He departed then, leaving Agnes and Waltrude alone. Agnes ran her fingers along the velvety petals of the moonflowers, just barely grazing the frail infant’s breath, not wanting to take the chance of crushing them. But her hand—her good hand, at least—seemed capable of such gentleness. She was no longer a child, clumsily squashing insects in her fist. She would not spoil every delicate thing in her grasp.
After Agnes nodded her approval, Waltrude took the crown of flowers from her. Agnes bent down so that it could be placed upon her head. And Waltrude did so quite solicitously, careful not to ruin the flowers, and careful not to tug too hard on Agnes’s hair. She wove the flowers into Agnes’s braid until it almost looked as though they were blooming right from her skull, as if her hair was the earth itself, darkened with rain and made rich and fertile for seeds.
When it had all been arranged, Agnes stood. Waltrude’s fingers danced around her face, tucking back any errant strands of hair, smoothing the soft black fuzz at the nape of her neck. Waltrude had now known her long enough that she could read Agnes’s face—what little she offered the world with her expressions, the subtlest shifts of her mouth and eyes and brow. And so perhaps she could read the emotion of her countenance before Agnes even found a name for it herself. It was a lucent feeling, softly bright, like morning dew on a daffodil, the dawning sun gathered on those drops of moisture and making them shine.
It was an emotion so foreign to Agnes that her mind stammered and tripped over the word. It was the opposite of hunger, the yawning pit in her stomach, the scraping of bone against bone. There could be no such harsh ugliness when this other emotion existed within her, all around her. This thing of nascent, glowing beauty, this hope.
Agnes saw the great hall through the mesh of her bridal veil. The veil was thick; Waltrude held her by the arm and led her down the aisle and to the dais. Given the hurried, almost clandestine nature of their betrothal, there had not been time to marshal up guests to fill the seats. The other great houses would hear about it through missives and messengers. The joining of the House of Teeth with the House of Blood. They would hear that Adele-Blanche’s strange, silent granddaughter had finally been taken to wife.
The seats were occupied by several members of Fredegar’s household, some names Agnes had not yet learned, but faces that would soon be familiar to her when she was the mistress of this house. In the front row there was Unruoching, his brow dark with simmering storm clouds, his eyes narrowed to knifepoints. Curiously, he did not wear the colors of his house; instead he wore a doublet of powdery black, like ash in a cold hearth. At his side was a young and rather beautiful woman, striking mostly for the bright, fox-red color of her hair. It shone in the torchlight, fire to her husband’s cinders. Agnes knew she had seen this precise shade of red before, though she could not place where.
At the woman’s other side was a boy—old enough to begin training in the yard, but not old enough to use real steel in the place of wood. His hair was a coppery color, darker than his mother’s and richer, as if it had settled somewhere between the hues of his parents. His eyes were darting all over the great room—more, Agnes suspected, out of childish boredom than true curiosity. But when they landed upon her, they lingered there, his brows arching upward. Momentarily, she had cured his boredom, or perhaps sated his curiosity. He had the noble, appealing features of his grandfather; there was nothing within him of Unruoching that Agnes could see. She looked away from the boy.
On the other side of the aisle, sat alone, was Liuprand.
It was a futile effort to try not to stare at him. Even in his doublet of grayish blue—a curiously diminished color; she had never seen himwear such a shade, and it did not suit him—he was still the brightest thing in the room, his puissant aura radiating from him like heat from sun-warmed stones. Liuprand the Golden. Thinking those words choked her. Her throat constricted and she faltered, just one small stumbling, perhaps not noticeable to anyone but Waltrude, who tightened her grip on Agnes’s arm.
Yet Liuprand noticed. He always did. He always had. When she had still been a wilting flower, a statue-girl, the ghost to Marozia’s warm body. Now she saw him tense, the muscles rippling beneath his doublet, as if he was restraining himself from rising to his feet.
A thought skipped over her like a flat rock across the water.I wish he would.So quickly had the words come to her mind that Agnes flushed with shame.
She shoved them down and yet—steps away from the dais where her true husband waited—more treasonous words rose within her.
Stand.It was almost beseeching, a silent plea.Stand and stop this.
The vision even played out, in front of her eyes. Liuprand rising in a ripple of gray-blue and dark gold, his powerful form planted between Agnes and the dais where she would be wed. The vision did not merely layer over the real world like a thin onionskin paper; it replaced the real world entirely. It was clearer and sharper than any memory; it was like a waking dream.
But this was Marozia’s husband and Drepane’s golden prince, and she was promised to another. Agnes had never been one to allow herself impossible dreams. So she blinked furiously, and the vision was cleared away, like a hand wiping condensation from glass.
Yet ahead upon the dais was another future she had never allowed herself to imagine. A husband, kind and noble. A life that was not lived in Marozia’s shadow. Days that were not spent breathing in treasonous smoke. Nights that were not stitched through with noisome, pestilent dreams. No more shadows rippling like fetid water at the edges of her vision. Adele-Blanche’s posthumous existence, banished as if by a prophet’s incantation.
As Agnes stepped onto the dais, she joined Lord Fredegar and hisleech in their still-life portrait. She felt the air go stiff around her, freezing her in place. She felt the boar bristles of the artist’s brush. She felt the cool coat of varnish, both holding her in timeless suspension and making her gleam. It was the perfect scene for a painting: bride and bridegroom mounted high above their guests and arranged neatly, facing each other, the leech in his sepia robes a bridge between them. The flowers planted in Agnes’s hair would never blow, for the wind was absent in this sacred place, and they would never rot, and never grow.
She could not help but wonder if Liuprand managed to see it: the beauty of the world when all its ceaseless motion was, for a moment, arrested. But Agnes could not bring herself to look at him. She did not trust her mind not to dream.
Instead she looked at Lord Fredegar, through her veil, and smiled. He looked back at her in surprise, then pleasure. For a bride to smile on her wedding day was a rare thing.
The leech, Pliny, began to speak.
“This noble lord, Fredegar, Master of Blood, and the lady Agnes, Mistress of Teeth, have gathered here today to be wed.” He had a high and clear voice, as if age had not shriveled his vocal cords or wizened his lungs. “We call upon the hands of the Surgeon to anoint their union. If anyone in attendance has cause to protest it, let them speak now or hereafter hold their tongue.”
No sound spoiled the air. The stillness had caught them all, like flies drowned in honey. Agnes could not have shifted her gaze from Fredegar even if she wanted to.
“Then I endlessly seal these two in lawful union. This binding is absolute and can be broken only by the cruel artifice of death.”
The ring that Fredegar produced was a thick band of gold set with a smooth black stone. Agnes had no name for such a stone, but it drew in the torchlight and glittered, iridescent like the shell of a beetle. Fredegar did not comment on the state of her hand as he drew it toward him; he merely frowned, perturbed, and slid the ring on with great gentleness. Agnes was aware of the pain as the metal scraped her tender, unhealed flesh, but it was a disembodied awareness, knownrather than felt. Such a vulgar and common thing aspaincould not exist in this moment, on this idealistic artist’s canvas, in this house where even blood stood still.
A few more words from the leech and the ritual was done. Hand in hand, Agnes and Fredegar turned toward the small crowd of guests. There was Waltrude, who watched with her canny green gaze but did not show any sentiment, pleasure or otherwise. There were the members of Fredegar’s house, whose names Agnes was keen to learn. There was Unruoching’s son, who looked eager to be done, his leg jiggling with anxiety. His mother had an arm braced around him, as if to fix him in place, her long red hair tumbling over her breast. And then there was Unruoching himself, whose lip was pulled back into a silent grimace, who nearly shattered the stillness of the room with such brusque and obvious disgruntlement. He must yet mourn his mother, Agnes thought. Or perhaps, petulantly, he mourned the loss of his father’s attentions.
And then there was Liuprand. At last Agnes turned to him. His marine-blue eyes were more cloudy than clear, as if a heavy fog had overtaken their waters. But Agnes saw the fog for what it was, as she had those same mists within herself. It was a dream, sepulchral and deep, impossible to realize but just as impossible to disillusion.
What a perilous thing to do now, to dream. Agnes broke their gaze and allowed Fredegar to lead her off the dais and away, into the feasting hall.
So few guests were in attendance that there was room for all at the head table. Fredegar sat in the center, of course, with Agnes at his left. But Liuprand was a prince, and so he was sat in a place of great honor, next to the bride. Even with such a small number of attendants, the fit around the table was tight. Liuprand was close enough that their armsnearly brushed as they sat. Nearly. There was still an abyss between them that might as well have been the breadth of the ocean.
On Fredegar’s right was Unruoching, and then Unruoching’s wife, whose name, Agnes had learned, was Ygraine. She fussed over her son—the boy Gamelyn—smoothing his hair back from his face, cutting his meat for him, even arranging the bites on his plate. Agnes saw that he took little heed of his mother’s attentions. He was as restless as he had been during the ceremony. Here was a boy whose mind was in the tiltyard, whose fingers ached to hold a sword. His grandfather was in him, Agnes thought. The lanky arms and legs of youth would grow into limbs as sturdy as an oak’s. His restlessness at the banquet table would serve him well in his battle.
Agnes would come to know him well, she realized. She would be witness to all of this blooming. The House of Blood was her house now.
