Chapter XXIII Truss and Mordaunt #2
Not that the girl was such lively company.
She did not speak as he led her through the chilly corridors; she kept her gaze on the ground, only rarely daring to steal glances up at him with her strange eyes.
In Seraph, such eyes would be considered portentous.
Here on Drepane, Mordaunt kept his superstitions to himself.
But he would be glad to deposit her back in her village and not think of her again.
Horror-touched eyes, they were. Each time he was caught in their path, Mordaunt shivered.
“You will not speak of what you have seen here today, girl,” he said.
“Of course, Your Scrupulousness,” she murmured.
They were not even halfway to the main courtyard gate when footsteps approached from the opposite direction.
Mordaunt stopped and thrust out an arm to prevent Ninian from taking further paces.
A maid, he figured, or perhaps an errant member of the Dolorous Guard.
In truth, the last figure he expected to see turn the corner was the prince himself.
It had not even been an hour since the prince had left them at the chapel, yet now his affect was entirely changed.
Gone was the imperiousness, the slight defiant tilt of his chin.
Now there was a hollow quality to the prince’s gaze.
His eyes were as bright and sea blue as ever, but without the oceanic depths behind them.
“Your Highness,” Mordaunt said, in shock. He bowed, and after a moment of floundering, Ninian found her way to a passable curtsy.
“Where are you taking the girl?” the prince demanded.
Further disconcerted by the lack of preamble, Mordaunt replied hesitantly, “Back to her village, Your Highness.”
“Then for what cause was she brought here in the first place?”
Mordaunt swallowed. He did not want to reveal his master’s activities.
It was not strictly forbidden for a man of his position and stature to seek a bride, but he suspected that the prince would not like the means by which he was conducting his search.
Liuprand was oddly beneficent toward his subjects, far beyond what propriety demanded.
To even the dullest, most inconsequential serf, the prince extended his protections.
“Her eyes, Your Highness,” Mordaunt said—and he was surprised by his own quick inventiveness. “The Most Esteemed Surgeon thought perhaps she was suffering in some manner. But he swiftly determined she was not in poor health. Just a caprice of breeding.”
Liuprand regarded the girl thoughtfully. “It is not the result of an illness?”
“No, Your Highness.”
“I was asking her,” said the prince, “not you.”
Mordaunt’s mouth snapped shut.
“I am not ill, Your Highness,” Ninian whispered. “I was born with these eyes. As was my mother, and her mother.”
The prince nodded. “And what is your name?”
“Ninian,” she answered softly. Then added, “Your Highness.”
The prince stepped forward, out of the falsifying shadows into the beam of light from the window, which made plain a startling truth: His hair was slightly disheveled, as if someone had run through it with an errant hand, and his clothes were rumpled.
All of this was not distressing on its face, but because it was Liuprand, the soon-to-be Golden, Mordaunt had to swallow down an appalled gasp.
The prince had never appeared any less than flawless in every sense, a marble facade without a single crack, without even a chip in the paint—so these subtle imperfections were as garish and ghastly as an open wound.
He might as well have staggered toward them, bleeding shamelessly.
Liuprand was of course perceptive enough to register Mordaunt’s shock, and in response, he let his gaze rest heavily upon him, like a sword on a would-be knight’s shoulder.
The weight of it galled him. He schooled his expression to one of neutrality, and it felt entirely unconscious, as if God himself had reached down and rearranged his features.
Then as quickly as it had been fixed, Liuprand’s gaze flickered away and to the girl’s face instead. “The princess has need of a new handmaiden,” he said. “If you are hale enough, I offer the position to you.”
Mordaunt could not keep back the appalled gasp this time.
No, this diabolically marked girl could not be allowed to remain in the castle, much less in such close proximity to the royal line itself!
The Most Esteemed Surgeon had been seized by a momentary lapse in judgment, moved by his desire for love, but he had corrected this slip of faith within himself quickly and ordered the girl gone.
Yet now—the world would never forget the error his master had made.
And this ill-omened creature would serve at the feet of Drepane’s future queen.
Say no, Mordaunt prayed silently, vainly. Dear God, girl, refuse.
But though it had been framed as a proposal, the prince’s word was always an order. The girl was wise enough to know it.
“Oh,” she said, a flush rising to her face, “yes, Your Highness. That is terribly generous. Yes.”
“Good,” said Liuprand. His tone was clipped. “His Scrupulousness will see that your family is informed and compensated. And he will show you to the princess’s chamber.”
Madly, mutinously, Mordaunt did. He walked like a prisoner to his own execution, chains rattling inside his mind.
The girl did not even have shame enough to hide her pleasure.
A small, quivering smile kept returning to her face, and her eyes were gleaming like two marbles, polished with the spit of the devil himself.
A full-bodied, lustful hatred rose in him.
“You will have to learn all the habits of a good lady,” he said. “Bend low when you curtsy. Your deference should make your knees crack.”
“Yes, Your Scrupulousness.”
“And keep your head down unless you are addressed. Your neck should carry the weight of your servility.”
“Yes, Your Scrupulousness.”
“And do not, ever, speak without being called to. Ignoble voices grate upon noble ears.”
“Yes, Your Scrupulousness.”
They arrived at the door of the princess’s chamber. Mordaunt drew in a breath through his mouth and then let it out through his nostrils. He inhaled deeply of his own animus. Then he raised a resentful hand and rapped once, lightly, upon the wood.
Silence. Perhaps the lady was out of her rooms. Yet Mordaunt doubted he would be so fortunate.
No voice called out from inside, but within moments, he heard footsteps on the floor.
The door opened, and the lady Agnes stood in the threshold.
He had been expecting the princess, and to see her cousin instead made him flinch.
The shock was like drawing out a babe from between a mother’s legs, only to have it slip, purple and stillborn and silent, into your arms.
“Lady,” he said, once he had grieved and then made peace with her presence. “Is the princess within?”
The lady glanced over her shoulder, eyes flickering beneath dense lashes.
Though she moved, her expression never changed; the light did not even seem to refract differently within her shifting gaze.
What an odd creature she was, closer to the dead than to the living.
But Mordaunt quickly amended this thought.
It was not as if she had lived and then perished; it was more as though she had not lived at all.
A preexistent being. A cold flower that had never bloomed.
She must have caught the eye of someone within, for Lady Agnes nodded, then stepped aside to let them through.
The princess was indeed within, wearing a gown of rich, choleric red. Her cheeks had a matching color, and she seemed to radiate warmth, though it was not at all a genial warmth. It was a burning heat, better observed than touched. Her lips were full but unsmiling.
“Princess,” Mordaunt said, bowing until his back ached. Beside him, Ninian gave a much-improved curtsy. “I come to you with a gift from your lord husband.”
Immediately, her dark eyes flared. “A gift?”
Her voice was so hostile that Mordaunt felt physically pricked. “Yes,” he said, rising again. “He said you have need of a new handmaiden. This is the girl Ninian.”
“I am honored to serve you, my princess,” said Ninian, and looked up earnestly, breaking both the third and second rules he had impressed upon her only moments ago.
But the princess did not react to this brazen interjection. Her knifepoint eyes never left Mordaunt’s face. “Why did he say I have need of a new handmaiden?”
“I suppose because he believes you do.”
The princess was a curious creature as well, though perhaps more so when taken in symphony with her cousin.
He could not fathom two more different strains of lady.
They were alike only in the shade of their hair, an ashen black, and otherwise so dissonant it was perturbing.
Yet—they moved in an unerring sort of consonance.
If the princess’s gaze moved to another part of the room, Agnes seemed to know immediately which object she desired from that area and fetched it for her.
If a question was ever posed to Agnes, the princess immediately offered up the answer in her cousin’s stead.
It struck him then, and Mordaunt felt foolish for not realizing it before.
This strange symbiosis between the ladies had to be the result of unfortunate circumstance—how many handmaidens could there be in that ghoulish, remote castle the House of Teeth called home?
They had learned to attend each other’s needs in such an unconscious way out of necessity, and seeing this, Liuprand had sought to relieve Agnes and the princess of this shared burden.
A perceptive man he was, and a good husband. Mordaunt was quite impressed.
But the princess did not appear remotely grateful for her husband’s gift. Her mouth—which was a very pretty mouth—twisted and made itself rather ugly. Light bounced sharply off the beads of that gruesome chain around her throat.
“I have no need of a new handmaiden,” she said venomously. “You may tell my husband that.”
Ninian looked so crestfallen that Mordaunt almost pitied her, and he might have been moved even to kiss her with how relieved he was that the princess was rebuffing the diabolical creature.
Joy began to rise in him at the thought of returning the girl to her village, watching her vanish among the crowd of stinking peasants, never to be seen again.
This dalliance with devilry would be dashed from the castle’s memory.
But before he could reply, the lady Agnes began to shake her head furiously.
Brow furrowing, the princess took her cousin’s hand and guided her to the far corner of the room.
There Mordaunt could hear snatches of her whispering, though he could not pick out any words.
He craned his neck, desperately curious to know if Agnes would speak to the princess in return.
It was said that she remained completely silent by will alone, not for any physical muteness.
Of course, rumors spread nonetheless—rumors that the lady Agnes did speak, yet only for her cousin’s ears.
But Mordaunt could not glimpse her mouth moving; her lips stayed pressed into a nearly colorless line.
She nodded and gestured but formed no words.
He again had the impression of her as a preexistent being, or perhaps as a babe born too soon, without all the faculties and functions that made one fit for the human world.
Mordaunt had delivered such babes: cold, tearless creatures with their hearts on the outside of their bodies, too small or ill formed to pump blood.
In thinking of this, Mordaunt suddenly found the lady Agnes mightily interesting. Her cousin was the beautiful one, but her bright liveliness was easily processed. She required no further inquiry. But Agnes—he could have pinned her down under glass and studied her as he would a peculiar insect.
So lost was he in these thoughts, he did not notice the princess stomping back over until she spoke again.
“Fine,” she said. “I will take the girl. And tell my husband thank you.”
The words sounded like half-chewed food, spat out because she did not like the taste.
“Very well, Princess,” said Mordaunt.
He turned to go, and he should have been happy at his dismissal, happy that he would no longer have to bear witness to this folly, that he would no longer be compelled to look into those unholy eyes.
But he felt inexplicably bereft. And so partway across the threshold, he glanced back over his shoulder.
The scene had changed within moments, the players rearranged, as if the room were the set of a masque: Agnes and Marozia stood slightly apart, facing each other, yet neither meeting the other’s eyes.
And Ninian stood between them, several inches shorter, though perhaps only as a consequence of the poverty that left every peasant with a burdened and stooped back.
A few weeks in the castle, sleeping on feather mattresses instead of straw, and she might be of a height to the ladies.
She looked especially grubby now, the dirty and sun-chapped cast to her skin thrown into harsh relief against the marble-white faces of the cousins and their fine aristocratic features.
But the shock of seeing Ninian between them was not this physical reality; rather it was something intangible and felt only in the air, an atmospheric augury.
He had the sense of a great lute string being plucked, reverberating out a lonesome final note, and then snapping.
And he felt a removed sort of grief for the bard whose broken instrument would never be played again.