Waltrude led Agnes through the chapel, footsteps hushing against the stone. She maneuvered the lady before the altar and placed her, as a draughts tile, across from the prince.
Liuprand’s eyes were the precise shade of the ocean under a midnight moon. Pliny had heard the other leeches whisper that this was the color of Seraph’s great lagoon—but he could not confirm or deny this himself, having never touched the mainland’s shores. The gash across his cheek had still not been attended, and so it would healcrudely, into a thin white scar. It would be the first blemish upon the golden prince’s beautiful face.
It was said that no creature born from the marshy soil of the island could ever equal the beauty of pureblood Seraph. Pliny had always accepted this to be true—why not? Beauty was not a virtue that moved him either way. Yet now, when he cast his gaze over the lady Agnes in the half-light, he was astonished to find that she looked for all the world like Liuprand’s matched half. Her beauty was a secret thing, perhaps best perceived in the darkness.
Waltrude still did not speak, though her mouth quivered, as if she wished to. Instead, she reached up and drew a veil of lace over Agnes’s hair. The only concession she would make to the specialness of the occasion. It was a thick veil, not gossamer, and it hid the white flowers well beneath it. Pliny’s throat grew unaccountably tight.
The prince and the lady Agnes joined hands. Pliny opened the book, which was new to him, but also unfathomably old.
He spoke the sacraments in the tongue that had died, and only he and Waltrude were witness as the prince and the lady repeated them, stammering a bit with their strangeness. From his pocket, the prince produced a ring. It was a rather simple one, such that would not call particular attention to itself when the lady wore it. A black pearl was set in its center, cushioned by two smaller pearls of white. The band was silver, engraved subtly. Words that, from this distance, Pliny could not make out.
With difficulty, the lady flexed the fingers of her left hand. Outstretching them, she allowed the prince to slip the ring onto her trembling and blemished fourth finger. Pliny felt a sting of failure against his skin, like the lash of a whip, but the pain was driven out by the poignancy of this moment. All his senses gathered to him, as soldiers called to arms. He smelled the burning wax and the candles’ cringing wicks. He felt the paper rasping under his palms. He saw Waltrude’s lips pressed into a thin and sober line. He heard the prince exhale softly as he admired the ring on his lady’s hand—no, not his lady, not any longer. She was more to him, in secret. She wasall.
Pliny tasted his own perfidy, which was as sweet as it was strong, like wine without water. He gulped it down remorselessly.
The vows themselves had been spoken. Pliny closed the book, which gave a soft thudding sound, and the candles flickered and revived themselves yet again with the disturbance in the air. This moment would return to him often, in waking and in sleeping—especially in dreaming—with all its accompanying senses. But none would be more clamorous, more forceful, and more evocative of emotion within himself than this: Liuprand raising his hands and, so very gently, cupping Agnes’s face.
“My love,” he whispered.
Book
III
I
Agnes in Love
Tisander was grown. He walked—if unsteadily—without his wet nurse’s abetting hand. Waltrude was ever more distant from him, watching only from afar as he stacked blocks and tugged his horse-on-a-string, or plucked flowers and menaced the moths in the garden.
Her milk had dried and withered, as did Tisander’s need of it. Now it was the lady Agnes who doted upon him. And endlessly she doted upon him, with the passion of a nun at prayer. She held the boy to her breast and whispered stories of her own invention, stories in which his horse-on-a-string was a horse of flesh and blood, and he was a knight and a hero; she fed him honey from her fingers; she carried him through the castle halls even when he was large and solid enough to make her arms quiver around him, no longer a babe but a boy. And he loved no one better than Agnes—she was sure of it. It was the greatest pride of her life.
Their most common retreat was the library. He had been no more than ten days old, his eyes still gummy with the slime of birth, when Agnes had first brought him to that great golden-lit chamber and raised him high in his bundle of blankets, both revealing to him his domain and flaunting him to the lurking spirits. He had an aura about him like his father’s, the pulsing, hereditary gleam of his Seraphine blood, and the ghosts all fled in his presence, banishing themselves to cobwebbed corners, or else dissipating where they floated, like tide pools dried to salt in the sun.
Agnes smiled then; she had at last put to rest those silent, lurking specters. Tisander’s birth had cleansed her world of its ghosts.
Tisander had talked before he could toddle, in a clear voice, like apour of freshest water. His hair grew in lush curls of dark gold. His eyes were the deep blue of Seraph’s great lagoon. In nearly every possible respect, he was his father’s son—and in the small ways he was not, Agnes told herself that it was her doting, her love, that had made him so. She refused any niggling hint that he was the profit of the woman who had birthed him.
And yet he was a peculiar child. Agnes could not deny it, even if she was the only one who saw his strangeness. As soon as he could speak, he said in that sonorous voice, as eloquent as any man grown, “Are these stories true and real?”
Agnes had stiffened, her arms growing taut around his small body. “What do you mean, my dearest love?”
“Stories of knights and heroes,” Tisander replied. “Did these knights ever draw breath? Do these heroes have statues raised in their honor?”
“Only within the pages,” Agnes said. She ran her finger hesitantly along the edge of the parchment. “Does that displease you?”
“No.” Tisander looked up at her with the steady gaze of the waveless ocean. “But please, tell me a story that is true.”
And so Agnes shucked those books of knights and heroes, of their romances and adventures, and spoke instead from her own memory, from the tales that had been told to her by Pliny the leech. She hoped they were indeed true.
“We sit within the castle of Nicephorus the Sluggard,” she began, “and before that it was the castle of Widsith the Precious, and before that, Berengar Who-Fights-Alone. This is the exalted line to which you are heir, my sweet dove. But Berengar was not always such a great man—or perhaps I should say he was once only a man of great confidence. His house in Seraph was a humble one, a merchant’s house, rather new in its nobility. He had only smelled the perfume of the Dogaressa at a distance. He had a modest number of ships. His stores of wealth were small—yet his nerve was boundless.
“When the plague struck the island and its revenants began to ravage the shores of Seraph, Berengar seized his opportunity. He saw thebroken vessels of his fellow merchants and heard their groans of calamity. They beseeched the Dogaressa for aid, but she did not deign to answer, glutted as she was on wine and sweets and the flattery of her many suitors. And so it was Berengar alone who took up his sword.”
Agnes paused there; Tisander was tensed with attention in her lap. She wondered how she might recount the garish violence that followed. There was no telling of this tale—notruthfultelling—that omitted it. Perhaps a different child would not be able to detect euphemism or falsity. But Agnes suspected that Tisander would sense the way her tone shifted uneasily with a lie.
“Berengar sailed to Drepane with a small army,” she went on, “and found that the island had gone to chaos, to madness. Revenants roved, mindless with hunger, feasting on the dead and the living alike. The clever nobles shut themselves up in their castles, safe from the savagery of these monsters. The cleverer still were those who managed to exert some control over the revenants, who could use them for their own ends.”
At that, Tisander tilted his head up, eyes questioning. “And how did they do that?”
