Chapter VI Spare
VI
Spare
Agnes had started her journey at a walk and then quickened to a run.
Yet still this was not fast enough. The halls seemed to unspool before her, gray and endless, and her bare feet throbbed from beating over and over against the cold stone floor.
She hated to be aware of any of it, to even be aware of the tightness in her chest, the burning of air in her throat.
She hated to think of anything but Marozia, dying.
She will not. She cannot. I will not let her. She reached the arched entrance to the leeches’ bay.
Agnes did not care to look around, nor did she have to—Pliny rose from his cot at once and came to her. He flipped his brown hood up over his head, covering the pits and the spots of age, and when he met her at the threshold, he merely said, “The princess?”
She nodded.
No more words needed to pass. This was good, as her voice was lost to her.
Agnes turned back to the corridor and Pliny followed, and when she broke into a run again, the old leech roused his ancient muscles and ground his ancient bones and ran, too.
Time clenched and then flattened. Within minutes, they were at Marozia’s chamber again.
There had not been blood when Agnes had left but there was blood now.
The salt of it curdled the air. It broke cold beads of sweat across Agnes’s forehead, this weighty atmosphere, these red mists, and for a moment she was stopped in her tracks.
Stopped as she breathed in Lord Fredegar’s death.
As she felt the briny tide of his blood rise and rise around her.
“No,” she whispered. “This is not then.”
Yet her own mind did not submit to her. She could not walk; she felt mired as if in a mud pit, and her lashes fluttered and her knees grew weak and all she saw was red, red, red.
“Lady?”
It was Pliny, touching her arm. Pliny, who reminded her, Yes, this is not then. He had seen Lord Fredegar’s blood, too. Had crawled on the floor with it. Agnes tried not to see it, oh, she tried, but she had never been good at banishing ghosts.
She blinked through the haze, through the miasma of red, and saw Marozia on the ground.
The spewing of her own blood was around her, up her swollen and pulsating belly, staining the white nightdress that had been removed to reveal all of her, her milk-heavy breasts and her nipples, grown stiff and taut from being exposed to the air.
Agnes felt her legs tremble under her. It took every ounce of her withering strength to cross the room. To kneel beside Marozia, in the spoiling pool of her blood, and press her hands to her cousin’s cold cheeks. They were like two gray stones.
Her voice rose within her, out of her mouth and then to a pitch that grated her own ears. “Help her!” she cried. “Help her, do something—”
Swiftly, Pliny dropped to his knees. He pulled Marozia’s legs apart; she was too far past the point of being able to protest. He dipped his head between them, examined her for a moment, then raised his head again. In a grave tone, he said, “Turn her over.”
This was not an easy task. Marozia had gone entirely limp. And the handmaiden Ninian was of no help; she had curled into a fetal pose on the floor, hands clasped to her ears. But with difficulty, Agnes, Waltrude, and Pliny managed to flip her onto her back.
Though the rest of her body was still, Marozia’s belly seemed to pulse and ripple.
Agnes did not dare look between her legs, from where the blood was draining steadily.
She focused on Marozia’s face, on her faintly fluttering lashes—the beautiful face that Agnes had by turns desired and envied, loved and hated, now turned ashen and dull.
The lips were odd, stained black. When Agnes brushed her finger across them, it came away with a faint charcoal-colored smear. As if she had drunk strange dark wine.
“You must keep her awake, lady,” Pliny said, “else the babe will not be born naturally. It will be—”
“I know,” Agnes bit out. She could see the scalpel flashing, that cruel and remote surgeon’s tool. She would not let it happen. Not such barbarity—the smell of the blood was making her woozy, and an even more peculiar odor was lifting from Marozia’s mouth.
Still, she pressed her forehead to her cousin’s. She spoke and let the mists of her words drift down onto Marozia’s cold-fevered skin.
“Be strong,” she whispered. “You have done so well already. Do not be silent—do not give up your screams. Let your pain be known to all. Let it echo through every corridor in the castle. Punish the world with your agony. I know you have the strength for this. In my dreams, I have seen you survive it.”
Very faintly, Marozia’s lips parted. Her eyes remained yet shut, though she said, in the lowest rasp that even Agnes strained to hear, “Get it out of me. Please.”
Agnes smoothed back the hair from her sweat-dewed forehead. “You must push. Only a little longer. I swear this trial is almost done.”
Of course, she could not swear such a thing, but her own desire to believe it was at least as powerful as Marozia’s. Her cousin’s brow furrowed, her lips twisting into a grimace, and she reached out and grasped for Agnes’s hand as she indeed gave a brutal, wrenching push.
Pliny’s head bobbed there between her legs. “Good, Princess. Now again.”
She obeyed, and this time a howl broke through her gritted teeth. Agnes let her hand be crushed in her cousin’s grip, let Marozia press her pain into Agnes, let it pour into her like a cistern filling with rainwater. She allowed the smallest pearl of hope to glisten inside her. And then—
The door swung open, with no subtlety or gentleness. In the threshold stood the leech, Truss.
Marozia’s eyes grew wide, her agony and her efforts momentarily forgotten. When she saw Truss, she screamed wordlessly.
The leech’s face went pale. He looked as though he wished to flee, and Agnes wished he would, but before he turned in cowardice, he said, “The prince waits outside the door.”
At this, a serpent within Marozia woke. She pushed herself up onto her elbows and shrieked, “Get out!”
Truss fled.
But Waltrude, who knelt on Marozia’s other side and held her knees apart for Pliny to work between them, glanced up at Agnes.
“Go to him, lady,” she said quietly. “The prince must know what comes of his wife and child. He must be consulted—better him than the king.”
Agnes’s stomach twisted. Words she wished to speak became dammed within her throat.
So rather than reply, she gently extricated herself from Marozia’s grasp—her cousin seemed hardly to notice, now within the fog of rage that Truss’s presence had provoked—and rose to her feet.
Unsteadily, as if bloated with wine, Agnes walked toward the door. She opened it.
Liuprand was pacing the corridor, his head turned down as he stared at the nothingness of the cold gray floor. When Agnes emerged, he looked up at once. The turmoil on his face was beyond description. Yet another crack went through Agnes’s brittle and scabrous heart.
“The babe will not come,” she choked out. Her vision swam with tears, though some ancient pride within her refused to let them fall. “She will not survive much longer in this state—Pliny will turn to the scalpel soon. I cannot—”
A sob rose from her chest and tumbled, still tearless, past her lips.
Liuprand stood with perfect rigidity, his arms at his sides and his fists clenched, as though he was restraining himself from reaching for her.
Agnes wanted the comfort and warmth of his body, but she could not bear what it would mean—the treachery, the perfidy—to be embraced by him.
Instead she exhaled a shuddering breath.
“You must tell them,” she said. “The leeches—your father. You must tell them that the princess’s life is paramount. That she should not be sacrificed for—”
Agnes could not go on; another knot of tears had coiled in her throat. She smelled it, even here: the blood, the blood, the blood. It was all the same. Fredegar’s, Marozia’s. It was all brine and red. It would rise in its heavy swells and drown her.
She saw Liuprand swallow. That muscle, feathering in his jaw.
“My father slumbers still,” he said at last. “It will take more than a woman’s screams to wake him. He has slept through that and worse before. If anything, it is a lullaby to him. He…” Liuprand’s voice broke off for a moment. His gaze swept to the ground.
Agnes only watched him, strung halfway between despair and hope.
Liuprand lifted his gaze again. Where they had been blurred before, like window glass in the rain, now his blue eyes were sharp and clear and burning.
“I will keep him from the door,” he said. “Him and his leeches both. But I cannot promise how long.” He cast a quick glance over his shoulder, down the long corridor where Agnes presumed Truss had fled. “Were I stronger—”
“No,” Agnes cut in. Her heart was beating a fierce but jagged rhythm. She pressed her finger to his lips, silencing him. “Not here. Not now. There is no time.”
And then she turned and went back into that bloody chamber before Liuprand could speak again.
Her limbs were trembling, and she was filled with remorse.
She had dismissed it too quickly—his turmoil, his pain.
It was his child, after all, caught half inside its mother, dying before it would ever take its first breath of air.
But she knew he had little love lost for the creature sown of this wretched union.
At that, Agnes felt her breath catch a bit in her throat.
Even if this babe was born, if it lived…
it would be hated for the hellish circumstances of its conception, hated for the pain it had wrought upon its mother and father both.
The Sorrowful. The Ill-Made. Half a dozen cruel epithets Agnes conjured as she watched Marozia writhe and scream.
Ninian had been roused at last, and with her help, Waltrude and Pliny had lifted the princess back onto her bed.