Liuprand approached her, a gentle hand on the small of her back. “Come, Lady Agnes,” he said softly. “Soon there will be nothing to see here.”
Agnes allowed herself to be led toward the steps, but she did not look away. She watched on as the Dolorous Guard untied Unruoching, thrusting him from the table and onto the floor, where he crumpled into a heap on his hands and knees. They shifted the table back toward Cendrillon, though it resembled less a table and more a butcher’s block, so thoroughly drenched in still-wet blood. The nymph of a man shuddered.
Without Agnes particularly noticing, Ygraine had fainted. She was borne away by two crimson-clad men, her body held by the ankles andwrists, swaying between them like a pendulum. Thus Gamelyn was alone now, watching without blinking as a wall flowered up around his father, stone upon cruel gray stone.
Agnes looked up at Liuprand. “How long will it take? For him to perish here?”
“Mere days.” Liuprand glanced at Unruoching’s quickly vanishing form. “A man cannot go much longer without water.” Then he cast his gaze around the room, over Cendrillon, over the small audience that remained. “I shall leave some men from the Dolorous Guard here, to ensure that the wall is not broken and Lord Unruoching is not rescued. And when he has died of thirst or hunger, I shall expect to receive a messenger at the castle gate, bearing his teeth.”
The masons were efficient at their work. They were even swifter than the ghouls of Agnes’s dream. And though Unruoching faded from her sight as the walls grew like mushrooms after a rainstorm, she found that he continued on in her imagination. She imagined that he would throw himself against the bricks, again and again, howling pitifully for release. She imagined Ygraine, pressed against the wall’s other side, whispering to him through the stone. Reassuring him, perhaps, as his tongue thickened in his mouth and death carved at his body like a lathe.Mere days.So short a span of time, yet so long.
As Liuprand guided her up the dungeon stairs, Pliny followed closely behind. She cast one last look over her shoulder. First her eyes landed on Cendrillon, who still grasped his notebook tightly, and she felt the familiar stirring of envy within her. She knew he did not think of it as a blessing, that his hand belonged to him, that he could move it as he wished, that it held such force within its working muscles and tendons.
At last, she looked upon Gamelyn, and found with great unease that he was staring back at her. Their eyes met for the briefest moment, green into gray. Agnes could sense herself becoming a specter within his mind, such a one that would live always in his thoughts.
She did not wish to swallow this truth. And so she left the boy alone with his ripening ghosts.
XXXVII
Sequelae
The mist and the twisted trees slipped by them, as if the world were moving rather than the carriage. The stillness had long since gone from the House of Blood and its environs. Now the white vapors swirled, the black branches swayed tremulously in the wind, and a number of birds darted from perch to perch, small flecks of color against the forest’s monochrome canvas. Agnes’s eyes followed them. A red bird. A brown-bodied sparrow. A cone-headed jay. A nightjar.
“What works within your mind?”
Liuprand’s voice was nervous. Yet it was a shallow and trembly sort of nervousness, as a boy might speak for the first time to a girl he had long been besotted with. It gave the scene a luster of absurdity, for surely he should be feeling a grown man’s fear.
Agnes turned back toward him and smiled faintly. “Nothing especially interesting.”
It was impossible, in these circumstances, for either of them to speak freely. They were not alone in the carriage. While Agnes shared a bench with Waltrude, Liuprand shared the bench on the opposite side with Pliny.
When she had asked the leech to come with them back to Castle Crudele, it had been a genuine entreaty. She worried he would no longer be safe within the House of Blood, having shown such obvious and enduring loyalty to Fredegar even after his death. Unruoching would soon follow his father’s fate, but Agnes was not innocent enough tobelieve that he had been the only one to harbor treasonous sentiments toward the old Master of Blood. The rest of Fredegar’s house might seek vengeance against his remaining loyalists. And Pliny was shrewd enough himself to know this.
And Agnes did not want to return to Castle Crudele as alone as she had been when she departed. Bereft of any friends, save Waltrude; she had even lost Marozia’s confidence and was not sure how she could earn it back. She was not sure if she even wanted it. The leeches at the castle were all sworn to the king and to the Most Esteemed Surgeon. Truss and Mordaunt had been the only accessories to her torment, but any leech would have leapt at the chance had the king asked. So to have her own loyal leech only seemed wise.
Yet now she felt pricked with a small needling of regret, for she would have to choose her words carefully in Pliny’s presence. He did not know—hecouldnot know, or else he would forsake her. Such a steadfastly faithful man might believe she had dishonored her husband by taking another man to bed mere hours after his murder.
But Waltrude.
The wet nurse knew. Even if she had not seen Liuprand come to her chamber that night, still she would have guessed; she was as canny as a weasel and as perceptive as a carrion bird. Yet more than that, she loved Liuprand. Their souls were twined in some strange sense that Agnes could not fully comprehend, and that meant she could feel the love he felt for another, like a tugging on some invisible thread within her. Perhaps the same thread was now wrapped around Agnes’s wrist. The weaving had become so intricate, so complex, that Agnes’s mind struggled to work over all its tangles and knots.
“Your thoughts are always of interest to me,” Liuprand replied.
This reply made her heart leap—first with fondness, then with fear. Every friendly word that passed between them might now be prodded and racked, wrung out for evidence of perfidy. Could she bear it? She had spent so many years in silence that it was accustomed to her, and she to it, but it was not the easy slide of a knife into its sheath; it was the thrust of a blade into giving flesh.
“I was wondering if you remembered the nightjar,” Agnes said. “The message it bore to you those many months ago.”
Liuprand smiled. “A clever little bird. Yes, I remember.”
Months before they had finished all their business and departed Castle Peake. Months before he had slipped a ring on Marozia’s finger.
She wanted to touch his hand. A simple touch, one that might have been within the bounds of propriety once, but not anymore. Even though she now knew what he felt like inside her, the small space between them was as unbreachable as ever. The ache of longing in Agnes’s chest was so great that she almost imagined it could beseen.A dark gash, exposing her blood-fed, anguished heart.
In the eye of her mind, she saw that same wound within Liuprand. Black, depthless, dripping lifeblood. He reached out, hand open, but before he could close that space, he retracted his arm. He clenched his fingers, folding them into his palm.
Agnes looked down at her own hands. One was fisted in her lap; the other was limp at her side, for still she could not make its fingers move of her own accord. The days-old bandages were yellow now, stained with Fredegar’s blood as well as her own.
When she glanced up, she saw that Pliny had been watching her steadily, perhaps for quite a long time.
