Marozia settled herself before the Exarch, throwing back her shoulders beneath the avian adornments. Agnes let the train drop, golden cloth spilling from her hands like honey wine. The eyes of aristocrats were upon her. She had to remove herself from their line of sight, but where? On one side, her grandmother’s ghost floated fractions of an inch above the stone bench. On the other, Nicephorus the Sluggard regarded her with his limpid, unreadable eyes.
Their power crushed her in, like an insect between clumsy hands. The force of life and the force of death. In the end, it was Marozia who made the choice for her, turning around and hissing between clenched teeth, “Go on.Sit beside the king.”
So Agnes did. Adele-Blanche’s ghost withered into empty air. Agnes wondered if she was the only one of the wedding’s attendees who understood the significance of this: Finally, the better part of a century after Berengar’s conquest, the House of Teeth had been anatomized.
But this epiphany did not rest upon Agnes for long; the gravity of the impending ceremony stole away its force. Instead, her gaze was drawn upward, toward Marozia, the Exarch—and Liuprand.
Liuprand wore a doublet of white, braided through with gold, and gilded epaulets that fixed a white cape to his shoulders. Next to Marozia’s marvelous dress, it was not an especially grand outfit, but his very presence was so luminous that standing beside each other they looked like two winking stars, part of their own private constellation.
It flooded her again, that noxious, treasonous feeling. When Agnes swallowed, she tasted its bile. And when she could no longer bear to look, she lowered her gaze to her own hands, fisted in her skirts, and the pearl ring that gleamed softly among the folds of pale fabric. Still she could not figure out its significance. It was not gaudy enough for anyone else to notice; the mystery was hers alone to contend with. He had not managed to wrest speech from her, but if Liuprand had intended to invade her mind, he had succeeded.
Agnes lifted her head again when the Exarch began to speak. Hewas a small, hunched man with eyes that resembled two spills of sour milk, and his voice was, shockingly, full of hate.
“In Seraph, it is believed that God divides every soul in two, and upon birth, each of his vessels is gifted with half a soul. With only half a soul, one lives half a life, and spends all one’s days seeking one’s matched half. One searches in sleeping, in waking, and especially in dreaming. Once one’s search has ended and the two souls have been joined, nothing may keep them apart. It is more binding than any treaty, more supreme than any law; it exceeds any power that might be exercised in the mortal world. If ever this bond is threatened, there is no limit to the violence one may enact to restore it, and if ever it is severed, there is no end to the brutality one might wreak as vengeance. This is God’s holiest promise: In death, these souls will be united forever and ever as one.”
The royal plot was situated behind Marozia, and Agnes could not see her face. But she watched Liuprand closely. All through this oration, his expression did not shift. He did not look at Marozia; rather, he kept his eyes on the Exarch, his jaw set in a nervy way, some private rancor filling the air between him and the priest.
“They keep up this farce, you know. In Seraph.”
Agnes whipped her head around. King Nicephorus had leaned over, his lips mere inches from her ear.
“This soul nonsense,” he went on in a gruff whisper. “Here on Drepane, they are just words…but in Seraph, they are as real as the food that fills your mouth. There is a rite—one man may duel another to the death if he feels this bond threatened. It is the law above the law. A law of God, superseding the law of man.”
Agnes tried to shift away from him as he spoke; he was so close to her ear that she felt the muggy warmth of his breath. But already she was near the end of the pew.
“What a relief it is to live on this godless island,” Nicephorus said, “where marriage is only ink and paper, and all the rest is fucking.”
And then his hand was on her thigh, crumpling the fabric of her dress. His fingers were enormous, swollen between the rings that hadbeen jammed on painfully, the tips so pink they were like boils ready to burst.
Agnes could not move; she dared not even draw breath. Encouraged by her lack of protest, Nicephorus moved his hand higher, fingers scrabbling in the silk to keep his grip tight. In this, he hardly seemed sluggardly at all—as Liuprand and Marozia spoke their vows and knelt for the Exarch’s blessing, the king worked himself over in the pews, one hand fondling Agnes’s thigh.
“Bleeding traitors,” Nicephorus panted as he rubbed himself fiercely. “He should be named Master of Stabbed Backs.”
With his chin, the king gestured over Agnes’s shoulder. She turned, the nape of her neck still damp with the king’s breath. It was only then that she realized the plot of the House of Blood was empty. All that occupied it was a wedding gift: a single bottle of wine, set upright on the pew, like an accusatory finger jabbed at the obstructed sky.
XVIII
A Feast for All but One
Though the king had satisfied one craving, he had not divested himself entirely of his appetites. As they processed into the great hall for the feast, Agnes heard his stomach growl deafeningly, lecherously, his footsteps growing swifter, lumbering and eager. But he overestimated himself. Two more lurching steps and he had to stop, catching his breath and grasping Agnes’s arm for balance. She felt the slick, nauseating heat of a fever crawl up her skin from where the Sluggard’s fingers touched her.
Marozia’s train had been snipped by this point, rolled up like a long and ponderous parchment, and carried away, so she could walk without assistance. She and Liuprand led this procession, though they did not touch each other—the moment that the ceremony had concluded, Liuprand had let go of her hand. Such fondness may have been expected in Seraph, where marriage was a union between two souls, but in Drepane marriage was a quotidian, corporeal contract, which expired when the mortal bodies of its signatories did. Yet both traditions dictated that Liuprand and Marozia must share a bed. A child, whether a product of love or convention, was a necessity.
Agnes did see Marozia’s wedding band flashing on her unencumbered finger. Gold was the ring, with a ruby gemstone large enough to pluck like a grape from a vine. Agnes looked down at her own ring, this thing of secret, unshowy beauty, and wondered again what thoughts had crossed Liuprand’s mind when he had it made for her.
At her first step into the great hall, Agnes was suddenly overcome.A memory invaded her, a memory that was not her own, perhaps something her grandmother’s posthumous existence had pressed into her mind; perhaps something her own brain had conjured, born of so many treasonous inhalations. She saw, for a moment, all the furniture cleared, the carpets pulled up from the floor, the candles gone cold—a dark, grim room, absent of all ornamentation. In its center, a man stood. He emanated the puissant golden aura of Seraph. He held a sword so thin, it looked carved by a lathe, as though a sewing needle had been magicked to an appalling length.
Before him knelt seven men. Their faces were covered in hoods, yet their clothes were rich; this was no common execution. The doomed men likewise did not beg, did not weep, did not shiver or exude the wispy vapors of fear. In fact, they were so still they seemed already dead, corpses arranged in stiff positions only to simulate life, like taxidermic animals. And the scene was all the more grisly for its lack of motion, as Berengar drew his sword, the cruel sword for which the cruel castle was named, and slit each of their illustrious throats.
Agnes was jerked forward, and the vision dissipated with an eyeblink.
“Come,” Nicephorus grunted. “Mulish little thing, eh?”
Agnes was led through the room where the throats of the patriarchs had been cut, watering the castle’s foundation. Had they been buried here? she wondered. Beneath the neatly laid stone and the deep-red carpets with their damask pattern that looked like the false eyes of moths? She could not focus her mind on the living; Nicephorus had to haul her up onto the dais and to the banquet table, as she was haunted and more haunted by the dead.
Still blinking through these visions, she was bewildered to find herself seated not at Marozia’s side, but at the king’s. Nicephorus had arranged her between himself and Liuprand.
“Oh,” Marozia sputtered. “My dear cousin—won’t you sit next to me?”
