced to inspect her own hands with just as much scrutiny, greater scrutiny than she had really ever given them before.
She was surprised by how gruesome she found them. Not only had all the nail beds been stripped away, but the skin around them had also been picked and peeled until all was a tender dark pink, pulsing with below-surface blood. In some places, the breakthrough of blood was merely imminent; in others, the barrier had already been breached, and red was scored through the mangle of white, transforming her fingers into something that resembled meat more than living flesh.
Agnes lifted her head and met Waltrude’s gaze defiantly.
“You are a lovely girl,” Waltrude said. “Not as vibrant as your cousin, but some men prefer a remote beauty. It is a shame to ruin yourself when you are young and might still find a fruitful match.”
At last Agnes managed to jerk her hands free. She stalked to theopposite end of the room and glared fiercely at the old woman, until, with a loud, indignant sigh, Waltrude turned and left her.
It was only after she was gone that Agnes considered a third possibility. She had spent those many hours sitting beside Liuprand in the library. He had taken notice of what she had read and written. Had he taken notice of her hands, too? Perhaps—she tried not to think it, yet the notion fought its way to the forefront of her mind—he wanted her to know that he had seen them. Always, she realized, he had seen her. When no one else bothered even to look.
XVII
Half a Soul
The great hall had no dais upon which the bride and bridegroom could kneel and be raised above their gathered guests. Rather, on either side of the aisle, there were four square depressions in the stone, like garden plots, and several pews within them. Eight plots in total, for each of the seven houses, and one at the front for the royal family and its attendants. Arranged within their distinct depressions, every house made a showing, except for one.
There was Hartwig of the House of Lungs, a handsome man who dressed in brocade of garish colors, his cloak, showing each shade of the rainbow, fanned out behind and beside him, filling every seat in his plot. The hair on his head was gray, but there was gold in his mouth: a grille that latticed his white-toothed smile. There was a ruby in each ear, and it was said that his most delicate part had also been pierced and studded with gems, but Agnes was not given to know if this was true.
There was Amycus, Master of Bones, who was of such slight stature that his seat had to be padded so that he could watch the ceremony. Evidently his attendants had anticipated this problem and brought with them a number of fatly stuffed silken pillows. Perched upon them, black hair combed flat, his face round and uncannily free of the furrows and blotches of age, he had a doll-like prettiness and looked closer to a child than a man. However, his age showed in the way his voice had withered to no more than a croaking whisper, and so he muttered into the ear of the raven that sat ever-presently upon his shoulder. The raven, a clever creature, then squawked out its master’s words.
The House of Hearts made the fairest showing, Lord Rabanus andhis wife both wearing vestments of rosy pink. They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, occasionally dipping their heads to whisper to each other. They had been wed for longer than Agnes had been alive and the lady had given her lord four children, but the coy smiles they exchanged were those of a courting couple, fresh and flushing in their love. Love? A marriage for love was rarer than an ivory tusk.
The Master of Flesh, Vauquelin, did not himself appear, but he avoided terribly offending etiquette by sending his most valuable son in his stead. His heir had also arrived bearing the most generous of wedding gifts, two creaky chests bursting with gold. This had pleased King Nicephorus enormously, and Agnes suspected he would indeed have been happier to see the pews filled with piles of gold rather than human guests.
The House of Eyes had the plot behind the king. Thrasamund was leaning forward, his words moistening the skin below the king’s ear. To Agnes’s surprise, Nicephorus appeared to be listening quite intently, nodding every now and then, even occasionally deigning to grumble back. Agnes could not imagine what Thrasamund could be saying to evoke such enthusiasm, other than oily flattery. Was this a particular defect in Nicephorus, or was there something about the condition of being king that made one vulnerable to the world’s toadies?
His power has grown as soft as his flesh,Adele-Blanche had said.
Across the aisle was the empty plot where her grandmother would have sat. The effect of seeing it, utterly devoid of life, was more poignant than Agnes had expected. As she hefted the enormous train down the aisle, trying to match Marozia’s measured steps, she was looking toward that empty plot rather than the bridegroom and the Exarch ahead. It made her realize, truly, the fruitfulness of the laws imposed by Seraph to conquer death. The desecration left not even a shallow grave behind, an absence that could still impose itself upon the world.
In the otherworldly theater behind Agnes’s eyelids, a ghost flowered up. She wore all black, with a netted veil that hid her face, but the end of the white braid, like a boar-bristle brush, peeked out frombeneath the macabre attire. Adele-Blanche’s pale impression turned, raised one crooked hand, and beckoned Agnes to her side.
