Liuprand was pacing the corridor, his head turned down as he stared at the nothingness of the cold gray floor. When Agnes emerged, he looked up at once. The turmoil on his face was beyond description. Yet another crack went through Agnes’s brittle and scabrous heart.
“The babe will not come,” she choked out. Her vision swam with tears, though some ancient pride within her refused to let them fall. “She will not survive much longer in this state—Pliny will turn to the scalpel soon. I cannot—”
A sob rose from her chest and tumbled, still tearless, past her lips. Liuprand stood with perfect rigidity, his arms at his sides and his fists clenched, as though he was restraining himself from reaching for her. Agnes wanted the comfort and warmth of his body, but she could not bear what it would mean—the treachery, the perfidy—to be embraced by him.
Instead she exhaled a shuddering breath.
“You must tell them,” she said. “The leeches—your father. You must tell them that the princess’s life is paramount. That she should not be sacrificed for—”
Agnes could not go on; another knot of tears had coiled in her throat. She smelled it, even here: the blood, the blood, the blood. It was all the same. Fredegar’s, Marozia’s. It was all brine and red. It would rise in its heavy swells and drown her.
She saw Liuprand swallow. That muscle, feathering in his jaw.
“My father slumbers still,” he said at last. “It will take more than a woman’s screams to wake him. He has slept through that and worse before. If anything, it is a lullaby to him. He…” Liuprand’s voice broke off for a moment. His gaze swept to the ground.
Agnes only watched him, strung halfway between despair and hope.
Liuprand lifted his gaze again. Where they had been blurred before, like window glass in the rain, now his blue eyes were sharp and clear and burning.
“I will keep him from the door,” he said. “Him and his leeches both. But I cannot promise how long.” He cast a quick glance over his shoulder, down the long corridor where Agnes presumed Truss had fled. “Were I stronger—”
“No,” Agnes cut in. Her heart was beating a fierce but jagged rhythm. She pressed her finger to his lips, silencing him. “Not here. Not now. There is notime.”
And then she turned and went back into that bloody chamber before Liuprand could speak again. Her limbs were trembling, and she was filled with remorse. She had dismissed it too quickly—his turmoil, his pain. It was his child, after all, caught half inside its mother, dying before it would ever take its first breath of air. But she knew he had little love lost for the creature sown of this wretched union.
At that, Agnes felt her breath catch a bit in her throat. Even if this babe was born, if it lived…it would be hated for the hellish circumstances of its conception, hated for the pain it had wrought upon its mother and father both.The Sorrowful. The Ill-Made.Half a dozen cruel epithets Agnes conjured as she watched Marozia writhe and scream.Ninian had been roused at last, and with her help, Waltrude and Pliny had lifted the princess back onto her bed.
Pliny’s robes were drenched in red up to his elbows, hands still working between Marozia’s legs. Upon hearing Agnes’s entrance, he paused his ministrations and looked up. Ninian and Waltrude, too, let their gazes leave Marozia and land upon Agnes.
Her silence was terrible, in that moment, in the blood-humid air, with Ninian’s tear-streaked face and Waltrude’s grave, green eyes and Marozia’s dazed, desperate keening. Only Pliny appeared unshaken—after all, he had seen so much blood before.
Somehow the silence had ensnared her again, that all-but-forgotten little noose. It had been her armor once and now it was her shackle. So Agnes had to swallow hard, and swallow again, until she tasted the burn of salt in her own mouth, until the words at last were freed.
“The prince has ordered that all measures be taken to preserve the life of the mother,” she said.
Still they stared on. There was only Marozia’s shallow panting to beat back the silence.
“So do it!” Agnes shouted, and she surprised herself more than anyone with the force of her words.
Flustered, the leech and the two women immediately returned to their task. Agnes joined them at the bed and saw at once that indeed some progress had been made in her absence. The head of the infant was now fully cresting into the world, plum-colored, smeared with the mucuses of birth—yet underneath those fetal oils were its eyes, the translucent lids showing a nexus of tender blue veins, and its lashes, which fluttered so very faintly, proving there was life within this yet-unborn creature. Agnes’s heart skipped.
Ninian was now the one who held Marozia’s hand, the girl’s fingers turned blistery red and throbbing with the pressure. But her pain was a trifle to her; Ninian’s tears were all for her mistress. She leaned down, close to Marozia’s ear, and whispered apologies, which were odd for Agnes to overhear. She did not know what the girl had to be sorry for. And she did not think that Marozia would care to hear them, either.
But this left Agnes to stare down at the branching of her cousin’s legs as she howled and thrashed and pushed and, at last,at last,the screaming of her child mingled with her own. It slipped out of her like a minnow, greasy and blood-dark, and Pliny caught it in a bundle of clean rags.
The denouement had come so suddenly, after these interminable and excruciating hours, that Agnes could only stare in blank shock. Pliny handed the infant to Waltrude, who began to wipe off that blood and grease, and he snipped the cord with a small pair of shears that seemed such a quotidian tool, better suited to embroidery or gardening than to the weighty tasks of life and death, and Marozia fell back limply on the bed, silent and still at last.
The infant’s cries warbled through the air, tremulous yet strident. Waltrude had managed, in a matter of mere moments, to bundle it up, to pin down its tiny limbs. She rocked it once in her arms, then carried it past Agnes to the side of the bed. As she laid the swaddling on Marozia’s chest, she said, “A girl, my princess.”
Weakly, Marozia opened her eyes. “A girl?” she echoed in the lowest, hoarsest tone.
Waltrude nodded.
With quavering arms—yet with a strength that surprised Agnes mightily—Marozia reached up and embraced the writhing white bundle. Agnes had yet to see its full face, and still she could not imagine it as anything but a vaguely formed creature, more a dream in her mind than a living thing. She could only watch as Marozia pressed the infant to her breast, as she lowered her lips to the crown of its head, weeping heavily, now in symphony with her daughter.
Her daughter. If already an unbreachable rift had grown between them, now Marozia had left her in the most permanent of ways. Within moments, the second-greatest metamorphosis of all had taken place—birth and life, second only to death—and Marozia had become something Agnes never would. A mother. This transformation was irreversible. Both she and the infant were wound around the spool of time, in endless coils of red thread. There would be no unwinding; thethread could only be cut by a single pair of shears, the shears of death itself.
Yet just as the infant began to quiet, as Marozia learned the first trick of soothing her child, Pliny said, “You must prepare for the other, Princess.”
