And perhaps most important, he was a peculiar creature, fit only to serve the House of Teeth. He would remind any who received his missive that Adele-Blanche’s strange customs were still followed, that they had not been driven into the mud with her innards. Let the other houses keep their dull and familiar messengers.
The nightjar’s journey was a harrowing one. He had never flown farther than perhaps half a mile down the mountains, and so the lushness of the green scrub he encountered at their base was arresting, confusing. The dirt was white—sand, an element he did not know. Andthe bright air was pricked with salt, a bitter, pungent smell that confounded his senses. He landed on the branch of a tall, narrow tree that resembled a pine if it had been shaved down nearly to its trunk. He scratched the white dirt from his feathers. He blinked salt from his eyes.
But the nightjar did not fail at his task. He landed upon a windowsill, chirped to announce his arrival, and allowed the letter to be unclipped from his leg. He took this time to rest on the sill while the letter was read, while humans moved in and out of the room, murmuring to themselves, poring over the parchment until it crinkled and dampened.
As was his nature, he slept during the day and was woken in the evening, to a man fixing another letter to his leg. The man had hair the color of wet gold, and though his body was large, his ministrations were gentle.
The nightjar fluffed his wings. The darkness was not so dense here, not so complete. The castle walls were ablaze with moonlight—powerful, silvery beams that shot to the ground like arrows. The nightjar flew in a swooping, diving pattern as if to dodge them. The sand captured the light and held it, spread it until the whole beach sparkled like glowworms on the ceiling of a cave.
The nightjar was relieved when the shadows of the mountain overtook him again, slicking him with their oils. He carried the letter to Lady Agnes, who waited in the garden, under the gloom of a willow tree. She rose and took the parchment from him, feeding him a centipede to thank him. He was too much an animal to understand that he had accomplished something momentous: The letter he delivered would summon the lady and her mistress down the mountain, and Castle Peake would stand precarious and empty, not even groaning with the footsteps of ghosts.
VIII
Castle Crudele
It was a colossal thing, and—christened with the blood of his enemies—Berengar Who-Fights-Alone had seen his castle rise like mushrooms in a rainstorm in the age immediately following his conquest. It was a palace that had no infancy, no floundering juvenile years, only the maturity that bleached its walls with accumulations of salt, scruffy and pale as a septuagenarian’s beard.
Not a palace so much as a fortress, Agnes amended as their carriage approached. It was connected to the main island of Drepane only by a narrow stone bridge. The rest of the land had collapsed around it, leaving the castle to float like its own tidal island. The whole ocean was its moat. The walls supporting the parapets were a sheer, steep drop directly into the sea. It would be an easy death, sleek as the cascade of water from a fountain, if one stepped over the edge. Agnes could imagine it within the eye of her mind. A woman falling and vanishing into the waves, no jutting stones to break her body apart during the descent.
The enormity of the castle stretched the limits of her vision. There were outer walls with ramparts, moss growing thickly over the white stone. Flanking towers notched with arrow slits. Between the outer and inner walls were wards so large that they could each accommodate many buildings. Stables and smiths, kennels and servants’ dwellings. There was room enough for a whole town enclosed within this fortress, yet as their carriage trundled through, Agnes was struck by its gloaming silence. The windows did not redden with firelight; there were no chuffs of greasy smoke from the chimneys; the air did not ringwith hammers beating against their anvils. No horses stomped at the dirt and no chickens squawked in their coops. The foul odors of life did not even drift upward: no steaming chamber pots or moldering hay, no pile of vegetables or meat declared too rancid to risk eating.
Or perhaps it was the ocean that smothered all these mortal scents. The waves crashed mightily and spewed their brine like the breath of God. This was no stagnant green pond, holding frogs and minnows and wilting lily pads in swampy, timeless suspension. This water seemed too furious and primordial to contain such mundane forms of life.
Agnes was cowed by its vastness and shrank back into her seat, turning her head away from the window. Her grandmother had felt so supreme, the House of Teeth so unchecked in its power, but they ruled over a domain that seemed painfully diminished now. A vulture might declare itself lord of carrion, but it did not take long for a corpse to be picked clean. Such seemed the potency of their house as Agnes beheld this great fortress rising from the sea.
“It’s so beautiful,” Marozia whispered. Her fingers danced across the window glass. “Isn’t it? All the colors.”
There were indeed more colors than Agnes regularly had the privilege of observing within Castle Peake. These were colors she saw only as threads for embroidery, as paints for her manuscripts. The azure waves lipped the white sand. The navy-and-gold flags of Seraph snapped in the wind. The strange, thin trees, which reminded her of upended chimney brushes, were coniferous gashes through the cloudless sky.
Their carriage reached the inner wall, and the stone gate ground open to allow them passage. As the portcullis rose, slowly, Agnes saw behind the latticework a long row of silver helmets, flanking the path. The Dolorous Guard? But when the grille was fully open and the carriage rattled through, she saw that they were only helmets, empty helmets without bodies beneath them, each one held up upon a wooden stake. The wind beat them around like bells, yet no incorporeal soldier abandoned his post. Sunlight darted off the dents in the polished metal.
Marozia drew a breath and pushed away from the window. Thesewere the helmets that had belonged to Berengar’s enemies, nameless soldiers who had died like cut flowers under his superior Seraphine steel. Yet if Agnes recalled, it was not Berengar who had mounted them there. It was his son, Widsith the Precious, in his grandest act as king. There was more function than feeling in this deed. Widsith had inherited none of his father’s blustering passions, his fiery loves and hates. Widsith only lazily observed that perhaps the noble houses were growing restless beneath the grinding weight of Seraph’s rule, that perhaps they were forgetting the violence visited upon them a generation ago. The emptiness of the act echoed in the unoccupied helmets, each one roughly as fearsome as a crab’s abandoned conch.
At last, the innermost gate. Its portcullis rose with a shout from an unknown source, and there was some commotion in the courtyard. Sand was kicked up into the white air. The carriage halted in the shadow of the Castle Crudele’s tallest spiraling tower. Here was the site where her great-great-grandfather’s throat was slit, where he was betrayed by Berengar, punished for his guileless acquiescence. Here was the structure that rose, watered with his blood. In this sense, Castle Crudele was the most elaborate and largest grave marker on earth.
And it was elaborate, a symphony of stone, all shades of gray and white and the dark age-spots of moss. Agnes stepped from the carriage and had the urge to touch the earth, as if she might feel her ancestors’ bones reaching up from underneath the sand and the soil, like a plant tendril searching blindly for the sun. Ordinarily she was not disposed to such imagining. But Castle Crudele was the only place on Drepane where the dead were consecrated. The bodies of the ancestors had not been defiled. They lay beneath the castle, seething, languishing.
Perhaps blooming.
This, she believed, was the power Adele-Blanche sought. Perhaps Agnes would have to tunnel under the palace like a mole and root out these hoary corpses. She bent over. The sun scorched the back of her neck, and her grandmother’s posthumous existence slid like a knife through her ribs. With every breath, it shifted, and she felt the pain of it.
“Lady Agnes?”
Her head snapped up and her spine straightened at once. Liuprand was standing over her. The prince. He had approached and she had not even noticed, had not noticed the Dolorous Guard treading the courtyard, had not noticed Marozia climbing down from the carriage, wearing her very coyest smile.
Agnes stepped back at once. Her fingertips were thinly grimy where she had touched the earth. She wiped her hand on her skirts.
“Are you well?” Liuprand asked.
He was wearing a pale-blue doublet this time. Some seamstress had painstakingly dyed its threads to perfectly match his eyes—which, upon seeing the ocean for the first time, Agnes now understood to be precisely the same color. The braids of gold across the breast and the epaulets that fixed his cape to his shoulders seemed, likewise, to have been sewn to match his flaxen hair. Standing in the sunlight, unhampered by the gloom as he had been on Adele-Blanche’s desecration day, he was more beautiful than any knight Agnes could have painted in her manuscripts or that the sculptor could have carved into his great frieze.
Liuprand the Golden, they would call him, when he came into his crown. There could be no other epithet. At least now when she blinked furiously and raised a hand to shield her eyes, she could fault the blazing sun and not the emanation of the prince himself.
Before Agnes’s silence became a breach of etiquette, Marozia rushed to her side.
“Your Highness,” she said, in a breathless way, having taken the steps down from the carriage two at a time. “Thank you for meeting us yourself. I am honored. Castle Crudele is magnificent.”
“I am happy to see both of you fine ladies again,” Liuprand said with a very sincere tip of his head. “And should it please you, I shall give you a tour about the grounds.”
