Agnes could imagine it. The painting. But just as easily she could imagine its spoilage.
Yet the moth did not leave the cage. It only sat, like a cat upon its haunches, its antennae vibrating softly.
XXXIV
With Flowers in Her Hair
The gown had been worn to one wedding before, though it had not been her own. A very pale lilac, closer to gray than to purple, with silver stitching up the bodice and sleeves that fit tight to Agnes’s thin arms. Only now her throat was not bare. The pendulum of teeth dangled between her small breasts. And now there was no golden gown, no golden princess-to-be, making her look dull and unremarkable by compare. Within the House of Blood, Lady Agnes was the only bright thing. Her gleam was softer, subtler than her cousin’s, but here, where there was no sun, the moon was an object of greatest worship. With Marozia’s light gone, Agnes was aware, for once in her subservient, ignorable life, she could shine.
The revelation was more poignant to her than she expected it to be, as Waltrude clasped her final button. In the long, narrow mirror, Agnes regarded herself. The mirror’s gilded edges closed her in, but not like a cell. Instead they framed her, as though she were a painting. Perfectly still, as all things within this house were, the varnish giving her an opalescent sheen. Her paleness was not that of a corpse or a statue—how could she have ever been convinced of such a thing? Her skin glowed like a pearl. Her eyes were not the gray of rain-damp stone—they had depth, a light behind them! Her blue veins were glistening, like rivers under the winter starlight.
She was overcome. She had to look away from her reflection, for this realization filled her with a grief that was just as poignant as the epiphany itself. All the years piled on her like snow. Years that she had spent as a servant, dusting Marozia’s skirts. Years she had spent as areflecting pool, vaunting Marozia’s beauty. Years she had spent as a cistern, being filled with Marozia’s outpouring of passions.
“Are you well, my lady?” Waltrude asked.
Agnes blinked. She was shocked and horrified to find that wetness was gathering at the corners of her eyes. She looked over at Waltrude and nodded.
“Do not grieve this union, lady,” Waltrude said softly. “Lord Fredegar is a good man.”
But Agnes was grieving the past, not the future. Waltrude patted her gently on the shoulder and then, with one gnarled hand, adjusted the necklace around her throat. Agnes stole a glance back at the mirror. It was all perfectly arranged now. Her hair, in its braided crown, black as the ocean at night. No strands came loose to tickle or caress her cheeks. Her cheeks! There was color in them: the faintest rosy hue. Her flush had risen at last. The House of Blood had compelled it.
“Your bandages,” Waltrude said suddenly. “Let me change them before the ceremony. So they are clean.”
Agnes nodded again, and Waltrude vanished behind the screen to search for new cloth. Agnes turned back to the mirror.
The bride within the frame was no longer grieving. The wetness had disappeared from her eyes, yet they gleamed still, from within, as if a match had been struck in her mind. The light trickling in faintly from the window pooled in the hollows of her throat; it gathered along her cheekbones. Her shoulders were narrow, but she did not slouch. She stood with her head aloft, chin inclined.
Some rich and powerfully strange metamorphosis had occurred while she slept. A dreamless sleep it had been, matte and black, with no mists rising, no cold sweats breaking, no Celeste with the masticated babe at her breasts, no Adele-Blanche poking her hoary eel’s head through the hallucinatory reeds. The weight of her grandmother’s posthumous existence had lifted. Her ghost had been exorcised.
Agnes did not fully understand how it had occurred. Was it that, for the first time in her life, she had not slept with Marozia? Adele-Blanche had planted them together, twin seeds, their proximity as essential toher purposes as any elixirs or dreams. Every custom of the House of Teeth was arranged to her aims. Their lives were joined, though those lives were only preexistent deaths.
But Nicephorus had given her no time to rest before leaving for the House of Blood, no time, even, for a farewell. Even as she dressed and packed to go, Marozia had not come to her. She did not know if the king had prevented her, or if it was Marozia’s own heart that kept her removed. Did it still beat with anger over her reduction in status? Or did it sense, somehow, that the distance between them had grown intractable? Marozia had a sharp-eyed vision of such things; she was brash but not a fool, and she knew Agnes best of all things in the world. Even blind and deaf, she would have perceived the treasonous splitting, the treasonous growing.
Had Agnes finally been permitted, in her cousin’s absence, to bloom within that bed of dark earth? Or perhaps some great shears had been at work for a long time, sawing slowly at the rope between them, too subtle for her to notice, and it had only just now snapped. And where the grief had been, something new flowered up within her. Something so foreign she could not even name it. But it filled her, like a gulp of unwatered wine, and made the emptiness of her soul feel like a distant memory.
Waltrude returned with a new length of cloth. While she unwound the old bandages, stained rusty with blood and yellow with pus, Agnes watched her own hand. She still could not move her fingers as she wished, but they would occasionally twitch of their own volition. Looking down, she felt a prick of loss again. The absence of Liuprand’s ring. Her hand seemed wrong and even more foreign to her without it.
“Does it pain you still?” Waltrude asked, her voice low.
Agnes considered the question, and found it impossible to answer. But before she could consider whether to nod or shake her head, there was a knock upon the door.
Waltrude left her hand unbandaged and went to answer it. She opened the door a crack, suspicion in the high pinching of hershoulders, and then suddenly doubled over in a deep curtsy. The wet nurse moved swiftly aside, and Lord Fredegar, Master of Blood, entered the chamber.
He was dressed in his house’s favored shade of crimson. His doublet was velvet, with obsidian buttons that shone like small dark eyes. But these deep colors enriched him, rather than making him look weak and pale by compare; here was a man fit to wear the title Master of Blood. His hair was more gray than silver, like iron, and it lent him an overall steadiness, as though he had strengthened with age rather than withered. If Agnes threw herself against him, he would not even stumble. He was as sturdy as the motte and bailey of his own castle.
Yet his great stature was offset by the gentleness with which he held the object in his hands. Broad hands, darkened by the sun and only faintly stippled with age, carrying a delicate wreath of white flowers.
“My lady,” Fredegar said, with a low bow. “You are beautiful.”
The simplicity of his words made them feel to Agnes more sincere. The Master of Blood was not a poet or a bard; she would rather a man show himself for what he was than wear a false face. She smiled at him.
“I would not be so arrogant as to say that this will augment your beauty,” said Fredegar, looking down at the wreath. “You are fairer a bride than a man like me has any right to expect. I merely thought you might wear it as a token of my affection, a symbol of my great confidence in this union. My late wife Eupraxia often wore a garland like this in her hair.”
Hesitantly, with her good hand, Agnes took the wreath. It really was quite lovely, and intricately fashioned. Sprigs of infant’s breath joined together fragile moonflowers, their petals still soft and scarcely crinkled, suggesting they had not been plucked from the earth more than a day ago. He must have sent a servant out to the garden last night, picking the petals of these night-blooming flowers by the shimmery light of the moon. Perhaps he had even done it himself. She imagined Fredegar, with his large, solid body, wading through evergreen shrubs and stalks of milkweed in the darkness, everything shadedin silver and black, like a charcoal sketch. She held this image in her mind, and it filled her with a fondness that made her smile grow wider.
“It is a kind and generous gift, my lord,” Waltrude said. “If it please, I will put it on the lady now.”
Fredegar dipped his head. “Of course. I will leave you to finish your preparations.”
