A Thousand Candles Burning
Agnes returned to her chamber, hating both its emptiness and her own. She stripped off her nightdress, irrevocably sullied with blood and sweat and the oils of barbarous birth. She flung it onto the ground, and it fell like a ghost bereft of its vessel. She stepped over it, the bodiless, soiled white, and went to her wardrobe.
She chose a deep-violet gown, the darkest she owned, the richest in hue, almost pure black. Violet for victory? Or black, for mourning? Her emotions were too multiform to be communicated through the limited language of rustling wings. There were not enough colors for all that she thought and felt. This was the gift of speech, which Liuprand had worked so meticulously and lovingly to draw out of her. And now she could not find him, her companion, her guardian, her beloved, the creature beneath the epithet whom she cared for so immeasurably that it had healed the broken pieces of her.
The flowers in her vase were wilting, but she had neither the time nor desire to go down to the garden and pick more, so she plucked the two least shriveled and put them in her hair, held there with a pair of silver clips. The necklace of teeth was fixed in place around her throat. And when she regarded herself in the mirror, she saw the lady Agnes, Mistress of Teeth, a rose-pink flush in her cheeks, made vivid and bright and even beautiful by the strength of the desire coursing through her. She could be all—she could be so much—except she could not be a mother and she could not be Liuprand’s bride.
Agnes pushed these thoughts from her mind. To find him was paramount. She would feel irreparably lost until she did.
First, she made the journey back to his chambers. The floors of Castle Crudele felt exceptionally cold at this early-morning hour, but perhaps it was merely because her feet were so warm. Her body was overall warm, almost feverish.Please,she thought, as she reached the door,please let him be on the other side.
But when she pushed it open, it was only Waltrude there still. She sat now, holding the child to her breast. The princeling was finally suckling, and the scent of milk filled the room. Agnes’s stomach twinged with grief.
“He has not yet come?” Agnes asked. “The prince?”
Waltrude regarded her with reproach. “No, he has not come. And you should not have returned here, lady. It is unbecoming.” The wet nurse sighed. “Yet at least you are properly clothed now.”
Heat prickled across Agnes’s cheeks, but she did not reply to Waltrude’s chastisement. Instead, she began to pace the room, trying to appear innocuous and incurious, as Waltrude continued to look at her with disdain. She let her eyes graze the half-gulped wine, the unmade bed, the crumpled livery. And then they landed upon the stack of books.
Waltrude let out a huff, but Agnes was undeterred. She walked over to the stack and lifted up the first book. It was the one she had picked out from the library herself—Liuprand’s favorite—the worn and rather unremarkable tome with the embossed sun on its cover. She ran her fingers gently across it, feeling the raised rays of solar fire. The spine was creased with a hundred openings and closings. When she opened the book herself, it fell open to the most accustomed page. It had been marked so many times that the corner was permanently creased.
Agnes did not know the plot of the book at all, so she could not guess at why it was so beloved to Liuprand. It would take hours to read in its entirety, and she did not have the time. So she merely skimmed this single page, all while Waltrude let out contemptuous sighs, and the soft suckling of the infant gave the chamber a warm and peaceful chorus.
At the bottom of the page, her eyes stopped. She read the final line.
And wing’d, sure-foot’d Tisander went to beg from the gods forgiveness for his father’s crimes—and Agnes knew where Liuprand had gone.
It was the very highest room, in the very tallest tower, and Agnes’s calves were straining by the time she reached it. The chapel. She suspected that few in Castle Crudele even knew of its existence, and those who did would never care to visit, especially since the Exarch had passed. What reason would they have? God had long been banished from Drepane. Whatever holiness still lurked behind these doors was invented by the chapel’s visitors, their mind supplying divinity where none existed. The mind, which itself could fathom the sea into a desert, and an oasis into a wasteland.
The door was heavy and gridded in iron. Agnes could not push it open merely with her hand; she had to thrust her whole body against it—once, twice, three times—and then it scraped open.
She had expected darkness on the other side, a filmy, smeared gathering of shadows. But instead there was, all around her, smoldering golden light. It pulsed from the altar in the very center of the room, where what seemed a thousand candles were burning. It pulsed from Liuprand himself.
He turned at once when he saw her, his face bathed in that heady glow. What might have been disguised in shadows was now thrown into harsh relief: the gash along his cheekbone, the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Agnes’s heart stuck in her throat.
No words passed; she merely hurtled toward him. She managed to stop just before they touched, and her hand felt for the altar, gripping the stone to steady herself. The candle flames juddered with her movement, her intrusion upon the room’s stale air.
Liuprand did not even reach up to wipe the blood from his face. Helet it drip down his chin. A moment or two passed. And then he said, in a hoarse voice, “She lives?”
Agnes nodded.
“And the child?”
“Children,” she whispered. “A girl and a boy.”
She watched his eyes fill with horror. He, too, had been made into something against his will. He had been sculpted from the clay of the king’s malice into this new creature, and it was a metamorphosis that could not be reversed. One might die, but one could not be unborn. And so Liuprand the Father now stood before her. The blood trickled past his chin and down to his throat.
“Agnes,” he said, so softly. Then he stopped and spoke no more.
He had stood between Nicephorus and Marozia and had suffered these wounds for it. Endured them to save the wife he could not be persuaded to love, the wife who loathed him down to her marrow. Liuprand the Just. Was it the fate of a just man to ever be confronted with such impossible choices—mother or child, bride or heir? Was it the fate of a just man to ever make small his own desires? Agnes’s heart beat with grief for him, with love, with longing.
“Would I were your wife instead.” Her voice broke. “Would that my womb could bear your child…”
Liuprand gave his head the smallest of shakes. “Do not speak such rapturous dreams to me. My greatest weakness is my wanting for the impossible.”
Pain embedded itself in her skin like splinters. “But it is not fair—it is not fair that we are doomed to only dream—”
She lifted a hand to his face. It was treason, she knew; it was perfidy, it was sin. Liuprand at first remained as still as stone, but then he leaned almost imperceptibly into her touch so that she could run her thumb along the gash on his cheek, so very gently, such that he did not even flinch. Agnes could imagine the force of the blow that had caused it—only a man of Seraphine strength could wound another creature of Seraph so facilely—and it made her skin heat with further defiance,with further abandon. The sight of this wound could almost convince her that she acted with justice. That the evil deeds of the king deserved to be repaid with treachery.
