“Thank you,” she said. “I will make sure the princess calls upon you when her state becomes…changeable.”
Mordaunt gave a stiff nod. His expression was, as always, one of stoicism, yet some indiscernible emotion made the corner of his mouth twitch. He glanced from Ninian’s face to the pocket where she had placed the vial. He appeared to be mulling something over.
At last, he said, “The tonic is a powerful one, and it does not affect the mother alone. There may be some risk to the child within her. It may be born cold as a stone. It may be born grotesque, mutated by the elixir spread through its mother’s veins. I have seen all and more in my time. Make sure the princess understands this price and is willing to pay it.”
There was a flutter in Ninian’s stomach. Visions were flowering up behind her eyes. She blinked to banish them and then said, “She is.”
“And is the prince willing to pay it? Is the king?”
Ninian set her jaw. And she did not reply.
The elixir had been made; it could not be undone, and she would not be buffeted from her course. She departed the leeches’ bay, leaving Truss and Mordaunt to their squabbling and their games of chance, and passed through the icy corridors of Castle Crudele. When she was alone, by the statue of the handless youth, she reached into her pocket and removed the vial. The glass was hotter than before, and it burned a red mark into her palm.
Her mistress would not take this tonic willingly, Ninian knew. It would be treason, to endanger the life of the heir that turned in her belly like a worm—let the price of that treason fall on Ninian’s head instead.Shewould pay it. She would lie on the rack and welcome the machine to carveBetrayerandButcherandVillainessonto her skin. She would allow herself to be carved down to the bone.
There, in this secret corridor, Ninian unstoppered the vial. Shepoured a bit of the liquid onto the pad of her finger—oddly, the potion itself did not scald. Then she smeared the tonic onto her lips. Let her mistress think she had merely eaten something foul…let her believe that there was no craft, no perfidy, when Ninian gave the princess her nightly kiss on the mouth.
IV
The Mummers
Agnes was not forced to confront Liuprand again until supper. She had thought to take the meal in her chambers, for the mere notion of seeing him, especially under the scrutiny of others, threatened to desolate her—how could she maintain this farce of remote civility?
Once, perhaps, they could have been companions, with nothing but the amity of common interests between them. Who but the king could tell the prince which company to keep? But they had poured themselves these gushing goblets of passion and drained them both in a single gulp. And now neither could be satisfied with the bland waters ofcompanionship.It left them both so weak and wanting these past nine months. Either Agnes was always thirsty, or she thought she would never be thirsty again.
But Waltrude came to her door and said, “The king requests your presence tonight, my lady.”
Agnes tried to appear unmoved. Waltrude knew her too well by now, however. The wet nurse’s brow arched.
“Do not tell me he has found another act,” Agnes said wearily.
Waltrude pressed her gummy lips together.
Agnes sighed. So supper would not be a simple affair, and she could not go in her current state. Waltrude picked through the gowns in her wardrobe, holding each one up for Agnes to affirm or to reject. There were gowns of lavender and lilac and gray, but Agnes passed over those, not for their color but because she did not fit them anymore. In these nine months she had eaten meat and drunk wine, and flesh had begun to fill the empty spaces between her bones. She would neverhave Marozia’s lush figure, but her breasts now strained the bodices of those old gowns and her hips split the seams of their skirts. It was not that she had had a child’s body before; it had been a corpse’s. She was now not only a woman but a living creature after all. Her cheeks could even be persuaded to fill with color.
So new gowns had been ordered from the seamstress in shades of deep violet, rich plum. These gowns had necklines that Agnes would have once considered daring—which would have scandalized her grandmother and which not even Marozia would have deigned to wear—and she chose them not despite this, but because of it. Adele-Blanche was dead and gone, and so was the silent Lady Agnes who had always seemed halfway to joining her. The Agnes who spoke, and smiled, and sometimes even laughed—she bared her collarbones and her shoulders and the necklace of teeth, refitted to suit her coloring and her coloring alone.Mistress of Teethwas a title she had made new, with the help of Pliny’s craft.
But Agnes’s form was not without its faults. As Waltrude laced her into an orchid-colored dress, Agnes looked down at her hand. Compelled the fingers to curl, the disloyal fingers. She could get them halfway up, but she could not cajole them to touch her palm. And again and again the quill slid out from her flaccid grip.
“It will come right,” Waltrude said. “Pliny knows his art.”
“Perhaps.” Agnes then clenched and unclenched the fingers of her right hand. “But I think that if I wish to write again, I should start learning with the other. I cannot wait forever.”
Waltrude sniffed. “You are so young, to think that nine months is forever.”
“Nine months is all it takes for a mere thought to become flesh and blood.”
At that, Waltrude fell silent. She used the excuse of crossing the room to fetch Agnes’s slippers. When she returned and knelt to slide them onto Agnes’s feet, she said, lowly, “I know it causes you grief.”
Agnes felt ice flood her veins. She did not allow her mind to turn, to truly consider Waltrude’s words, to let the panic spread its cold rootsthrough her. With a short breath, she replied, “It causes me grief to know that the union between the prince and the princess is not a peaceable one.”
Disdainfully, Waltrude said, “I was never fool enough to believe it might be peaceable. This castle has not seen a peaceable union in all its years standing.”
Agnes’s skin prickled. She did not like to feel as though her world were the execution of some prophecy. Yet so often it did. Despite the articles of the Covenant, despite all the swords that had broken to banish bitter death from Drepane’s shores, the bones of their ancestors were the castle’s foundation and the past was always pulsing under her feet.
Perhaps it was not so horrible a thing to consider, the legacy of the royal line in this respect. Widsith had his squires, and Nicephorus had his whores. Agnes could only assume that even Berengar had his overt indiscretions. It was no sin to seek pleasure outside the marriage bed. But to seek love?
I would want you even if I could not touch you.
