Chapter IX What Might Break Apart the World
IX
What Might Break Apart The World
“Princess? Princess?”
His words fell upon the limp body in the bed like leaves from a dead tree.
They lay across her but did not penetrate.
Marozia was on her side now, the child swaddled in her arms and held near to her face so that she could brush kisses against her daughter’s red cheeks.
The sheets were soaked with the mucuses of birth, sweat, and blood.
Her nightgown was tangled about her tired limbs, which lent her the look of a mermaid caught in a sea-net, having yet given up its desperate thrashing.
She did not seem to even hear him at all, so Pliny gently touched her arm.
At that, she came alive, flinching and then jerking up to shake off his grip. The babe stirred, but only yawned and then returned to sleep. Marozia flashed her teeth.
“Get away from me,” she rasped. “Leave me alone with my daughter. You foul little worm.”
“I will, Princess,” Pliny said. He was well accustomed to the mistrust many on Drepane harbored toward leeches, but such a slight directly against his person was enough to prick at him. “But first I must ensure that you and the child are sound.”
“I am sound enough to claw your robes to ribbons and your heart to shreds.”
Pliny retracted his hand. He laced its fingers with those of his other and held them across his middle.
He did not care for the princess at all—he much preferred the nature and manner of her cousin—but he could not help feeling a begrudged tug of admiration.
She had survived what most other women would not.
Such a violent labor he had never seen, and so unprovoked.
He had not been given a chance to examine her during the pregnancy; Nicephorus had his own leeches perform this task, but nothing about her general condition suggested to Pliny that she would be so wrung through so brutally as her children were delivered into the world.
At that moment, as if summoned by his thought, Truss and Mordaunt came through the door. Pliny stifled a sigh.
These two leeches—the favored of the king and the Most Esteemed Surgeon—were not, to Pliny’s mind, shining paragons of their order.
He had observed them spilling tonics, shattering bones as they were bundled up to be sent to Lord Amycus, and playing inane games of chance in the leeches’ bay.
This could occupy them for hours. Once, Pliny had asked the short one, Truss, what had inspired his interest in surgery and ceremony, such that he would take the leech’s somber vows.
Vows that would put one always in the reach of death’s white arms. Truss had replied that he enjoyed the company of men who spent their money on gambling instead of on whores.
“Princess.” Mordaunt, the taller and slightly wiser of the two, bowed his head. “Congratulations on the birth of your children.”
Marozia’s dark eyes narrowed to slits and she did not reply. She only clutched the infant closer to her chest.
“Where is the other?” asked Truss.
“Gone,” Marozia hissed. “I do not wish to see it. Do not even speak of it.”
Truss and Mordaunt exchanged dumb glances.
“With the wet nurse, Waltrude,” Pliny answered in Marozia’s stead. “Your daughter will be hungry soon, Princess. I shall call Waltrude back—”
“No!” Marozia cried out, this time with less vitriol than grief. “I will nurse her myself…it is the custom of my house…she will not spend a single night in another’s arms.”
Pliny drew in a breath. Truss and Mordaunt still regarded each other in doltish bewilderment. A heavy and discomfiting silence filled the room, and it was broken only by a small, soft voice from the corner by Marozia’s bed.
“If it please, my princess,” Ninian whispered, “let me, I beg, at least give you a fresh gown and sheets.”
Marozia’s mouth dragged down into a grimace of pain.
Yet she did not protest; she did not even speak.
Evidently her handmaiden knew that this silence was assent, for she then moved toward her mistress and began removing the sheets from the bed.
A difficult task, as Marozia still lay within it, stiff as a stone, but Ninian persevered.
After watching her labor for several moments, Pliny stepped forward.
Silently he withdrew his shears and began to cut the bloodied sheets until mere strips of fabric remained, which could then be slipped out easily from beneath the princess’s unmoving body.
Truss and Mordaunt, of course, watched this all without even the subtlest indication of wanting to assist.
Her nightgown was still plastered to her limbs with blood, drying as dark as oil. Gingerly Ninian began to peel back the fabric, but it stuck on her mistress’s skin, and Marozia gave a grunt of displeasure.
“You will need a sponge and water for that,” Pliny said quietly. His gaze flickered to Truss and Mordaunt. “Go fetch them at once.”
Mordaunt gave a haughty sniff, but if Truss chafed at being ordered by a leech of no special stature, he did not show it. The two went obediently, their sepia robes hushing across the stone floor. Once they were gone, Marozia went limp against the bare mattress.
“Please,” she whispered. It was nearly too low for Pliny to hear. “Please, leave me. I wish to be alone with my daughter.”
To hear a princess beg was appalling to Pliny. Her desperation was a tangible thing, a gray miasma in the air. It touched him, and his heart flooded with grief and with pity. No princess should be in such a state that she pleaded mercy from a leech. It almost disgusted him.
He should have stayed, to ensure that she—and more important, the child in her arms—was firm enough to survive.
It was his duty, as he had sworn when he took his leech’s vows.
But Pliny tasted the brine of blood on his tongue, and his arms were soaked with it up to the elbow.
That alone would not be enough to dissuade him—he was a surgeon, after all—but when it mingled with the princess’s despair, he felt as if he might be sick all over the floor.
So with one last dip of his head, Pliny obeyed the princess and vanished.
What was his duty now? He had been dismissed by the princess; he had not even been granted a moment to examine the infant clutched so jealously in her arms. His duty was to surgery, to easing and prolonging life, to beating back unyielding death.
If the princess or her child died under the inept care of Truss and Mordaunt, Pliny would not endure the guilt.
This was the mark of a good leech, he thought.
To shame oneself for failing at one’s paramount task.
Death sweeping in, beneath his notice, and stealing away the breath of Marozia and her daughter.
Perhaps he should have insisted on staying.
Perhaps he should have fought. Pliny turned all of this over in his mind as he paced the corridors, until he remembered—There is another.
He could redeem himself in this matter by seeing to the second child.
The poor, rejected princeling, smaller and weaker than his sister, turned away from his mother’s breast before he could ever feel her warmth.
Waltrude, he thought then, I must find Waltrude. The princeling will be with her.
He first checked her chambers and found them empty.
Had she gone to the leeches’ bay, seeking a tonic to bring forth her milk?
This was possible; probable, even. Pliny chose this as his next destination.
By now dawn had come, and it lit the hallways of Castle Crudele with pale and powerful beams of sun, shrinking the torch flames within their sconces.
Yet for all this light, the stone floors never grew warmer; they were as cold as ever beneath Pliny’s feet.
Pliny was approaching the long spiraling staircase to the cellar when another thought entered his mind. The prince. Waltrude would have gone to him, would she not? Liuprand was her dearest love, the singular joy of her shriveled heart. She would have wanted to show him his son.
So Pliny turned abruptly on his heel and headed backward to the prince’s chambers.
He had been summoned there twice, maybe three times before, to treat Liuprand’s minor ailments—a headache induced by a greedy gulping of wine, a bruise or a cut that he claimed was from a tiltyard tumble, though Pliny had never seen the prince take up a spear or a sword.
He had no squires, and seemingly no love for hunting or sport.
His only true passion appeared to lie within the conch-shell spiral of the library.
When he reached the door, Pliny rapped once upon the wood. There was a shuffling, and a haughty breath he recognized, and then Waltrude called out, “Come in and do it quickly.” As if she could scent him through the threshold.
He entered and found the wet nurse seated with the princeling in her arms. He slept now, a tranquil bundle of white, though the red blotches of birth were still risen across his cheeks.
Otherwise he was a handsome infant, though Pliny would not expect anything less from the joining of the prince’s blood with Marozia’s.
The baby’s beauty could only increase as he grew—or so Pliny thought.
This was the first time he had seen the product of a union between Seraph and Drepane.
“The child,” Pliny said. “He is well?”
Waltrude nodded. “He ate fulsomely and rests now. Already he is the picture of his father, in face and in nature. A quiet, unobtrusive infant. A boon to Castle Crudele.”
Pliny inched closer. The child’s face was indeed turned blank with sleep; there was no scowl or grimace or furrow in his brow as he dreamed his first living dreams. “Has he yet been named?”
“No. The prince cannot be found. Still he has not laid eyes on his son.”
“Still?” Pliny inhaled, breathing the lingering scent of milk in the air. “Where do you suspect he has gone?”