“I didn’t mean it,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean it, darling, I didn’t know.”
If she had not already known she was dreaming, Agnes would have known it then. Her mother had never called herdarling.
Liar.The word was not vocalized, but Celeste stiffened at once, a sharp inhale making her lips quiver.
“Why are you so cruel?” she asked, and tears gathered on her lashes but did not fall. “Is it not enough; have I not paid the highest price?”
The bundle in her arms began to shift. A fold of the blanket fell away and revealed the squirming child beneath. It had no eyes, and no mouth, and only two slits in the place of its nose. Yet still a noise came from it, a muffled, impossible keening.
Agnes’s heart jumped into her throat.Get that thing away from me.
Celeste’s eyes widened, and she clutched the bundle closer to her chest. “No! You cannot take him!”
Agnes wondered if her dead mother was somehow dreaming her own dream. She wondered if, in her dream, she could not distinguish between her own daughter and Adele-Blanche. Perhaps they had always been the same to her: one twisted creature, though her grandmother had been the hands and Agnes had been the mouth.
The not-child’s fleshy arms were riddled with bite marks. Bile pooled in Agnes’s belly.
It never would have lived.These were Adele-Blanche’s words, but they were Agnes’s words, too.You chased a corpse over a cliff. You left your living child behind.
“I didn’tknow,” Celeste insisted, jutting out her chin. A shiny trail of mucus ran down from her nose. “How could I have known?”
Easily.
And then one dream shimmered away into another.
All seven torches were aglow, painting the stone walls of the library in daubs of orange and gold. Light gathered along the spines of the books and set them gleaming as well, bright as goblets of yellow nectar. Adele-Blanche stood, which was strange on its own. In the library, her grandmother always sat. If a tome needed to be fetched, Agnes did it. If a torch needed to be relit, that was Agnes’s duty, as well.
Stranger still was the presence of Wrestbone. As a rule, Adele-Blanche allowed none within the library but Agnes and herself. It was Agnes who dusted the shelves, who scraped wax from the wooden table, who wiped up spills if her grandmother toppled a cup of wine. Even Marozia was forbidden to enter, not that she would have wanted to.
“You are especially silent today, Agnes,” Adele-Blanche said. “Is it your mother’s fate that troubles you still?”
Agnes bit her lip. “I keep thinking how I might have stopped it. How I might…”
“Come now. It could not have been prevented. She has always been a tricky one. In some ways I am surprised it did not happen sooner.”
Agnes dropped her gaze. She did not want to speak of this in front of Wrestbone. The leech did not appear comfortable with it, either. His beetle-black eyes kept shifting, from her grandmother’s face to Agnes’s and, oddly, to the unoccupied table behind them. His eyes lingered longest on the table, as if he were seeing something there that Agnes could not.
“Perhaps it was an accident,” Agnes tried. “Perhaps she merely fell.”
Wrestbone shook his head grimly. “I recovered her body myself. There were wounds open on both her wrists. The House of Blood is bereft, and the House of Bones will have to make do with little more than scraps and dust. The House of Flesh—”
“Enough,” Adele-Blanche cut in. “We do not need an accounting. There will be time enough for that during the desecration.”
Wrestbone nodded and fell silent.
“But she was driven mad by grief.” Agnes felt her hands trembling and tucked them into the folds of her gown; she did not want her grandmother to see this weakness in her. “Because of what we did.”
A slant of light came into Adele-Blanche’s eyes. She advanced upon Agnes and grasped her by the collar of her dress. It was not a gesture fierce enough to be painful, but the shock of it made Agnes flinch. Yet she did not try to get away.
(Often, she wondered what would have happened: if, in that moment, she had wrenched herself free of her grandmother’s grasp, pushed past her and Wrestbone, and fled into the corridor. Would she have been chased? Would she have been caught anyway? These were wonderings that could drive a person mad.)
“Listen to me, Agnes,” Adele-Blanche said. “Your mother forsook the customs of our house, and she paid the price for it. Do you understand why a lady of the House of Teeth cannot be permitted to have unsanctioned dalliances with some common serf?”
When she did not answer, her grandmother gave her a rough shake. Adele-Blanche was a small woman—at fourteen, Agnes was taller—but sometimes it seemed as though her body were no more than a frail mortal shell for some arcane and deathless power.
“Yes,” Agnes whispered back.
“And do you understand why a boy child born of a forbidden affair could not be allowed to live?”
