Chapter IV The Library
IV
The Library
Sleep, however, could not keep Adele-Blanche at bay.
She was a more virulent illness than her daughter; in fact, it seemed almost as though death had augmented her.
She stormed Agnes’s dreams. In this misty terrain of unreality, her grandmother stood, clad as she always was in black, and stared with her unblinking, lidless eyes.
“Bring back our house’s glory,” she said. “Do not fail me, granddaughter.”
I will not fail. I swear it. Even in her dreams, Agnes did not vocalize.
“Marozia is the snake’s hypnotizing gaze, but you are the snake’s deadly fangs. Do you understand?”
Yes.
“Then waste no more time.”
And then her grandmother vanished, as if swept away by a sudden, terrible gale, snatching her black dress, the white shock of her hair in its long braid. Yet her posthumous existence woke Agnes like a knife in the dark, and she shot up in bed, panting.
Marozia still slumbered unperturbed. Outside, dawn had not begun to wriggle into the starless sky; there was not even a pale band of light at the horizon. Agnes wiped at her eyes to banish the film of sleep, then stood.
The damp air around Castle Peake often smothered the torches, despite the best efforts of the servants and the sconces, so Agnes lit a candle and dressed by its murky orange glow.
Marozia shifted in her sleep, mewled like a cat, but did not wake.
Agnes slipped out the door, brandishing her single candle against the vast solidity of the night.
What had aided in keeping the House of Teeth safe from the ravening of the plague was their castle’s ungainly stone walls, its windowless towers, its slimy green moat.
All of this was a marvelously effective bastion against sickness and supplicants, but it made an ungenial home for its inhabitants.
Shadowy corners and empty hallways were gorged with rats.
The gargoyles, once grimacing boars or reposing lions, had been eroded by thousands of putrid storms, soiled rainwater eating at the stone like acid.
Now they were all moldering, lumpish monsters, curdled into sameness.
The qualities of cold and damp both thrived in the dark.
The stairs to the library were slippery with mold, and Agnes took them in slow, ponderous steps, one hand braced against the equally slick wall.
Her breath unfurled in wisps of white. The thick, gloomy air clutched at these vapors, holding them in icy suspension, so that they hovered before her like ghosts.
Agnes thrust her candle forward, and the light spooked them away.
At the top of the stairs was a door constructed entirely of unpolished obsidian.
Her candlelight spasmed off the stone, trying to gather in its grooves but each time repelled by its matteness.
The hinges and knob were bereft of rust, as they had spent less than half a century embedded in the door and all that time had been scrubbed regularly and lovingly.
Often Agnes climbed the steps to clean the metal herself.
She turned the knob and hurled her body against the colossal mass of stone. The dull pain in her shoulder portended a bruise, but her efforts were rewarded, and the door groaned open.
Of all the many grim chambers in the castle, the darkness of this room was the most complete.
A clever, truly evil darkness that seemed to threaten any who entered it, taunting them with the possibility of irrevocable blindness should their candle extinguish and they not manage to stumble their way to the door again.
The silence was not tinged by the scabbering of rats, though they should have found much to chew on among the manuscripts.
The cold, and the darkness, and the lingering memory of Adele-Blanche repulsed them.
The library was a place where only Agnes dared tread.
But her single candle labored bravely on, and with its light she reached the first of seven torches mounted upon the wall. She lit it, and then the others.
The brightness seemed almost perverse in the immediate aftermath of such malevolent black.
In some ways, it was more terrifying to know both light and darkness.
Always it was uneasy shifting from day to night, never allowing one’s eyes to adjust. Agnes often wished that, if she could not walk with other humans in the sun, she could be a nocturnal animal, one that thrived and fed itself in the dark.
Instead she was a withering intruder in both worlds.
The torches painted every manuscript in gold, even those whose pages Agnes had not yet gilded.
They also shone down softly on the table and the two velvet-backed chairs, one of which would be empty forevermore.
Adele-Blanche’s chair was more plush, more well stuffed, and Agnes briefly considered sitting in it, but her grandmother’s memory, her stubbornly posthumous existence, gusted across her in a cold draft, and she quickly scuttled to the other side of the table.
Quill and ink and parchment were still set out neatly on the table, like a lord’s uneaten meal, because Adele-Blanche had died as she lived, armoring herself in words.
Agnes had been scribbling so furiously that at first she had not noticed that her grandmother had stopped dictating, and indeed, when she finally looked up, she saw that her grandmother’s head was tipped back, her mouth open just slightly, her blank eyes reflecting the torchlight.
At first, she thought her grandmother had merely fallen asleep.
And then Adele-Blanche slumped forward onto the table, cracking her skull against the wood. Red liquid dribbled out from around her hair, which meant that the House of Blood had been robbed of some meager portion of its inheritance.
Agnes sat. She stared down at the parchment, at her grandmother’s arrested final words, committed to the page in Agnes’s elegant script.
These words were nothing remarkable. In fact, Agnes had copied them down half a dozen times before, because Adele-Blanche’s memory had grown frayed with age and her stories had begun to repeat themselves like thread around a spindle.
Yet Agnes did not dare crumple the parchment up.
Instead she set the sullied parchment aside and took a clean sheaf.
She opened the jar of ink and dipped her quill, but doing so seemed to chase every thought from her mind.
She sat vacant and stupid. The letter. You must write the letter.
If only Adele-Blanche had lingered long enough in Agnes’s dreams to offer further guidance.
Her grandmother had given her little practice in writing anything of her own invention.
The manuscripts that occupied the shelves were fat with page after page of baroque script, accompanied by painted illustrations in brazen reds and greens and blues, bound steadfastly between covers of leather and held together with clasps of bronze.
Each one was a beautiful object, the covers engraved and set in jewels, the edges stenciled or lacquered in gold.
And yet none contained a single word that Adele-Blanche had not dictated herself.
They were the stories of their family, of their house.
Of Agnes’s great-grandfather, killed by the cruel sword of Berengar.
Of Castle Peake’s tremendous old library, turned to ash in accordance with the laws of the Covenant.
In each story, the House of Teeth was noble and grand, wise and capable, so far exceeding the crass manner of other humans that they were almost another species entirely.
Technically, this was not treason. There was no specific law of the Covenant that prohibited the relation of old tales, though Agnes knew the king would not be pleased to know of Adele-Blanche’s actions and might have tried to punish them in some indirect manner—if he held any real power at all over the machinations of Adele-Blanche within the obscure rooms of her castle.
When she was young, before Adele-Blanche had halted such indulgent frivolity, Agnes had scribbled away at some small stories of her own.
In them, the mutilated gargoyles came to life and fluttered around the courtyard on their scabrous stone wings.
A man and a woman fell in love, but at night he was cursed to turn into a green serpent.
During the day they slept, ate, and made merry as husband and wife would, but at night, she kept him locked in a cage and fed him mice through the bars.
Another man and another woman fell in love, but they drank from poisoned fountains that filled their hearts with hate, and in the end they murdered each other.
Only then, in the throes of death, did the fountain’s magic loosen its grip.
They came to weeping on a bloody bed of grass, curled together like mollusks, a lover’s dagger in each belly.
Of the gargoyles, Marozia said, “They would sooner fall apart than learn to fly.”
Of the green serpent: “I would not labor so much over such an ugly creature as a snake.”
Of the lovers’ sad end: “There is no such thing as magic fountains.”
Agnes showed the stories to her grandmother, who read them all very intently. Once, then twice. Her brow crumpled over her tiny black eyes.
“What is the meaning of this first one?” Adele-Blanche asked, lifting her head.
“That you can imagine a statue stirring to life? Anything in the world can be imagined, yet not all things are worth putting to paper, unless there is a meaning to them. I can perhaps see the motive of the other two stories. In the first, romance overcomes tragedy; in the second, tragedy overcomes romance.” She smiled her close-lipped smile.
“They are not so poorly written. But do you see how simply I cut straight to the heart of it? For such silly tales, it is better if they are confined to your mind. You may play with them like a horse-on-a-string. Like your cousin dresses her dolls. If you wish to use ink and paper, I must ask that you craft a tale of steeper heights and greater depths. Do you understand?”
Agnes nodded.
“But they are charming little tales. I shall keep them.” Adele-Blanche folded the parchment and tucked it into the sleeve of her gown. Agnes never saw it again.
Agnes could not decide on the opening of the letter.
My dear Liuprand was overfamiliar, yet Your Highness was too formal.
And of course it had to appear as if Marozia had written it herself.
There must be some supplication, but Adele-Blanche’s legacy resisted the act of total surrender.
And although Agnes did not know the prince beyond their single brisk meeting, she thought of his gracious eyes and could not be convinced he was the breed of man who was infatuated with his own power, who fell in love with the grand performance of kneeling.
And so he must fall in love. On this, her grandmother had been unwavering, even as her eyes clouded over and her gaze lost its bright edge; she had impressed it upon Agnes the very hour before she had slumped over in her chair.
Had Adele-Blanche not perished, she would have penned this letter herself.
But she was gone, and so by any means, and against all odds, Agnes was to arrange this.
And while Marozia yawned and stretched beside Liuprand in their marriage bed, Agnes would crawl on her belly through the winding halls of Castle Crudele, overturning every brick, leafing through every book, until she found what Berengar had stolen from them, the ritual that would reassemble the body of Adele-Blanche, who would then take her vengeance upon the royal line and upon Seraph, and would bring the island of Drepane under the rule of death again.