A hard stone formed in Agnes’s throat. “Yes.”
“Why? Speak it aloud to me.”
“Because.” Agnes swallowed. “The line of the House of Teeth is carried through the firstborn daughter. Any son would challenge his sister’s or his cousin’s birthright, and he would easily find allies among the other noble houses of Drepane who chafe at the notion of a woman inheriting titles.”
“Good.” Her grandmother’s grip loosened slightly, but still she did not let go. One of her cold knuckles rested in the hollow of Agnes’s throat. “The child had to die. And perhaps Celeste would have chosen another manner of death, but her indiscretion cost her any sway she might have had over the affairs of our house. She was the second daughter anyway; a spare. At least her folly served some greater purpose.”
Agnes could still taste the blood of her infant brother on her tongue.
“But it did not work,” she said.
“Who are you to say it did not? No effort in this great endeavor is wasted. You will taste the flesh of a thousand children, if I command it. If I believe it might restore our house’s power. You are the spare, but you are much cleverer and more useful to me than your ingrate of a mother.”
Her grandmother’s voice did not blow across her, like a wave of heat from that inner flame; rather it was a gust of chilling air, as if from a flung-open window. There was no passion within Adele-Blanche, even when her words were so full of lust. Her power came from her icy cruelty, the remoteness that had shielded and sustained the House of Teeth through the darkest days of the plague. Her coldpreeminence was legendary. Castle Peake and its teeming stores of gold were a great monument to Adele-Blanche’s frozen heart.
“Do you wish to be my successor?” her grandmother asked. “Not in title, of course—that belongs to Marozia—but do you wish to someday hold the true power of death in your hands?”
Agnes uncurled her fingers and looked down at her open palms. If she stared and stared until her eyes watered, she could see the blood still staining each crease. The blood of the infant that had screamed as Adele-Blanche had broken apart its fragile bones and pulled its organs through the gashes in its newly born flesh.
The word seemed to lift from her throat as if elevated by some external force. It came out in a wisp of white air.
“Yes.”
Adele-Blanche looked over at Wrestbone and beckoned him with a jerk of her chin. “Then let me mark you,” she said to Agnes, “so you will carry with you always the edicts of your duty, and so you will never forget the oath you have sworn to me.”
Had that answer, that one word, been an oath? Before Agnes could make any sense of her grandmother’s declaration, Wrestbone was upon her. Truly upon her, his heavy body forcing her down and onto the table. She squealed, more out of confusion than fear, and this bewilderment made her go as stiff as a doll. Her clouded mind could not even conceive of fighting him off.
Once she was laid out there, her back flat against the wood, Wrestbone let go. Agnes tried to sit up, her movements still sluggish and flustered—but then her grandmother was upon her, pinning her arms down.
“Be still, Agnes,” Adele-Blanche said. “Wrestbone has a steady hand, but you do not want to chance a mis-struck cut.”
Out of the folds of his robe came a knife, shining. It was the same type of blade the leeches used to pare flesh away from bone and carve lungs from cracked-open chests.
“Wait,” Agnes choked. “Please—”
But the knife was not for her flesh, not yet. It was to slice open thefront of her dress. The fabric fell away in two even sheets, baring her belly, the mound between her legs, and her still-budding breasts. The cold air swarmed to her skin and made it prick like a thousand beestings.
Agnes yelped and tried to move an arm to cover herself, but her grandmother’s grip was unrelenting. She could not break free. She tried to cross her legs over her exposed center. Yet Wrestbone parted her knees easily and came to stand between her legs, his hipbones hard against her soft inner thighs.
He was hard, too, between his own legs. But it was an unconscious hardness, born not from true lust but from the base mechanics of his anatomy. Though her nakedness aroused his body, his mind was surgically focused on his task. He pushed her small breast aside and then drove the knife down on the taut skin that cloaked her rib cage. Her flesh was so thin there that she could feel the blade scraping her bone.
Agnes screamed.
The blade traced a path along her rib cage, from the underside of one breast to the other. It was not an unbroken path; at intervals, Wrestbone lifted the knife and then brought it down again, in straight, short lines and long curved strokes, as if he were penning a note.
The fog in her mind had cleared, and now there was nothing between her and the world’s bitter truth. Everything was clear and sharp. The pain was bright and burning. It whetted her senses; she was aware of her grandmother’s brutish knuckles grinding into her wrists, the cold air that turned her nipples stiff, and the strange slickness at her center—her own arousal, base, anatomical, though it served a different purpose. Should something be thrust inside her, this slickness would ease its path, protect her from the worst of the dragging, scraping agony. She would not be violated in that manner, but neither her mind nor her body knew it yet. She would only be grateful, afterward, that it was her grandmother’s intention to always leave this part of her untouched.
Yet now the blade cut and cut and cut.
“Please,” Agnes sobbed. “Please, please, please stop—”
The knife trailed gashes down her belly, deliberate and neat. She could see very little through the film of her tears, yet she saw the sweat gleaming on Wrestbone’s bald head. His hood had fallen back with the exertion of his movements, and it bared the jagged birthmark on the side of his skull: a leaping fish, a slice of melon, a quarter of a moon. She would remember this small detail very keenly, even when the rest of the scene’s ephemera faded from her mind.
She tried thrashing, yet her grandmother’s fingernails dug into her wrists when she did, deep enough to draw forth blood. Her blood was hot and slippery and everywhere, pooling in the hollow of her belly, dripping off her and onto the table, and then farther onto the floor. The stench was pure copper and brine, and it made the air thick.
With each new slash of the blade, Agnes screamed. Her tongue was a heavy, lolling thing, swollen with bite marks, and it made her voice slur as she tried to speak. The froth of spittle, the mucus running down and into her mouth—through these vile human moistures, she managed to cry out, “Please, Grandmother, make him stop!Please!”
Adele-Blanche’s only response was to rub the inside of Agnes’s wrist with her thumb. A calming gesture, though without any words to accompany it. Her grandmother’s face hovered above her, utterly expressionless. It was like staring up at a cold and constant moon.
