Chapter XXXII Pliny
XXXII
Pliny
As if a spigot had been turned, a flood of bodies washed out of the great hall.
The Dolorous Guard, a tributary of gray, carried the prince and the lady Agnes along their course.
Then Unruoching, whose vanishing was as quick and cold as a floe of ice borne down a fast-melting river.
In mere moments, the hall was left parched and empty.
Save for Pliny and the lord of the castle. Fredegar exhaled loudly and slumped over, Pliny rushing to his side to support his master’s weight.
“Thank you, Your Scrupulousness,” Fredegar murmured.
Pliny frowned. A thousand and one times he had told Fredegar not to bother with such stilted formalities.
He had pulled forth the man from between his mother’s legs, wiped from him the plum-colored mucuses of birth, and clipped the fleshy cord with his own shears.
They were long past this pomp and mummery.
“Would you like to go to your chambers, my lord?” Pliny asked.
Fredegar gave a tight nod. “Yes. We cannot discuss these matters here.”
Thus began the journey to the master’s chambers, which were not far but felt quite distant to Pliny, aware that the castle had been invaded by outsiders with their inscrutable agendas.
These halls were as well known to Pliny as his brain’s own circuitry, but with the intrusion of the prince and his retinue, they began to feel obscure, strange.
The corners, where neither the sun nor the torchlight reached, seemed impenetrable with shadows.
Once they were within Fredegar’s chambers, Pliny shut the door and his master went immediately over to the table, where his carafe of wine was waiting. He poured a glass, drank deeply of it, then set it down again with a burdened sigh.
“Truly it is incredible,” he murmured, “how a man’s stars can change within the span of a moment.”
“For the worse?” Pliny asked. “Or for the better?”
Fredegar smiled with wine-stained lips. “I was hoping you would tell me.”
Pliny flexed his fingers, the fingers that had pulled the master and his son from the womb, the ones that had performed a thousand desecrations at Lord Fredegar’s heed, yet were still remarkably smooth and strong, unmarred by the blotches of age or the creases of a lifetime of labor.
Because rarely did these efforts feel like labor when he knew he was performing them for his gentle master and for the noble House of Blood.
“I fear you do not have much choice in the matter,” Pliny said at last. “But you are wise enough to know that. The king’s orders cannot be refused.
” He paused. “I do wonder what his purpose is with this match. If still he is wary of your treachery and thinks binding you to the lady Agnes will keep you in check. Now that the Crown is allied forever with the House of Teeth.” Again he paused.
“But it is a profitable match, as you said. You could hardly hope for a wife of finer pedigree.”
At that, Fredegar inhaled sharply. “You know the stories, don’t you, Pliny? Do you think they are true?”
Once more, Pliny looked down at his hands. This time, he found them to be slightly more infirm. Tremulous and showing their age.
As remote as Castle Peake was, it could not hold all its secrets within. Rumors rolled down the mountains like mist. And for the oldest men and women on Drepane—older even than Pliny himself—with the longest-reaching memories, these were more than idle gossip.
“I do,” he admitted. “No one can say for sure, of course—now that the old woman is dead. The truth may have perished with her. But…” He trailed off, then shook his head, as if not to be consumed too inexorably by this smog of ugly thoughts. “…for myself, yes, I do believe them to be true.”
Fredegar was silent. He lifted his wineglass again but did not drink from it. At last, he said, “I had hoped you would say otherwise.”
Pliny merely looked back at him grimly.
Fredegar sighed. “Such degenerate cruelty within Castle Peake. Old crimes and old sins. I never knew the man, the grandfather of Adele-Blanche, who perished under the blade of Berengar. But perhaps that one murder was just. I cannot fathom—to force your granddaughter, at fifteen, to bear your child.”
“Children,” Pliny corrected softly.
“Yes.” Fredegar swirled his cup. “Children. The mothers of the princess and the lady Agnes. They were never married. Adele-Blanche rejected all suitors. I wonder, by what means were her daughters bred?”
“Adele-Blanche would have her title pass only through her female heirs.” This fact, at least, was known by all, and had alone birthed some of the grisliest rumors.
The conditions that might cause a woman to rule would, in the minds of men, necessarily be repugnant.
“Perhaps she did not wish for her grandfather’s crimes to be repeated.
It is suspected—merely suspected, of course—that she used peasant men for breeding stock, as one harvests the seed of bulls to propagate their herd.
Her daughters impregnated by nameless, faceless serfs.
It is a clever solution, I must confess.
Her line has remained unsullied, the power of her daughters and granddaughters unchallenged by male relatives. ”
Fredegar nodded slowly. The wine in his cup formed a small red tempest. “I do not see the stain of incest upon the lady Agnes. She is beautiful, no?”
“In a peculiar way, as a statue, or a corpse before its desecration.” Pliny tried to inject his voice with humor, but his master did not smile. “But yes, my lord. She is lovely.”
“I did not think I would ever be prevailed upon to marry again, after Eupraxia.” Fredegar cast his gaze out the window, and Pliny wondered what he was seeing there.
Eupraxia, dancing as she once had in the courtyard, pale flowers in her hair?
She had been so young then, and so had he.
“I have often wondered if my heart has become too scabrous and shriveled for love.”
“Love and marriage have little to do with each other,” Pliny said gently.
“True words. It will be enough, I think, to at last have a woman to share my bed. I have missed that these many years.”
“Better still, the lady is young,” Pliny agreed. “There is ample time for her to bear you many children, should you wish it.”
At that, Fredegar’s gaze snapped up. “And why should I wish it? I have an heir, and my heir has a son. My line is secured.”
The sudden hostility in his master’s voice was not unexpected, though it perturbed Pliny nonetheless.
Lord Fredegar was a wise man, humane and genial.
That he could have begotten a son so different in nature was a source of much philosophical musing on Pliny’s part.
Yet Fredegar was not inclined to suffer any slights against Unruoching, no matter how measured or subtle.
The love of a father for his son was something Pliny admittedly could not, and would not, ever understand.
It was greater than a love of an artist for his painting, a yeoman for his crop, a diver for his treasure.
Pliny wondered if it rivaled the love he had for his own lord.
“I only meant that she is fertile, and a child is likely to be produced from your coupling,” Pliny said hurriedly. “The lady herself might wish to be a mother. But I am not given to know.”
“It may be difficult to ply such truths from her,” said Fredegar, “if she is indeed as silent as the prince says.”
Pliny was not remote enough from his humanity for that piece of knowledge to pass beneath his interest. He wondered if perhaps that was the stain of incest upon the lady Agnes, that perhaps her tongue did not work as it should, some consequence of ill breeding.
But he did not think his master would appreciate these musings being spoken aloud, either.
“That does not trouble me,” Fredegar said suddenly, as if he had decided the fact right then and there. “Eupraxia was near mute, at the end—do you remember? When sickness stole her voice. And then her breath.”
“I remember,” Pliny said.
Fredegar stepped away from the window and turned his back, so that his large body partially obscured the light.
What little sun could leaked down around him, over his strong shoulders, in the gap between his arms and his torso, between his legs.
There was his outline on the floor, a shadow man, carved out from these beams of light.
This shadow man quivered, growing wispy at his edges.
But the real Lord Fredegar had no such infirmity.
He was like the proud hull of a ship, streaked with the white lashings of salt, yet hard-carved and pointing ever forward.
If Pliny had not seen this shadow man stretched and shuddering across the floor, he would have feared nothing in the world; he would have believed his master could endure all.
But as it was, the shadow was as real as the man who cast it.
“Thank you for your counsel,” Fredegar said, lifting his gaze to Pliny’s. “It is wise as always. By the skillful shaping of the Surgeon’s hands, I shall wed the lady Agnes tomorrow.”
Pliny stepped out of his master’s chamber and closed the door quietly behind him.
The corridor still felt to some degree impure, tainted by the obscure agendas of strangers.
The shadows were deeper with the waning sun, and the light had a waxy tinge of gray, as though it were infected.
He wondered if he alone was given to sensing it, or if others could perceive this sickness within the House of Blood.
He was not very far down the corridor when another man’s shadow stretched along the wall, warping and straining as he rounded the corner.