The words of Adele-Blanche, as dictated by her ghost.
Marozia blinked her tear-daggered lashes. “Try? But he…he did not want me.”
Agnes was not certain this time whether it was her grandmother’s posthumous existence that moved her quill.
Try harder.
Silence. Finally came the haughty breath, the hackling of Marozia’s shoulders. “You are not the Mistress of Teeth.”
Agnes grew still, her breath gathering like dust in her throat.
“You are here to give mecounsel,” Marozia went on, sniffing. “Not orders. Not as our grandmother would have done…”
Agnes remained frozen, hands clasped at her waist. The shadows rippled and deepened, as a great fish leaves its wake in the water. For several more moments, Marozia simply gulped air, chest rising and falling, but there had never been a silence that her cousin did not know how to fill.
“Tell me, then,” she said at last. “Notyourwill. Tell me what Grandmother would wish for me.”
Agnes had never been sure how much Marozia had known. The profit of her elixirs and potions, her grandmother’s ministrations, or the constitution of her dreams. Marozia knew that Adele-Blanche plotted for their house’s advancement through this marriage, yet what more? Her grandmother had always wished for Marozia to be ignorant of the truth. Of that much, at least, Agnes was certain.
Agnes tore the pieces of parchment into the gasping hearth as Marozia let out a small whimper. Then she went to her trunk and took out the mandrake and henbane, the ingloriously crumpled leaves, edges tinged with rot. They were her last and she could not use them now; she had to save them, so that she could plant more.
Marozia approached her and took Agnes’s mangled hands in her own. Never once had she remarked upon the carnage wrought by and wrought upon her cousin’s fingers, just as she had never asked what secrets lay within the library, what thoughts preyed upon Agnes’s mind. She merely turned Agnes’s hands over, and then over again as she pleased, as one would an embroidery hoop.
“Tomorrow,” she said softly. “I am so…I must sleep.”
And so she, the Mistress of Teeth, guided her Lady of the Bedchamber into their bed. She covered them both with the blankets. She curled around Agnes, as a mollusk folds its own legs under itself, and brushed Agnes’s lips with her thumb. She did not seem to notice the blood on the sheets, the blood spilled by her cousin’s impassioned torment, yet Agnes was gripped in the rictus of this knowledge: that here,in their bed, the sheets had been bloodied, but in the marriage bed where Liuprand slept alone, the sheets were white and clean. No lust had sullied them.
Sleep did not deign to visit Agnes alone, but even it bowed to the whims of Drepane’s newly anointed princess. When Marozia yawned and sniffled, burying her face into Agnes’s shoulder, sleep drew its mighty arms over them both.
XXI
The Language of Rustling Wings
Adele-Blanche could not manage to twist her way into Agnes’s dreams, yet her sleep was not unperturbed. She was assaulted instead by a bizarre array of visions, which did not particularly disturb her but were vexing nonetheless for the little sense they made and the lack of continuity between them. She saw again a stonemason laying bricks. She saw an ancient man in stained white robes, lying face down on a cot, his hoary face painted in candlelight. She saw a set of enormous stone doors, impenetrably gray, with frayed ropes fed through small notches in the rock so they could be forced open; so heavy they were that a simple knob would not do. The bolt across them was pure steel, and it gleamed with its great mass. It would take two men, perhaps three, to lift it. A vault? What could be so precious that it required such elaborate means to hold it within?
These were dreams she had never had before, not since coming to Castle Crudele. And she had dreamed them without the aid of herbs and smoke. The same question as always pricked at her: Fantasy or prophecy?
But Agnes was thrust into the waking world before she could glean any more knowledge from her dreams. She had not closed the drapes last night, and now sunlight drenched the chamber as if poured from a golden urn. Removing Marozia’s hand from her waist, she rose.
The matter of Liuprand’s rejection fell heavily onto her shoulders the moment she stood. In the clarity of day, no longer warped by night’s freakish shadows, it seemed less strange, yet even more dire. This was Marozia’s one task, to make the prince fall in love. Andthough she had not failed precisely, Agnes did not know a man alive who could be persuaded into love without the coercion of corporeal pleasure. No affection could blossom in a bed of cold bodies.
She did not truly want the directives of her grandmother in this matter. Agnes knew she would not see it as Marozia’s failure alone. To Adele-Blanche, Marozia was half a child still, and it was Agnes’s duty to arrange her into her place, no matter how ignominious or ugly the task became. She picked at the pale band of flesh around her nail. An old scab, tiny and black like an itch-mite, came loose and fell to the ground.
It was then that she saw the ring. She had not removed it last night. Unaccustomed to wearing jewelry, Agnes had forgotten she had it on at all. This revived her wondering: What was the purpose of the gift? Had he always intended to rebuff Marozia and, if so, did he hope the ring would help smooth over the pain and tensions wrought by this great slight? This thought made her want to remove the ring and retire it to some secret corner of her trunk, but she could not afford to be seen snubbing Liuprand so openly. And in the most obstructed and forbidden part of her mind—her heart?—it would have pained her to be rid of it.
She remembered how concernedly Liuprand had looked upon her at the banquet, with the king’s grip forming bruises on her arm. She remembered Nicephorus’s hateful, slinking glare as he released her. Liuprand had maligned his father for her sake, why? It made no sense to try to endear himself to the one cousin, and the lesser lady by far, while planning to offend the other, greater cousin, his lady wife.
All this rumination without agenda was useless. Agnes dressed in her accustomed violet-gray and tucked the seedlings into the pocket of her gown. While she pondered the wiles of the prince, she could at least play her role to perfection.
She sought a garden. This was no simple task. Castle Peake was known for its maze-like halls, its dark and vexing stairwells, and itsconfounding, precarious parapets, but Castle Crudele was a beast of another order. She guessed it as three, four times larger, if not in height then in area, for the moment that she turned one corner, she would be confronted with no less than three distinct paths down different corridors, which, at least, were flooded with light from the many windows near the high ceilings.
However, this gave her the disadvantage of being unable to peer through them to gauge her proximity to the courtyard. Agnes went down one hallway that was decorated on both walls with garish, heavy tapestries, depicting a massacre of revenants. She stopped to examine the embroidered renditions of these pale creatures and was surprised to find they had a certain unearthly beauty about them.
Their limbs were overlong, their skin blanched to terrible whiteness, but death and its undoing chiseled their features to loveliness, as a sculptor carves a statue. Old men lost their wrinkles and regained their rotted teeth. Children replaced their tottery steps with a graceful, loping gait. Sharp cheekbones emerged from previously flabby cheeks; broken noses were slanted back into place. And their eyes, while black from end to end, glittered richly, like water under a midnight sky.
Agnes traced her finger across one of these beautified faces. Did the clandestine cure for death lie here, in the threads of this tapestry? She would return to study it later. Perhaps she would ask her grandmother what she thought when they spoke again in the misty terrain of her dreams.
For now she needed to hurry on. Should she be caught wandering the halls alone, much less regarding this particular tapestry with so much scrutiny, she would be made to explain herself. Granddaughter of Adele-Blanche, overly engrossed in death. The king would be leery, even furious.
