Chapter XXIV Dissolved through Death
XXIV
Dissolved Through Death
Agnes had the pins in her mouth and Marozia had the curse on her tongue, but only Marozia spit hers out.
“By the hands of the Surgeon, I hate this dreadful match,” she said. “I cannot bear it, being scorned and now insulted…the prince does not know me and does not care to. But he is my husband, and nothing can remedy that.”
With a gentle hand, Agnes burrowed one of the pins into her hair.
She hoped the steady motion, like a needle through cloth, would comfort Marozia, but it did not.
Rather she turned around with such abruptness that several of the pins came loose.
This undid an hour of Agnes’s work—yet Agnes was so alarmed by the suddenly heightened distress of her cousin that she couldn’t be bothered to grieve the time lost.
“Let us go,” she whimpered. Unfallen tears made glossy her dark eyes. “Let us return to Castle Peake. I want to go home.”
Agnes let her hands fall from Marozia’s hair. The room was drowned in silence. And like a lamprey, the posthumous existence of Adele-Blanche lithely parted the dark water.
“Grandmother is dead and gone.” Marozia’s voice trembled as she spoke the words. “Truly, she is. Nothing can remedy that.”
What she spoke was akin to treason. Agnes removed the pins from her mouth, set them down upon the table, and felt a tremor go through her entire body.
It was a tremor of fear—Adele-Blanche’s abyssal mouth and its needle-thin teeth edged ever closer—but there was a thread of anger within it that shocked her.
This anger pulsed in her palms, almost unrealized violence.
Of course Marozia spoke so facilely of this; she had never been permitted inside the library; she did not dream of the dead.
She did not know that the profit of her grandmother’s work was already unfolding before them, Marozia’s marriage, Agnes circling and circling her quarry, with each day spent searching Castle Crudele.
Her own rage frightened Agnes so terribly that she stepped away from her cousin, letting the unsanctimonious emotion be expelled like a long-held breath.
“You still believe her stories. About the once-greatness of our house and how it must be restored.” It was an accusation. Marozia got to her feet. “They are only that, Agnes—stories.”
Agnes looked back at her cousin, whose stare crackled like lightning in the limpid summer air.
The revelation she had then was so simple, she was almost embarrassed to tell it to herself.
Yet there it was. As she stood, cloaked as always in her silence, Agnes realized that she was by herself in these dark waters.
Marozia’s dress did not lift and ripple in the current; her skin did not grow cold beneath the watchful eel-eyes of Adele-Blanche.
For all Agnes floundered, she floundered alone.
When had this lonesomeness begun? All their lives, she and Marozia had shared the same bed.
They had both fed of her mother, Manon, until they were old enough that they began to grow breasts of their own.
Marozia is the snake’s hypnotizing gaze, but you are the snake’s deadly fangs.
And indeed Agnes had believed this, but now she knew they were not different aspects of the same animal.
They were separate creatures entirely. One knew the sky and the sunlight, and the other knew only murk and depths.
In this realization, Agnes began to feel obscure not only to her cousin but also to herself.
Her spirit was escaping its vessel. She pressed her hands hard against her abdomen as if to keep it in.
When she felt the words on her skin, the familiar stroke of pain was like a key turning in a lock, and it trapped her insolent soul inside.
If there was any force to rival her silence, it was Marozia’s anger. The lightning still cracked behind her eyes. So Agnes plucked up a piece of parchment and a quill, bent over the desk, and scrawled a message. She held the paper out to Marozia, who snatched it from her hand.
A marriage pact can only be dissolved through death.
Marozia read it once and then crumpled the parchment in her fist. The ink had not even dried, and now it bled its black color into the lines of her palm. It pleased Agnes for some strange reason to see it.
Before Marozia could make a reply, there was a knock upon the door. A cheery voice called out, “Princess?”
Agnes flinched. And Marozia—for all her impatience and lack of wiles—noticed. An unpleasant smile turned up her lips.
“Come in,” she said.
It was not only the fact of being interrupted that galled Agnes; rather, it was who interrupted them.
Ninian opened the door and minced her way into the room, her gait something akin to a puppet with tangled strings.
It was the shoes she wore, with their wooden soles.
Unaccustomed to this small luxury, which kept her feet dry and relatively clean, unlike the leather slippers of peasants, she walked as a young child would, clumsy on its new feet.
There could hardly have been a more inferior interloper, and Agnes had to wonder what, precisely, Liuprand had been thinking. Marozia was accustomed to Agnes’s agile, aristocratic hands. She would never have imagined that her cousin would accept such a coarse creature to attend her. And yet…
Ninian’s gaze passed briefly over Agnes, like a bird’s wing skimming the water, before her eyes landed on Marozia’s face and brightened. She seemed not to register Marozia’s barely checked anger at all, oblivious to the hard set of her jaw and her quivering lips.
“My princess,” Ninian said with a deep curtsy. “I came to see if you perhaps needed help with your dressing.”
There was nothing wrong with the girl, Agnes had to reluctantly admit, aside from her curious eyes and her rough peasant manners, not yet smoothed by noble graces, but the circumstances through which she had come to them confounded her.
Again, Liuprand had proved himself obscure.
His behavior turned her inside herself for answers; it was as though his very soul protested being understood.
Sending the girl was all he had done to even acknowledge Marozia since their disastrous wedding night.
And what a strange gift she was, if Liuprand was indeed trying to smooth tensions with his spurned wife.
Agnes herself had not seen him in the two days after their meeting in the garden of moths.
And Marozia, out of both petulance and shame, had refused to leave her chamber, ordering all her meals to be left outside her door and, other than Agnes, accepting Ninian as her only visitor.
Yesterday Agnes had made her way back to the moth garden and successfully planted the seeds of her grandmother’s treasons.
Her intention in returning was surreptitiously twofold—as much as she could barely admit it, even to herself, she had hoped she might see Liuprand there.
She had hoped to speak to him again in the language of rustling wings.
Yet the garden had been empty, and more and more their meeting had felt like something out of a dream, a hallucination that left no physical evidence behind.
Agnes did not think she was mad enough to conjure up such an elaborate fantasy.
But around the prince, she had begun not to trust the things about herself she had always known.
“Yes,” Marozia said pertly, jolting Agnes from her thoughts. “Come here and finish my hair.”
Eagerly and without reserve, Ninian minced across the room toward her.
Marozia sat back down in the chair, facing away from Agnes.
Ninian bent over, still-callused fingers running gently through Marozia’s hair, with eyes so soft they were almost lambent.
For a moment, Agnes watched them. Marozia preeminent and attended to; Ninian in her worshipful pose.
Bile rose in Agnes’s throat, but it was not a thin bile; it was rich, richer than any wine she had ever been allowed to drink.
It was steeped in malice, yet the aftertaste was pure pleasure.
She could not comprehend this exquisite poison.
She fled the room, afraid of what was at work inside her soul.
The Exarch’s body reeked. Death had been at work on his corpse for two days now, which was not such a long time, but the manner of his passing seemed particularly solicitous, seducing forth the dark tendrils of decay.
Maggots writhed inside his burst tumor with such vigor that it almost reanimated him, his limbs twitching with the rapacious feasting of parasites.
And the flies swarmed so thickly that it looked as if his corpse were laid over by a blanket knitted of iridescent wings and glittering black bodies.
The drone of their ecstatic repast was almost deafening.
“May you be consumed as a coal upon the hearth. May you dry up as water in a pail. May you become as small as a linseed grain, and much smaller than the hip bone of an itch-mite, and may you become so small that you become nothing.”
The Most Esteemed Surgeon nearly had to shout.
Fortunately for him, there were not many gathered around to hear.
There was Agnes, her hands tucked into the folds of her dress.
There was Marozia, staring ahead with a fierce wetness in her eyes.
There was Ninian, devotedly swatting the flies away from her mistress’s face.
And across the pit stood the king and the prince, two paces apart from each other, both of their expressions cloaked in some unreadable sentiment.
Agnes should not have been doing what she was doing, which was trying to catch the prince’s gaze.
She felt embarrassed to find herself making such an effort.
His face was inscrutable to her at a distance.
Yet his posture was poor, his back hunched, his shoulders drawn up around his ears.
This alarmed her. She remembered the bitter stares that had passed between him and the Exarch at the wedding; surely he could not be grieving the man now.
Something else troubled the prince’s soul.
The other noble houses had not been invited to the desecration—the Exarch was not and had never been the conduit of God to them—but their leeches were in attendance. And when the Most Esteemed Surgeon finished his service, he raised a hand, beckoning the first of them forward.
Yet none within the gathered flock shifted. Every sepia robe lay still against its wearer’s body.
The brow of the Most Esteemed Surgeon wrinkled. “Come, then,” he said. “The blood is ready to be harvested.”
Still there was no movement. The sky was as taut and blue as a cauterized wound, and not even the faintest breeze rustled the heavy parchment-colored cloth.
There was some movement at last, though not among the leeches. King Nicephorus took a mighty step forward, the dirt flattening under his foot, as if the very earth shrank from him.
“Well, then?” he called out. “Where are the representatives of the House of Blood?”
The air itself was stiff, hard as it would have been in winter. The only movement was the tapestry of flies, which rippled like it was being shaken out. Agnes did not realize she was pulling apart the skin of her thumb until a blood drop fell into the dirt.
“Answer me!” the king snarled. “I am your sovereign!”
At last came a creaking voice from one of the leeches: “They are not here, Your Highness. We are twelve only.”
Several flies came loose from their mass and seized upon the drop of blood from Agnes. They feasted until the red was gone.
“Not here?” Nicephorus echoed. “They were summoned by royal missive. Does the Master of Blood think I was merely inviting them to tea?”
No response came from the throng of leeches.
They all stared penitently at the ground, as though the shame of this belonged to their whole order.
Perhaps it did. Agnes did not think the king would be particularly discerning when it came to punishing this offense.
He would not seek to carry out justice; he would merely seek to sate his rage.
And the rage was clear on the king’s face.
It devastated his features. His lumpy brow sagged down further over his eyes, and it broke out in beads of sweat that made his skin look even more slack and greasy.
His cheeks were flushed, the broken blood vessels as pink as boils.
His jowls quivered, and spittle formed in the corners of his grimacing mouth.
“This is an unacceptable slight,” he thundered. “And it will not go without remark. The Master of Blood will feel the full might of Berengar’s line—”
“Father,” Liuprand said at last. He laid a hand over Nicephorus’s outstretched arm. “This is a petty slight. A tiltyard taunt. It does not require a rejoinder of clanging blades. I will travel to the House of Blood myself, if I must, to make things right.”
“And what do you plan to do?” The king sneered. “Share a cask of wine with the traitor? Make peace over roast pig and fish?”
No one else among the crowd dared to speak, and even Marozia angled her gaze away.
Discomfort spasmed across the Most Esteemed Surgeon’s face, while the leeches still stared determinedly at the dirt.
Their thoughts were all the same: that the king and the prince shamed themselves in this public scuffle.
These matters ought to have been discussed behind closed doors and in even tones, the conclusions then communicated through pronouncements and orders.
It was as awkward to witness as any spat between father and son, only swelled to truly galling proportions by the preeminence of the quarrelers.
Two such powerful beings in so ignominious a struggle.
Liuprand seemed to realize this, for his voice grew low. “Let us discuss the subject later,” he said. “For now, the desecration must be performed. Truss and Mordaunt can fill the role of the House of Blood. Then we will give the leeches their sustenance and send them on their way.”