A very faint smile toyed at the corner of Unruoching’s mouth, but it was humorless, and it was even cruel.
“I cannot allow a child born of your union to usurp my place as heir,” he said. “AndnowI shall speak plainly indeed—the time of Lord Fredegar is over.”
His next motion was so quick, Fredegar could not even gutter out a noise of shock. Unruoching’s hand went to his belt and unsheathed a dagger. There was the sharp glint of metal in the torchlight. It gashed the air and then, fast as it had been drawn, it was buried in his father’s chest.
Fredegar did not raise an arm to defend himself. He merely looked at Unruoching, confusion and sorrow clouding his gaze, and then down at the wound, which was curiously bloodless, and perhaps even more horrific for that fact. The stillness of the air now seemed perverse.
But then the knife was drawn out, and all that was still in the air became frenzied and mad.
Blood spurted from the deep gash; it splattered on the front of Agnes’s dress, her face. Her mouth was open in shock and she even tasted it, oily on her tongue. But this was not the end. Unruoching drove the blade again, deep into Fredegar’s stomach, and here blood came more dramatically, a torrent that could not be quenched, closer to black than to red. The wound was long, and something slippery showed through—his intestines? They spilled out and piled on the floor.
Astonishingly, Fredegar stood. A corpse with a still-beating heart. He turned, wobbling, to face Agnes, something childlike in his expression. In death all men became children again, for it was something that no human could truly comprehend.
Then his knees began at last to quiver, and he reached up, grasping at Agnes for purchase, to keep himself upright. He found it on her necklace of teeth, but it broke easily in his scrabbling fingers. The chain snapped. The teeth went scattering all over the floor.
Unruoching reached around his father’s shoulder and made one last cut. Fredegar’s throat opened under his blade. The blood was like a geyser, and Agnes was drenched in it.
And then, at last, he fell.
Agnes looked down at her husband, crumpled in a heap on the floor. Blood poured out, stretching in all directions, like shadows lengthening as the sun cached away its light. It lapped at the hem of her dress, over her slippers, a dark and slimy tide. The life went out from him. His eyes were like smoked glass, matte and opaque, nothing to be seen behind them. He did not even moan or otherwise protest his exit from the earth. It had all been too quick.
Slowly Agnes lifted her gaze to meet Unruoching’s. He stood as still as his father lay there at his feet, his face blanched like naked bone. The fury was all in his eyes; they were wet, and whetted, and sharp. And he breathed heavily, shoulders rising and falling, like a man in the throes of finding his pleasure, moments before the crest of climax. The dagger was held limply in his hand.
Blood soaked her shoes, and something else died in that corridor. The beautiful, immortally frozen canvas, the work of art she had imagined her new life to be, was torn up, ripped from its frame and shredded into irretrievable pieces. Set alight, then stamped into ash. And that bauble of light, the gleaming object of loveliness that Agnes had polished within herself, that shattered, too. Hope misted out of it, like perfume from a broken bottle, and then was dissolved into the air.
With trembling fingers, Unruoching raised the blade.
And Agnes screamed.
It was at first a wordless shriek, high and thin, and it burned as if her throat were blazed through with fire. The agony was beyond what she could have imagined, the dredging of her voice, at last, from its cold tomb within her. It was so loud and so sudden that the knife fell from Unrouching’s hand and clattered to the ground, shock making him stumble back.
She screamed and screamed. It turned into a broken and bitter howl. Gray moths rose from her and took flight, their wings beating athousand furious beats. Terror lifted in a palpating scarlet mass. The corridor was glutted, the air was thick; Unruoching shrank down then, arms braced over his head, as if to shield himself from the fluttering legions of grief, of fear, and to muffle the terrible, animal sound of her howling.
Agnes chose these screams just as she had chosen her silence. Her silence broke apart, like ice in an avalanche. She screamed Liuprand’s name.
The hallway thundered with footsteps. Armor clashed as the Dolorous Guard rounded the corner, and metal hissed as they drew their swords. Agnes saw no more than flashes of steel, metal-plated limbs whirling about her, forming a circle that pressed her within.
She dropped to the floor then, exhausted by the agony of such vicious wailing. She knelt in the puddle of blood, her legs and arms boneless, as weak as jellied broth. Tears ran scorching paths down her cheeks. What rose was not a scream but a sob, wretched and guttural, mucus clogging her throat and half obstructing the sound.
Agnes bent over, and then she could not keep herself aloft at all. She collapsed upon Fredegar’s chest. Her cheek was pressed to his doublet, the velvet turned sticky with blood, dyed a darker and richer red. She clung to him like a child. Her sobs ran through her; her whole body convulsed with them, as though she were being tossed and tossed again by a vicious current.
There was so much of this hideous red liquid. It sank into the floorboards, into the stone, absorbed into the very foundation of the castle. She imagined the walls woozy with blood, bloated, swaying like a drunkard. She imagined the castle itself, falling.
And then, through the clashing of metal and the furor of her own sobs, Liuprand’s voice cleaved like a sword.
“Make a path,” he said.
Armor clattered as the Dolorous Guard stepped aside. Liuprand knelt down; she heard the sloshing of disturbed blood as he did. He slid his arms under her, gently, one beneath her shoulders and the other beneath the crook of her knees. She clutched at Fredegar’s doublet, buther fingers were too weak to keep hold. So when Liuprand rose to his feet again, he lifted Agnes with him.
Tears had turned her vision into something like rain-streaked glass. She pressed her face into Liuprand’s shoulder and sobbed.
“Take him to the dungeon,” Liuprand said. His voice was as black as midnight. “Clap him in as many chains as you can find. Tie the rope tight.”
Helmets clanged; the Dolorous Guard were nodding in collective assent. Agnes heard Unruoching babbling incoherently, more gasps than words, as the guards closed in on him. She squeezed her eyes shut as the very last of her sobs drained out of her. Her tears had soaked into Liuprand’s doublet, turning the fabric soft with water. She clung to his chest, the fingers of her good hand clenched so fiercely that her nails scraped and broke his flesh.
There was nothing but darkness behind her eyes, limpid and gauzy. She felt Liuprand turn. Away from the thick brine of the shuddering air, the blood besmirching the floor and the feet of all those who stood upon it, and Fredegar’s body, already growing stiff and cold, gripped by the cruel rictus of death. Her sobs had quieted to small whimpers, her mouth full of spittle and salt, but she was not silent. It was Liuprand who held her without speaking, his grip both firm and tender, and carried her down the corridor, until the smells and sounds of the carnage behind them were lost to distance.
The water folded over and under her limbs, soft as skeins of silk. It rose up, brimming like the tide, covering her breasts, leaving only her collarbones and her shoulders exposed. Without the time to heat it above a fire, the water was cold, cold but clear, pooling with the golden torchlight.
