VI
The Ladies of the House of Teeth
“He brought it to me.”
Agnes found Marozia in the great hall. She was perched on a stool, plucking the strings of her harp in an aimless way, and the untuned notes were like the squeals of a small caged bird protesting its entrapment. They were painful to hear, yet the tic seemed rather unconscious to Marozia, as the scratching of an itch. She did not look down at the twanging strings as she spoke.
“Do you think it befits me? I’ve not yet seen myself in the mirror.”
The hall was dark, and Agnes had to come closer to catch the gleam of the necklace. It had been wrapped twice around Marozia’s throat, with another unfixed strand dangling pendulously over her chest. The gold chain complemented her, but the teeth, in truth, did not. Their pale sheen gave her skin a yellowish cast. Sallow, like Adele-Blanche had been in her last years. Thankfully, Marozia’s beauty was a cup that threatened to overrun; this small defect would not lower the level of liquid but merely keep it from spilling over the rim. Adele-Blanche would have accepted this transaction: Marozia’s loveliness was still lesser in value than the advantage of keeping her yoked to their grandmother’s posthumous will.
Agnes said none of this. She merely held out the folded parchment.
Marozia abandoned her aimless plucking and took it. Unfolded the paper and read it twice over with a wrinkled brow.
When she finished, she looked up at Agnes and said, “It is good. Except perhaps the last line? Does it fail to flatter the prince enough? I worry—but you are the one who knows the trick of the quill.”
Agnes took back the letter and reread the last line. It was mere instinct that had compelled her not to overly compliment Liuprand. But withholding full flattery would please her grandmother; she was certain of that. There must always be a hatch for escape, a bastion that could be hurriedly constructed, just in case. Berengar Who-Fights-Alone had taught all of Drepane this lesson well. One could never leave oneself entirely to the mercy of Berengar’s line. His betrayal echoed through the ages.
And the restrained nature of the letter left room for further acquiescence, should the prince meet their initial terms. If Liuprand carried the blood of his great-grandfather, it surely meant he did not care for anything that submitted too easily.
“I leave it to you, then,” Marozia said. “Please send the letter at once.”
The imperious words did not yet suit her—they made her voice tremble like the strings of her harp. But they would soon. She was the Mistress of Teeth, and she would come to wear that power like the most exquisite of jewels. It would knit together perfectly with her beauty, with her skill in the gentle arts of a lady, such as the playing of a harp. And Agnes would compensate for any and all things that she lacked.
And Marozia was not given to know the full truth. Adele-Blanche had entrusted it only to Agnes; their plot was now hers and hers alone. Her grandmother had assumed—and correctly so—that Marozia would be pleased, as any girl would, to marry a prince, and would think only of how it augmented her own status, the honor of her own house.
Agnes often felt as if she were observing Marozia from a great distance, even when their bare limbs were tangled in bed. She could not fully fathom a creature with such bald and simple desires. With such straightforward charms.
“I have been practicing,” said Marozia. This time, when she plucked the string, the note sang out splendidly into the reposing early-morning air of the great hall. “I shall learn a new song before we leave. Let me play it for you.”
Agnes had nowhere to sit so she stood, hands clasped at her waist, while Marozia strummed her harp. But her mind warped and stretched around the moment, the music fading into the backdrop as she thought of all else that had come together to compose it. It was like the scene of a masque, so impeccably arranged, down to the minutest detail.
Marozia had the eyes of Adele-Blanche: dark, small, snapping like the beaks of crows. Even at her palest, there was spring beneath her skin, the warmth of moss-green veins that crept up to her cheeks and gave her a liveliness, the flush of a ripened peach. Agnes had the cast of winter. Her veins were ice-blue tributaries, and when she flushed, it was the shade of a rose before its rot, too pink and sickly. Her eyes were a lacking, unshowy gray. Dense, like stone, such that their color could hardly be discerned from a distance.
Marozia’s hair curled by nature, not quite in ringlets, but in waves, thick like wool newly sheared. To hide it would be an impairment to her beauty, so she wore her hair long and loose, held back by a plaited hood with biliments of gold. Agnes’s hair was of the variety that slipped through one’s hands like water. It was stubborn in this straightness. Even if all day she wore her hair in braids tight enough to make her scalp prickle, when she unplaited them, her hair would fall in its same gauzy, unrumpled sheets. This was no asset to her. So Agnes wore her hair in a braided crown, sometimes threading it through with ribbons of silk or teardrop pearls on a string.
Only the hair’s color, dark like peat from a bog, suggested any relation. Marozia’s nose was straight and sharp. Agnes’s nose turned upward, incongruously pert. They were precisely the same height. The soft curves of Marozia’s body showed themselves even through the wrappings of silk. Agnes’s skin stretched tautly over her bones, with little flesh to fill the spaces between. She always felt herself a narrow, slippery thing, a diaphanous shadow, a pale-bellied newt.
Marozia was the fairer. This truth was not relayed to Agnes bluntly. Rather, it lurked under the surface of things, the green lagoon water beneath its scummy top. The kitchen boys jostled about when Marozia passed, whispering and smirking and growing red in the face. Thosesame faces grew cold and thin-lipped when Agnes stood before them, mollified by her discomfiting presence.
Her grandmother said,The right hand is far more useful than the left, but at least the left is lovely and can be adorned with rings.Extraordinarily precious rubies bulged from the fingers of her grandmother’s left hand, like knots on the branch of a tree. The right, meanwhile, was lithe, assiduous, unconstricted by luxury. It gripped a quill with no hindrance, and a carving knife without restraint.
Agnes was not uncomely, but mundane beauty did not interest Adele-Blanche. Anything that was not exceptional was worthless.
The song finished, and Marozia’s hand slipped from the strings. “Did you like it?” she asked.
Silence fell like a velvet drape. The basking air grew still. Even close as they were in the chamber, Agnes felt again that great distance, watching her cousin from above. Pale, and passionate, and so embodied, and believing that all had been arranged for her own pleasure. And to an untrained eye, it would appear to be precisely so.
Agnes dipped her head in acquiescence to her new mistress, and Marozia smiled, preening already, as if the stool she sat upon were a throne.
VII
A Historic Flight
The nightjar that carried Agnes’s letter down the mountain had a difficult task. The first difficult task, however, had been finding a bird that was fit and obliging. The barren peaks did not make hospitable homes for many creatures, save for goats, which were likelier to eat the letter than deliver it, and snakes, which were sadly short of any appendage that would make them suitable for letter-carrying. There were vultures, which had been Adele-Blanche’s favored of all beasts, but they were too wicked to be tamed, even when tempted with the ripest pieces of carrion. Agnes lacked her grandmother’s affinity for vicious things.
So Agnes had chosen a nightjar, luring him with beetles and writhing pillbugs. He was perhaps smaller than she would have liked, but he saw better in darkness than in light, which would be useful for the business of flying through the valleys of the black peaks where the sun barely reached. His camouflage was impeccable. He blended perfectly with the bark on rotted branches, or among the dry, underfed grass.
