Yet rebellion it would be. The prince’s line had won Drepane by blade, and the laws of the Covenant they forged must be executed. Even in the Master of Blood’s rude absence, the ritual was fulfilled.
Thrasamund, Master of Eyes, fancied himself a man of exceptional charisma, so as his leeches set to work, he orated.
“How many gentle faces in attendance! The gentlest, of course, is of our dear prince. He has journeyed through reeking swamps and upmiserable cliffs, through the gloomy stench of mist, to the peak that upholds the Peake. What a dreadful odyssey. But the House of Teeth has always enjoyed its inscrutable isolation. Let us hope for the sake of the honorable and merciful prince that there will be no more deaths within Castle Peake for a good long time.”
“There will not be,” Marozia said.
It had started to drizzle. Thrasamund grinned widely under his beard. The beard was itself a momentous thing. It draped over the curve of his stomach in wry, fox-red curls. As if to maintain some sort of filamentary equilibrium, the hair on his head was entirely gone. His baldness shone like the back of the silver spoon his leeches used to scoop out Adele-Blanche’s eyes.
Luckily, the task of his leeches was quite simple, and so they were spared more of his speech. The eyes, once removed, were placed inside a leather purse. Staggering out of the mud pit, the leeches handed the purse to their master.
Unluckily, Thrasamund and his leeches did not depart. The Master of Eyes rocked back and forth on his heels and watched in a serene manner as the leeches from the House of Teeth descended upon their mistress’s corpse.
They had been her grandmother’s leeches, and they were Marozia’s leeches now. Agnes had known them both since she was a little girl. One was named Swallow, and the other was Wrestbone. She had seen them polishing their pliers in preparation for the event. Swallow held her grandmother’s mouth open with a gentleness none of the other leeches had afforded her body. Then Wrestbone removed each tooth with a brisk, dexterous tug, the tendons on the inside of his wrist tensing and bulging. For thirty-two teeth, this process was completed in under a minute. Then the teeth were deposited inside a velvet pouch, bunched closed with a drawstring.
It was Wrestbone who presented the pouch to Marozia, panting slightly from the exertion of scrabbling out of the mud pit. This was the first time Agnes saw her cousin’s eyes well up. But the tears stayed lodged resolutely along her lash line, like beads on a taut chain.
“Give them to Agnes,” she said. And then Marozia turned to face her. “Hold them, will you?”
Agnes nodded and accepted the pouch. She clasped it between her hands, as a child might clutch a firefly she had captured while frolicking in the purple dusk. Once, Agnes had held her captive too clumsily, mashing its fragile body between her finger and thumb. She had cried then, out of guilt and grief but also slightly out of envy, because Marozia’s firefly remained a lustily glowing little prisoner in her more delicate hands. Agnes knelt in the grass and smeared the juices of the insect’s demise into the dirt. When she stood up again, all evidence of its death was gone.
The leeches from the House of Hearts and the House of Lungs could do their work in tandem. All four bent down over the body, obscuring the finesses of their labor under reaching limbs and flapping robes. When they rose and stood back, Adele-Blanche’s chest was sliced down the middle in one grave stroke. The loose folds of skin, which parted to reveal the dark cavity half empty of organs, were now the purview of the House of Flesh.
“I don’t want to watch this,” Marozia said. “It’s raining again. Can’t they hurry up?”
They could not, Agnes knew. Indeed, this was the fastest she had ever seen the desecration performed. Perhaps it was the foul weather, or perhaps the other houses were merely treating their grandmother in death as they had treated her in life: as a disagreeable, vaguely malevolent presence that one feared either offending or overly flattering. To be in Adele-Blanche’s favor was just as unpleasant as being her enemy. Agnes understood this better than anyone.
Amycus, Master of Bones, had the most material to recover and the heaviest consignment to carry away; his leeches groaned and shook under the weight of their trunk, loaded with Adele-Blanche’s disassembled skeleton. But Amycus was a shrewd and efficient man, putting all things in his power to their best use. It was said that he slept on a bed frame constructed out of femurs and fibulae, and that his torches all burned inside sconces made from the ribs of children.
There was very little left of Adele-Blanche’s body now. None of what remained was the inheritance of any great house, yet by ArticleIII of the Covenant, it all must be obliterated immediately. The Covenant also restricted the methods of expunging it: There could not be a pyre; vultures could not be permitted to feast upon it; it could not be sent out to sea; and, of course, it could not be buried. So here at last was the paramount duty of the Most Esteemed Surgeon.
Both Swallow and Wrestbone helped the Surgeon down from his dais and allowed him to grip their arms for balance as he maneuvered toward the very last remains of their departed mistress.
The Most Esteemed Surgeon wore heavy wooden clogs. Holding on to Swallow and Wrestbone, he stomped Adele-Blanche’s entrails into the mud. Thudding, squelching, like he was mashing grapes for wine, until the red matter of her grandmother was reduced to invisible bits and mixed with the dirt so as to be completely, utterly irretrievable.
II
Liuprand
The rain spent itself, and the clouds broke apart to show strips of hoary light. Marozia nudged Agnes meaningfully, and Agnes stepped down from the pew onto the sodden earth that infected her flesh with goosebumps. She raised a hand to help her cousin descend, and Marozia followed her down primly, nose wrinkling as her feet met the same cold ground.
“Come on, come on,” Marozia urged. “He’s going to leave.”
Marozia neverrushed.This manner of locomotion did not befit a noble lady. But the impatience in her cousin’s voice had Agnes stumbling forward, half tripping over her muddy skirts, desperately trying to blaze a trail for Marozia, newly anointed Mistress of Teeth. It would not do for Marozia to be observed faltering and fumbling. Particularly by Thrasamund, Master of Eyes, who, congruous to his title, had the perception of a carrion bird. He steepled his hands over his stomach and watched Agnes’s awkward efforts.
Fortunately, the gray mass of guards did not move. Each stood as straight as an upright sword and, clad as they were in armor and mail, looked more metal than man.
Agnes bent down to brush some of the mud from Marozia’s skirt, taking this moment to catch her breath. From inside the mass of soldiers came a stately voice: “Part.”
No sooner had the command left the mouth of their master than the guards each took one step to the side, forming a gap through which the prince was at last revealed. Agnes stood quickly, not wanting to be perceived in such a cowed position, but when she turned her eyestoward the prince, she had the sensation of being cowed twice over, in fact almost blinded.
It was more so the contrast between the prince’s emanation and the dismal surroundings than anything innate to His Highness, though it could not be denied that he was an inordinately and surpassingly beautiful man. Gold was his hair, but a dark gold, like sunken treasure. His face appeared carved, with the adoring, if not slightly lascivious, ministrations of a master sculptor, one who took great care in shaping its aquiline nose and august brow, who caressed the statue’s high, prominent cheekbones as though it were a lover.
He wore a doublet of midnight blue, banded with opulent braids of gold, a cape held to his shoulders with gilded epaulets. The prince trod the path created for him by the Dolorous Guard and stopped before Agnes and Marozia. With this proximity, Agnes could properly appreciate his stature. He was of a greater height even than Thrasamund, but he had none of the latter’s adipose indulgence. His broad figure was led by bone and muscle rather than by fat and flesh. And with the grace that Thrasamund had ascribed to him earlier, he smiled down at his subjects.
“My good ladies,” he said. “I did not have the occasion to meet your grandmother, but I grieve the loss of such a distinguished woman.”
“Thank you, Your Highness,” Marozia said. “I will endeavor to fill her slippers.”
