“Father,” Liuprand said tersely, “leave her be. She has proven her obeisance, as have we all.”
The king’s gaze cut the air like a whip as he shifted to look at his son. “She has proven nothing until I say so. Nothing will satisfy me but her voice. Sospeak,Lady Agnes. Or if you cannot, I will have to wrest the words from you myself.”
And then he drove his knife down, right through the center of her hand.
There were screams enough to butcher the silence for good, though none came from Agnes’s mouth. She did not even whimper as she looked down. The blade had driven straight through the meat and muscle of her, pinning her hand to the table. There was no blood at all. And the shock had, in fact, smothered most of the pain.
She regarded the bloodless wound with a removed sort of curiosity. She felt almost buoyant. Though her hand was held fast to the wood, her mind floated freely, watching herself from above.
The king regarded her with his mouth ajar, stupid like a gutted fish. He had meant to surprise her voice out of her, as if her silence was an animal that could be spooked. Yet the act was so brusque and quotidian that Agnes felt almost embarrassed on his behalf. He had no wiles, not even imagination. And true torture required a bit of both.
And then at last came the anger, gathering on his brow like black storm clouds. He released the knife, leaving it to stand perfectly upright, held in place by her constricting flesh. Over her head, he gestured to the leeches at the end of the table.
“Truss,” he said. “Mordaunt. Come.”
They shuffled across the dais toward him. The remove Agnes felt made her sluggish, her reflexes slow. By the time Truss and Mordaunt reached her, she could not manage to wrest her hand free. And then, at the king’s gruff instruction, they each took her by one shoulder and thrust her down onto the table.
“Father!” Liuprand’s voice rang out in horror. “Stop this—let her go!”
With her cheek pressed roughly against the wood, Agnes could not see what scene played out above. She heard scraping as Liuprand pushed back his chair and stood. The king stood, too. Marozia was letting out little wordless squeals of panic, muffled, as though she had one hand clapped over her mouth.
Metal clattered against metal. She could glimpse only the legs and feet of the Dolorous Guard as they cracked the doors and poured into the room, storming the dais. They crowded the table like weevils upon a crop. Agnes struggled to turn her face up until at the blurry edge of her vision she managed to see four of them holding Liuprand back. Their steel-clad arms gripped him about the waist and the chest, and then two others came and grasped each of his wrists.
She had not given Nicephorus enough credit, she realized hazily. He had some wiles after all. This was no impulsive turn; it had been planned and calculated, arranged like an act of a grand masque. And this masque had a theme to impart upon its audience:Do not ever mistake Sluggardry for idleness. The slumbering bear is not complacent in its den. It is merely working up its appetite again.
Adele-Blanche had made this error. And now Agnes would pay a martyr’s price for it.
The knife was removed, and blood spurted from the wound like a spray of seawater. Agnes barely had the chance to draw breath beforethe blade was driven down again, this time into the tender webbing of skin between her finger and her thumb.
Pain broke through at last. It spiraled outward from her hand, bright and sharp and burning. Tears gathered along her lashes, and her eyes burned like sun-scorched stones.
Above, she heard Truss and Mordaunt—who, if they knew nothing else, at least were experts in the anatomizing of a human body—directing the king. When he raised his knife again, one of them whispered, “There, drive it right there; you will not be slowed by her knuckles.”
It came down again, yet this time the blade twisted and wrenched, burrowing into her flesh. Bands of sinew snapped like cut ribbons. Blood pooled on the table around her hand, ruby-hued and thick. There were maggoty bits of flesh floating within the blood, like ice floes in a slowly melting river, which then branched into many tributaries and dribbled down onto the floor. It seeped toward Agnes’s face, still pressed hard against the wood, and she had to close her mouth to keep from tasting it.
The air was heavy and, as with the stench of a wildfire, it reeked of both warmth and death. Marozia was sobbing. The leeches were retching. The king was panting, in equal parts exertion and pleasure, and Agnes wondered if he was working himself over on top of her, if she might soon feel his splatter on her back. And Liuprand raged, beating himself upon the chests of the Dolorous Guard, his unprotected flesh pounding against their metal breastplates. He was seeding a field of purple bruises, she thought, to match with the one on his cheek.
“Fucking scream, won’t you?” rasped the king. “What kind of sick creature are you?”
Agnes watched through her lashes as the knife was raised and brought down again. This time it ran along the length of her fourth finger, stopping only when the point of the blade hit upon her ring. Liuprand’s ring. There was the faint, tinny sound of metal meeting metal, and the even fainter reverberation that Agnes felt shiver through her skin. Her finger had been split open, like a furrow carved in theearth, deep enough that the bone showed itself under loose flaps of flesh and burbling blood.
Agnes was left-handed. It occurred to her, quite suddenly and almost trivially:I will never hold a quill again.
It was certainly not the punishment Nicephorus had in mind, but the pain of this epiphany entered her, and it did make her lips tremble. That was all. Her tongue was still limp and dull in her mouth, a dead thing. And her throat was an empty chasm that even agony could not fill with words.
Her cheek was sticky and hot, drenched in blood. Her hand seized now of its own accord; she could not make it move through power of will. Her eyes, too, seemed to close of their own volition, the lids too heavy for her to hold open. Blackness was eating away at the corners of her vision. Yet just when she thought unconsciousness might take her—or rather remove the world from her knowledge, and with it all wretched earthly sensations—there was a furious, almost animal snarl, and the pressure of the leeches’ hands on her shoulders lifted.
With great effort, she looked up, though she could not raise her face from the wood. Liuprand had at last managed to free himself. He grasped Mordaunt and hurled him away from her so that he stumbled into the metal-plated chests of the Dolorous Guard. Then he took Truss by the collar of his robe and thrust him hard against the wall, his head knocking back on the stone with an audible but quite hollow thud.
At last Liuprand had his hand on his father’s throat.
“You are the most loathsome man to ever walk this earth,” he breathed, and through each syllable was laced that gleaming, splendid hate. “You have never been, and will never be, a true king. You are lowlier than a worm and viler than a maggot. Nothing but depravity runs through your veins.”
But Nicephorus did not protest as his son’s grip tightened around his neck. He merely spluttered out a laugh and dropped the knife. It clattered to the cruel stone floor.
“Such vicious chatter, and yet so empty,” he said hoarsely, with atwitching smile. “The damage to the lady’s hand has been done, and you could not stop it. But perhaps it was no damage at all. I do not think she feels pain; she is too inhuman. It is like visiting violence upon a corpse.”
“Do not,” growled Liuprand, “speak another word.”
