XXIV
Dissolved Through Death
Agnes had the pins in her mouth and Marozia had the curse on her tongue, but only Marozia spit hers out.
“By the hands of the Surgeon, I hate this dreadful match,” she said. “I cannot bear it, being scorned and now insulted…the prince does not know me and does not care to. But he is my husband, and nothing can remedy that.”
With a gentle hand, Agnes burrowed one of the pins into her hair. She hoped the steady motion, like a needle through cloth, would comfort Marozia, but it did not. Rather she turned around with such abruptness that several of the pins came loose. This undid an hour of Agnes’s work—yet Agnes was so alarmed by the suddenly heightened distress of her cousin that she couldn’t be bothered to grieve the time lost.
“Let us go,” she whimpered. Unfallen tears made glossy her dark eyes. “Let us return to Castle Peake. I want to go home.”
Agnes let her hands fall from Marozia’s hair. The room was drowned in silence. And like a lamprey, the posthumous existence of Adele-Blanche lithely parted the dark water.
“Grandmother is dead and gone.” Marozia’s voice trembled as she spoke the words. “Truly, she is. Nothing can remedy that.”
What she spoke was akin to treason. Agnes removed the pins from her mouth, set them down upon the table, and felt a tremor go through her entire body. It was a tremor of fear—Adele-Blanche’s abyssal mouth and its needle-thin teeth edged ever closer—but there was a thread of anger within it that shocked her.
This anger pulsed in her palms, almost unrealized violence. Of course Marozia spoke so facilely of this; she had never been permitted inside the library; she did not dream of the dead. She did not know that the profit of her grandmother’s work was already unfolding before them, Marozia’s marriage, Agnes circling and circling her quarry, with each day spent searching Castle Crudele. Her own rage frightened Agnes so terribly that she stepped away from her cousin, letting the unsanctimonious emotion be expelled like a long-held breath.
“You still believe her stories. About the once-greatness of our house and how it must be restored.” It was an accusation. Marozia got to her feet. “They are only that, Agnes—stories.”
Agnes looked back at her cousin, whose stare crackled like lightning in the limpid summer air. The revelation she had then was so simple, she was almost embarrassed to tell it to herself. Yet there it was. As she stood, cloaked as always in her silence, Agnes realized that she was by herself in these dark waters. Marozia’s dress did not lift and ripple in the current; her skin did not grow cold beneath the watchful eel-eyes of Adele-Blanche. For all Agnes floundered, she floundered alone.
When had this lonesomeness begun? All their lives, she and Marozia had shared the same bed. They had both fed of her mother, Manon, until they were old enough that they began to grow breasts of their own.Marozia is the snake’s hypnotizing gaze, but you are the snake’s deadly fangs.And indeed Agnes had believed this, but now she knew they were not different aspects of the same animal. They were separate creatures entirely. One knew the sky and the sunlight, and the other knew only murk and depths.
In this realization, Agnes began to feel obscure not only to her cousin but also to herself. Her spirit was escaping its vessel. She pressed her hands hard against her abdomen as if to keep it in. When she felt the words on her skin, the familiar stroke of pain was like a key turning in a lock, and it trapped her insolent soul inside.
If there was any force to rival her silence, it was Marozia’s anger. The lightning still cracked behind her eyes. So Agnes plucked up apiece of parchment and a quill, bent over the desk, and scrawled a message. She held the paper out to Marozia, who snatched it from her hand.
A marriage pact can only be dissolved through death.
Marozia read it once and then crumpled the parchment in her fist. The ink had not even dried, and now it bled its black color into the lines of her palm. It pleased Agnes for some strange reason to see it.
Before Marozia could make a reply, there was a knock upon the door. A cheery voice called out, “Princess?”
Agnes flinched. And Marozia—for all her impatience and lack of wiles—noticed. An unpleasant smile turned up her lips.
“Come in,” she said.
It was not only the fact of being interrupted that galled Agnes; rather, it was who interrupted them. Ninian opened the door and minced her way into the room, her gait something akin to a puppet with tangled strings. It was the shoes she wore, with their wooden soles. Unaccustomed to this small luxury, which kept her feet dry and relatively clean, unlike the leather slippers of peasants, she walked as a young child would, clumsy on its new feet.
There could hardly have been a more inferior interloper, and Agnes had to wonder what, precisely, Liuprand had been thinking. Marozia was accustomed to Agnes’s agile, aristocratic hands. She would never have imagined that her cousin would accept such a coarse creature to attend her. And yet…
Ninian’s gaze passed briefly over Agnes, like a bird’s wing skimming the water, before her eyes landed on Marozia’s face and brightened. She seemed not to register Marozia’s barely checked anger at all, oblivious to the hard set of her jaw and her quivering lips.
“My princess,” Ninian said with a deep curtsy. “I came to see if you perhaps needed help with your dressing.”
There was nothingwrongwith the girl, Agnes had to reluctantly admit, aside from her curious eyes and her rough peasant manners, not yet smoothed by noble graces, but the circumstances through which she had come to them confounded her. Again, Liuprand hadproved himself obscure. His behavior turned her inside herself for answers; it was as though his very soul protested being understood.
Sending the girl was all he had done to even acknowledge Marozia since their disastrous wedding night. And what a strange gift she was, if Liuprand was indeed trying to smooth tensions with his spurned wife. Agnes herself had not seen him in the two days after their meeting in the garden of moths. And Marozia, out of both petulance and shame, had refused to leave her chamber, ordering all her meals to be left outside her door and, other than Agnes, accepting Ninian as her only visitor.
Yesterday Agnes had made her way back to the moth garden and successfully planted the seeds of her grandmother’s treasons. Her intention in returning was surreptitiously twofold—as much as she could barely admit it, even to herself, she had hoped she might see Liuprand there. She had hoped to speak to him again in the language of rustling wings. Yet the garden had been empty, and more and more their meeting had felt like something out of a dream, a hallucination that left no physical evidence behind. Agnes did not think she was mad enough to conjure up such an elaborate fantasy. But around the prince, she had begun not to trust the things about herself she had always known.
“Yes,” Marozia said pertly, jolting Agnes from her thoughts. “Come here and finish my hair.”
Eagerly and without reserve, Ninian minced across the room toward her. Marozia sat back down in the chair, facing away from Agnes. Ninian bent over, still-callused fingers running gently through Marozia’s hair, with eyes so soft they were almost lambent. For a moment, Agnes watched them. Marozia preeminent and attended to; Ninian in her worshipful pose.
Bile rose in Agnes’s throat, but it was not a thin bile; it was rich, richer than any wine she had ever been allowed to drink. It was steeped in malice, yet the aftertaste was pure pleasure. She could not comprehend this exquisite poison. She fled the room, afraid of what was at work inside her soul.
