“I do not know,” Agnes confessed. “That wisdom has been lost to time. All those who did know perished under Berengar’s blade. He could not allow such dark practices to continue, or to stretch beyond Drepane’s shores.”
Tisander was silent a moment. “Why would he not claim such power for himself?”
“Because,” Agnes said, and looked out over the glorious library, with its staircase that spiraled upward like the inner curl of a conch shell, with the spines of the books that gleamed gold in shafts of sunlight from the high, recessed windows, this great treasury of art and knowledge that had been built upon a bed of torrid blood, “because…he was too noble. Berengar knew that this power was beyond what any mortal man would possess. It was a danger, and so he slaughtered this wisdom as he slaughtered the revenants and the nobles who had borne them up from their graves.”
There was a sudden tremor as she spoke the words that had once been treason to her. As surely as the necklace of teeth lay around her throat, Agnes was still the heiress of its ancient bloodline, once glorious, now shrunken and diminished. These were not tales that her grandmother would have permitted within the cold walls of Castle Crudele. Adele-Blanche mangled truth; she chewed it like meat.
But her grandmother was expired, extinct, forever gone, and the necklace Agnes wore was as much pearls as teeth.
If Tisander indeed detected the shift in her voice, he did not remark upon it. He merely snuggled closer to Agnes, his cheek pressed against the velvet bodice of her dress. The warmth of his skin pulsed through the fabric, heat leached from his body to her breasts, and she felt—cursing herself—that old, revived sense of bereftness. Waltrude had nursed the boy, not her. Agnes was still, and would be always, as barren as a shining-white salt flat.
Yet she did not have more than a moment to mourn it. The door to the library creaked open, and Pliny the leech appeared in the threshold.
Immediately, Tisander scrambled off her lap, and in his rather clumsy physicality, he appeared to Agnes as an ordinary child again. Indeed, when he reached Pliny, he grasped the leech’s robes with tiny fists and excitedly cached himself among them—a little game Agnes had seen him play over and over again. If he loved Agnes best, then his father, and then his wet nurse, Waltrude, in this ranking of affection it was Pliny who followed closely behind.
The leech rested a gentle hand on Tisander’s head. “It is time for your lesson, my lord.”
Eagerly, and still half ensconced in Pliny’s robes, Tisander followed him from the room. He paused only once, to peer back at Agnes. His gaze was bright and shimmering now, like the ocean made lively with the leaping of fish.
“Goodbye, my dear heart,” Agnes said.
And Tisander waved at her as he vanished through the threshold.
The library was not Agnes’s only place of refuge. Her days had become rote, though not unpleasantly so—time seeped slowly past her, like amber from oak-wood, each moment a luminous, treasured droplet. Her footsteps were slow, measured, the low hush of silk upon stone. The windows gridded the floors with squares of deep-orange evening light. Agnes passed through them, feeling the brief brush of warmth against her bare shoulder.
She did not need to hurry. He would wait until the death of the world, and perhaps even his soul would wait when his mortal form was desecrated and gone to nothing.
It was only her own eagerness that quickened her steps, as Agnes reached that final, narrow stairwell. She climbed it and pushed open the iron-heavy door.
At once she was soaked in the light of a thousand burning candles. The domed ceiling was dappled with it, as were the hoary stone walls, and in the very center, by the wax-coated altar, stood Liuprand. He was lighting the final wick.
When he saw her, he turned at once, and her name came from his lips in a soft whisper. “Agnes.”
“My love,” she answered.
The door shut behind her.
Agnes joined him there by the altar, as she always did, and together they looked at the lit candles in silent vigil. It was a ritual that had come to pass unspoken, grown at first from their shared sense of guilt, which bloomed outward, tinging the air with a sourness like smoke.
But Agnes was beyond shame now. She had shed its heavy husk. And as the flames leapt and the candle wicks curled and blackened, she reached up, undid the clasp, and shed her necklace of teeth, too. The chain slipped down between her breasts a moment before she caught it in a clutched fist.
Liuprand let out a shuddering breath.
“You know I would come to you already bare, if I could,” Agnes said. She lay the necklace on the altar, in that one small space that was not occupied by candles.
But the chapel was not the bleak and dreary place it had once been; with the passing of years, it had evolved to meet the needs of the two lovers who met there every evening. There were sprigs of lavender to perfume the air, tapestries to adorn the walls, and most important, a velvet couch, upon which Liuprand bore Agnes down.
Their coupling was not so frenzied now. There was time and more time for tenderness, for words of devotion whispered between kisses. Gently Liuprand swept back Agnes’s hair, fingers slipping through smooth black strands, baring her nape and her throat. As he trailed his mouth across her skin, down to the swell of her breasts, he murmured, “You feel new to me each night, as if I am born again in your arms.”
Agnes turned his chin up with one finger, forcing him to pause his ministrations. “You are my first thought upon waking, and my every dream in the dark.”
Liuprand smiled tremulously, almost shyly. He looked boyish to her sometimes in these secret moments, though he was now a man nearing thirty.
She kissed him on his earnest mouth, working at the ties of his breeches, while he pushed up the skirt of her gown to her hips. Even after all this time, after all their countless couplings, Agnes was left breathless by the size of him inside her, how he filled her so completely.
His thrusts were slow, dragging, the most exquisite torture. Agnes gasped as each one touched that place of pleasure within her. Liuprand lowered his huge body so that their foreheads were pressed together, and he stuttered around his release as she came, keening, too.
Butthesewere Agnes’s most treasured moments: when the fever-pitch of climax receded but the fog of bliss still remained, as heavy and sweet as incense. Liuprand shifted so that he lay on the narrow couch beside her, arms circling her waist, pulling her flush against his chest. She felt the staggered beating of his heart, thrumming unevenly until, with time, it grew steady again.
