“She means she is the elder,” Marozia said, with undisguised exasperation. “By five days, nothing more. My mother was meant to have given birth first, but Agnes insisted on rushing out a month too soon. It was thought she would not survive. And it has maimed her for life, you see. She is a fragile creature now, and always quite poorly.”
Liuprand looked at Agnes for a long moment, though the emotion in his gaze could not be read. At last, he said, “She does not seem such a fragile creature to me.”
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the water and the bread. All around her, there was feasting, laughing, fair faces going red with drink, promises made of hunts and future banquets, and Agnes sat, sipping her pale wine, picking at her bread, and feeling grateful that her hunger had been excised from her long ago, like the sawing of a gangrenous limb.
XIX
Agnes Alone
Marozia was gone, to the prince’s chamber with her new husband. The sun had sunken into the ocean, yet no moon rose in its place; the clouds were too dense to be penetrated by its silvery emanation. And thus, only the torches on the walls and the fires in the hearths gave light to Castle Crudele.
The hearth in her chamber was cold. Her chamber, Marozia’s chamber, their chamber, for since the moment of Marozia’s birth they had never slept apart; their bodies had grown in tandem under the same sheets, as weeds sprout from the same plot of dirt. Yet more life had gone into Marozia somehow. She had leached more water from the earth, soaked more sun from the sky. And perhaps she had left Agnes bereft of these things, or perhaps she had drained them directly from Agnes herself, like a snake’s teeth are milked for venom, which is then brushed onto the arrow-tips of men.
Agnes sat upon the empty bed. Visions of the living assaulted her now, scenes that played out mere rooms away. She imagined how Marozia would bloom even more brilliantly once within the privacy of Liuprand’s chamber, how his large but gentle hands would unlace her corset, then run over her waist and her naked hips. But her imagining stopped dead here. She could not picture a wanton stare on Liuprand’s face. It seemed beneath him somehow; at the feast he had not even eaten much more than Agnes. As though he could subsist on nothing more than air. Agnes wondered if his father’s appetites disgusted him, whether the king’s revolting indulgences had turned Liuprand into a remote creature who could not bear to want or need.
She could easily summon to mind visions of the king, however. When she rolled up the sleeve of her gown, she saw the nascent bruises, in their pulsing, sickish violet. It was then that fear rippled through her, a roiling sensation in her belly that almost approximated hunger.
You must refuse all mortal desires. You must summon visions in smoke. You must consume the knowledge of every plant.The secret covenant of Adele-Blanche, sworn between her and her anointed granddaughter. Agnes touched her stomach through her dress. She felt each jutting bone of her ribs. She felt the slight rising of her small breasts. She felt the letters that ran across her skin.
The ritual to raise the dead from the earth required priest, prophet, and surgeon. And so Adele-Blanche had cultivated in Agnes the asceticism of a monk, the future-sight of a sibyl, and the medical wisdom of a doctor; all of this in preparation for the day she would find the secret words that had been buried in the boneyard of time, in some clever place within the walls of Castle Crudele, guarded more jealously than gold.
Agnes dug into the nail bed of her left thumb. Blood loosened and ran a path down her palm. When she was hungry, she feasted upon pain. When her body throbbed with need, she indulged in this passionate torture. Rich foods and rich wine may have been forbidden to her, but she had learned, like a dog, how to gnaw the marrow from a naked bone.
Her fear then was that somehow she had violated her grandmother’s hidden covenant. The king had found his pleasure while kneading the flesh of her thigh. Was this enough to ruin her; had she failed to live as an ascetic, thus preventing her from ever performing the ritual Adele-Blanche required? Exhaustion lay across her heavily, but now Agnes feared sleep, lest her grandmother rise like a specter in her dreams.
She raised her hand to her face and examined it, this gruesome instrument, which itself had suffered so many ignominies yet also inflicted them; it was both the weapon and the wound, her nails working with the steady rhythm of embroidery to peel back her own flesh. Herhand, the instrument that had guided her to Castle Crudele, that had led Marozia to the prince’s bed.
The pain had become familiar to her: the endurance of it and the execution. It was this pain that she curled up beside in the bed, holding it as if it were a warm body. Blood traveled along the creases of her hand, dyeing the sheets a fresh and vivid red.
Sleep did not visit Agnes alone. It came only to brush her eyelids shut and then vanish before she could be pulled under. In her mind, she shouted out for it:Please, wait, come back.But the words, like all others, would not fall from her lips.
XX
Unstained Sheets
A visitor did come to her, in the most arcane hours of the night, and it was not sleep. It was a living creature, flesh and bone, and it came to her racked with heaving sobs. Marozia.
Agnes shot up in bed, blinking away the film in her eyes. The shadows were glimmery and deep, like the realm beneath the surface of the water, when rippled through with overworld light. Marozia thrust the door shut behind her with a thud loud enough that it would surely wake Waltrude in the next room over. Hurriedly Agnes got to her feet.
“He would not touch me,” Marozia bawled. Her hands were curled up into fists and pressed to her eyes, obscuring most of her face. “He invited me to his bed, yet he left such a berth between us that I could not even reach out and brush his fingers. When he slept, he faced away from me. He averted his gaze as I undressed. As though I disgusted him.”
So bewildered herself, Agnes could not very heartily comfort Marozia. She drew her cousin into her arms and patted her back, but her movements were made stiff with shock.
Marozia’s tears ran into her skin, slippery and hot. They soaked her exposed collarbone and the hollow of her throat. Marozia’s forehead was pressed so powerfully against Agnes’s shoulder that she felt like a mule under its burden, and she tried to shift subtly without disturbing her cousin. Then at last, at last, Marozia raised her head and spoke.
“He hates me,” she whispered hoarsely. Her face was as red as a fever, and her eyes had the gloss of tears. “Am I not lovely enough for him? Not as beautiful as a bride of Seraph?”
In her gauzy nightgown, which clung to the curves of her body asif it were soaking wet, and even with her countenance so flushed by her impassioned weeping, there could be no disputing Marozia’s beauty. Vibrant, ripe, and soft, like a flower-field nymph in a painting of old. She was not the blood of Seraph, true, but was that not the purpose of their union? Why would Liuprand have pursued this match, only to rebuff Marozia so coldly in their marriage bed?
A union was not fruitful until it bore fruit. Until there was a child born who would yoke the royal line to this ancient house of Drepane, a child who might serve as a bridge between two feuding families, a child who might be held up as shining proof that there could be a peaceful joining of old blood and new, that the Seraphine planned no longer to coldly rule from their fortress but rather to mingle among their subjects, coming down from on high like a god from his mount.
Agnes doubted that Marozia was considering all this as her body trembled with now-muted weeping. The insult had been to her person, not to the House of Teeth. Agnes felt her belly go soft with pity, and it was a strange feeling, unfamiliar to her. There was a sharp and acrid morsel of perversity in it. The wine inside the watered-down drink, bitterness just barely coating her tongue.
She was surprised by how quickly that little poison began to spread. Because she was then able to step away from her cousin, and lean over her desk, and scrawl something on a bit of parchment, all while feeling the strength that this small venom pulsed through her blood.
She showed the paper to Marozia, who was still swallowing thickly to contain her sobs.
Try again,it read.
