Chapter XXI The Language of Rustling Wings
XXI
The Language of Rustling Wings
Adele-Blanche could not manage to twist her way into Agnes’s dreams, yet her sleep was not unperturbed.
She was assaulted instead by a bizarre array of visions, which did not particularly disturb her but were vexing nonetheless for the little sense they made and the lack of continuity between them.
She saw again a stonemason laying bricks.
She saw an ancient man in stained white robes, lying face down on a cot, his hoary face painted in candlelight.
She saw a set of enormous stone doors, impenetrably gray, with frayed ropes fed through small notches in the rock so they could be forced open; so heavy they were that a simple knob would not do.
The bolt across them was pure steel, and it gleamed with its great mass.
It would take two men, perhaps three, to lift it.
A vault? What could be so precious that it required such elaborate means to hold it within?
These were dreams she had never had before, not since coming to Castle Crudele. And she had dreamed them without the aid of herbs and smoke. The same question as always pricked at her: Fantasy or prophecy?
But Agnes was thrust into the waking world before she could glean any more knowledge from her dreams. She had not closed the drapes last night, and now sunlight drenched the chamber as if poured from a golden urn. Removing Marozia’s hand from her waist, she rose.
The matter of Liuprand’s rejection fell heavily onto her shoulders the moment she stood.
In the clarity of day, no longer warped by night’s freakish shadows, it seemed less strange, yet even more dire.
This was Marozia’s one task, to make the prince fall in love.
And though she had not failed precisely, Agnes did not know a man alive who could be persuaded into love without the coercion of corporeal pleasure.
No affection could blossom in a bed of cold bodies.
She did not truly want the directives of her grandmother in this matter.
Agnes knew she would not see it as Marozia’s failure alone.
To Adele-Blanche, Marozia was half a child still, and it was Agnes’s duty to arrange her into her place, no matter how ignominious or ugly the task became.
She picked at the pale band of flesh around her nail.
An old scab, tiny and black like an itch-mite, came loose and fell to the ground.
It was then that she saw the ring. She had not removed it last night.
Unaccustomed to wearing jewelry, Agnes had forgotten she had it on at all.
This revived her wondering: What was the purpose of the gift?
Had he always intended to rebuff Marozia and, if so, did he hope the ring would help smooth over the pain and tensions wrought by this great slight?
This thought made her want to remove the ring and retire it to some secret corner of her trunk, but she could not afford to be seen snubbing Liuprand so openly.
And in the most obstructed and forbidden part of her mind—her heart?
—it would have pained her to be rid of it.
She remembered how concernedly Liuprand had looked upon her at the banquet, with the king’s grip forming bruises on her arm.
She remembered Nicephorus’s hateful, slinking glare as he released her.
Liuprand had maligned his father for her sake, why?
It made no sense to try to endear himself to the one cousin, and the lesser lady by far, while planning to offend the other, greater cousin, his lady wife.
All this rumination without agenda was useless. Agnes dressed in her accustomed violet-gray and tucked the seedlings into the pocket of her gown. While she pondered the wiles of the prince, she could at least play her role to perfection.
She sought a garden. This was no simple task.
Castle Peake was known for its maze-like halls, its dark and vexing stairwells, and its confounding, precarious parapets, but Castle Crudele was a beast of another order.
She guessed it as three, four times larger, if not in height then in area, for the moment that she turned one corner, she would be confronted with no less than three distinct paths down different corridors, which, at least, were flooded with light from the many windows near the high ceilings.
However, this gave her the disadvantage of being unable to peer through them to gauge her proximity to the courtyard.
Agnes went down one hallway that was decorated on both walls with garish, heavy tapestries, depicting a massacre of revenants.
She stopped to examine the embroidered renditions of these pale creatures and was surprised to find they had a certain unearthly beauty about them.
Their limbs were overlong, their skin blanched to terrible whiteness, but death and its undoing chiseled their features to loveliness, as a sculptor carves a statue.
Old men lost their wrinkles and regained their rotted teeth.
Children replaced their tottery steps with a graceful, loping gait.
Sharp cheekbones emerged from previously flabby cheeks; broken noses were slanted back into place.
And their eyes, while black from end to end, glittered richly, like water under a midnight sky.
Agnes traced her finger across one of these beautified faces. Did the clandestine cure for death lie here, in the threads of this tapestry? She would return to study it later. Perhaps she would ask her grandmother what she thought when they spoke again in the misty terrain of her dreams.
For now she needed to hurry on. Should she be caught wandering the halls alone, much less regarding this particular tapestry with so much scrutiny, she would be made to explain herself. Granddaughter of Adele-Blanche, overly engrossed in death. The king would be leery, even furious.
So she turned the corner, leaving the tapestry behind.
Yet another corridor was lined on both sides with spears, their tips reddened with ancient blood.
Another was glutted with cats, fat-bellied tabbies with mauled ears who raised their hackles at her and hissed until Agnes retreated.
Another was lined with birdcages, though these cages held no birds, only feathers and crusted droppings.
Did death lurk here, in their absence? Agnes felt increasingly fearful that she would be discovered, and she quickened her pace yet more.
The most curious corridor of all was one that was empty save for a glazed clay statue at the end, in the shape of a handsome youth with a collar around his throat.
There was a crown askew on his head, and he was missing his hands.
Agnes could not tell if they had been broken off, or if they had never been sculpted in the first place.
The statue bore the cracks of age but had no coating of dust, suggesting it was visited and polished regularly.
The youth’s stare was so baleful that it made Agnes shudder.
She turned away and hurried down another corridor, then immediately thought she should have examined this statue more closely, for perhaps it held a secret clue.
It was surely the most enigmatic thing she had encountered on this treasonous journey.
But when she tried to retrace her steps, she could not find it again.
At last, as a current carries a fish, a narrow corridor bore Agnes into the daylight.
She blinked and raised a hand against the sudden brightness of the sun.
The courtyard was rather compact, dusty, more scruff and yellow earth than growing leaves and reaching vines.
It was not wild enough to look untamed; rather it appeared merely abandoned, the plants left to their own apathetic devices.
Agnes fingered the stem of a dandelion, which curled upward from a spindly nest of goosegrass.
So light a touch, and still the plant resisted her, releasing its seeds instantly.
The white down scattered and then was carried away on a thin breeze.
Here, in this courtyard, she would commit treachery.
Even in the sunlight, she felt cold; she glanced again and again over her shoulders, scanning the windows that looked down into the area from above, searching for watchful faces.
And though she found none, she could not exorcise her fear.
If she were caught, not even Marozia’s new status as princess would protect her.
But this was her task, as ever, and so Agnes knelt.
With a cupped hand, she began to dig a small hole in the yellow, cracked earth.
The soil did not come away easily. It burrowed up beneath her fingernails.
She reached and reached, searching for the deeper place where she might find moisture, yet it was dry all the way down.
Nothing would grow here. A dejected feeling started in the center of her chest and unfurled outward.
It made her limbs feel leaden, and her head too heavy for her neck to hold aloft.
Once more she had failed. Agnes pressed the petals into her palm, feeling the bite of pain as her tender fingers flexed. She was mired in this gloomy mood when she heard someone call out her name.
“Lady Agnes?”
By now she recognized the sound of these syllables on the prince’s lips.
Yet when she did turn, Liuprand still found a way of surprising her.
It was not his presence alone, which was unexpected, for why would the prince find himself in this neglected corner of Castle Crudele where even the plants only halfheartedly sought out the sun?
Rather it was his aura, which ordinarily seemed so preeminently golden but was now somehow paler, reduced.
His doublet was perhaps a shade closer to gray than to blue.
His stride, always deliberate, was hesitant, as if he approached a creature he thought might startle and run at the very sight of him.