“Please,” she whispered. It was nearly too low for Pliny to hear. “Please, leave me. I wish to be alone with my daughter.”
To hear a princess beg was appalling to Pliny. Her desperation was a tangible thing, a gray miasma in the air. It touched him, and his heart flooded with grief and with pity. No princess should be in such a state that she pleaded mercy from a leech. It almost disgusted him.
He should have stayed, to ensure that she—and more important, the child in her arms—was firm enough to survive. It was his duty, as he had sworn when he took his leech’s vows. But Pliny tasted the brineof blood on his tongue, and his arms were soaked with it up to the elbow. That alone would not be enough to dissuade him—he was a surgeon, after all—but when it mingled with the princess’s despair, he felt as if he might be sick all over the floor.
So with one last dip of his head, Pliny obeyed the princess and vanished.
What was his duty now? He had been dismissed by the princess; he had not even been granted a moment to examine the infant clutched so jealously in her arms. His duty was to surgery, to easing and prolonging life, to beating back unyielding death. If the princess or her child died under the inept care of Truss and Mordaunt, Pliny would not endure the guilt. This was the mark of a good leech, he thought. To shame oneself for failing at one’s paramount task. Death sweeping in, beneath his notice, and stealing away the breath of Marozia and her daughter.
Perhaps he should have insisted on staying. Perhaps he should have fought. Pliny turned all of this over in his mind as he paced the corridors, until he remembered—There is another.He could redeem himself in this matter by seeing to the second child. The poor, rejected princeling, smaller and weaker than his sister, turned away from his mother’s breast before he could ever feel her warmth.Waltrude,he thought then,I must find Waltrude. The princeling will be with her.
He first checked her chambers and found them empty. Had she gone to the leeches’ bay, seeking a tonic to bring forth her milk? This was possible; probable, even. Pliny chose this as his next destination. By now dawn had come, and it lit the hallways of Castle Crudele with pale and powerful beams of sun, shrinking the torch flames within their sconces. Yet for all this light, the stone floors never grew warmer; they were as cold as ever beneath Pliny’s feet.
Pliny was approaching the long spiraling staircase to the cellarwhen another thought entered his mind. The prince. Waltrude would have gone to him, would she not? Liuprand was her dearest love, the singular joy of her shriveled heart. She would have wanted to show him his son.
So Pliny turned abruptly on his heel and headed backward to the prince’s chambers. He had been summoned there twice, maybe three times before, to treat Liuprand’s minor ailments—a headache induced by a greedy gulping of wine, a bruise or a cut that he claimed was from a tiltyard tumble, though Pliny had never seen the prince take up a spear or a sword. He had no squires, and seemingly no love for hunting or sport. His only true passion appeared to lie within the conch-shell spiral of the library.
When he reached the door, Pliny rapped once upon the wood. There was a shuffling, and a haughty breath he recognized, and then Waltrude called out, “Come in and do it quickly.” As if she could scent him through the threshold.
He entered and found the wet nurse seated with the princeling in her arms. He slept now, a tranquil bundle of white, though the red blotches of birth were still risen across his cheeks. Otherwise he was a handsome infant, though Pliny would not expect anything less from the joining of the prince’s blood with Marozia’s. The baby’s beauty could only increase as he grew—or so Pliny thought. This was the first time he had seen the product of a union between Seraph and Drepane.
“The child,” Pliny said. “He is well?”
Waltrude nodded. “He ate fulsomely and rests now. Already he is the picture of his father, in face and in nature. A quiet, unobtrusive infant. A boon to Castle Crudele.”
Pliny inched closer. The child’s face was indeed turned blank with sleep; there was no scowl or grimace or furrow in his brow as he dreamed his first living dreams. “Has he yet been named?”
“No. The prince cannot be found. Still he has not laid eyes on his son.”
“Still?” Pliny inhaled, breathing the lingering scent of milk in the air. “Where do you suspect he has gone?”
Waltrude examined the infant’s face very closely. She hummed a tune, wordless and brisk. Then she looked up at Pliny and said, “I have sent the lady Agnes to find him.”
Her voice had the charge of the sky before a storm, dense and taut, with the promise of cruel white lightning. Pliny shifted, made uncomfortable by this sudden transformation, which turned the whole room into a place of ill omen, of warning. He was silent for quite a long time, considering how the mere mention of Agnes’s name had engendered this change. Waltrude’s lips were pressed into a thin line. Pliny did not even bother to ask, because he knew she would reveal nothing on this matter.
Instead, he chose a more innocuous question.
“Do you think the prince has gone to see his father?”
Waltrude gave him a dour look. “That is the last place he will have gone.”
The last place, indeed. No one went to pay a visit to the king unless it was on pain of death. These past months had warped and mangled Nicephorus so repulsively. Now, Pliny thought, the king was lucky to only wear the epithetthe Sluggard,for he could invent far more fitting titles that were far less flattering.
Pliny considered this all heavily. Not the king’s chambers, not the tiltyard—nowhere he would expect to be easily found. He did contemplate the library, but if the prince was indeed hiding, he would not be in one of his daily haunts. He would cache himself within the castle’s most secret place. Where not a soul would think to look because they did not even know that such a place existed. But Pliny did. And so that was where he went.
What a grueling journey, to Castle Crudele’s tallest tower. Pliny’s muscles twinged with agony and his very bones seemed to tremble, age and exhaustion loosening them at the joints. Only torchlight thrivedhere, flickering boldly against the windowless dark. No sun could pass through solid stone. Pliny put one hand upon the wall to steady himself as he climbed, acutely aware of his own labored breaths, how his panting made the mucus rattle in his throat. Yet undeterred, he climbed.
When he reached the landing, he stopped to regain his strength, and was suddenly overcome by a sensation of ill ease. It did not press in on him as some atmospheric augury; rather, it was summoned from within his very own being. There was a heat that began in his chest and then stretched its tendrils outward, until the tips of his fingers and toes hummed like beating wings. The bones of his sternum seemed to rattle as his heart leapt and juddered with impossible ferocity. His mouth filled with saliva, which threatened to foam and spill past his lips. His lips! They were aflame, puckering and curling, though not of his own accord—shaping themselves for some action, to fit some form.
And most perturbing and foreign of all was the pull between his legs, the bunching, like a fist curling into fabric. A second pulse began there, and he was filled with desire that was beyond desire, a cloying and desperate need, which he had not felt since boyhood, long before he had taken his leech’s vow. So aberrant it was that Pliny nearly guttered out a noise of shock.
Under it all was revulsion and terror at his body betraying him. At his mind, which could not keep dominion over these unsanctified urges. At this age, Pliny had long since shaved down his cravings to the bone, to the barest essentials of humanness: the want for food, for water, for occasional companionship, for an afternoon spent in the warmth of the sun. These modest desires he allowed himself, and nothing more. Yet now another need was building upon him, adding muscle and sinew and voluptuous flesh to the bare skeleton of his asceticism.
What had happened to fatten his form so lasciviously, and so suddenly? Pliny was alone on the landing, in only the bare glow of the flickering torchlight, his feet and hand against cold stone. It could not be the castle itself, the castle built upon the blood of those struck downby Berengar’s needle-thin blade. Rather it was something that existedwithinthese cruel walls, a strange flower that bloomed despite the dark and the frigid air—a night-blooming flower, perhaps, that opened its petals only beneath the obscurity of the black sky.
Could such a thing be born here? Something so fleshy, so full? Pliny’s mind could not conceive it; his body could only feel it. His bones knew that a secret lurked within these walls. His heart propelled him forward, almost unconsciously, toward the chapel’s heavy stone door.
He felt possessed, too, by a preternatural strength, and a stealthiness that better befit a mountain cat than an ancient leech. So when he pushed open the door, it opened for him immediately, and without a sound. No scrape of stone upon stone; even his footsteps did not hush against the floor. Every thought seemed to have vacated his mind, so Pliny had no expectation of what he would see when he crossed the threshold. He was more a spirit than a body; a figment, not a form.
