The handmaiden finished her wrapping and hurriedly went to the wardrobe to retrieve her mistress’s gown. The princess did not like to be naked for long. Her new form repulsed her.
Marozia stood as still as stone, her arms at her sides, as she waited to be robed. Ninian had to maneuver her hands through the sleeves, for her mistress remained limp, giving her no help at all. Yet the more difficult part was to draw the front of the gown up over her stomach. That distended, tumescent thing that held the spawn of the prince.
Ninian did not so much like to look at it, either. Her mistress’s skinhad been stretched so tautly that her blue veins showed in a stark, bright nexus, and across them there were garish red streaks, like the claw marks of a mountain cat, and the flesh itself had grown dimpled and furrowed in places, as one’s fingers shriveled in warm water.
None of this detracted from the princess’s beauty, not in Ninian’s mismatched eyes. Her beauty was like marble; nothing could corrode it, not even this blight, now hidden beneath the crimson velvet of her gown. It was a fever that would pass, a gangrenous limb that would be amputated, a cancerous lump that would be excised. It was a foreign thing that had infected her mistress, not something that had been engendered by Marozia herself. And it was the prince who had spread this pestilence.
At his father’s orders, yes. The fault did not lie with Liuprand alone. He had been as unwilling a participant as the princess herself, both of them so rudely forced by the brute machinations of the king. They had shared a bed only once. Ninian knew this because it was she who shared the princess’s bed on all other nights. One brisk and joyless coupling, one that had left Marozia in a state of unnatural stillness and silence, like a victim of the unspeaking plague that had once gripped the inhabitants of the Outer Wall.
(In those months, Ninian had passed countless slumped bodies on the street—not dead, but not quite living, either, merely stunned and stupid as the sickness ate away at their minds. Her mother had passed in this manner, and her brother. She had spooned water into their mouths until the moment that their empty, unfixed eyes closed for good.)
This unhappy coupling had sent the prince into some small self-exile. Weeks went by before he revealed himself again in the feast hall, and even then he ate little, drank more, and spoke in short, bitten-out words. He did not deign to even look at his wife, though his cheeks flushed in shame as her stomach swelled and swelled, the child desired by no one growing within it.
Ninian did not pity this unborn creature. She could not. It was a soulless thing, to her. It felt more like a machine, a device made solelyfor her mistress’s torture. More than once she had ached for a scalpel. More than once she had woken at night, gently pressed a palm to her mistress’s belly, and yearned to carve out this ugly instrument from within her.
“Ninian,” Marozia said. “My rings.”
“Yes,” Ninian said, blinking from her reverie, “of course, my princess.”
She went to the jewelry box and retrieved them. She knew which three her mistress wished to wear, and she cringed as she placed them in her palm. They were beautiful but hateful. Most loathsome of all was the wedding band, with its bulging, blood-red ruby, that seemed another device of torture, especially now. Ninian paused before Marozia.
“Are you certain you wish to wear them, my princess?” she asked. “I can have the metalworker stretch the bands—”
“No,” Marozia snarled. “Put them on and do not question me again.”
Ninian ducked her head, cheeks pinking with shame. At least the princess did hold out her hand and splay her fingers, so it was not as difficult a task as it might have been otherwise. Still—she struggled and her brow dewed with sweat as she tried to force the rings down her mistress’s swollen fingers. All the while sympathetic pain scraped at her. But Marozia did not even flinch.
“The child will be born soon,” the princess said, more softly now, “and the swelling will go down.”
Ninian nodded. The fingers were not the only thing that gave her trouble. There were her feet, bloated to a vulgar size, which Marozia still insisted on cramming into her same slippers. At night, when Ninian removed them, her mistress’s poor toes were mottled blue. She insisted, too, on being buttoned into stiff gowns of velvet, unforgiving of her new girth, bandaging her breasts so they would fit and so the leaking of milk would not show through.
At least in this she acquiesced—Ninian was allowed to bundle up her long, thick hair and enclose it in a golden hairnet. But the more sheconsidered it, the more she thought it was perhaps not an acquiescence but another dagger aimed at her husband, making more obvious the bare column of her throat and that brusquely poached title.
Yet perhaps not a dagger? That was too common and too flimsy a weapon. And it could pierce only one heart at once. The princess had blades for many in Castle Crudele. Her eyes were always shining like their sharp ends.
Then came the heavy earrings, solid gold and large as figs, which pulled down her mistress’s poor earlobes. Then the rouge, which gave some color to the flesh that had grown wasting and pale, as if the princess’s lifeblood were being siphoned by the foul parasite within her. All this finery lay over Marozia with a stiffness, transforming the princess into something like a painted doll. Nothing like the straw dolls Ninian had played with as a child, rough and crude. The princess—whom Ninian handled just as gently as she would a child’s toy—was the loveliest thing within the castle. No object, no bauble could be more beautiful or more treasured.
Ninian allowed her finger to rest too long on the princess’s cheekbone. Marozia twitched, but it seemed an unconscious seizing, like a clamshell or a poisonous plant snapping itself shut.
“Enough now,” her mistress said. “I am awaited in the great hall.”
Marozia made to leave the room, and Ninian rushed to follow her, plunging ahead so she could open the door for her mistress. The princess went past her down the hall, Ninian loping after, and they walked for several moments in silence—other than the faint, granular sound of the bandages rubbing together and against Marozia’s flesh, which only Ninian’s ears were trained to hear—before Marozia turned and said, “I have no need of you tonight.”
Ninian’s face burned, and her stomach twisted with horror. The words were not unexpected, yet to be separated from her mistress for any length of time was torturous. Ordinarily Ninian would lie in their shared bed, face pressed to the princess’s pillow, smelling the salty dew of her body, the oils of her hair, each moment they were apart dragging past painfully, like the scrape of a paring knife against bone.
But Marozia did not like to always be attended, not even now; especially not now. She did not wish to be perceived as weak, leaning upon her handmaidens as her pregnancy dragged after her like a sodden dress…yet more, Ninian suspected, she did not wish to accentuate in any way her husband’s benevolence, his generosity. After all, Ninian had been a gift from the prince. Ninian knew her mistress would sooner drink poison than let him think her grateful.
“Shall I ready a bath for when you return?” Ninian asked hopefully. “Perhaps a balm for your feet? I can seek the counsel of the leeches—”
“I do not care what you do.” Marozia’s lips were thin, and because Ninian had not painted them, they were as white as marble. “I wish only for my labors to come and to be finished quickly.”
Chastened into silence, Ninian merely nodded.
Marozia turned and did not look back at Ninian again; her gait did not falter, not even in the too-small slippers, in the starched confinement of the dress. She stopped only a single moment, placing one hand flat upon the top of her swollen belly, and Ninian knew she was feeling the gyrations of that miserable creature, its writhing, like a worm inside the unwilling flesh of a lovely red apple.
Ninian watched until her mistress turned the corner and vanished from her sight. Her heart was filled with longing and with hate.
Like a beaten dog, Ninian walked glumly through the halls of Castle Crudele, the image of her mistress and her mistress’s traitorously swollen belly grinding on and on in her mind. Always she had been prone to florid imaginings. Maleagant, the wise woman of the Outer Wall, said that her mismatched eyes had gifted her with second sight: blue for what was, and gray for what was to come. She had so far manifested no talent for prophecy—much to the dismay of Maleagant, who wished for a successor—but she could so easily envision things that were impossible, things that would never be.
