“Would you have begged your husband for mercy, had you been witness to his crime?” she asked quietly.
Ygraine’s brows drew together. “Of course. I would have fallen to my knees in the corridor. I swear it.”
“It would not have done any good,” Agnes said, “just as it will do no good now.”
At first there was only bewilderment in Ygraine’s eyes; it darted like minnows through those pools of moss green. It was not until Liuprand lifted up the cask again that she cried out, cried as if someone had thrust a knife into her own belly, and then fell forward onto the floor, quaking with sobs.
Agnes took a step back so that Ygraine’s lamentable form did not brush against her skirts.
Blood poured from the cask in hot, heavy gouts onto Unruoching’s already profaned face. He gulped and gasped still, but these sounds were muted now, and where before he had writhed and thrashed in protest, now he merely trembled. His own life was leaving him in slow and agonizing increments. The knowledge of this grew Agnes’s heart with pleasure, though it was not the sort of pleasure to make her smile.
“Lady?”
The suddenness of this voice startled Agnes. She turned to see the leech Pliny standing before her.
Her mind understood that he was quite an old man, for he had been present at Lord Fredegar’s birth, but the sight of him did not accentuate this understanding; in fact, it undermined it. The skin about his face was loose and silver-stubbled, giving him the appearance of a hoary tomcat, but otherwise he stood impeccably straight, his posture not remotely diminished by age. He was a good deal taller than Agnes, though not of a height to Liuprand. He had a large forehead, intimating that he was bald beneath his leech’s hood, but the flesh of it was taut and shiny, and bore none of those brown splotches of senility.
Agnes acknowledged him with a nod, thinking he merely meant to make a show of his deference, but he did not nod back. Instead he reached into the folds of his robe and retrieved something, which he then held out to her in his open palm.
“If it please you, lady,” he said, “I have had it repaired.”
It was the necklace of teeth, her house’s ancestral totem, but it was not the same bauble that had been torn off her and scattered across the floor. He had retrieved all the teeth—Agnes counted them swiftly—but he had reset them, in a silver chain instead of gold. Between each tooth he had even added a small pearl, which transformed the piece of jewelry from something primeval and gruesome into something new and delicately beautiful.
Agnes reached out and took it.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
She imagined the leech kneeling on the floor, kneeling in Fredegar’s blood, carefully plucking up each small tooth as though he were sifting through sand. He had treated the teeth so lovingly, as if they were his master’s own.
Pliny nodded. And then a new cacophony of sounds called their attentions back to the table.
Unruoching’s coughing was renewed in strength, and now there was bile seeping from the corners of his mouth. There was yet morewrithing, though it seemed a less conscious action, as if he were a puppet with its strings cruelly tugged by a child. A child of Death, who watched over the whole proceeding, a gathering of shadows along the wall. His cruel white hands were reaching, and he would strike out with them soon.
But it was here that Liuprand paused and set down the cask. Unruoching groaned feebly.
“Your words have moved me, Lady Ygraine,” he said—suddenly, as if he had only decided it at that very moment, and bewildered himself with the knowledge. “I shall give your husband a different death.”
Ygraine looked up through a tangle of red hair. Yet there was no more hope in her eyes, only hollow despair. “You will?”
“Yes,” said Liuprand. “I shall give him a death that your son will not have to witness. In fact, no one will bear witness to his death at all.”
The crowd mumbled with confusion. Agnes glanced over at Pliny; a frown pulled down his mouth. He had relished watching Unruoching’s torture, as had she. The red thread of love stretched from his finger to Fredegar’s corpse, which still awaited desecration. He was loyal even in death, and her chest tightened with fondness for him.
“Where are your masons?” Liuprand asked, directing his question toward the crimson-clad staff of the House of Blood. “Summon them.”
Still, confusion reigned, as one man pulled himself from the throng and departed up the dungeon stairs. He brushed past Cendrillon, who still clutched his book against his chest, as though he feared it might be snatched from him. The ethereal qualities had vanished from his face; it was a mask of quotidian, human horror.
The man was gone for a long stretch of time, during which no one dared speak. Ygraine pushed herself up onto her knees, breathing hard enough to make her shoulders rise and fall heavily.
At last the man returned with three masons, their hands hard and yellow with calluses, the years of labor showing on their furrowed brows and slouched backs. Their long arms hung limply at their sides, giving them a rather simian look. They arranged themselves in a half circle before Liuprand and gave low bows in deference to their prince.
Yet rather than addressing them, Liuprand turned to the gathered crowd.
“The casks of Lord Fredegar are well kept and well treasured,” he said. “I would not waste any more of them. And I am sure, for whatever time Lord Unruoching is given to live, he will not be inclined to indulge in any more of these fine vintages.”
His words did not make sense to Agnes, nor to those around her, who looked among themselves in bemusement. She began to feel removed from the room, from the chill air of the dungeon, from the coppery odor of blood, all her senses becoming obscure. And as she stood there, a ghost slipping from its frail human shell, another world shuddered to life before her, layered over the first. It was the world of strange vapors, of spectral mists, miasmas of silvery gray. The phantasmic vision played out before her eyes.
A mason, laying bricks. Her dream had been drivel to her then, but now she knew it was prophecy. For the flesh-and-blood masons began to heft down wagons of stone, the carts clattering heavily against the steps as they descended. And Liuprand began to beckon the crowd away from the table, toward the door of the dungeon, where they all became audience to this prophecy made manifest. It was only Agnes who did not move, struck dumb by the way her vision turned corporeal before her eyes. And if she had once dreamed the future, what of her other slumbering fantasies? Were they prophecy, too?
