“Yes, Your Scrupulousness.”
They arrived at the door of the princess’s chamber. Mordaunt drew in a breath through his mouth and then let it out through his nostrils. He inhaled deeply of his own animus. Then he raised a resentful hand and rapped once, lightly, upon the wood.
Silence. Perhaps the lady was out of her rooms. Yet Mordaunt doubted he would be so fortunate.
No voice called out from inside, but within moments, he heard footsteps on the floor. The door opened, and the lady Agnes stood in the threshold. He had been expecting the princess, and to see her cousin instead made him flinch. The shock was like drawing out a babe from between a mother’s legs, only to have it slip, purple and stillborn and silent, into your arms.
“Lady,” he said, once he had grieved and then made peace with her presence. “Is the princess within?”
The lady glanced over her shoulder, eyes flickering beneath dense lashes. Though she moved, her expression never changed; the light did not even seem to refract differently within her shifting gaze. What an odd creature she was, closer to the dead than to the living. But Mordaunt quickly amended this thought. It was not as if she had lived and then perished; it was more as though she had not lived at all. A preexistent being. A cold flower that had never bloomed.
She must have caught the eye of someone within, for Lady Agnes nodded, then stepped aside to let them through.
The princess was indeed within, wearing a gown of rich, choleric red. Her cheeks had a matching color, and she seemed to radiate warmth, though it was not at all a genial warmth. It was a burning heat, better observed than touched. Her lips were full but unsmiling.
“Princess,” Mordaunt said, bowing until his back ached. Beside him, Ninian gave a much-improved curtsy. “I come to you with a gift from your lord husband.”
Immediately, her dark eyes flared. “A gift?”
Her voice was so hostile that Mordaunt felt physically pricked. “Yes,” he said, rising again. “He said you have need of a new handmaiden. This is the girl Ninian.”
“I am honored to serve you, my princess,” said Ninian, and looked up earnestly, breaking both the third and second rules he had impressed upon her only moments ago.
But the princess did not react to this brazen interjection. Her knifepoint eyes never left Mordaunt’s face. “Why did he say I have need of a new handmaiden?”
“I suppose because he believes you do.”
The princess was a curious creature as well, though perhaps more so when taken in symphony with her cousin. He could not fathom two more different strains of lady. They were alike only in the shade of their hair, an ashen black, and otherwise so dissonant it was perturbing. Yet—they moved in an unerring sort of consonance. If the princess’s gaze moved to another part of the room, Agnes seemed to know immediately which object she desired from that area and fetched it for her. If a question was ever posed to Agnes, the princess immediately offered up the answer in her cousin’s stead.
It struck him then, and Mordaunt felt foolish for not realizing it before. This strange symbiosis between the ladies had to be the result of unfortunate circumstance—how many handmaidens could there be in that ghoulish, remote castle the House of Teeth called home? They had learned to attend each other’s needs in such an unconscious way out of necessity, and seeing this, Liuprand had sought to relieve Agnes and the princess of this shared burden. A perceptive man he was, and a good husband. Mordaunt was quite impressed.
But the princess did not appear remotely grateful for her husband’s gift. Her mouth—which was a very pretty mouth—twisted and made itself rather ugly. Light bounced sharply off the beads of that gruesome chain around her throat.
“I have no need of a new handmaiden,” she said venomously. “You may tell my husband that.”
Ninian looked so crestfallen that Mordaunt almost pitied her, and he might have been moved even to kiss her with how relieved he was that the princess was rebuffing the diabolical creature. Joy began to rise in him at the thought of returning the girl to her village, watching her vanish among the crowd of stinking peasants, never to be seen again. This dalliance with devilry would be dashed from the castle’s memory.
But before he could reply, the lady Agnes began to shake her head furiously.
Brow furrowing, the princess took her cousin’s hand and guided her to the far corner of the room. There Mordaunt could hear snatches of her whispering, though he could not pick out any words. He craned his neck, desperately curious to know if Agnes would speak to the princess in return. It was said that she remained completely silent by will alone, not for any physical muteness. Of course, rumors spread nonetheless—rumors that the lady Agnesdidspeak, yet only for her cousin’s ears.
But Mordaunt could not glimpse her mouth moving; her lips stayed pressed into a nearly colorless line. She nodded and gestured but formed no words. He again had the impression of her as a preexistent being, or perhaps as a babe born too soon, without all the faculties and functions that made one fit for the human world. Mordaunt had delivered such babes: cold, tearless creatures with their hearts on the outside of their bodies, too small or ill formed to pump blood.
In thinking of this, Mordaunt suddenly found the lady Agnes mightily interesting. Her cousin was the beautiful one, but her bright liveliness was easily processed. She required no further inquiry. But Agnes—he could have pinned her down under glass and studied her as he would a peculiar insect.
So lost was he in these thoughts, he did not notice the princess stomping back over until she spoke again.
“Fine,” she said. “I will take the girl. And tell my husband thank you.”
The words sounded like half-chewed food, spat out because she did not like the taste.
“Very well, Princess,” said Mordaunt.
He turned to go, and he should have been happy at his dismissal, happy that he would no longer have to bear witness to this folly, that he would no longer be compelled to look into those unholy eyes. But he felt inexplicably bereft. And so partway across the threshold, he glanced back over his shoulder.
The scene had changed within moments, the players rearranged, as if the room were the set of a masque: Agnes and Marozia stood slightly apart, facing each other, yet neither meeting the other’s eyes. And Ninian stood between them, several inches shorter, though perhaps only as a consequence of the poverty that left every peasant with a burdened and stooped back. A few weeks in the castle, sleeping on feather mattresses instead of straw, and she might be of a height to the ladies.
She looked especially grubby now, the dirty and sun-chapped cast to her skin thrown into harsh relief against the marble-white faces of the cousins and their fine aristocratic features. But the shock of seeing Ninian between them was not this physical reality; rather it was something intangible and felt only in the air, an atmospheric augury. He had the sense of a great lute string being plucked, reverberating out a lonesome final note, and then snapping. And he felt a removed sort of grief for the bard whose broken instrument would never be played again.
