Agnes pleaded anyway. She begged, and when she could not make her spent, gushing mouth form any coherent sounds, she merely screamed. The pain obliterated all sense of time; the torture wore on for what felt like hours, until her throat was itself like an open gash, scraped and raw, until she began to wonder if her grandmother meant to kill her. Even if she did not, still Agnes thought she might die, and when Wrestbone twisted the knife in such a manner that she felt as if her insides were being stirred and tangled like dirty rope, she wished for it. She would have pleaded openly, if she still had the capacity to speak.
Later, she would be stunned to learn that they were all surface wounds. They had felt as deep as a sleep without dreams.
She remembered the precise moment that she stopped. When the breath went out of her, and blood sloshed from the hollow of her stomach and onto the floor. Her eyelashes were thick and daggered with tears, and she could see very little through them, only the vague outline of Wrestbone’s shiny skull, rising up against the library’s filmy darkness like the pale crest of a wave. She breathed in again, scream gathering in her throat, but the sound never made it past her lips.
She had chosen it, the silence. She could have kept screaming, and thrashing, and sobbing. The silence was not an inescapable fog that consumed her, nor was it even a heavy cloak she drew around herself; there was no comfort in this choice, and certainly no escape. It did not numb the pain—if anything, without the release of her screams, it made the agony sharper.
But she had realized her voice was worth nothing. No matter how loud or how fierce, it could not impress itself upon the world. And it had been worth nothing all along. Wrestbone had known she would scream and her grandmother had known she would scream and it had not stopped them, had not even made them flinch or grimace. But silence—they would not expect that. They would not know what to do with it.
And indeed, when she swallowed her screams and her sobs and did nothing but breathe softly through her nose, Wrestbone paused in his ministrations. Adele-Blanche’s grip on her loosened slightly. They both peered down at her, brows wrinkling.
“You have not maimed her seriously, have you?” Adele-Blanche asked.
“No,” said Wrestbone. “I did precisely as you asked.”
Tears ran down Agnes’s unmoving face.
“Well,” said Adele-Blanche, “are you finished now?”
“Not yet.”
There was another gash. Agnes closed her eyes briefly. The pain soaked into her like rainwater into the cracked earth.
“There. It is done.”
She was left alone there in the library, blood drying into stagnant pools the color of rust, her bare skin sticking fast to the wood. She lay there in utter silence. Each breath was agony, but every time a sob or a whimper threatened to spill from her lips, she swallowed it down. Even her tears, after several moments, dried into stale paths of salt. Her lashes fluttered. Like susurrating moth wings, it was the only sound in the room.
The pain did not abate, but her patience with it did. Agnes sat up. She ignored the white-hot fire that laced through her veins and ran her finger gently along the wounds. The cuts were not nearly so deep as she had imagined them. The blade had not touched her insides, had not scraped her bones.
But the marks were deliberate. It took several moments for her to find a pattern beneath the drying blood and the red, taut swelling of her flesh. She traced the words underneath her left breast.Never seek the pleasures of the body.
Agnes was startled by the words, and by their remarkable legibility. She followed the sequence further.
Along her rib cage:Eat no foods richer than bread and no wine without water.
Across her stomach, in an arch:Consume all knowledge of herbs and plants.
Below this there was a magnificently etched drawing, so detailed that it was like the craft of the sculptor who chipped away at the frieze in the basement. Agnes did not know it then, but the etching was of henbane and mandrake, their leaves unfurling down her abdomen, a flower circling her belly button.
She dipped her finger lower, tracing the skin just above her mound:Jealously guard your maidenhead.
There were yet more words, but the cuts were too fresh to make them out, and the agony strengthened with each passing moment. Agnes lay back down. Only the softest breath went out of her.
She would learn to live by these rules. That day was the last that she had a bite of meat, the last before she knew the taste of henbane on her tongue. And it was the last that she made a sound. It was not some unconscious mode of being, impressed upon her by terror, a sickness that the pain had infected her with, a symptom that she struggled violently against, a betrayal of her mind by her body—though many, including Adele-Blanche, thought it to be so. Her grandmother believed she had stolen the words from Agnes’s mouth.
It was not true. Her silence was as much a choice as any speech had ever been. It was not withdrawal, not cowering. As she had discovered, silence was not the absence of a thing. It was a force in and of itself. She brandished it like a sword. She impressed it upon the world. And in that manner, she could alter the shape of things. Perhaps only in the minutest fashion, but her screams had never done so much. They had been empty air.
The act of disappearing was a mightily visible one. A lady who spoke little could be forgotten. A lady who did not speak at all evoked, at the very least, a curiosity. And she could draw out that curiosity, mold it into embattled frustration—this by the power of her silence. It was no flimsy weapon. It was a punishment she inflicted upon any who dared to grow near.
She guarded the secret of her silence as jealously as her maidenhead. Because the truth would drain it of its power. And because Agnes did not want to admit, even to herself, that she was as cruel a creature as Adele-Blanche had made her. That beneath her silent exterior, under her frail, corpse-like beauty, she was filled with envy and a focused, sharp-edged rage.
And yet—even her silence did not belong to her alone. When at last she managed to peel herself from the table, when the blood had dried and the cuts had mostly closed, Agnes went down into her chamber and found Marozia there. Canny Marozia, who for all her faults, had a clear-eyed perception of everything that others desired. Marozia, who, as always, undressed her and helped her change into her nightgown. Marozia, who saw the wounds and, even though her chin quivered,never said a word. Marozia, who knew Agnes’s secret without ever needing it to be spoken aloud, and who wielded Agnes’s silence like a subtle dagger of her own.
Agnes woke from her dreams like she was surfacing from the water: gasping, panting, searching vainly for breath. She swam through the morass of sheets and clawed herself free of them. The sky was dense and black now, yet it made it easier to see the timid winking of stars. There were few of them that could be seen from her window—perhaps the most minor of constellations.
She rose, keeping her hand clutched close to her breast. The pain was more ice than fire now, though no less brutal for it. But the despair that pooled like stale water in the pit of her stomach was not because of this ache, not because of the crushing realization that she could no longer write. That was not the loss she grieved.
No, she grieved the loss of her most formidable weapon—perhaps her only weapon—and her most beloved ally. For the first time since that day in the library, her silence did not serve her. It was a false friend all along. A fragile blade, so easily shattered by the king’s ravening fury.
