Chapter II The Just
II
The Just
Each day Agnes entered the library it felt new again, not for the room itself but for how she could freshly perceive it.
Since she gave up the pursuits of her grandmother, her vision seemed to have shifted irrevocably.
The gray veil over the world had lifted, and nowhere was this more evident than in the library.
One day it was maze-like, all the spiral staircases and the shelves that curved in and around endlessly, like a conch shell, and she wondered, How will I ever escape this labyrinth of knowledge?
How will I ever be satisfied to leave? And in those moments, Agnes searched for books of philosophy, the musings of old men from Seraph long expired, arguments of law and matter and mathematics, such that her grandmother would have disdained and forbidden her from.
And the next day the library was a comfort, and she returned to it as an animal to its den, a bird to its nest, knowing the spine of each book so intimately that it was as if she had constructed the library itself.
She read accounts of the adventures of great men, soldiers and kings, that were half true at most, knitted through with the fantastic, dragons and ogres and vengeful, squabbling gods.
She read only of their lives, not their deaths.
Agnes was one day jubilant, one day fearful, and yet she never hesitated to enter, because she could not be dissuaded from the hope that her work with Pliny would restore to her the faculties of her hand. Such dear hope was both enlivening and miserable.
Yet it was not half so dear as the secret hope she nursed within the recesses of her soul. The hope that Liuprand would appear to her as he had today.
He stood before her in his doublet of midnight blue, the rich aura of Seraphine blood around him, brilliant and gold.
His beauty, which was never anything less than a revelation, was a force that emanated from him as well, though beneath it—well cloaked—Agnes recognized exhaustion.
No one else would see it, because no one else would think to look; no one wanted to perceive any weakness in their prince.
But Agnes saw it—the dull gleam of his ocean-colored eyes; the daubs of sleepless gray beneath them. And in that moment she was glad her left hand was useless to her, for she wished so desperately to raise it, to cup his cheek, to stroke her thumb across his weary face.
Liuprand’s gaze met hers steadily, within it a thousand unspoken words. And then it skirted down to the arm that hung limply at her side.
“You said there has been an improvement in the pain,” he murmured.
She nodded.
“But no progress made in restoring its function?”
“Little progress,” she admitted. “It is not for lack of trying. Pliny has devised many creative schemes. But I fear it will not be enough. He does not wish to deflate my hope, of course, by speaking such a thing aloud—though I think he, too, believes the inner wounds are too grave to be remedied.”
Liuprand drew a breath. The tremulous rise of his shoulders spoke to Agnes of fettered anger. The vengeance he craved upon his father was a glass that he drank from and then filled again and again.
“Perhaps I am being too precious in my wishes,” Agnes said with a sigh. “I wish to write again. I do not care about sorting beads from rice or threading needles for sewing. But perhaps I should be satisfied that I still have a hand at all.”
“No,” Liuprand said firmly. “Your wishes in this matter are so modest. And your desires…they are not aberrant. Do not let yourself be convinced otherwise.”
Agnes gave a faint shake of her head. “Whatever I would write has no great value to the world.”
“That is not true.”
She lifted her good arm and swept it out, indicating the masses and masses of books around them, the staircases of books that climbed to the high circular window, spiraling up endlessly toward that aperture opened to the sky. “Is each of these tomes of equal value to you?”
There was a tug at the corner of Liuprand’s mouth; it was almost a smile.
“You always have the quicker rejoinder, lady. Yes, of course some books are more essential to me than others. And even if I live another century, there are some I will never have the occasion to open—for sometimes I would sooner return to the same book for comfort than seek out a new one. Does that make me a coward of the mind?”
“It makes you human. There are other reasons to read than for the sake of acquiring knowledge.” Agnes had to bite her lip to keep her own smile at bay. “Which book do you return to most often?”
“Such an intimate question.” Liuprand lifted a brow. “Perhaps I shall have you guess.”
“You must give me a hint,” Agnes protested. “This library is large enough to fulfill the appetites of a hundred sages.”
“My mother would be pleased to hear that,” Liuprand said, a note of melancholy in his voice. “Here. I will lead you to the proper section. Within that, you will have to pick it out yourself.”
No small task, as every discrete section of the library was a cobbling of at least a dozen different cabinets, the books crammed tightly against one another on every shelf, hardly leaving room for dust to gather.
Liuprand made his way toward the rear section, farthest from the door, where the space between the shelves grew so narrow that he had to twist his enormous body sideways to fit through them.
Agnes followed, pulse twinging in her throat.
Where Liuprand stopped was not particularly remarkable; they were hemmed in by shelves on either side, cast in the rather aqueous gleam of sunlight from the very distant window.
There was a sense of great stillness here, but not the stillness of death, of blood stopped suddenly within its course, of a body seized in rigor mortis.
It was the stillness of the seafloor, where the water lay gently over the white sand, and the sand lay gently over the crabs in their shells and the pearls in their oysters and the buried doubloons in their chests.
It was a stillness that held the hope of life within it.
Liuprand watched her expectantly, a pleased gleam in his eyes.
Agnes looked around. Up to the tops of the shelves where the books were stacked in perilous, tottering piles, and then to the floor.
Her gaze caught on one pale spot, where the carpet had been rubbed to whiteness by the repeated planting of feet.
She approached it, and stood upon it. Then she rose up onto her tiptoes, as far as she could manage, holding on to the shelf for balance.
She could not, of course, fully approximate Liuprand’s height.
But her fingers could reach up and brush the spine of the book that, she imagined, would be at his eye level.
Still pushed up on her tiptoes, Agnes looked back over her shoulder. Liuprand was smiling. A secret smile, for her and her alone.
“You are terribly perceptive, my lady.”
“I think perhaps you are not quite as enigmatic as you hope.”
His smile deepened to form dimples in his cheeks, and he approached her. They did not touch, but Agnes could feel the warmth and nearness of his body, and her heartbeat quickened. He reached over her shoulder and took down the book from the shelf. He gave it to Agnes.
As an object of art, it was nothing exceptional.
Agnes had bound books for her grandmother that were more ornate, even when constructed with her clumsy child’s hand.
(How she longed for that clumsy hand now!) The cover was brown leather, worn around the spine, with gilt peeling away in long stripes from the page edges.
She passed her palm across it and felt the embossing, the slightly raised symbol—a sun, its feathery rays extending nearly to the corners of the cover.
Touched by curiosity, Agnes went to open it.
Yet before she could, Liuprand’s arms came around her.
The suddenness of this movement made the book fall from her hands and thud to the ground.
He gripped her tightly, one arm across her middle, the other over her breast and her bare shoulders, and his cheek brushed the column of her throat as he held her there against his chest.
His need pulsed from within him, like a second heartbeat. Agnes could feel it, thudding through her, heating her blood and the very marrow of her bones. She was made a hollow drum, his desire beating against her taut skin.
The sensation it provoked in her was almost beyond words.
Her body remembered every moment of their coupling, the dragging thrusts of him, which were now echoed in the intangible aura of want.
And so he ground her own need into her—the ache between her legs terrible, as her channel clenched and clenched around empty air.
“Please,” he rasped, lips brushing the shell of her ear.
She could not move; she was bound to him as a martyr to her pyre.
Her arms pressed tautly to her sides. Her throat was not similarly subjugated, yet she could not speak.
The words only inked themselves into her mind.
Call me by name, I beg of you, say Agnes, not lady, do not act as if we are strangers—
Somehow—perhaps she should not have been surprised—he perceived this need from her. He dipped his head lower until his lips grazed her nape, and he whispered, “Agnes. Agnes—”
Her head was not subdued, either; she could turn it, and she did. Slowly, so that their noses touched, and their mouths were so close she swore she tasted him already, and with her eyes shut, she could pretend for a moment that this was not the greatest and most faithless of treacheries.
Unaccountably, a prick of reason jabbed at her. Agnes opened her eyes and recoiled only slightly, as much as she could when she was so firmly bound against him. Liuprand flinched.
“We cannot do this,” she said brokenly.
“No, I cannot do without it.” Liuprand’s voice was low and rough, and it laid bare his pain. “There is not a single moment that is empty of my need for you.”
Her stomach contracted upon itself. Weakly, she said, “You must be a master of your body…”
Liuprand shook his head, which brushed his cheek against hers again.
“It is not the desire of my earthly form that torments me. I would want you even if I could not touch you. I need your clever counsel. All your secret smiles. Your gentleness and sensibility…I need the one person in all the world who can tend to the feeble creature beneath the epithet.”
At last he had been marked with one. Liuprand the Just, he was called, after the news of what had transpired at the House of Blood made its way to the ears of peasants and nobles alike.
It would not be penned into Drepane’s annals until he died—one could gain or lose an epithet over the course of one’s life—but for now men drank toasts to the prince who had proven patricide could not go unpunished, that such a savagery would be repaid a thousandfold.
To the prince who promised a reign of brutal righteousness when finally he came into his crown.
Agnes could see very well the creature beneath the epithet.
It was the epithet itself that gave the eye of her mind trouble.
Justice meant violence, and this was incongruous with the character she knew, the one who held her now, the one who tended moths and preferred books to jousting or merrymaking, the one who had martyred his own pleasure for the health and longevity of Drepane while his father the king consumed whatever was in reach of his hands.
But a man would not prostrate himself for Liuprand the Gentle, or Liuprand the Wise, or Liuprand the Learner. These virtues held no honor on Drepane.
It was certainly not Liuprand the Just who embraced her. This creature was perfidious, and so was Agnes.
“I would give you all you wish for,” she whispered, “if there were not half the world between us.”
His lips pressed to her ear again. “I feel nothing between us now.”
Agnes felt herself dripping for him. “You are reckless with your desire, and all my reason is undone by your mouth.”
He groaned softly and ground himself against her.
Her legs were weak, and had Liuprand not been holding her, she might have dropped to the ground, a wobbly wreckage in purple silk.
He was crumpling the white flowers in her hair, and she did not care—she cared nothing until she felt his mouth fix to her throat, just barely grazing the necklace of teeth there.
This rocked the reason back into her. Agnes wrested herself free of him, breathing hard.
Liuprand’s chest was pumping, shoulders rising with each ragged, heavy inhale. His eyes still gleamed with desire, but as he regarded her, they shifted and grew matte with despair.
Though he opened his mouth to speak, Agnes’s tongue was quicker.
“You are the prince,” she said. Each word was wrung out from her painfully. “You are bound to another…to…” She shook her head. It was pure cowardice that she could not speak the name. “I will not be your ruination.”
“No,” Liuprand broke in, reaching for her. “You are the only thing that will save me.”
But Agnes could bear no more. She fled the library, fled the treachery of her desire, though her heart ached with love for him and she was still slick between her thighs.