Nicephorus’s jaw twitched. Fear entered Agnes—she wished Liuprand had not said such to provoke him. But she suspected the king could not rise to his feet without help, and none of his attendants were about. No revenge would come, for now.
“That is all,” he said lowly, at last. “Every one of you, go now. Let me see no more of you.”
XI
Asunder
Agnes was the first to leave the king’s chamber, in the hope that she would not be followed. Indeed, she took a long and meandering route through the twisted corridors to vex any who might try to chase after her. She was accompanied on her journey by only her shadow, that black and wispy twin that brushed the white walls of Castle Crudele like dark lashes against a pale cheek. It oozed and slid alongside her.
As Agnes walked, she had the heaving sense that she had failed, even now, to perfectly exemplify all of her grandmother’s teachings—she had spurned Adele-Blanche’s posthumous orders and given up the pursuit of mystic power, though she had still believed herself as clever and clear-sighted as her grandmother had trained her to be.
Somewhere in the time that she had stopped dreaming of the dead, Agnes’s earthly vision had begun to blur around the living. Nicephorus, brute she had long imagined him to be, had in this instance honed his cruelty like a finely tempered blade. She should not have thought him limpid and dull—Adele-Blanche had taught her better than that. With one decree, he had cowed the princess, ended the glorious and horrible traditions of the House of Teeth, and regained the favor and loyalty of two more great houses. And he had dealt his son, writhing so painfully within the stricture of this detested marriage, another mighty blow. Two children, burdensome and unwanted, forever and ever a reminder of how he had been so brutally forced that night in bed.
She could not afford to believe that this was all incidental. Mightshe one day find herself trussed up by hands she had once believed were too clumsy for such maneuvers?
Silence had suited her, had oiled the wheels of her intellect and perception. As much as it frightened her to think it, when Agnes’s tongue had stirred to life, a part of her mind had died.
Agnes stopped before the door, sickened to stillness by her failure.I will resurrect that clever creature,she vowed,that sharp-eyed, venom-mouthed thing, no matter the cost. That thing that flourishes grotesquely in the quiet.
Armored by this resolve, she pushed open the door and stepped into Marozia’s chamber.
Her cousin sat in the chair that was ordinarily posed by the window but had, without Agnes knowing when or how, been moved to the dim, airless corner of the room. Marozia was lit not by the sun but by a contorted, half-melted mound of candles, like orphaned chicks in their aeries. Flames danced on the side of her face, warring with the murk of shadows.
Alerted by the sound of Agnes’s entrance, Marozia lifted her gaze through the gloom.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, without inflection.
The bodice of her cousin’s dress had been drawn down, her breasts exposed to the shadows. The child was clutched to her chest, the wet sounds of its suckling as steady and rhythmic as a needle through embroidery cloth. Standing beside her, in gray observation, was her handmaiden, Ninian.
“What are you doing here?” Marozia repeated sharply.
Agnes flinched, yet a part of her—that malformed, freakishly growing thing—loved the catch of her cousin’s voice, how it nipped at her with kitten teeth. Slowly and solicitously she approached, apology in her posture.
Marozia drew a sudden breath, like a dress snapping in the wind. As Agnes grew closer, she recoiled, shoulders rolling back and long, supple neck straining to its full extension. A muscle throbbed in her throat.
“You don’t have to be here,” Marozia said, quieter this time, yet all the more bitter for it, somehow. “I have no need of you.”
Agnes thought to reject the words at first; she knew her cousin was brash and impulsive, and so aggrieved as to be beyond reason—yet as she looked on in silence, Marozia’s gaze did not falter, nor did she blink, and there was only the sound of her daughter’s suckling, more vigorous now, filling the room with the warm and sensuous scent of milk.
Her daughter, who should have been heiress to the House of Teeth, who was meant, by Adele-Blanche’s edict, to wear the necklace around Agnes’s throat. Agnes saw the anguish in it, in the plundering of her birthright. She could understand Marozia’s malice and pain.
And perhaps once Agnes would have taken the pain, and even the malice, too, gently between her teeth and then swallowed. But now her treasonous mind reeled on, generating words that she knew she would never speak aloud.
I made you princess. I made you powerful. I made you miserable.Her throat soured with bile.I placed that child in your arms.In some manner, she might as well have impregnated Marozia herself. Agnes thought of the other infant, the girl’s twin, half Liuprand and half Marozia, but really more of Agnes than both, for she had arranged it, arranged it all.
Not a mother,she thought miserably,never a mother, but something worse. A creator.
Yet now Marozia looked at her as if she were nothing.
Her gaze slid to the handmaiden, Ninian. Though all this time she had not spoken, her hostility sat around her like a cloak. She bristled with it. Agnes felt antipathy rise in her, but more powerful than that was the sense of disgust. Agnes almost wished the girl would speak; she wanted to hear the pitiful, wheedling tone of her voice, the dull and simple words of her commoner tongue, and revel in her own superior silence.
But Ninian said nothing, and neither did Marozia. The infant shifted and mewled in her arms.
And then Agnes turned. She was almost unaware of herself doing it. Her limbs moved seemingly of their own accord. By the time she reached the door there was the faintest perspiration on her brow, the prickle of cold dew, but that was all—in another beat she was through the threshold and gone.
XII
A Stone Turned
