Chapter XX Unstained Sheets
XX
Unstained Sheets
A visitor did come to her, in the most arcane hours of the night, and it was not sleep. It was a living creature, flesh and bone, and it came to her racked with heaving sobs. Marozia.
Agnes shot up in bed, blinking away the film in her eyes.
The shadows were glimmery and deep, like the realm beneath the surface of the water, when rippled through with overworld light.
Marozia thrust the door shut behind her with a thud loud enough that it would surely wake Waltrude in the next room over. Hurriedly Agnes got to her feet.
“He would not touch me,” Marozia bawled.
Her hands were curled up into fists and pressed to her eyes, obscuring most of her face.
“He invited me to his bed, yet he left such a berth between us that I could not even reach out and brush his fingers. When he slept, he faced away from me. He averted his gaze as I undressed. As though I disgusted him.”
So bewildered herself, Agnes could not very heartily comfort Marozia. She drew her cousin into her arms and patted her back, but her movements were made stiff with shock.
Marozia’s tears ran into her skin, slippery and hot.
They soaked her exposed collarbone and the hollow of her throat.
Marozia’s forehead was pressed so powerfully against Agnes’s shoulder that she felt like a mule under its burden, and she tried to shift subtly without disturbing her cousin.
Then at last, at last, Marozia raised her head and spoke.
“He hates me,” she whispered hoarsely. Her face was as red as a fever, and her eyes had the gloss of tears. “Am I not lovely enough for him? Not as beautiful as a bride of Seraph?”
In her gauzy nightgown, which clung to the curves of her body as if it were soaking wet, and even with her countenance so flushed by her impassioned weeping, there could be no disputing Marozia’s beauty.
Vibrant, ripe, and soft, like a flower-field nymph in a painting of old.
She was not the blood of Seraph, true, but was that not the purpose of their union?
Why would Liuprand have pursued this match, only to rebuff Marozia so coldly in their marriage bed?
A union was not fruitful until it bore fruit.
Until there was a child born who would yoke the royal line to this ancient house of Drepane, a child who might serve as a bridge between two feuding families, a child who might be held up as shining proof that there could be a peaceful joining of old blood and new, that the Seraphine planned no longer to coldly rule from their fortress but rather to mingle among their subjects, coming down from on high like a god from his mount.
Agnes doubted that Marozia was considering all this as her body trembled with now-muted weeping.
The insult had been to her person, not to the House of Teeth.
Agnes felt her belly go soft with pity, and it was a strange feeling, unfamiliar to her.
There was a sharp and acrid morsel of perversity in it.
The wine inside the watered-down drink, bitterness just barely coating her tongue.
She was surprised by how quickly that little poison began to spread. Because she was then able to step away from her cousin, and lean over her desk, and scrawl something on a bit of parchment, all while feeling the strength that this small venom pulsed through her blood.
She showed the paper to Marozia, who was still swallowing thickly to contain her sobs.
Try again, it read.
The words of Adele-Blanche, as dictated by her ghost.
Marozia blinked her tear-daggered lashes. “Try? But he…he did not want me.”
Agnes was not certain this time whether it was her grandmother’s posthumous existence that moved her quill.
Try harder.
Silence. Finally came the haughty breath, the hackling of Marozia’s shoulders. “You are not the Mistress of Teeth.”
Agnes grew still, her breath gathering like dust in her throat.
“You are here to give me counsel,” Marozia went on, sniffing. “Not orders. Not as our grandmother would have done…”
Agnes remained frozen, hands clasped at her waist. The shadows rippled and deepened, as a great fish leaves its wake in the water. For several more moments, Marozia simply gulped air, chest rising and falling, but there had never been a silence that her cousin did not know how to fill.
“Tell me, then,” she said at last. “Not your will. Tell me what Grandmother would wish for me.”
Agnes had never been sure how much Marozia had known.
The profit of her elixirs and potions, her grandmother’s ministrations, or the constitution of her dreams. Marozia knew that Adele-Blanche plotted for their house’s advancement through this marriage, yet what more?
Her grandmother had always wished for Marozia to be ignorant of the truth.
Of that much, at least, Agnes was certain.
Agnes tore the pieces of parchment into the gasping hearth as Marozia let out a small whimper.
Then she went to her trunk and took out the mandrake and henbane, the ingloriously crumpled leaves, edges tinged with rot.
They were her last and she could not use them now; she had to save them, so that she could plant more.
Marozia approached her and took Agnes’s mangled hands in her own.
Never once had she remarked upon the carnage wrought by and wrought upon her cousin’s fingers, just as she had never asked what secrets lay within the library, what thoughts preyed upon Agnes’s mind.
She merely turned Agnes’s hands over, and then over again as she pleased, as one would an embroidery hoop.
“Tomorrow,” she said softly. “I am so…I must sleep.”
And so she, the Mistress of Teeth, guided her Lady of the Bedchamber into their bed.
She covered them both with the blankets.
She curled around Agnes, as a mollusk folds its own legs under itself, and brushed Agnes’s lips with her thumb.
She did not seem to notice the blood on the sheets, the blood spilled by her cousin’s impassioned torment, yet Agnes was gripped in the rictus of this knowledge: that here, in their bed, the sheets had been bloodied, but in the marriage bed where Liuprand slept alone, the sheets were white and clean. No lust had sullied them.
Sleep did not deign to visit Agnes alone, but even it bowed to the whims of Drepane’s newly anointed princess. When Marozia yawned and sniffled, burying her face into Agnes’s shoulder, sleep drew its mighty arms over them both.