“Precisely. They passed beneath your attention. It is understandable.” Unruoching’s voice took on a tone of gentleness, but it was as false as the eye on the wing of a moth. “And the matter has been settled now. But I expect, if the prince inquires further, that you will confess to your part in it.”
Pliny met the gaze of his master’s son. He still had the lankiness of a boy, but Pliny had thought he had left behind his boyhood’s cruelties. He realized now that he had not. He had only grown cleverer at disguising them.
Pliny was not proud. But he did believe himself to be a reasonably clever man in his own right. At least, clever enough not to fall into a trap so clumsily set.
“Then I will confess it,” he replied. “But it seems that perhaps the loss of these missives was a secret blessing. For now your father will have a new wife, and you a new mother, and perhaps, if the lady is fertile, a new brother.”
There was a low, rough exhale from Unruoching. His eyes narrowed. “My father has no wish for more sons.”
“So he has said. But perhaps his love for the lady will change his mind. She is from an immensely virtuous bloodline. It stands to reason that she would want to see her own line continued.” Pliny raised his shoulders, then let them drop. “But who can know what works behind the lady’s silent gaze?”
For a long moment, Unruoching did not speak. Unlike the lady Agnes, his thoughts were not well disguised. His anger burned right through his eyes.
“I will always be the eldest boy,” he said at last. “My father’s first son.”
Pliny pressed his lips together—inclined, in that moment, to allow the silence to speak for him.
“You are old, leech,” Unruoching snarled. “And so is my father. Too addled and frail to see that the world you have always known is breaking apart beneath you. The prince, of all people, understands the burden of a son not to allow his father to rule beyond his limitations. He knows it is to the detriment of all.”
“Perhaps,” Pliny said. And then he spoke no more.
With a wordless growl, Unruoching pushed past him. Pliny watched him go, shadow loping after him. It was a distorted beast, its limbs overlong, its fingers sharp at their ends. Even when Unruoching turned the corner and vanished, his shadow remained for several heartbeats after, stretched across the wall like a stain of wine from a shattered glass.
XXXIII
Gray for Grief
There was a tall pendulum clock in Agnes’s chambers. It was carved out of black bog-wood; indeed, it looked as though it could have been dredged intact from the peatlands outside the castle, the fossilized instrument of the ancient peoples who had inhabited the island well before the plague and well before Berengar. Their bodies often surfaced from beneath the lime-green waters, their skin dyed charcoal, their bodies scrolled and tiny like a fetus wrenched too early from the womb. Their hair was always the same gorgeous russet, no matter what shade it had been in life. And indeed, while there could be very little determined about their lives, their deaths were writ all over them. They were found with ropes around their necks, swords plunged through their desiccated chests. There were laws written into the Septinsular Covenant about how to deal with these corpses from the bog. They were too frail for desecration—half the houses would have been bereft of their inheritances, including the House of Blood—so instead their bodies were trampled under the leeches’ feet, squelched into matter so small it could never be revived.
Agnes looked through the window, over the castle’s gray wall, and beyond, to the marshes. Black trees rose from the shallow water like rain-slicked horses, dark but arrested in motion, as if someone had jerked the reins upward and then time had frozen. The air had grown too stiff around them, molding them into these poses. Everything was still. There was not even the ripple of a silver-backed fish.
She was overcome, suddenly, by the notion that it was beautiful. It seemed to come from outside of herself, this knowledge, as ifsomeone had tugged her by the sleeve and whispered it into her ear, but of course it was only her mind supplying the thought. Her mind—perhaps she had grown too obscure to herself even to recognize her thoughts as her own. But she thought the stillness was beautiful, like an oil painting. Such a one that she could pass every day and be reassured that it would never change. Such a one that was lovelier than whatever scene it portrayed, because all the grueling little details—the white feces of birds on the dark branches, the brown of dying grasses, the flowers where there shouldn’t be flowers—were taken away by the stroke of a dreaming artist’s brush. None of life’s painful mushrooms grew.
If I live here,she thought,I will not live.The epiphany was as beautiful as the tapestry of a hunt that had never been.
“Agnes?”
Liuprand’s voice startled her. She turned toward him, away from the window.
He did not stand near to her. It would take him three strides—perhaps four—to reach her side. He stood near the pendulum clock, across the room from the large canopy bed. Behind a screen, Agnes could see the outline of a deep porcelain tub. This was the chamber of a lady, not just a passing guest. Her trunks had already been opened and their contents placed upon shelves and within wardrobes.
Liuprand knew that, and it cowed him. His gaze was on the floor.
“Lord Fredegar seems to be a gentle man,” he said, after a moment of her watching him expectantly. “By all accounts, he cherished the wife who came before.”
Agnes nodded.
“And he holds no ill will toward my father. He will not…” Liuprand raised a hand and ran it through his hair. “He will not endanger his relationship with the Crown by mistreating the Mistress of Teeth.”
Again Agnes nodded. Her moth rustled in its golden cage.
“So the marriage will proceed.”
The quality of stillness about the House of Blood made silence seem far more natural than speech. So while Liuprand said nothingmore, and Agnes of course did not answer, the air did not stiffen; it did not crack; it did not grow oppressively hot.
It was Agnes’s heart, instead, that cracked.
She moved toward him. One faltering step. There was still too much space between them—the abyss too vast for her to reach out and grasp whatever part of him she could touch. She stopped there, her footsteps soundless against the plush carpet.
