Chapter III The Origins of Our Custom #2
These creatures were nearly human, but not quite.
They knew their names and the faces of their mothers and fathers and children.
They were pale and gangly, with jutting bones and strange, mincing gaits.
Yet they were not diminished. They were imbued with a preternatural power.
Strength beyond that of an ox, hunger beyond that of a starving monk, thirst beyond that of a fish.
Even the resurrected children could splinter stones in their tiny fists.
The men broke the backs of horses when they rode them.
The women stuck their hands in open fires and their flesh did not burn.
And so, death ruled Drepane.
Perhaps the island would have been left to writhe beneath the sepulchral might of these monsters if their ravening did not become so great that it bloated past the island’s borders.
These revenants swam to the mainland, their pale limbs arcing and knifing through the waves like ivory-handled blades.
They terrorized the shores like ghoulish pirates.
They slaughtered fishermen in their huts and devoured their eels whole, crunching the bones in their teeth.
It was the council of the luminous city-state of Seraph, on the mainland, that responded in kind.
With gleaming swords forged from the finest tempered steel, they struck down the revenants and tore apart their twice-dead bodies.
And one man among them, a Seraphine knight of uncommon courage, sailed to Drepane itself to stamp out this scourge at its fount.
This man was Berengar, great-grandfather of Liuprand.
His soldiers cut down every revenant from the mountainous crest of the island to its marshy pediment.
And the seven noble houses, crushed under this mainland muscle, bent the knee rather than taste the conqueror’s blade.
He took the masters of each great house to the table, yoked them in like oxen, and bound them with a treaty called the Septinsular Covenant.
It was a formidable document, cloaked in jargon that disguised the brutality through which its articles were executed.
First, power was to be divided equally among the seven houses, as a body is anatomized upon a table.
Every man, woman, or child who died upon the island would be desecrated, their parts distributed to the master of each house.
But this still risked a show of odd unity among the houses during which they might put aside various discords to reclaim their grave power.
So Berengar gathered the doctors, the priests, and the prophets, and slit their throats upon the foundation of his new castle.
He burned their books and their herb gardens, demolished their churches, and walled up the prophets’ caves.
From the mainland he brought leeches, lay monks who could perform the crudest of medical tasks, and appointed the eminent among them, the Most Esteemed Surgeon, to oversee each corpse’s desecration.
It was forbidden even to record dates of birth and death, in case some latent magic lurked in these numbers.
It was forbidden to grow herbs or cast stones or even pray to God.
And then, at last, he killed every noble who had ever heard the secret words spoken and the secret ritual performed.
Any memories of magic perished with them, dismembered and ground into the earth, quashed like worms after a rainstorm, leaving widowed, weeping women, maddened by their loss, and bewildered children, confused at their sudden elevation.
The house to emerge from this massacre with the greatest vestiges of power, with unequaled stores of ancestral wealth, was the house that had remained most cold-blooded.
That had kept out, from the plague’s very first hour, the sickness and the pleading serfs at all costs.
That had retreated immediately to its remote mountain castle, armoring itself in apathy.
That had slaughtered any fever-stricken supplicants with cruel alacrity.
That had, during those clandestine meetings, discovered and proposed the ultimate solution. That had cured and thus mastered death.
The House of Teeth perched resplendently on its peak, both hideous and supreme, admired and reviled in equal measure. Like all the other houses, it had lost its patriarch. Yet unlike the rest, it had no male heir crouched and waiting.
And that was how, at the tender age of fifteen and already gravid with twins, Adele-Blanche, Mistress of Teeth, became the most dreadful and illustrious woman in Drepane, second in her power only to the king himself.
Her grandmother’s face did not appear to Agnes that night in the throes of her induced dreams, but she did not expect it to.
She was too freshly dead. It had taken weeks, a whole month perhaps, for the purple smoke to help conjure images of her mother, Celeste’s pale, overly youthful countenance floating like the moon at its fullest. So Agnes lay in bed, her vision clouded with strange hazes, bizarre images that rippled from one to the next without coherence or reason.
A mason laying stones. A parchment-colored moth landing on the inside of an anonymous wrist. A parade of masked figures in dark, candlelit chambers.
She had the vague sense that they were important, as they were the result of Adele-Blanche’s treasonous designs, but she recognized nothing within them, could pry from them no deeper meaning.
Sweat broke out across her skin as it always did, and she began to tear at her clothes, though the herbs turned her fingers numb and clumsy, her movements sluggish.
Marozia’s gentle hands chased back the apparitions, clearing the haze until it was wisps of smoke at the edges of her vision.
Without speaking, she unlaced Agnes’s dress and removed the pins from her hair.
She peeled off her stockings and released her from her corset.
At last, when she was naked save for her gauzy shift, Marozia arranged her body into a fetal pose upon the bed, then lay down beside her.
Instinctually, Agnes drew her arms around her cousin, pulling Marozia to her chest. The notches of Marozia’s spine prodded at her breasts. Agnes slowed her breathing until they were inhaling and exhaling in tandem.
And then, as she did every night, Marozia took Agnes tenderly by the wrist and drew her hand upward toward her mouth.
Agnes felt a shiver dance across her skin, first cold, and then warm, settling into a heavy need at the bottom of her belly.
Marozia put Agnes’s thumb to her lips and sucked until they were lulled into twin slumbers.