Agnes looked down at the ring. Nothing passed beneath Liuprand’s attention; he would have seen her wearing it. All of this for what? She began to think the prince was as secretive a creature as she was, his true nature unknown to all others, perhaps obscure even to himself.
The fuchsia-colored moth fluttered off her wrist and disappeared among some large stalks of lavender. Agnes left Liuprand again and returned with a moth whose wings had large, optical-looking spots. When it fluttered from her hand to Liuprand’s, he laughed—openly, as she had never heard him do before. False eyes for a false surrender.
Agnes found that she quite liked the sound of his laugh. She found that she wanted to draw it out of him, again and again. And she found that shecould,through this droll casting of moths back and forth. That was how she came to know the language of rustling wings.
The sun rose to its highest point in the sky as they spoke without speaking. And by the time duty called them both away, her back to Marozia’s bedchamber, Liuprand back to whatever princely business, Agnes realized she had entirely forgotten to plant her grandmother’s treasonous seeds.
XXII
The Most Esteemed Surgeon
“No,” the Most Esteemed Surgeon said. “Not you.”
He was standing at the center of one of the villages within the Outer Wall, upon an improvised podium that was no more than an overturned crate. Flies swarmed heavily. The leeches he had brought along—Truss and Mordaunt, his favorites—attentively swatted at them with horsetail staffs. Yet this had the additional effect of blowing the scents of the village directly into his nasal cavities. Boiling offal, teeming latrines, and the brine of seldom-washed bodies.
The Most Esteemed Surgeon sighed and tried to breathe only through his mouth. All these gross odors of humanity made him despair. Was this a hopeless endeavor?
The girl he dismissed slunk away, head hanging low. Behind her, the line had swelled to two dozen, maybe three, all jostling over one another’s shoulders to catch a glimpse of the Most Esteemed Surgeon and his retinue. So many smudged, leery faces. Not a single one stood out to him or even dared to meet his gaze.
Mordaunt waved the next girl forward. The Most Esteemed Surgeon regarded her.
She had her dun-colored hair tucked beneath a kerchief, and her brow was tacky with sweat. Under that brow, however, were the most curious eyes. One was a kaleidoscopic gray, the color of pebbles on the beach. The other was a clear, sharp blue.
The Most Esteemed Surgeon studied those eyes. “Name?”
“Ninian,” she answered softly. Her pert chin quivered.
The Most Esteemed Surgeon squinted at her until his own eyeswatered. Sensing the need of his master, Truss reached up and dabbed at his unshed tears. The Most Esteemed Surgeon blinked to clear his vision. And then he looked at the girl again.
Fair she was, for an islander. There was a naturalness to her features that would not be found in Seraph, where every cheekbone and nose bridge and brow was sculpted as if by the deft hand of God himself. But her lips were pink, her lashes full, her face mostly symmetrical—except for those astonishing eyes.
And yet, when he looked upon her, the Most Esteemed Surgeon felt nothing at all.
Nothing, not even a quick skipping of his heart, not even a quiver in his stomach, not even a faint warming of his veins or a catch in his throat. There was no great, encompassing emotion that eradicated all else, that made the foul odors and the voices of his leeches recede into the background, so that it seemed as though the only two people on earth were him and the girl with mismatched eyes. In fact, the nothingness he felt made the scents and noises assert themselves even more dramatically, and he found himself wrinkling his nose and resisting the urge to clap his hands over his ears. Somewhere a horse snorted and pawed the dirt. A woman tossed the contents of a chamber pot into the street.
Truss and Mordaunt both watched him expectantly. With a weary exhale, the Most Esteemed Surgeon shook his head.
He had been at this increasingly fruitless toil for weeks now. It had all begun when he heard that the prince was to be wed to a noble lady of Drepane.Impossible,he had thought, at first, until her carriage clattered down from the morose mountains surrounding Castle Peake. And he had been taken by her loveliness, the lady Marozia, Mistress of Teeth (now princess-consort). He had not imagined such beauty could exist on this grim, forbidding, godless island. If the prince could not import a Seraphine bride, this was the next best thing.
And so the Most Esteemed Surgeon began to wonder if he, too, could find a mate among the women of the island. Surely there was at least one woman here who was to his liking. He would accept half,even a quarter of the beauty of a purebred Seraphine, if she was gentle in her manner and eager to please him. He thought he would have his best luck searching among the inhabitants of Castle Crudele, as if, through their proximity to the royal family, they might have leached a bit of Seraph’s graces. Yet he had already moved through nearly every dwelling within the Outer Wall and found nothing. And with each day the search wore on, he became more and more despondent.
Perhaps he should not have had such high hopes. For, in truth, beauty and gentle manner were not enough to soothe the soul-deep yearning that he felt. This was both the blessing and the burden of having Seraphine blood: Every Seraphine has one great love, the other half of his soul, and no other can compare. Even the kisses of the most beautiful woman would taste like ashes in his mouth if she were not his true mate. Her words of adoration would be hollow and cold. Their marriage bed could only ever be as barren as a salt flat.
There was, in fact, a pamphlet commissioned by the Dogaressa of Seraph that offered guidelines for any man in search of his great love. These rules were adhered to as strictly as the laws of the city that prohibited theft and ravishment and murder.
Marriage is no excuse for not loving.
He who is not jealous cannot love.
No one can be bound by two loves.
No one should be deprived of love without good cause.
A true lover never desires the embraces of anyone save his lover.
Love rarely lasts when it is revealed.
An easy attainment makes love contemptible; a difficult one makes it more dear.
