Chapter XXXV The Mute Tongue Moves #2
She screamed and screamed. It turned into a broken and bitter howl.
Gray moths rose from her and took flight, their wings beating a thousand furious beats.
Terror lifted in a palpating scarlet mass.
The corridor was glutted, the air was thick; Unruoching shrank down then, arms braced over his head, as if to shield himself from the fluttering legions of grief, of fear, and to muffle the terrible, animal sound of her howling.
Agnes chose these screams just as she had chosen her silence. Her silence broke apart, like ice in an avalanche. She screamed Liuprand’s name.
The hallway thundered with footsteps. Armor clashed as the Dolorous Guard rounded the corner, and metal hissed as they drew their swords. Agnes saw no more than flashes of steel, metal-plated limbs whirling about her, forming a circle that pressed her within.
She dropped to the floor then, exhausted by the agony of such vicious wailing.
She knelt in the puddle of blood, her legs and arms boneless, as weak as jellied broth.
Tears ran scorching paths down her cheeks.
What rose was not a scream but a sob, wretched and guttural, mucus clogging her throat and half obstructing the sound.
Agnes bent over, and then she could not keep herself aloft at all.
She collapsed upon Fredegar’s chest. Her cheek was pressed to his doublet, the velvet turned sticky with blood, dyed a darker and richer red.
She clung to him like a child. Her sobs ran through her; her whole body convulsed with them, as though she were being tossed and tossed again by a vicious current.
There was so much of this hideous red liquid. It sank into the floorboards, into the stone, absorbed into the very foundation of the castle. She imagined the walls woozy with blood, bloated, swaying like a drunkard. She imagined the castle itself, falling.
And then, through the clashing of metal and the furor of her own sobs, Liuprand’s voice cleaved like a sword.
“Make a path,” he said.
Armor clattered as the Dolorous Guard stepped aside.
Liuprand knelt down; she heard the sloshing of disturbed blood as he did.
He slid his arms under her, gently, one beneath her shoulders and the other beneath the crook of her knees.
She clutched at Fredegar’s doublet, but her fingers were too weak to keep hold.
So when Liuprand rose to his feet again, he lifted Agnes with him.
Tears had turned her vision into something like rain-streaked glass. She pressed her face into Liuprand’s shoulder and sobbed.
“Take him to the dungeon,” Liuprand said. His voice was as black as midnight. “Clap him in as many chains as you can find. Tie the rope tight.”
Helmets clanged; the Dolorous Guard were nodding in collective assent.
Agnes heard Unruoching babbling incoherently, more gasps than words, as the guards closed in on him.
She squeezed her eyes shut as the very last of her sobs drained out of her.
Her tears had soaked into Liuprand’s doublet, turning the fabric soft with water.
She clung to his chest, the fingers of her good hand clenched so fiercely that her nails scraped and broke his flesh.
There was nothing but darkness behind her eyes, limpid and gauzy.
She felt Liuprand turn. Away from the thick brine of the shuddering air, the blood besmirching the floor and the feet of all those who stood upon it, and Fredegar’s body, already growing stiff and cold, gripped by the cruel rictus of death.
Her sobs had quieted to small whimpers, her mouth full of spittle and salt, but she was not silent.
It was Liuprand who held her without speaking, his grip both firm and tender, and carried her down the corridor, until the smells and sounds of the carnage behind them were lost to distance.
The water folded over and under her limbs, soft as skeins of silk. It rose up, brimming like the tide, covering her breasts, leaving only her collarbones and her shoulders exposed. Without the time to heat it above a fire, the water was cold, cold but clear, pooling with the golden torchlight.
Until the blood poisoned it. The solid crust of red was scoured from her body, turning to a thin mist as the water lifted it and spread it about within the tub.
Now the water was hot and thick and smelled of copper, of brine.
It was red, and red, and red. Though her skin was clean, all around her, Fredegar’s blood pulsed and rippled.
It was diluted, translucent as the tail of a fish, but not gone. It engulfed her still.
“It will all go down the drain,” Waltrude murmured. “Down the drain. Down the drain.”
She could not stop repeating this phrase, as she combed her fingers through Agnes’s hair. The pins were pried out. The braids were undone. Her hair, now loose, floated around her, buoyant in the water, like the dark tendrils of a squid.
The flowers were scattered on the floor.
The white moonflowers, the infant’s breath, splattered with blood and crushed like paper as she had buried her head against Fredegar’s chest. His body had still been warm, his flesh soft.
It was impossible that he could be gone.
But the House of Blood had taken what it was owed from its very own master.
The foundation was soaked with it and the articles of the Covenant had been fulfilled, Berengar’s cruel laws followed to the letter. And so it had to be true.
Waltrude lifted Agnes’s arm a moment from the water and scrubbed at it, expunging the blood from the clever places it had hidden, between her fingers, in the crook of her elbow.
One arm and then the other. Her limbs felt heavy and foreign to her.
She was not dead, but her body did not seem to know it.
“There’s a good girl.” Waltrude’s voice was so soft and low, it was almost a coo. “In a moment it will all go down the drain.”
Agnes found she could not close her eyes, though her body was limp in the water, unwound and as tranquil as a bird briefly stunned by its collision into glass.
Instead she stared ahead, taking in the screen of the chamber, the writing desk, the stone wall and the unlit fireplace, her belongings still scattered about, placed on shelves; the wardrobe door was open and her dresses were hung within, all but the bridal gown, which was puddled on the floor, soaked in red like a gored pig.
The sensation that it was ugly washed over her.
All the beauty of the House of Blood had drained out with the lifeblood of its master.
What remained was a gruesome and shuddery dream, a scene set on the dark floor of the ocean, scattered about with huge-jawed fish and quivering purple kelp, curled mollusks the size of men, crabs so bulbous with barnacles that they could not lift their claws, sanguine-colored sharks that had never felt even the feeblest slant of sunlight.
Waltrude lifted Agnes’s hair and gently scrubbed the back of her neck. She whispered, but not to Agnes, “Down the drain. Down the drain.”
There was a sound outside the door. Waltrude’s gaze snapped up and she let Agnes’s hair fall and spread out again in the water.
It was the scuffling of footsteps, the faint clanking of armor as the guards posted outside the door stirred. There was the murmur of voices, but it was too quiet for any words to be discerned. Then, slowly, the door opened.
Waltrude rose to her feet, sponge clenched in her fist. A fearful but defiant expression crossed her face. But it dissipated at once, upon her seeing Liuprand.
The wet nurse did not speak, did not even acknowledge his presence with a deferent dip of her head.
Yet her eyes had the steadiness of secret knowledge.
At a distance, in the half-light, Agnes could not easily perceive the expression on Liuprand’s face.
She only saw the soft golden gleam of him, which repelled the dark.
It spasmed off him, like arrows deflected from a steel breastplate, and these weapons of shadow fell dully onto the floor.
As he stepped toward her, toward the tub, she saw the blood staining his doublet.
It had dried into a deep shade of rust. Some of it flecked his throat, his chin.
There was even a streak along the left side of his jaw, where one of her dyed-red fingers must have brushed.
He wore her husband’s blood on him like a second layer of livery.
Waltrude stood for one moment longer, the damp sponge dripping in a steady rhythm. Then, without speaking a word, she crossed the room and went out through the door. There was more faint clanking as the retinue of guards broke apart to let her pass.
Then Liuprand stood before her at the foot of the tub, alone.
“Unruoching has been imprisoned,” he said quietly. “He will never again breathe free air.” He paused, and his eyes gleamed like the moonlit ocean. “He will never so much as look upon you again.”
“Yet he will live always within my thoughts,” Agnes said.
The shock that overtook Liuprand’s face was not fast and bright, a sudden and short-lived flicker, but rather a slow burning—embers, not flame. His aura smoldered a darker gold. And it was her voice that set this fire within him.
So delicately, almost painful in his deliberation, Liuprand stepped toward her. He knelt beside the tub, near where her head rested against the marble.
“I would give my life,” he said, “to turn it back. To have the knife buried in my chest instead.”
“No.” The word lifted from her like a pale moth, taking flight. “I would never wish for such a thing. This I may survive. But not that.”
Liuprand drew a breath. “Agnes,” he whispered. “I cannot exorcise you from my mind. I have tried—but I think of you always. In sleeping, in waking, and especially in dreaming.”