“It is a great honor to meet the new Mistress of Teeth so early in her incumbency.” He turned and looked Agnes directly in the face. “And who else do I have the pleasure of meeting today?”
He was Liuprand, eldest and only son of Nicephorus the Sluggard, heir to the throne of Drepane, already well loved by his subjects, already affixed with half a dozen potential epithets:the Golden, the Great, the Just, the Illustrious, the Fair, the Ready.He had no reason to know her.
“My dear cousin,” said Marozia, touching the small of her back. “Agnes.”
“Agnes,” Liuprand repeated. “You must be mourning the great oldwoman as well. I have heard she was especially attached to her grandchildren. How is your heart?”
“Aggrieved, Your Highness, of course,” Marozia said. She gave Agnes’s back a soothing pat. “But your attendance honors our house and warms our cold spirits.”
The smallest of furrows ran along Liuprand’s noble brow. His eyes left Agnes briefly, flickered to Marozia, then returned to her. “And you, Lady Agnes?”
The bile of nervousness rose in her throat. The prince’s gaze was not malicious, but it was probing. Quickly, before the silence could stretch on too unpleasantly, Marozia took her hand.
“Aggrieved as well, Your Highness,” she said. Her voice was smooth, cloaking any strangeness the prince might have observed. It would not do to have him unnerved or suspicious. They were meant to be mending the bridges Adele-Blanche had broken, treating the old wounds she had inflicted, draining the moats she had dug around the House of Teeth.
When still Liuprand regarded Agnes in that rather puzzled manner, Marozia hastened to say, “But she, too, is cheered by your presence.”
“I am glad,” he said, finally lifting his eyes from Agnes’s face. The furrow, however, did not disappear from his brow. “Perhaps when your grief is not so fresh, we may discuss the future of your house’s relationship to the Crown.”
A joyful flush filled Marozia’s cheeks. “Yes,” she said. “I would like that very much.”
“I mean no disrespect to your grandmother’s memory, of course. But with the House of Teeth under the purview of a new mistress, there may be a path forward yet untrodden.”
“It is to be my first act as Mistress of Teeth,” Marozia said. She squeezed Agnes’s hand in a very significant way that almost hurt. “If it please Your Highness, I will visit Castle Crudele within the month to discuss these arrangements.”
“It would please me very much, Lady Marozia.” Liuprand nodded at her. And then he looked to Agnes again. His eyes were awater-bright blue but seemingly without depths, such that they reflected her own countenance back at her. These two cerulean mirrors showed a blanched oval face, thin dark eyebrows, and imperturbable lips.
“Lady Agnes.”
She dipped her head in acknowledgment and performed a half curtsy. It was a perfect gesture that would have pleased her grandmother enormously. Acquiescent enough to satisfy the superior being, yet still withholding complete submission.
As he turned, the Dolorous Guard were inspired to life again, forming a phalanx around the prince. Now only the crown of his golden head could be seen, rising atop the bobbing gray helmets. He was escorted into the waiting carriage, which was made of a splendorous soldered metal that seemed not to show the mud that must have accumulated on its wheels and its belly as it clambered up the mountain to Castle Peake.
Marozia was standing on her tiptoes to watch his departure, one hand braced on Agnes’s shoulder. Agnes stood flat on her feet and felt the mist creep around her with a cold, solicitous grip.
On the top step of the carriage, Liuprand looked back. He had a curiously unimposing gaze for a prince. It was an intense gaze, to be sure, but it did not demand. It seemed merely to ask. And for a reason Agnes could not comprehend, his gaze lay not upon the black tree branches that fingered into the flat gray air, nor upon the mud pit that contained her grandmother’s infinitesimal matter, nor upon beautiful Marozia in the deep-red gown that impressed her on the world like a passionate stain of blood, but uponher.
Silent, grim Lady Agnes, wearing bruise-colored silk.
His stare could not have rested there for more than a quarter minute, yet it felt the length of hours. Then without warning, Liuprand ducked into the carriage, and a member of the Dolorous Guard stepped forward to close the door behind him.
III
The Origins of Our Custom
Castle Peake, the ancestral dwelling of the House of Teeth, was the object of ridicule and drollery among the people of Drepane. Nobles and peasants alike sneered at its ugliness, its remoteness, the bleak, gloomy color of its crumbling walls, the battlements that staggered unevenly along the edge of the mountainside, as if the structure were a great layered cake gone mealy and rotten with time. The treacherous peaks around it, which had given the castle its name, rose into the gray sky like the scutes of a slumbering dragon. Masons and millers who lived miles away, who could barely glimpse the mountain range from their huts and hovels, grinned toothily over pints of ale and said,I would sooner climb to Castle Peake than wed my daughter to you, you copper skink. I would rather listen to a screaming owl than the groans of Adele-Blanche. They say the Mistress of Teeth has filed her teeth into points, like a horned viper.
None of them would guess that Castle Peake was in fact teeming with flowers. Behind those moldering battlements and the rusted barbican, the courtyard bloomed with betony and bitter nightshade, monkshood and catnip, fuchsia and sea thistle. Foxgloves rustled like wind chimes, and heliotropes turned their humble faces toward the rare and precious beams of sun. Spines of sea holly pierced the air like the minutest daggers. Wisteria clambered up the columns with the powerful muscularity of a snake. Altogether, they filled the air with pollen so thick that it clogged the throats of any who passed through, and left behind its yellowish powder on their clothes and hair. If one were unwise enough to take the path near the shrubbery, thecrown-of-thorns and blackberries might tear holes in one’s skirts. One might become sticky with sap or pricked with barbs. All such small perils awaited any visitor to the House of Teeth.
Agnes was still holding her grandmother’s teeth in their velvet pouch as Marozia led them to a small plat of dirt near the drooping fuchsia.
“He was charmed, don’t you think?” Marozia asked. “He invited me to come. I should go right away.”
Agnes shook her head. With the one hand that was not occupied by the pouch of teeth, she made a scribbling motion in the air, as if there were a quill pinched between her forefinger and thumb.
“You’re right,” said Marozia. “I should write first. Just to be certain—you will write the letter, won’t you?”
Agnes nodded.
