Chapter III The Origins of Our Custom
III
The Origins of Our Custom
Castle Peake, the ancestral dwelling of the House of Teeth, was the object of ridicule and drollery among the people of Drepane.
Nobles and peasants alike sneered at its ugliness, its remoteness, the bleak, gloomy color of its crumbling walls, the battlements that staggered unevenly along the edge of the mountainside, as if the structure were a great layered cake gone mealy and rotten with time.
The treacherous peaks around it, which had given the castle its name, rose into the gray sky like the scutes of a slumbering dragon.
Masons and millers who lived miles away, who could barely glimpse the mountain range from their huts and hovels, grinned toothily over pints of ale and said, I would sooner climb to Castle Peake than wed my daughter to you, you copper skink.
I would rather listen to a screaming owl than the groans of Adele-Blanche.
They say the Mistress of Teeth has filed her teeth into points, like a horned viper.
None of them would guess that Castle Peake was in fact teeming with flowers.
Behind those moldering battlements and the rusted barbican, the courtyard bloomed with betony and bitter nightshade, monkshood and catnip, fuchsia and sea thistle.
Foxgloves rustled like wind chimes, and heliotropes turned their humble faces toward the rare and precious beams of sun.
Spines of sea holly pierced the air like the minutest daggers.
Wisteria clambered up the columns with the powerful muscularity of a snake.
Altogether, they filled the air with pollen so thick that it clogged the throats of any who passed through, and left behind its yellowish powder on their clothes and hair.
If one were unwise enough to take the path near the shrubbery, the crown-of-thorns and blackberries might tear holes in one’s skirts.
One might become sticky with sap or pricked with barbs.
All such small perils awaited any visitor to the House of Teeth.
Agnes was still holding her grandmother’s teeth in their velvet pouch as Marozia led them to a small plat of dirt near the drooping fuchsia.
“He was charmed, don’t you think?” Marozia asked. “He invited me to come. I should go right away.”
Agnes shook her head. With the one hand that was not occupied by the pouch of teeth, she made a scribbling motion in the air, as if there were a quill pinched between her forefinger and thumb.
“You’re right,” said Marozia. “I should write first. Just to be certain—you will write the letter, won’t you?”
Agnes nodded.
“Tomorrow?”
She nodded again.
“Good.” Marozia smoothed her skirts in an anxious manner. “I shall practice. I shall have new gowns made…and the necklace. Will you bring them to the metalworker?”
She was looking down at the velvet pouch. Agnes met her eyes and once more nodded in agreement. Silence blossomed between them in the moist, sullen air.
“She would be pleased by this, wouldn’t she?” Marozia’s voice was quiet. Atypically so. If there was one thing Agnes thought her cousin lacked, it was the skill of subtlety, of subterranean machinations. “Grandmother trusted us with this.”
Yet Marozia had a certain clear-eyed perception of the world that allowed her to easily ascertain the desires of others.
If this skill were not so often trodden under the heels of impatience and frivolity, such that Marozia could make little use of it, perhaps their grandmother would not have needed to rely so heavily upon Agnes.
And yet even then, there were burdens Adele-Blanche’s heiress could never be permitted to bear. These duties, too, fell to Agnes.
Marozia took Agnes’s hand and waited expectantly, watching her face. Agnes squeezed her cousin’s palm.
With that, Marozia threw back her shoulders confidently, drew herself to her full height, and let go of Agnes.
“Very well,” she said.
Then she turned away and navigated through the cruel garden, though she did not quite manage to avoid its hazards entirely. Before Marozia reached the door to the great hall, the hem of her skirt was torn in several places, and burrs of soft agrimony were caught in the scarlet fabric.
With her cousin departed, Agnes took her own well-beaten path to the innards of the garden, its central cavity, so ruthlessly protected by Adele-Blanche.
She bypassed fragile sweet peas and crinkly hellebores.
She knelt down at the feet of the black henbane shrub, its sallow flowers curving up out of the ground in a single large stalk, like vertebrae.
She plucked out twelve leaves and pressed them into her palm.
She then shifted to where the mandrake bloomed in starry clusters, a violet cosmos.
She dug around until she freed one of its roots—small, white, and tender, curled in a fetal shape.
Agnes kept these bits of vegetation in her right hand and held her grandmother’s teeth in her left.
She deposited the teeth with the castle’s metalworker, who would very meticulously carve them into flat disks, set them inside rings of gold, and add them to the chain that her cousin would wear from this day until her own death.
Then Agnes went to her own chamber, where the small iron pot and her other supplies waited.
She dumped the old water out the window and refilled it from the jug that sat on the floor beside her bed.
It was a dark chamber, even on the sunniest of days, and when she lit her firesteel, it became the room’s most persuasive light.
The shadows scuttled away and held themselves at a distance, occupying only the cold corners of the room.
While the water boiled in the pot, Agnes mashed the mandrake root and henbane leaves with her mortar and pestle.
When fat bubbles swelled and burst and the water frothed like a mutt’s spittle, she scraped the mashed roots and leaves into the pot.
Sweet-smelling steam unfurled in miasmic wisps of purple and green.
Agnes set down the mortar and pestle. She placed her hands flat on the table, steadying her weight against the wood. Then she leaned forward, inhaled, and committed the highest of treasons.
This had all been set upon its course a hundred years ago, long before Agnes was so much as a dream in her mother’s mind.
Some said it was rats, stealthily boarding one of the many creaking trade vessels that sailed each moon from the mainland republic of Seraph to Drepane.
Others said it was the fleas that traveled as parasitic passengers upon the backs of these rats.
Still others said that the island itself birthed the scourge, in protest of the humans who brusquely planted flags upon it, soiled its ground with spilled blood, poisoned its waters with their waste, and drove its wolves and wild boars up into the black mountains for refuge.
Whichever of these stories was true—if any at all—death came to Drepane like an enormous bird of prey, shadowing the whole island beneath the darkness of its oily wing.
First, it was a fever, though perhaps this is too quotidian a word.
It was a fever that drew every drop of moisture from the body and dappled it in hot-cold sweat across the skin.
It was a fever that turned eyes a blind, leucitic white, then boiled those eyes inside the skull like pearl onions in a cooking pot.
Those few who survived roved sightlessly across the island, driven to a madness that compelled them to fight stray dogs in the gutters for carrion and offal.
Yet if the fever broke, it only gave way to the pustules, strange growths that pushed upward through the flesh, bulging and tumescent.
When these pustules burst, they spilled into a lava field of blood and pus, leaving behind open wounds through which maggots could tunnel and lay their eggs.
This was a slow death of hours, sometimes of days, being eaten alive with the most infinitesimal insect teeth.
Doctors donned beaked masks and slathered on every poultice they knew, forced tonics and elixirs down their patients’ seizing throats. Priests prayed to God for deliverance, for salvation. Prophets in their caves predicted the end of the world.
Mothers tore their hair and scratched at their eyes as their children were wrenched from them and tossed upon burning piles—until at last there were more corpses than there were corpse-burners, and bodies were stacked, naked and swollen, in the streets, where vultures and weasels began to masticate their flesh.
The subjugated wolves crept down from the mountains to feast.
The nobles hid away in their castles and closed the drawbridges to the serfs who pounded desperately at the doors.
Only the remotest, most hard-hearted houses survived.
The stench of death lay so oppressively upon Drepane that even in their opulent fortresses, these nobles began to grow mad with isolation, and still fever crept in beneath the closed doors, like the scent of ash from a pyre.
And so these noble houses of Drepane, of which seven remained, began to meet in secret, each bringing along all of their doctors and priests and even dragging the prophets from their caves.
They scoured medical compendiums and holy texts and asked the prophets what visions they saw in pools of water, in the entrails of crows, in the mists of their dreams.
It was one noble, from a house within the remotest black peaks, who came first to the answer. Yet what they discovered was not a cure for sickness, but instead a cure for death.
The medical compendiums offered the herbs.
The holy texts offered the words. And the prophets offered some intangible magic that knitted all this knowledge together into a spell, a ritual that, when performed, cracked through the husk of death and drew from the corpse a living, breathing creature, slathered in fetal oils like a newly hatched bird.