Yet this was not why she acted. Not truly. She acted because her wanting for the impossible was more potent than any sense of justice or reason.
Agnes pushed herself onto her tiptoes, to the greatest height she could reach. Still it was not enough, not until Liuprand dipped his head to meet her. To touch his blood-tainted lips to hers.
It did not even begin gently; it could not. They could not stand among these flames without being consumed. Liuprand drove his mouth against hers, relentless, ignorant to—perhaps uncaring of—how he further opened and aggrieved his split lip. Agnes tasted his blood on her tongue, and it was salty like his seed.
He groaned, hands roaming against her breasts, grasping her hips through the skirt of her gown. Without breaking the kiss—and with such swiftness and ease that it was a shock even now to Agnes, who thought she had accustomed herself to his strength—he lifted her.
There was a small swath of stone on the altar where no candle burned, just large enough for her to be seated upon it. Liuprand set her down carefully, on the very edge, so that if she leaned too far forward she would fall. Yet the position was in fact twice as precarious: If she leaned too far back, her hair would catch fire, and she would be truly consumed.
Liuprand did not bother fumbling with the stays of her corset. He grasped the front of her bodice and tore it open, exposing her breasts to the cool and gloaming air. His thumb dragged across her nipple, stiffening it, and she moaned. Already she was slick for him, dripping through her skirts and to the stone of the altar below. Their coupling would leave its mark here.
Agnes had thought at first to be tender with him. Since last she had touched him, he had been handled roughly, by those cruel and detestable leeches, and she did not wish to make him recall those moments when his body had not been his own. But he did not want her restraint.He wanted to know that his yearning was not unanswered. That he was not alone in this doomed and desperate desire.
So she tore at his breeches, feeling the hard swell of him beneath the fabric that made her throat go dry with need. He drew in a rasping breath, his lips against the shell of her ear and then the column of her throat as she divested him of the breeches and then the underclothes, and took his length in her hand.
Liuprand let her hold him for no more than a moment, and then wrested himself free and knelt before her. He shoved up her skirts and fixed his mouth to the sweet place between her thighs, the place where she had so often stroked herself but could never manage to find even a shadow of the pleasure he had impressed upon her. Agnes’s eyes squeezed shut and her head rolled back, the ends of her hair dangling mere inches above the leaping flame.
All her reason was, indeed, undone by his mouth. Yet just as her release was mounting within her, Liuprand pulled away. Panting, he looked up at her, lips painted with a smear of her spend and his blood, blue eyes holding the light of these thousand candles.
“Will you have me?” he asked in a voice as deep as a dreamless slumber.
“Yes,” she whispered back, “please—”
He rose and caught her mouth in his. She grasped at his shirt, tugging it until she bared his collarbone and his shoulder, though she could not manage to get it off all the way. For now it was enough to touch even a modest expanse of his bare skin, after so long having not more than a glance from afar. She felt him nudge at her entrance, and she pushed her hips upward, coaxing him inside her.
In all these months, she had almost forgotten the magnificent size of him and how he seemed perfectly formed just to fill her. She had been so horribly, bitterly empty, and now she was sated at last—almost glutted, as her channel stretched and stretched to accommodate him. His thrusts were hard, and ruthless, and nearly bruising—though any pain was pain she welcomed, pain she craved, pain she would have even begged for.
Liuprand crushed her against his chest, holding her taut there so she would not slide back and be eaten alive by the flames. He fisted her hair, dislodging the clips and scattering the white petals about the altar. Some of them caught alight; she smelled their burning. With his other hand, Liuprand clutched and kneaded at her breast, her terribly deprived breast, which ached, too, at its emptiness. She wondered if he was thinking it—that it would never swell to feed a child. She wondered if the thought struck him as grievous and unjust. But as he thrust into her, angling his hips to reach that exquisite place within her, Agnes could think no longer.
His climax was near; she felt his breathing grow rougher and his thrusts more desperate. Agnes was making high, keening sounds that she should have muffled against his shoulder, but they were in such a secret and remote place that she knew no one would hear. This was not like before, in the House of Blood, borrowed space and borrowed time. The moments stretched and warped around them, accommodating their act of perfidy.
Her short, sharp gasps filled the room, as did Liuprand’s throaty groans. His mouth caught hers in a kiss, hasty and heedless of his own pain, or hers, teeth grazing her lip and then her tongue.
He caressed her nipple just so, and then she was undone. Her head tipped back, her mouth unlatching from his so that she could cry out with her release. Pleasure rolled through her in one great wave, and then another, as she felt Liuprand spill himself inside her. He muffled his own cry against her throat, but the sound of it echoed through her, making her skin hum like a harp string. When she felt the warmth of his seed rush into her cold and barren womb, she came to climax once more, imagining the impossible, that it might take root.
Liuprand remained that way, inside her, holding her flush against his chest, until he grew limp and slid out. Agnes let out a whimper as his seed leaked down her thighs. Tears gathered along the line of her lashes, and she pressed her face to the fabric of Liuprand’s doublet to keep them from falling, to keep him from noticing that their coupling had stirred within her a certain grief. But he did notice—how could henot, with the warmth and salt of her tears seeping through his shirt? He pulled away, one hand on her thigh to keep her steady upon the altar, and the other under her chin, tipping her face up to his.
“I hate to watch you weep,” he said. “What have I done to you, Agnes?”
It was a question as much to himself as it was to her. Agnes merely shook her head. The tears doused her cheeks.
“Tell me.” He spoke with a prince’s tenor. His thumb stroked over her lip. Moments fell around them, sand through the siphon of an hourglass.
“I did not wish for this,” she said brokenly, at last. “Who would wish for this—for love that burns only in the dark?” She took him by the wrist and guided his hand down, over her stomach, bony and scarred, and pressed his palm flat against it. “To be mistress at best, never bride, never wife, never mother.”
Liuprand inhaled, sharp and tremulous. His fingers splayed across her belly, tracing the words Adele-Blanche had etched there.Jealously guard your maidenhead.Well, that was over, and Agnes was glad for it to be done. But the very deepest wounds, the ones that could not be seen, remained. The wreck of her womb, stabbed and shriveled. A sob tumbled past her lips.
“Would that I could take it back,” he whispered. “This miserable union that writhes within us all like a maggot. I knew from that earliest moment. From the moment I met your eyes above Adele-Blanche’s desecrated body. I knew that I would die a thousand deaths waiting for you.”
The gash on his cheek was still fresh and red. Many halls and chambers away, Marozia lay stiffly in her bed of blood. And Agnes’s tears spilled and spilled, half defiance, half sorrow, and all for what she could see but never hold, for what she could hold but never have.
“At least let me go then,” she said, her voice choked with bitterness. “As you would have done with Lord Fredegar…make me another match so that I must not always be tormented with the sight of you.” The words were perhaps harsher than she meant, but her tongue feltloose in her mouth, and her tears had slicked the path for such stinging retorts.
Liuprand’s face hardened. “Is that truly what you desire?”
No, she thought, and then yes, and then no again. Agnes let her hands fall into her lap, into her crumpled skirts. Her bare thighs were two shocks of white against the altar’s dark stone. Her fingers, spidery, pale, laced with the memory of Nicephorus’s knife. She thought of Marozia’s thighs, painted with blood, of Marozia’s hands, knuckles straining under her skin as she clawed at the sweat-damp sheets. None of this could be undone.
Agnes reached through the flame-daubed dark for Liuprand.
