Yet her gaze wandered as she did. Wandered to Liuprand, who was watching this act unfold intently. His ocean eyes were a maelstrom, but Agnes could easily imagine the thoughts turning behind them. He was willing her, in his mind, to stop this. He could see how it both comforted and diminished her. He was wishing that he were the hand, and she were the mouth, that he could feed her endlessly, that he could take her fingers into his mouth. This was the part of him whose shoulders trembled under the weight of the crown.
And then there was Liuprand the Just, who saw his wife being attended, who saw the ripening of his seed in her belly. The child who would mend these gashes his actions had left upon the island, turn those wounds to stiff blue scars. He had told her in haunted, miserable tones how the child had come to be conceived—and Agnes had listened, beaten by each word like flotsam caught in a snarling tide.
She came to me in my chambers. She was escorted by the Dolorous Guard. Flanked, on either side. They said my father had given them orders not to leave until it was done. They stood outside the door, and when they heard nothing but silence from within my bedchamber, they sent in those two leeches—those hideous creatures Truss and Mordaunt. The tall one came to me and the other to her. He stroked me roughly until my body betrayed my mind, and the princess’s legs were pried apart and held there—and I was guided by their crass hands…when it was done, the stained sheets were taken to the king.
Agnes had then lapsed back into the agony and safety of silence, as her mind supplied her with a single thought:I cannot bear this manner of existence for a moment longer.
The mummers’ act was done, and they bowed deeply. Through a mouthful of meat, the king ordered applause to be given. Agnes did not clap; her hand was occupied. Marozia was eating from it, but the bread was nearly gone. When it was, Agnes would miss it.
“There,” Agnes said, softly. “Would you like any more?”
“No,” Marozia whispered. “Just water, to wash it down.”
So Agnes lifted the goblet in trembling fingers, and Marozia drank deeply of it. The mummers proceeded out of the hall, their feetslapping the stone floor. She wondered if they could feel the coldness through their slippers. And all the while Liuprand watched Agnes with a steady gaze, as if they were the only two creatures in the world, when in truth the world was crushing them inward, like grapes mashed for wine.
V
Life and Death
Waltrude knew the sound of a woman greeting her death. It echoed throughout the halls of Castle Crudele that night. She woke to it with a start, as it reverberated like bells gonging within her ancient bones. She rose and followed the sound. She was too fixed in her course to even be afraid of what she would see when she found it, to even be haunted by the howling of ghosts. They were following her, but at a distance. Iphigene. Philomel. Pale-haired wights, held aloft in the air like ornaments fixed on an invisible string.
The sound led Waltrude to the princess’s chamber, and she did not hesitate before swinging open the door.
She was not first to come—that was Marozia’s handmaiden, the queer-eyed girl Ninian. She was holding her mistress’s hand as her mistress writhed and twisted in the sheets, her sleeping shift pulled up over her breasts and her gruesomely distended belly. Her sweat had turned the bedclothes damp and dewed her forehead, but there was no blood to be seen yet.
Waltrude approached the bed briskly, sparing no moment for her own upset. She had witnessed and aided many a violent labor before. The only shock to her was how swiftly this labor had come. The princess had complained of no pains; Waltrude had not even noticed her wincing as she walked. Despite her thrashing, Marozia’s legs were wrapped together, the muscles in her thighs clenching and taut. This was no good. Waltrude took one of her knees in each hand and began to wrest them apart.
“No!” the princess screeched. “Don’t touch me!”
The viciousness of her protest made Waltrude recoil, but only briefly. “The child will not come if you are blocking its path, Princess,” she said. To Ninian, she said, “Fetch some rags and hot water. Quickly.”
Her queer eyes wavered and her chin quivered. “I should not leave my mistress’s side…”
“This bed will become her deathbed if you stand there like a dumb statue,” Waltrude snapped. “Go.Now,you useless girl.”
Still, Ninian hesitated. With a deliberation that seemed to cause her physical agony, she untwined her fingers from the princess’s. Marozia gasped at the loss, but then she was racked with a great pain that made her howl and writhe again, swollen breasts leaking.
She did not—perhaps could not—protest now as Waltrude pried her legs open. The oils of birth shone on her thighs. Already the child had begun to breach the exit, horribly stretching the flesh of its mother with the overripe plum of its head. There came now the trickle of blood, madder red.
Marozia shrieked again, fingers scrabbling for purchase in the sheets. When Ninian returned with the rags, Waltrude would put one in her mouth for the princess to bite down upon, which was as much for her own sake as for Waltrude, whose ancient ears were beginning to throb at the sound.
Yet it was not Ninian who came through the door then. It was the lady Agnes.
Unlike Waltrude, she hesitated there, just past the threshold. She, too, wore her nightgown still, suggesting she had been roused from her slumber and come running—her hair was loose around her, glossy yet mussed with sleep. And her eyes, her stone-gray eyes, were flung wide in horror, the color having already drained from her cheeks.
When it became clear that Agnes was frozen there, Waltrude jerked her head toward the princess. “Come now. Hold your cousin’s hand. She will need a vessel for the pain.”
Agnes came, but her steps were wobbly, halting, as if she were being yanked rudely forward on a rope. She paused at the edge of the bed, her gray eyes round and huge, and then, after another moment’shesitation, she found Marozia’s hand amid the sheets and laced their fingers.
Marozia clamped down upon Agnes’s hand at once, nails clawing at the flesh with such violence that it made even Waltrude shudder. The lady Agnes did not flinch. Instead she glanced up at Waltrude and in a small voice asked, “Is there nothing to give her for the pain? We should send for Pliny. He will—”
“No,” Marozia gasped, and with a sudden surge of strength, she pushed herself up to a near-sitting position. “No leeches. Swear to me there will be no leeches.”
Waltrude raised a brow. “Then you will endure the pain baldly?”
Tears broke from the princess’s bloodshot eyes as she looked down at herself, at the swollen, undulating belly, at the open space between her thighs. “I do not care,” she rasped. “I do not care, I do not care—only get it out of me, get it out of menow!”
On that final word her voice crested into a scream. Her face contorted into a grimace of anguish, the whites of her eyes flooding with yet more red.
