If a sickness could not be seen, could it ever be cured?
As if intentionally, to break Agnes from her reverie, Waltrude jabbed a pin to the hair near her temple. The wet nurse was never especially gentle, and Agnes flinched.
“I suppose you’ll want your flowers,” Waltrude said.
Agnes nodded.
At least in this, she never had to go wanting. As soon as they had returned to Castle Crudele, Liuprand had ordered a new plot dug and a new garden planted. A garden of white flowers, in every species, lilies and camellias and infant’s breath and yarrow. The garden had its own cadre of servants to tend it, and more than once Agnes had glimpsed Liuprand there himself, cupping the flower heads in his palm to examine their fitness, even lowering himself to the ground to test the dampness of the soil. And each time her heart broke, and then mended itself, and then broke again, harrowed by this terrible affliction of loving him.
She wondered what the other inhabitants of Castle Crudele thought when they saw their prince among the white flowers, in the garden he had built for a woman who was not his wife. It was close to treachery because it was close to love. Would they see the gentleness beneath the epithet, the tenderhearted creature upon whom the crown and the title rested so heavily? Or would they only squint their eyes and wonder if it was trulyjust,to behave so devotedly toward the lady Agnes, when it was her cousin who wore his wedding band? Such thoughts could drive one to madness.
As Waltrude picked the crushed petals from her hair, Agnes flushed to recall how they had been so mangled. If she tried, she could summon the memory of his body pressed against her, his warmth and his hardness, his yearning made physical and driven into her. When Agnes had returned from the library, she had slipped her own hand between her thighs and brought herself to release with thoughts of Liuprand in her mind, but it was a hollow pleasure, a shade of what he could do with his fingers and his mouth. Her flush deepened. She hoped Waltrude did not notice.
“There,” the wet nurse said, stepping back. “You are fit for supper with the king.”
If only it were just supper and nothing more. Agnes’s stomach ground against itself. And then she departed for the great hall.
Agnes heard the jangling of bells before she even reached the chamber; the performance had begun without her. Dread still knotted her insides, but she pushed through the door and entered. The feasting table was set out on the dais, but the other tables had been cleared away to make room for the mummers.
Their silk ribbons twirled in endless red gyres, and their slippered feet slapped the floor in a tuneless rhythm. They seemed to take no notice of Agnes’s arrival, and she gave them a wide berth as she passed.She climbed the dais and took her seat. The art of silence was still one she knew well, and it was only Liuprand who stirred when she sat. King Nicephorus was chewing on a leg of lamb and enraptured by the performance of the mummers. And Marozia—
Marozia. She sat at Liuprand’s right and stared straight ahead—not at the mummers but past them. Yet her eyes were not glazed or hollow or empty. They were as sharp as they had ever been, flashing like the beaks of carrion birds, and her jaw was held taut. Her focus seemed to be on not looking at her cousin, on not acknowledging her presence.
A certain grief entered Agnes at this cold neglect. Marozia had been many things, but she had never been a creature of ice. Never heir to Adele-Blanche’s legendary apathy. Now a strange reversal had occurred, one that Agnes half feared and half hoped would never be undone: Agnes wore the necklace of teeth and bore the title, but she no longer shared her grandmother’s pitiless temper; Marozia had lost her inheritance yet now seemed more than ever Adele-Blanche’s successor.
“Good evening, lady,” Liuprand said. “I’m glad you have joined us.”
“Thank you, my prince. I am glad to be here.”
Pure lies and they both knew it. Agnes feigned great interest in her plate. Anything to keep her focus off Liuprand, and off the mummers.
They were mainland mummers, actors of farce, the faint aura of Seraph pulsing from them and turning the air in the great hall a very pale gold. As Agnes had recently learned, not all those of Seraphine blood seemed to equally inherit its gifts. These mummers were not especially beautiful; their hair was a dull shade of yellow, and though their eyes did gleam blue, Agnes could not recognize Seraph’s lagoon within them. She knew this particular hue well, for how long she had spent looking into Liuprand’s eyes.
She did not understand the language of Seraph but it did not matter, for the mummers did not speak. They went through the motions of their act in silence, with great, exaggerated gestures, swooning dramatically or stomping in feigned, sensational fury. The plot was a simplistic one and could be followed even without speech. There were no heights or depths. Two men fought over a woman (who was really a man in agown and a wig, for mummery was a profession prohibited to the fairer sex), and the woman died. The men raged in grief and stuck swords in each other’s bellies. Yet they played it all with humor. The king chortled as the mummers shook their fists at each other; when the woman died, he laughed so heartily that he dribbled wine down his doublet.
These acts were the new fancy of Nicephorus, whose former amusements had worn thin. It was whispered that he had grown too indolent to even welcome his favorite whores to his chamber. He had tasted every flavor of pleasure on Drepane. It all turned to ash in his mouth. So now he must import his merriment from Seraph.
Always the acts were excruciating, and none but the king enjoyed them. Perhaps he derived some pleasure from this—the small torments he inflicted upon his court by forcing them to watch again and again these dull charades. Agnes picked up her wine and took a sip, but it was as thin as water and as sour as bile. It did not fill her; it only reminded her of her own emptiness, how she had not felt Liuprand’s lips on hers for nine terrible months.
Marozia had touched neither her food nor her wine. It would not have been an easy task, anyway—her chair was pushed far back from the table to accommodate the swelling beneath her gown. That sorrow swaddled in velvet. Agnes’s throat grew tight as she stared at it. Since she had returned from the House of Blood, they had not shared a bed. She had not seen how her cousin’s stomach had grown; she had only been able to perceive it as a stranger.
And yet its grotesqueness was not lessened for that; it was even augmented, perhaps. If Agnes had been able to touch her cousin’s flesh as she once had so commonly, she might have managed to glean some fondness from it. Yet as it was, there was only limpid horror.
“You must eat something,” she said, softly. “To keep up your strength.”
Marozia’s gaze snapped to hers immediately. “I will eat when and what I please.”
Agnes felt a pricking at the corners of her eyes. “Perhaps just some bread?”
Marozia did not acquiesce, but she did not refuse, either. Her gaze was still fixed ahead. Agnes took the bread from her own plate and began to butter it. This was not the easiest task, given the limited use of her left hand, but she had been training her right to compensate so she did not make such a terrible mess of it, did not clumsily mangle the bread. She then cut the bread—with her right hand, again, in uncertain motions—and held out one small piece of it to her cousin.
As she did, Agnes’s fingers were shaking. She was afraid Marozia would not take it, but she was equally afraid that she would. Marozia’s head turned toward her, and in the dark mirrors of her eyes, Agnes saw herself not as she was but how she had been—the corpse-like figure with odd-jutting bones, her flesh more gray than white, the statue-girl, the silent lady. She saw her mouth as that unused, parched, ugly thing—the lips that had not ever been kissed, the tongue that had never tasted wine.
It would be so easy to fall, she thought, to slip back into that creature like a ghost returning to its body. She was filled with horrible terror, horrible dread, which made her want to drain her goblet and crunch the gristle of meat in her teeth to remind herself that she wasnotthat creature, not anymore, though her flesh remembered all its abuses and her belly remembered its scraping emptiness.Please, please, do not let me go back, I cannot return to that—
Gingerly, as a cat laps at a bowl of milk, Marozia bit off the smallest chunk of bread. She chewed, chewed, and swallowed. Agnes grew as still as stone. When Marozia took another bite, Agnes felt her teeth graze the very tip of her index finger, and her tongue slightly rasp her thumb, and she was falling then, not into an empty abyss, but rather into a smothering warmth, almost a womb, a place that was so familiar to her that she nearly keened. She nearly fed her thumb into her cousin’s mouth.
Marozia had a handmaiden now to share her bed, and Agnes had not held or been held by her in nine months. In this moment, she realized she missed it, missed it the way a whetstone missed its blade. And so Agnes lapsed back into silence as Marozia ate the bread from her hand.
