Chapter XVI Two Gowns
XVI
Two Gowns
The gown was an elephantine thing, almost a creature itself.
The bodice was ivory, stitched through with the most intricate embroidery of gold, flourishes and vines and minute flowers, and whenever Agnes looked closer, she could see some shape that she had previously missed: a bird caching itself among the leaves, an upside-down cat’s face camouflaged among volutes and plumes.
The skirt swelled from beneath the bodice like a puff of pastry, planked with alternating stripes of ivory and gold.
A narrow, plaited belt was fixed around the waist of the gown, and chains of gold draped down, giving the appearance that Marozia was wearing a second skirt made of delicate and impractical mail.
It also created no small amount of commotion when she moved.
The sleeves were fitted and again stitched through with gold, baring tiny diamonds of Marozia’s skin between the embroidery.
But most exceptional of all were the shoulders.
They jutted up tremendously, crafted not out of cloth but out of corset boning, and looked for all the world like a rib cage picked clean.
Agnes imagined that the dressmaker had thought of this feature’s avian qualities, that he had intended for it to resemble wings, but she could not dispossess her mind of its glorious horridness.
Unintentionally, the dressmaker had crafted the most fitting gown for a noble lady of Drepane.
Marozia’s throat bore the ancestral necklace of their house.
Her hair was held back with the high bridal hood, a braiding of white and gold, the cumulus veil floating out behind her like a spirit escaping its vessel.
The golden train was so heavy that Agnes had to practice lifting it, trying to determine the proper way to haul its weight without her knees buckling.
She tested this as Marozia paced about the room, oblivious to Agnes’s endeavors.
“It suits me perfectly, does it not?” Anxiously Marozia fingered the necklace of teeth. “Every stitch and seam. It was the old queen’s wedding gown. The dress of Liuprand’s mother.”
Agnes let the train tumble out of her arms in fear that she would split the seams of her own gown if she continued in this enterprise.
Her dress had also been provided by Castle Crudele, and it perfectly suited Agnes’s stature as well.
It was a greatly diminished version of Marozia’s, lacking those wondrous bird-sleeves, and where the golden embroidery gleamed radiantly against the ivory of Marozia’s gown, Agnes’s dress was stitched in silver.
The color did not shine against the cloth’s overall hue, which was a very diluted lilac, so pale as to almost be white, and even resembling gray in certain ungenerous slants of light.
Her hair was caught up in a silver hairnet.
“It needed no alterations, the seamstress said. That is a good portent, surely. That this gown was meant for me.”
Agnes nodded. She had not had much occasion to examine her own reflection in the mirror, but she caught a glimpse of it now.
Those two fickle strands of hair had come loose to frame her face, and she felt a startlingly powerful surge of anger when she saw them.
The strength of this fury surprised and terrified her.
Marozia inhaled suddenly, a quick but lusty gasp. “Agnes,” she said.
So rarely did her cousin address her directly by name that this startled Agnes further. She looked up.
“Is it wrong,” Marozia said softly, “to be afraid?”
A slow moment passed between them, silence wreathing the air.
And then Marozia came to her in such a brisk manner that it was violent, crashing into Agnes and seizing her about the waist, pressing their bodies flush together.
Agnes tucked her face against her cousin’s shoulder.
Even with layers of silk and corset boning between them, her liveliness was overwhelming, the urging of her breasts against Agnes’s, the overly sweet smell of the orange blossom oils in her hair.
Marozia raised a hand to caress the back of her neck. She gently fingered the ribbons of Agnes’s corset. Then she whispered, “Swear to me. Swear you will always be my Lady of the Bedchamber, even when I must share my bed with the prince.”
Agnes closed her eyes, lashes feathering against Marozia’s bare collarbone.
In the matter of an hour, she would be princess-consort, the most powerful and esteemed woman in Drepane.
Her words were no longer requests; they were orders.
And somehow this made it far easier for Agnes to lift her head and meet her cousin’s gaze and nod without hesitation.
Marozia smiled at her. She tucked back the strands of hair from Agnes’s face. Then she murmured something about ill-fitting slippers and rushed from the room, dragging that heavy golden train behind her as if it weighed nothing at all.
Agnes stood in place, arms fixed at her sides.
The strands of hair slipped down again, and this time she made no effort to push them back into place; she simply let them fall, and with her head bowed they obscured her vision, filmy streaks of black like wet lashes, though of course she did not cry.
Her eyes did not even burn with the desire to weep.
For weeks, preparations for the wedding had busied and diverted her attention; she’d not had the time to return to the library or search elsewhere in the palace.
Agnes would have gone to the library again, eagerly, even if she had found nothing there, in the hope of seeing the prince again—yet now that foul and perfidious desire passed over her, like a stone skimming the water’s surface.
What she did feel, rooted there, was far worse.
The slippery and foul bile of envy. She felt it in her stomach.
She tasted it in her throat. And each time she thought she had crushed this sensation, anatomized it, desecrated it, she could pass weeks, sometimes months without it, but then it would come seeping back.
And worse still was the fear that it was a part of her, as essential as a heart or lungs or a set of teeth, without which one could not eat, and if she tried to kill it or starve it out, she would wither and die before the envy did.
But these thoughts broke like a fever as the door to the bedchamber scraped open.
It was Waltrude, dressed for the wedding in a very simple shift of white, tied at her waist with what appeared to be no more than a tasseled rope. Waltrude regarded her up and down, and it was only now that Agnes realized she had very canny eyes. Guarded, icy green, and sharp.
“My lady,” she said. “The ceremony is nearly upon us.”
Agnes nodded.
Waltrude did not prod further. Instead she crossed the room until she was standing before Agnes and held something out in the open palm of her hand.
“Here,” she said. “I was instructed to give this to you. A gift, from the prince.”
It was a ring: a thin silver band with very fine engravings, so delicate she could have spent no small amount of time examining them to see every detail.
And in the center, two modest white pearls enclosing a larger—black, but iridescent when it was turned to catch the pale shafts of sunlight.
She had never seen one with this coloring before.
She looked up at Waltrude in bewilderment.
“I was not given to know the prince’s reasoning,” Waltrude said. “But perhaps he meant it as something like a dowry. You are the bride’s only family, after all.”
If that was so, it was overly generous, beyond what propriety demanded.
If he had meant it as a gift for her, unconnected to her kinship with Marozia, it was a clever one.
Nothing so opulent as to disgrace his wife, yet still solicitous enough to flatter, showing he knew the color of her gown and had perhaps even noticed her preference for silver over gold.
It sat just within the boundaries of decorum, pressing at their limits but not infringing them.
That was too absurd for Agnes to entertain.
Liuprand must have seen this as some way of fulfilling his bridegroom’s duties, nothing more.
She had tried to evict the memories of their encounter in the library from her mind, and it would not help, in such efforts, to wear a reminder of the prince on her person.
Still, it would be a garish breach of etiquette to refuse, so Agnes took the ring and slipped it on her finger. The pearls did not glint powerfully in the light as a precious stone would, but their chameleonic sheen showed a soft rainbow of colors, subtle and almost secret.
Then, quick as the bite of a viper, Waltrude reached out and grabbed her wrist.
Numbed by shock, Agnes did not protest as Waltrude took her other wrist as well, yoking them together and pulling them toward her. Waltrude turned Agnes’s hands over in hers, eyes narrowing as she inspected them.
“Why do you destroy yourself?” she asked.
One of Agnes’s nail beds was bleeding. She must have picked at them just now, unconsciously. She tried to tug her hands away, but Waltrude would not let go. She was then forced to inspect her own hands with just as much scrutiny, greater scrutiny than she had really ever given them before.
She was surprised by how gruesome she found them.
Not only had all the nail beds been stripped away, but the skin around them had also been picked and peeled until all was a tender dark pink, pulsing with below-surface blood.
In some places, the breakthrough of blood was merely imminent; in others, the barrier had already been breached, and red was scored through the mangle of white, transforming her fingers into something that resembled meat more than living flesh.
Agnes lifted her head and met Waltrude’s gaze defiantly.
“You are a lovely girl,” Waltrude said. “Not as vibrant as your cousin, but some men prefer a remote beauty. It is a shame to ruin yourself when you are young and might still find a fruitful match.”
At last Agnes managed to jerk her hands free. She stalked to the opposite end of the room and glared fiercely at the old woman, until, with a loud, indignant sigh, Waltrude turned and left her.
It was only after she was gone that Agnes considered a third possibility.
She had spent those many hours sitting beside Liuprand in the library.
He had taken notice of what she had read and written.
Had he taken notice of her hands, too? Perhaps—she tried not to think it, yet the notion fought its way to the forefront of her mind—he wanted her to know that he had seen them.
Always, she realized, he had seen her. When no one else bothered even to look.