The urge to move closer was so unconscious that it frightened her. It was no foreign emotion, like the sense of beauty, impressed on her by some outside force. It came up from the deepest reaches of her soul, or down from her soul’s greatest heights. It surfaced from these depths like a whale, its great white head breaching the black water, or swooped down like a hawk, its wings slicing the blue sky.
Liuprand lifted his gaze to hers. She wondered if there was such a bird inside him, or such a fish. Now she would not ever know.
“I suppose,” he said, “your husband will want to put his own ring on your finger.”
Agnes looked down at her hand. From between the swaddling of bandages, the dark pearl gleamed. Just as soon as she had convinced herself to stop wondering about it, Liuprand had brought it to her mind again. She glanced back up at him, a question in her eyes.
He returned her stare with a bleak sort of humor. And perhaps he had learned a bit of her language, too, the language of mutes, because she was able to read this line in his eyes:If you do not ask, you will never know.
And so perhaps that had been the reason all along. Some ploy to draw the words from her throat. She had considered it, once, that she was nothing more than a curiosity to this prince, a strange insect trapped beneath glass, a beach stone lathed by the tide into an odd shape. But there was such devastation on his face. No man could grieve so deeply the loss of a stone.
The ring could not be removed without causing her a great deal of pain. King Nicephorus had sliced the skin of that finger right down tothe bone. Waltrude had bandaged it as well as she could, but the flesh had not fully knitted back together again. It was pulpy and white, like damp paper, and when Agnes pulled back that first bandage, the pain went through her like a lancet. She had to bite down hard on her lip to stifle a gasp.
But Liuprand had known her now long enough that he would not miss this subtle indication. He frowned, the corner of his mouth trembling, as if he wanted to speak but could not work up the nerve. Instead he merely watched. Watched as she was subjected to this torment, so small in scale compared with what had wrought the wounds in the first place—though she herself was the perpetrator this time. Agnes wondered if he was thinking of how she had looked pressed to the high table, his father’s knife in her hand. Liuprand looked as though he, too, was being subjected to some small-scale torment, his features held in a stricture of pain.
At long last, the ring was off. Her blood was smeared across the silver band. She had studied the engravings, written in the ancient tongue of Seraph, but she could not read them. Agnes had wanted to learn the language, once. She had hoped she might teach it to herself in the library of Castle Crudele. But then Adele-Blanche’s ghost had wriggled its way into her mind like a white worm, reminding her that she had one goal in the castle and one goal only. She had no reason or no time for such frivolity, for learning a language that was long dead and had never been spoken on Drepane anyway. Such a shallow yearning it had been on Agnes’s part. The desire of a child to know something merely because it was unknown.
What was her goal now? Adele-Blanche had poured so much into Agnes, but it was a spill of water into the dry-cracked earth. It was all gone and she was still as barren and dead as she had ever been. Her grandmother was expired, extinct, her blood in Fredegar’s stores, her bones girding Amycus’s torches, her teeth ringing Agnes’s throat. And Agnes had not known, until this moment, how terribly alone she would feel when there was no ghost left to haunt her.
She reached out, stretching her arm to its limit, and dropped the ring into Liuprand’s hand.
He let it sit there for a moment, a gleam of silver upon his flesh of gold. Then he closed his fingers around it. Agnes could sense their warmth even from a distance; his skin radiated pure illustrious power, like the heat from a fire. She remembered how his touch on her chin had chased the winter from her veins. The ice had frozen back over now. Nothing else had the power to melt it. She felt she would never be warm again.
“In Seraph,” he said softly, “there are laws governing marriage and laws governing love. They are not one and the same. Perhaps they cannot even be reconciled with each other. But I do not know the laws. I have never touched Seraph’s shores or seen the precise shade of its great lagoon. I do not think I ever will.”
Agnes regarded him questioningly.
“Seraph is finished with us,” he said. “With this island. It has been nothing but more bulk upon a sinking vessel.”
She had suspected it, as all the great houses of Drepane had. But Agnes had not known it was so official, this severing. His marriage to Marozia was more essential than she had thought—essential to all who lived upon this sickle-shaped island, no matter if they were a peasant or a king. It was the union that would save Drepane.
It could not be violated, could not be threatened. Even the smallest fissure in its foundation would mean ruin. Agnes stepped back and let her arm drop to her side.
Liuprand squeezed tightly the hand that held her ring. And then, with his other hand, he reached into his pocket and retrieved a small scrap of parchment. It was creased very deeply, as though it had been folded and then unfolded a great number of times. He unfolded it once more so Agnes could read the words, written in her own halting, sloppy penmanship.
Thank you.
“If I accomplish nothing else in my tenure as prince, or in my reignas king, at least I will have this,” Liuprand said. “I will have proof that the lady Agnes deigned to deliver two words to me.”
A smile lifted the corners of her mouth; she could not help it. She could feel his warmth even from a distance now, even through the space between them, the still air that seemed to fix them in place, like carvings in a marble frieze. Agnes turned on her heel and vanished for a moment behind the screen, where her belongings had been placed. She searched among the shelves until she found parchment and ink. Then, with immense difficulty, and several false starts, she took her quill and wrote something down.
Returning to Liuprand, she held out the paper.
He took it, squinting down at the words. Her penmanship with her right hand was as clumsy as a child’s. But when a smile overtook his face, Agnes knew he had been able to read it.
Now, four.
Liuprand exhaled softly. “Another great triumph to my name.”
She almost laughed then, and was surprised that the urge even rose in her throat; she could not remember the last time any sound had come so close to spilling from her lips. Agnes swallowed it down, and it dissolved in her belly. But the smile remained. There was no power within her to revert it.
Liuprand folded up both papers and slipped them into his pocket. The ring he still held in his closed fist. She wondered what he would do with it. Would he clean her blood from the band? Would he toss it into a fire to be melted? Would he let it gather dust in some forgotten corner?
Agnes would never know that, either, because Liuprand left her without speaking another word. When he was gone, she went behind the screen again and sat before the table where the moth’s cage had been placed. It was rustling ceaselessly inside, but she could not tell if it was from agitation, from a desire to be free, or merely from some base animal instinct. As intelligent as the creature was, she could read no emotion in its solidly black eyes. She only knew the language that Berengar had impressed upon it. Gray were its wings; gray for grief.
Agnes lifted the cage into her arms and carried it over to the window. She set it upon the ledge and then unlatched the golden door.
The moth shifted, but it did not move toward the now-open door. It simply stared ahead at the sudden gap in the bars. Some feeling she could not discern was working behind those animal eyes. Agnes did not know what she hoped for as she watched it. That it would flutter out into the hazy white air, its sudden, palpating motion despoiling the stillness, blemishing the oil painting? Or, as soon as it flitted free of its golden cage, would it freeze mid-beat of its wings, captured in an instant by the stroke of that dreaming painter? A smudge of gray that the brush’s bristled end blotted once against the canvas, then dried and sealed with varnish.
