Chapter XXXIII Gray for Grief
XXXIII
Gray for Grief
There was a tall pendulum clock in Agnes’s chambers.
It was carved out of black bog-wood; indeed, it looked as though it could have been dredged intact from the peatlands outside the castle, the fossilized instrument of the ancient peoples who had inhabited the island well before the plague and well before Berengar.
Their bodies often surfaced from beneath the lime-green waters, their skin dyed charcoal, their bodies scrolled and tiny like a fetus wrenched too early from the womb.
Their hair was always the same gorgeous russet, no matter what shade it had been in life.
And indeed, while there could be very little determined about their lives, their deaths were writ all over them.
They were found with ropes around their necks, swords plunged through their desiccated chests.
There were laws written into the Septinsular Covenant about how to deal with these corpses from the bog.
They were too frail for desecration—half the houses would have been bereft of their inheritances, including the House of Blood—so instead their bodies were trampled under the leeches’ feet, squelched into matter so small it could never be revived.
Agnes looked through the window, over the castle’s gray wall, and beyond, to the marshes.
Black trees rose from the shallow water like rain-slicked horses, dark but arrested in motion, as if someone had jerked the reins upward and then time had frozen.
The air had grown too stiff around them, molding them into these poses.
Everything was still. There was not even the ripple of a silver-backed fish.
She was overcome, suddenly, by the notion that it was beautiful.
It seemed to come from outside of herself, this knowledge, as if someone had tugged her by the sleeve and whispered it into her ear, but of course it was only her mind supplying the thought.
Her mind—perhaps she had grown too obscure to herself even to recognize her thoughts as her own.
But she thought the stillness was beautiful, like an oil painting.
Such a one that she could pass every day and be reassured that it would never change.
Such a one that was lovelier than whatever scene it portrayed, because all the grueling little details—the white feces of birds on the dark branches, the brown of dying grasses, the flowers where there shouldn’t be flowers—were taken away by the stroke of a dreaming artist’s brush. None of life’s painful mushrooms grew.
If I live here, she thought, I will not live. The epiphany was as beautiful as the tapestry of a hunt that had never been.
“Agnes?”
Liuprand’s voice startled her. She turned toward him, away from the window.
He did not stand near to her. It would take him three strides—perhaps four—to reach her side.
He stood near the pendulum clock, across the room from the large canopy bed.
Behind a screen, Agnes could see the outline of a deep porcelain tub.
This was the chamber of a lady, not just a passing guest. Her trunks had already been opened and their contents placed upon shelves and within wardrobes.
Liuprand knew that, and it cowed him. His gaze was on the floor.
“Lord Fredegar seems to be a gentle man,” he said, after a moment of her watching him expectantly. “By all accounts, he cherished the wife who came before.”
Agnes nodded.
“And he holds no ill will toward my father. He will not…” Liuprand raised a hand and ran it through his hair. “He will not endanger his relationship with the Crown by mistreating the Mistress of Teeth.”
Again Agnes nodded. Her moth rustled in its golden cage.
“So the marriage will proceed.”
The quality of stillness about the House of Blood made silence seem far more natural than speech. So while Liuprand said nothing more, and Agnes of course did not answer, the air did not stiffen; it did not crack; it did not grow oppressively hot.
It was Agnes’s heart, instead, that cracked.
She moved toward him. One faltering step. There was still too much space between them—the abyss too vast for her to reach out and grasp whatever part of him she could touch. She stopped there, her footsteps soundless against the plush carpet.
The urge to move closer was so unconscious that it frightened her.
It was no foreign emotion, like the sense of beauty, impressed on her by some outside force.
It came up from the deepest reaches of her soul, or down from her soul’s greatest heights.
It surfaced from these depths like a whale, its great white head breaching the black water, or swooped down like a hawk, its wings slicing the blue sky.
Liuprand lifted his gaze to hers. She wondered if there was such a bird inside him, or such a fish. Now she would not ever know.
“I suppose,” he said, “your husband will want to put his own ring on your finger.”
Agnes looked down at her hand. From between the swaddling of bandages, the dark pearl gleamed. Just as soon as she had convinced herself to stop wondering about it, Liuprand had brought it to her mind again. She glanced back up at him, a question in her eyes.
He returned her stare with a bleak sort of humor. And perhaps he had learned a bit of her language, too, the language of mutes, because she was able to read this line in his eyes: If you do not ask, you will never know.
And so perhaps that had been the reason all along.
Some ploy to draw the words from her throat.
She had considered it, once, that she was nothing more than a curiosity to this prince, a strange insect trapped beneath glass, a beach stone lathed by the tide into an odd shape.
But there was such devastation on his face.
No man could grieve so deeply the loss of a stone.
The ring could not be removed without causing her a great deal of pain.
King Nicephorus had sliced the skin of that finger right down to the bone.
Waltrude had bandaged it as well as she could, but the flesh had not fully knitted back together again.
It was pulpy and white, like damp paper, and when Agnes pulled back that first bandage, the pain went through her like a lancet.
She had to bite down hard on her lip to stifle a gasp.
But Liuprand had known her now long enough that he would not miss this subtle indication.
He frowned, the corner of his mouth trembling, as if he wanted to speak but could not work up the nerve.
Instead he merely watched. Watched as she was subjected to this torment, so small in scale compared with what had wrought the wounds in the first place—though she herself was the perpetrator this time.
Agnes wondered if he was thinking of how she had looked pressed to the high table, his father’s knife in her hand.
Liuprand looked as though he, too, was being subjected to some small-scale torment, his features held in a stricture of pain.
At long last, the ring was off. Her blood was smeared across the silver band.
She had studied the engravings, written in the ancient tongue of Seraph, but she could not read them.
Agnes had wanted to learn the language, once.
She had hoped she might teach it to herself in the library of Castle Crudele.
But then Adele-Blanche’s ghost had wriggled its way into her mind like a white worm, reminding her that she had one goal in the castle and one goal only.
She had no reason or no time for such frivolity, for learning a language that was long dead and had never been spoken on Drepane anyway.
Such a shallow yearning it had been on Agnes’s part.
The desire of a child to know something merely because it was unknown.
What was her goal now? Adele-Blanche had poured so much into Agnes, but it was a spill of water into the dry-cracked earth.
It was all gone and she was still as barren and dead as she had ever been.
Her grandmother was expired, extinct, her blood in Fredegar’s stores, her bones girding Amycus’s torches, her teeth ringing Agnes’s throat.
And Agnes had not known, until this moment, how terribly alone she would feel when there was no ghost left to haunt her.
She reached out, stretching her arm to its limit, and dropped the ring into Liuprand’s hand.
He let it sit there for a moment, a gleam of silver upon his flesh of gold.
Then he closed his fingers around it. Agnes could sense their warmth even from a distance; his skin radiated pure illustrious power, like the heat from a fire.
She remembered how his touch on her chin had chased the winter from her veins.
The ice had frozen back over now. Nothing else had the power to melt it. She felt she would never be warm again.
“In Seraph,” he said softly, “there are laws governing marriage and laws governing love. They are not one and the same. Perhaps they cannot even be reconciled with each other. But I do not know the laws. I have never touched Seraph’s shores or seen the precise shade of its great lagoon. I do not think I ever will.”
Agnes regarded him questioningly.
“Seraph is finished with us,” he said. “With this island. It has been nothing but more bulk upon a sinking vessel.”
She had suspected it, as all the great houses of Drepane had.
But Agnes had not known it was so official, this severing.
His marriage to Marozia was more essential than she had thought—essential to all who lived upon this sickle-shaped island, no matter if they were a peasant or a king.
It was the union that would save Drepane.
It could not be violated, could not be threatened. Even the smallest fissure in its foundation would mean ruin. Agnes stepped back and let her arm drop to her side.
Liuprand squeezed tightly the hand that held her ring.
And then, with his other hand, he reached into his pocket and retrieved a small scrap of parchment.
It was creased very deeply, as though it had been folded and then unfolded a great number of times.
He unfolded it once more so Agnes could read the words, written in her own halting, sloppy penmanship.
Thank you.
“If I accomplish nothing else in my tenure as prince, or in my reign as king, at least I will have this,” Liuprand said. “I will have proof that the lady Agnes deigned to deliver two words to me.”
A smile lifted the corners of her mouth; she could not help it.
She could feel his warmth even from a distance now, even through the space between them, the still air that seemed to fix them in place, like carvings in a marble frieze.
Agnes turned on her heel and vanished for a moment behind the screen, where her belongings had been placed.
She searched among the shelves until she found parchment and ink.
Then, with immense difficulty, and several false starts, she took her quill and wrote something down.
Returning to Liuprand, she held out the paper.
He took it, squinting down at the words. Her penmanship with her right hand was as clumsy as a child’s. But when a smile overtook his face, Agnes knew he had been able to read it.
Now, four.
Liuprand exhaled softly. “Another great triumph to my name.”
She almost laughed then, and was surprised that the urge even rose in her throat; she could not remember the last time any sound had come so close to spilling from her lips. Agnes swallowed it down, and it dissolved in her belly. But the smile remained. There was no power within her to revert it.
Liuprand folded up both papers and slipped them into his pocket. The ring he still held in his closed fist. She wondered what he would do with it. Would he clean her blood from the band? Would he toss it into a fire to be melted? Would he let it gather dust in some forgotten corner?
Agnes would never know that, either, because Liuprand left her without speaking another word.
When he was gone, she went behind the screen again and sat before the table where the moth’s cage had been placed.
It was rustling ceaselessly inside, but she could not tell if it was from agitation, from a desire to be free, or merely from some base animal instinct.
As intelligent as the creature was, she could read no emotion in its solidly black eyes.
She only knew the language that Berengar had impressed upon it. Gray were its wings; gray for grief.
Agnes lifted the cage into her arms and carried it over to the window. She set it upon the ledge and then unlatched the golden door.
The moth shifted, but it did not move toward the now-open door.
It simply stared ahead at the sudden gap in the bars.
Some feeling she could not discern was working behind those animal eyes.
Agnes did not know what she hoped for as she watched it.
That it would flutter out into the hazy white air, its sudden, palpating motion despoiling the stillness, blemishing the oil painting?
Or, as soon as it flitted free of its golden cage, would it freeze mid-beat of its wings, captured in an instant by the stroke of that dreaming painter?
A smudge of gray that the brush’s bristled end blotted once against the canvas, then dried and sealed with varnish.
Agnes could imagine it. The painting. But just as easily she could imagine its spoilage.
Yet the moth did not leave the cage. It only sat, like a cat upon its haunches, its antennae vibrating softly.