“So you are not only a kinslayer, but a false face as well,” he murmured. “You would have struck down an unarmed woman, all for your crazed and petty jealousies.” With each word, color rose in his cheeks. “You are a greater danger to the world than your father ever could have been.”
Unruoching was weeping now. Fat, garish tears, mucus running silvery paths from his nose and into his mouth. It was pathetic to watch a grown man weep in the manner of a child, but Agnes could not wring from herself even a drop of pity. Her heart was cold.
“Please, Your Highness,” he whispered. “It has always been your faith I have sought. Not your father’s. I would urge the House of Blood to champion the reign of Liuprand, the golden prince of Drepane, Liuprand the Great, Liuprand the—”
“Enough,” Liuprand said. “Let me hear no more from you.”
Unruoching sniffled, spittle pooling at the corners of his mouth. These showy tears perhaps worked their alchemy upon the members of his house, who began to turn their gazes to the floor and wipe at their own eyes, but Agnes felt nothing. And his own son, Gamelyn, only stared unflinchingly at Liuprand, with that frigid and surpassing hate.
Liuprand left Unruoching there upon the table and walked back farther into the dungeon, approaching the entrance to one of the tunnels. He felt along the wall for a moment and then pulled something out from a shelf within it.
It was a wooden cask, smaller than any Agnes had ever seen, hardly any larger than an ordinary bottle of wine. Liuprand hefted it easily in one hand. Agnes now knew the strength of those fingers, which had last night left bruises of passion on her hips and along her thighs.
He turned the cask over, squinting at some faded script written across its side. Then he raised his other hand and beckoned Cendrillon.
“You,” he said. “Bring that ledger book and tell me whose lifeblood I hold.”
Cendrillon hurried over to him, his gait made clumsy by his fear. His nymphlike graces had suddenly evaporated. He stopped before Liuprand and paged through the ledger book, pausing after a few moments and pointing his finger at a page.
“There,” he said, in a high and tremulous voice. “Montagu, of the House of Lungs.”
“Noble blood,” Liuprand said. “A fine vintage. Lord Fredegar was so fastidious in his accounting.”
It took a moment for Agnes to understand. Just as Adele-Blanche had ordered the great frieze to be built in Castle Peake’s dungeon, and the teeth of their house’s inheritance set within it, Fredegar had turned his dungeon into a vault inside which the blood of every corpse was bottled like wine.Clever,she thought dimly, and then dismissed the word, for it pained her to praise her dead husband, whose blood would never be bottled and treasured, would only ever be an inglorious stain upon the floor.
Liuprand returned to Unruoching, holding the cask. There was no spigot for him to twist, so instead he thrust the heel of his hand against the wood, and it splintered. Agnes thought she had finally come to know the heights and depths of his strength, but clearly she had underestimated him still, because the wood fell away so easily, and blood came pouring forth.
It poured down over Unruoching’s face, dribbling into his eyes, into his mouth. He gasped and choked, spitting out what blood he could, only for more to come gushing in. He thrashed there on the table and tried to cry out, but his screams were strangled by the ceaseless flowing of red. It drenched his doublet and the table beneath him. Even his ears were flooded, like cisterns filling with rainwater.
“Please!” Ygraine’s desperate howl broke the air. “Please, my prince,please,give my husband a different death. Or please at least let my son not bear witness to it.”
She had clapped a hand over Gamelyn’s eyes, but her fingers were splayed such that he could still peer through them, and his gaze was unrelenting. Agnes felt her skin prickle at seeing it.
Liuprand’s head snapped up. He set down the cask, leaving Unruoching to writhe and desperately splutter out what blood he could, moaning weakly.
With measured steps, Liuprand approached Ygraine. He looked down at her sympathetically. Kindness touched the planes of his lovely face.
“You beg mercy for your husband,” he said, and his voice was gentle. “You are a loyal wife, even now, and I hold such a virtue in high esteem. Do not believe otherwise.”
Hope brimmed in Ygraine’s green eyes.
“And yet,” Liuprand said, “mercy precludes the possibility of true justice. What recompense will there be for the lady Agnes’s pain? For the bride who saw her hours-old husband struck down in front of her? Who wears his lifeblood upon her still?”
The heads of the audience once more turned to Agnes. Ygraine’s tearful gaze caught on her as well, and she bit her trembling bottom lip.
“I am sorry, lady,” she whispered. “I never wished for this. I loved Lord Fredegar as I do my own father. And now I feel your pain, the pain of watching your beloved’s torment.”
Ygraine paused and waited for Agnes to speak. She did not. Her throat felt like a burnt tree, curdled and black.
“Go on,” Liuprand said. “Beg your mercy from the lady Agnes.”
Slowly, Ygraine crossed the room. She left her son, whose green gaze shifted at last to follow her. When she reached Agnes, she lowered herself to her knees, pale, pretty face turned upward, the shimmer of shed tears on her cheeks. She clasped her hands before her chest with all the penitence of a prayerful monk.
“Please, lady,” she said. “You did not deserve to witness such a thing. In all of this you are innocent. But surely—perhaps—you can say the same of me. That I do not deserve such a fate, either. That at least my son and I are also blameless.”
Agnes looked down at her, yet she did not see her, not truly. Instead Ygraine’s blanched countenance became as shuddery as a pool of clear water, and in this water, Agnes saw her own reflection. Not thereflection of a woman grown, loose black hair flowing over her shoulders, wrapped in the prince’s cloak; rather she saw herself as a girl, spread out naked upon her grandmother’s table. It was not a memory, for she had not witnessed the event from afar, as though watching a scene in a masque; it was something her imagination had conjured on its own. She saw her crazed, wheeling eyes, their whites shot through with red. She saw the spittle dripping from her lips and her own cold sweat soaking the wood beneath her. She saw the blood—so much, more in her imagination than there had been in reality—transforming her flesh into no more than a mangle of white and red. She saw the slit between her legs, dripping with desperate, protective arousal. She saw her mouth, opening and closing as it worked out its vain pleas.
A thin bile of disgust pooled within her. Agnes placed a hand on Ygraine’s shoulder to feel the warmth of her skin, banish these visions of her putrid girlhood, and return to the woman her face.
