Yet two things she was never without: the pearl-and-tooth necklacethat Pliny had recovered and remade for her, back in the House of Blood, and a cluster of white flowers, woven through her black hair. In this way, she honored her title as Mistress of Teeth, and she honored her late husband, too. With these accoutrements, no one could fail to appreciate her noble pedigree—nor her widowhood. She had made both essential to her person.
Having watched the lady’s metamorphosis from its very inception, over these nine months, Pliny had spent no small amount of time ruminating upon it and the feelings it provoked in him. He had observed her come into awareness of her own beauty, tentatively at first, and then without inhibition. As her voice lifted from her throat, some of her modesty had been shed, a newly winged insect shucking its outgrown husk. The façade of her statue had been broken apart, revealing the living girl within.
It sent Pliny into deep thought. He was not so cruel, so bitter as to hope that widowhood would diminish her, that she would shrink and languish in Fredegar’s absence as a flower in a rainless winter. So why should he begrudge her sudden flourishing? After much consideration, he realized that this metamorphosis was not to do with his old master. And once he realized, it seemed so clear—that, quite simply, the lady Agnes was no longer deigning to live in the coldness of her cousin’s shadow.
Stumbling upon this epiphany was like overturning a stone and finding a writhing mass of serpents beneath. Pliny wished he had not uncovered such a thing. Yet the stone could not be set down in the same place, just as his elixir could not be returned to its unblended state.
Marozia’s shadow—and what a shadow it was. Agnes was not the only one who had changed tremendously in these intervening months.
Pliny watched the lady’s fingers, trembling as they sifted through the rice, seeking the amber beads that turned over and over, slipping from her clumsy grip. She could cup her hand and let the rice pool there in her palm, but she did not have the dexterity or control to pinch a bead between her fingers. They rolled and rolled in a seeminglyendless gyre, catching the golden light of the library when they surfaced, like flotsam in the tide, and then were buried once more, sunken treasure on the ocean’s white-sand bed.
After several moments, Agnes lifted her head. “Do you think I might try holding a quill again?”
Half of Pliny was relieved, for it was sad for him to watch these earnest but futile efforts; the other half feared that she would only be disappointed again when she found her fingers could not come around the quill or manipulate it to form legible words. But he nodded, and she withdrew her hand, and he moved the vat away, relegating his impotent elixir to an inglorious spot beneath the table.
Pliny set out the parchment, the inkwell, the quill. There were always ample writing supplies in the library, for he and the lady Agnes were only two-thirds of its regular visitors, and the other patron was not impaired as Agnes was.
She sat down, her hair slipping over her bare collarbone. In the streaming of sunshine from the library’s single high, circular window, the hair was not pure black, as it appeared in less beautifying lights. It was dark brown, like peat, like petrified bog-wood dredged up from centuries-long interment. In no other aspect did Agnes particularly resemble her cousin, but this color was, Pliny concluded, the mark of the House of Teeth, as legitimizing as a signet ring.
Her quivering hand scooped up the quill. It shifted between her fingers as they spasmed desperately to grasp it, and Pliny could not bear this, could not bear to witness the shame of her struggle, so with an uncharacteristic impetuousness, he leaned over her shoulder, closed his hand around hers, and maneuvered her fingers into position.
Agnes swiveled her head to look up at him. And then he was bestowed one of her secret smiles.
“Perhaps this is the more practical endeavor,” she said. “I do not think I will have much occasion in my life to sift through rice.”
Pliny offered her a small smile and nod in return. “Tell me, lady, what you wish to write, and I will help you.”
The lady paused, rumination furrowing her brow again. She madeto open her mouth but, before a word could fall from her tongue, the door to the library opened and the last of its regular visitors appeared in the threshold.
His golden aura could be seen, almost felt, from a distance, like the warming glow of a hearth.
Pliny straightened, his hand leaving the lady’s, and then he bent at the waist in a bow. “Your Highness.”
“Your Scrupulousness.” Drepane’s prince crossed the room in a mere three strides, his gait powerful and assured. “I hope you do not begrudge the interruption.”
“Of course not, Your Highness.”
Lady Agnes rose then, a bit of color coming into her pale cheeks. This did not pass beneath Pliny’s notice. The prince—Agnes always had many a secret smile for him.
“Lady,” Liuprand said, with a dip of his head. “How is your work coming this afternoon?”
“Well enough,” Agnes replied. “Pliny is a great help to me. The pain is nearly gone.”
The smile that broke apart the prince’s face was for Agnes, but Pliny could not help feeling it was a gift to him, too, such was the beauty and the charisma of the man who would be king. To even stand in his proximity was to bask in a vivifying light. Pliny felt this in his creaky knees, in his once-broken elbow, in the marrow of every one of his old bones.
“I am gladdened to hear it.” Liuprand looked away from her, to Pliny. “Forgive me, Your Scrupulousness, but I must speak to the lady alone.”
The dismissal was not unexpected, though it slightly rankled him, only because he did not like losing the time of their sessions together. The metalworker, for all his acrimony, had been right in the sense that leeches did not have much to fill their hours when there was not flesh to be pared or blood to be drained. Death had not touched Castle Crudele in the nine months that Pliny had been here. And so his service to the lady Agnes formed the shape his days.
He refused to partake in the ignominious little amusements of the other leeches, like Truss and Mordaunt, who could be occupied for hours over knucklebones or spinning tops. Games of chance held no appeal for him. Nor did the company of Truss and Mordaunt. If he had one friend within the castle, it was the wet nurse, Waltrude.
So with one last bow to the prince and a nod to the lady, Pliny set off to find her. He left behind the pleasantly heavy air of the library for the cold, thin atmosphere of Castle Crudele’s corridors, and felt the loss acutely, just as acutely as he felt that, had he stayed, he would have borne witness to something else he did not wish to know, something that ambivalent time could not prevent or reverse.
II
The Just
Each day Agnes entered the library it felt new again, not for the room itself but for how she could freshly perceive it. Since she gave up the pursuits of her grandmother, her vision seemed to have shifted irrevocably. The gray veil over the world had lifted, and nowhere was this more evident than in the library.
