Chapter XXXVI The Casks of Lord Fredegar #3
The crowd mumbled with confusion. Agnes glanced over at Pliny; a frown pulled down his mouth.
He had relished watching Unruoching’s torture, as had she.
The red thread of love stretched from his finger to Fredegar’s corpse, which still awaited desecration.
He was loyal even in death, and her chest tightened with fondness for him.
“Where are your masons?” Liuprand asked, directing his question toward the crimson-clad staff of the House of Blood. “Summon them.”
Still, confusion reigned, as one man pulled himself from the throng and departed up the dungeon stairs.
He brushed past Cendrillon, who still clutched his book against his chest, as though he feared it might be snatched from him.
The ethereal qualities had vanished from his face; it was a mask of quotidian, human horror.
The man was gone for a long stretch of time, during which no one dared speak. Ygraine pushed herself up onto her knees, breathing hard enough to make her shoulders rise and fall heavily.
At last the man returned with three masons, their hands hard and yellow with calluses, the years of labor showing on their furrowed brows and slouched backs.
Their long arms hung limply at their sides, giving them a rather simian look.
They arranged themselves in a half circle before Liuprand and gave low bows in deference to their prince.
Yet rather than addressing them, Liuprand turned to the gathered crowd.
“The casks of Lord Fredegar are well kept and well treasured,” he said. “I would not waste any more of them. And I am sure, for whatever time Lord Unruoching is given to live, he will not be inclined to indulge in any more of these fine vintages.”
His words did not make sense to Agnes, nor to those around her, who looked among themselves in bemusement.
She began to feel removed from the room, from the chill air of the dungeon, from the coppery odor of blood, all her senses becoming obscure.
And as she stood there, a ghost slipping from its frail human shell, another world shuddered to life before her, layered over the first. It was the world of strange vapors, of spectral mists, miasmas of silvery gray.
The phantasmic vision played out before her eyes.
A mason, laying bricks. Her dream had been drivel to her then, but now she knew it was prophecy.
For the flesh-and-blood masons began to heft down wagons of stone, the carts clattering heavily against the steps as they descended.
And Liuprand began to beckon the crowd away from the table, toward the door of the dungeon, where they all became audience to this prophecy made manifest. It was only Agnes who did not move, struck dumb by the way her vision turned corporeal before her eyes.
And if she had once dreamed the future, what of her other slumbering fantasies? Were they prophecy, too?
Liuprand approached her, a gentle hand on the small of her back. “Come, Lady Agnes,” he said softly. “Soon there will be nothing to see here.”
Agnes allowed herself to be led toward the steps, but she did not look away.
She watched on as the Dolorous Guard untied Unruoching, thrusting him from the table and onto the floor, where he crumpled into a heap on his hands and knees.
They shifted the table back toward Cendrillon, though it resembled less a table and more a butcher’s block, so thoroughly drenched in still-wet blood. The nymph of a man shuddered.
Without Agnes particularly noticing, Ygraine had fainted.
She was borne away by two crimson-clad men, her body held by the ankles and wrists, swaying between them like a pendulum.
Thus Gamelyn was alone now, watching without blinking as a wall flowered up around his father, stone upon cruel gray stone.
Agnes looked up at Liuprand. “How long will it take? For him to perish here?”
“Mere days.” Liuprand glanced at Unruoching’s quickly vanishing form.
“A man cannot go much longer without water.” Then he cast his gaze around the room, over Cendrillon, over the small audience that remained.
“I shall leave some men from the Dolorous Guard here, to ensure that the wall is not broken and Lord Unruoching is not rescued. And when he has died of thirst or hunger, I shall expect to receive a messenger at the castle gate, bearing his teeth.”
The masons were efficient at their work.
They were even swifter than the ghouls of Agnes’s dream.
And though Unruoching faded from her sight as the walls grew like mushrooms after a rainstorm, she found that he continued on in her imagination.
She imagined that he would throw himself against the bricks, again and again, howling pitifully for release.
She imagined Ygraine, pressed against the wall’s other side, whispering to him through the stone.
Reassuring him, perhaps, as his tongue thickened in his mouth and death carved at his body like a lathe.
Mere days. So short a span of time, yet so long.
As Liuprand guided her up the dungeon stairs, Pliny followed closely behind.
She cast one last look over her shoulder.
First her eyes landed on Cendrillon, who still grasped his notebook tightly, and she felt the familiar stirring of envy within her.
She knew he did not think of it as a blessing, that his hand belonged to him, that he could move it as he wished, that it held such force within its working muscles and tendons.
At last, she looked upon Gamelyn, and found with great unease that he was staring back at her. Their eyes met for the briefest moment, green into gray. Agnes could sense herself becoming a specter within his mind, such a one that would live always in his thoughts.
She did not wish to swallow this truth. And so she left the boy alone with his ripening ghosts.