It was a formidable document, cloaked in jargon that disguised the brutality through which its articles were executed. First, power was to be divided equally among the seven houses, as a body is anatomized upon a table. Every man, woman, or child who died upon the island would be desecrated, their parts distributed to the master of each house. But this still risked a show of odd unity among the houses during which they might put aside various discords to reclaim their grave power.
So Berengar gathered the doctors, the priests, and the prophets, and slit their throats upon the foundation of his new castle. He burned their books and their herb gardens, demolished their churches, and walled up the prophets’ caves. From the mainland he brought leeches, lay monks who could perform the crudest of medical tasks, and appointed the eminent among them, the Most Esteemed Surgeon, to oversee each corpse’s desecration. It was forbidden even to record dates of birth and death, in case some latent magic lurked in these numbers. It was forbidden to grow herbs or cast stones or even pray to God.
And then, at last, he killed every noble who had ever heard the secret words spoken and the secret ritual performed. Any memories of magic perished with them, dismembered and ground into the earth, quashed like worms after a rainstorm, leaving widowed, weeping women, maddened by their loss, and bewildered children, confused at their sudden elevation.
The house to emerge from this massacre with the greatest vestiges of power, with unequaled stores of ancestral wealth, was the house that had remained most cold-blooded. That had kept out, from the plague’s very first hour, the sickness and the pleading serfs at all costs. That had retreated immediately to its remote mountain castle, armoring itself in apathy. That had slaughtered any fever-stricken supplicants with cruel alacrity. That had, during those clandestine meetings, discovered and proposed the ultimate solution. That had cured and thus mastered death.
The House of Teeth perched resplendently on its peak, both hideous and supreme, admired and reviled in equal measure. Like all the other houses, it had lost its patriarch. Yet unlike the rest, it had no male heir crouched and waiting.
And that was how, at the tender age of fifteen and already gravid with twins, Adele-Blanche, Mistress of Teeth, became the most dreadful and illustrious woman in Drepane, second in her power only to the king himself.
Her grandmother’s face did not appear to Agnes that night in the throes of her induced dreams, but she did not expect it to. She was too freshly dead. It had taken weeks, a whole month perhaps, for the purple smoke to help conjure images of her mother, Celeste’s pale, overly youthful countenance floating like the moon at its fullest. So Agnes lay in bed, her vision clouded with strange hazes, bizarre images that rippled from one to the next without coherence or reason. A mason laying stones. A parchment-colored moth landing on the inside of an anonymous wrist. A parade of masked figures in dark, candlelit chambers. She had the vague sense that they were important, as they were the result of Adele-Blanche’s treasonous designs, but she recognized nothing within them, could pry from them no deeper meaning.
Sweat broke out across her skin as it always did, and she began to tear at her clothes, though the herbs turned her fingers numb and clumsy, her movements sluggish.
Marozia’s gentle hands chased back the apparitions, clearing the haze until it was wisps of smoke at the edges of her vision. Without speaking, she unlaced Agnes’s dress and removed the pins from her hair. She peeled off her stockings and released her from her corset. At last, when she was naked save for her gauzy shift, Marozia arranged her body into a fetal pose upon the bed, then lay down beside her.
Instinctually, Agnes drew her arms around her cousin, pulling Marozia to her chest. The notches of Marozia’s spine prodded at her breasts. Agnes slowed her breathing until they were inhaling and exhaling in tandem.
And then, as she did every night, Marozia took Agnes tenderly by the wrist and drew her hand upward toward her mouth. Agnes felt a shiver dance across her skin, first cold, and then warm, settling into a heavy need at the bottom of her belly. Marozia put Agnes’s thumb to her lips and sucked until they were lulled into twin slumbers.
IV
The Library
Sleep, however, could not keep Adele-Blanche at bay. She was a more virulent illness than her daughter; in fact, it seemed almost as though death had augmented her. She stormed Agnes’s dreams. In this misty terrain of unreality, her grandmother stood, clad as she always was in black, and stared with her unblinking, lidless eyes.
“Bring back our house’s glory,” she said. “Do not fail me, granddaughter.”
I will not fail. I swear it.Even in her dreams, Agnes did not vocalize.
“Marozia is the snake’s hypnotizing gaze, but you are the snake’s deadly fangs. Do you understand?”
Yes.
“Then waste no more time.”
And then her grandmother vanished, as if swept away by a sudden, terrible gale, snatching her black dress, the white shock of her hair in its long braid. Yet her posthumous existence woke Agnes like a knife in the dark, and she shot up in bed, panting.
Marozia still slumbered unperturbed. Outside, dawn had not begun to wriggle into the starless sky; there was not even a pale band of light at the horizon. Agnes wiped at her eyes to banish the film of sleep, then stood.
The damp air around Castle Peake often smothered the torches, despite the best efforts of the servants and the sconces, so Agnes lit a candle and dressed by its murky orange glow. Marozia shifted in her sleep, mewled like a cat, but did not wake. Agnes slipped out the door, brandishing her single candle against the vast solidity of the night.
What had aided in keeping the House of Teeth safe from the ravening of the plague was their castle’s ungainly stone walls, its windowless towers, its slimy green moat. All of this was a marvelously effective bastion against sickness and supplicants, but it made an ungenial home for its inhabitants. Shadowy corners and empty hallways were gorged with rats. The gargoyles, once grimacing boars or reposing lions, had been eroded by thousands of putrid storms, soiled rainwater eating at the stone like acid. Now they were all moldering, lumpish monsters, curdled into sameness.
The qualities of cold and damp both thrived in the dark. The stairs to the library were slippery with mold, and Agnes took them in slow, ponderous steps, one hand braced against the equally slick wall. Her breath unfurled in wisps of white. The thick, gloomy air clutched at these vapors, holding them in icy suspension, so that they hovered before her like ghosts. Agnes thrust her candle forward, and the light spooked them away.
At the top of the stairs was a door constructed entirely of unpolished obsidian. Her candlelight spasmed off the stone, trying to gather in its grooves but each time repelled by its matteness. The hinges and knob were bereft of rust, as they had spent less than half a century embedded in the door and all that time had been scrubbed regularly and lovingly. Often Agnes climbed the steps to clean the metal herself.
She turned the knob and hurled her body against the colossal mass of stone. The dull pain in her shoulder portended a bruise, but her efforts were rewarded, and the door groaned open.
Of all the many grim chambers in the castle, the darkness of this room was the most complete. A clever, truly evil darkness that seemed to threaten any who entered it, taunting them with the possibility of irrevocable blindness should their candle extinguish and they not manage to stumble their way to the door again. The silence was not tinged by the scabbering of rats, though they should have found much to chew on among the manuscripts. The cold, and the darkness, and the lingering memory of Adele-Blanche repulsed them. The library was a place where only Agnes dared tread.
But her single candle labored bravely on, and with its light she reached the first of seven torches mounted upon the wall. She lit it, and then the others.
The brightness seemed almost perverse in the immediate aftermath of such malevolent black. In some ways, it was more terrifying to know both light and darkness. Always it was uneasy shifting from day to night, never allowing one’s eyes to adjust. Agnes often wished that, if she could not walk with other humans in the sun, she could be a nocturnal animal, one that thrived and fed itself in the dark. Instead she was a withering intruder in both worlds.
The torches painted every manuscript in gold, even those whose pages Agnes had not yet gilded. They also shone down softly on the table and the two velvet-backed chairs, one of which would be empty forevermore. Adele-Blanche’s chair was more plush, more well stuffed, and Agnes briefly considered sitting in it, but her grandmother’s memory, her stubbornly posthumous existence, gusted across her in a cold draft, and she quickly scuttled to the other side of the table.
