Chapter IX What Might Break Apart the World #2
Waltrude examined the infant’s face very closely. She hummed a tune, wordless and brisk. Then she looked up at Pliny and said, “I have sent the lady Agnes to find him.”
Her voice had the charge of the sky before a storm, dense and taut, with the promise of cruel white lightning.
Pliny shifted, made uncomfortable by this sudden transformation, which turned the whole room into a place of ill omen, of warning.
He was silent for quite a long time, considering how the mere mention of Agnes’s name had engendered this change.
Waltrude’s lips were pressed into a thin line.
Pliny did not even bother to ask, because he knew she would reveal nothing on this matter.
Instead, he chose a more innocuous question.
“Do you think the prince has gone to see his father?”
Waltrude gave him a dour look. “That is the last place he will have gone.”
The last place, indeed. No one went to pay a visit to the king unless it was on pain of death.
These past months had warped and mangled Nicephorus so repulsively.
Now, Pliny thought, the king was lucky to only wear the epithet the Sluggard, for he could invent far more fitting titles that were far less flattering.
Pliny considered this all heavily. Not the king’s chambers, not the tiltyard—nowhere he would expect to be easily found.
He did contemplate the library, but if the prince was indeed hiding, he would not be in one of his daily haunts.
He would cache himself within the castle’s most secret place.
Where not a soul would think to look because they did not even know that such a place existed.
But Pliny did. And so that was where he went.
What a grueling journey, to Castle Crudele’s tallest tower.
Pliny’s muscles twinged with agony and his very bones seemed to tremble, age and exhaustion loosening them at the joints.
Only torchlight thrived here, flickering boldly against the windowless dark.
No sun could pass through solid stone. Pliny put one hand upon the wall to steady himself as he climbed, acutely aware of his own labored breaths, how his panting made the mucus rattle in his throat. Yet undeterred, he climbed.
When he reached the landing, he stopped to regain his strength, and was suddenly overcome by a sensation of ill ease.
It did not press in on him as some atmospheric augury; rather, it was summoned from within his very own being.
There was a heat that began in his chest and then stretched its tendrils outward, until the tips of his fingers and toes hummed like beating wings.
The bones of his sternum seemed to rattle as his heart leapt and juddered with impossible ferocity.
His mouth filled with saliva, which threatened to foam and spill past his lips.
His lips! They were aflame, puckering and curling, though not of his own accord—shaping themselves for some action, to fit some form.
And most perturbing and foreign of all was the pull between his legs, the bunching, like a fist curling into fabric.
A second pulse began there, and he was filled with desire that was beyond desire, a cloying and desperate need, which he had not felt since boyhood, long before he had taken his leech’s vow.
So aberrant it was that Pliny nearly guttered out a noise of shock.
Under it all was revulsion and terror at his body betraying him.
At his mind, which could not keep dominion over these unsanctified urges.
At this age, Pliny had long since shaved down his cravings to the bone, to the barest essentials of humanness: the want for food, for water, for occasional companionship, for an afternoon spent in the warmth of the sun.
These modest desires he allowed himself, and nothing more.
Yet now another need was building upon him, adding muscle and sinew and voluptuous flesh to the bare skeleton of his asceticism.
What had happened to fatten his form so lasciviously, and so suddenly?
Pliny was alone on the landing, in only the bare glow of the flickering torchlight, his feet and hand against cold stone.
It could not be the castle itself, the castle built upon the blood of those struck down by Berengar’s needle-thin blade.
Rather it was something that existed within these cruel walls, a strange flower that bloomed despite the dark and the frigid air—a night-blooming flower, perhaps, that opened its petals only beneath the obscurity of the black sky.
Could such a thing be born here? Something so fleshy, so full? Pliny’s mind could not conceive it; his body could only feel it. His bones knew that a secret lurked within these walls. His heart propelled him forward, almost unconsciously, toward the chapel’s heavy stone door.
He felt possessed, too, by a preternatural strength, and a stealthiness that better befit a mountain cat than an ancient leech.
So when he pushed open the door, it opened for him immediately, and without a sound.
No scrape of stone upon stone; even his footsteps did not hush against the floor.
Every thought seemed to have vacated his mind, so Pliny had no expectation of what he would see when he crossed the threshold.
He was more a spirit than a body; a figment, not a form.
So perhaps it was no surprise that his entrance did not shift the air within the chapel or alert those within it to his presence. The prince was indeed there—Pliny had been right to expect this—but what else he saw shocked him to stillness, and made all the moisture dry up in his mouth.
The prince was standing at the altar, where every candle had been lit, forming one large swell of flame, greater than its discrete parts.
He was half clothed, his breeches shucked and his doublet tugged down to bare one shoulder.
And there before him, balanced precariously on the edge of the altar, her hair dangling down in dangerous proximity to the flame, was the lady Agnes.
All the breath was stolen from Pliny’s lungs.
Agnes’s gown was pushed up around her hips, and the bodice was ripped—violently, almost, as if passion had prevailed over tenderness.
Her breasts were released to the cold air, her nipples two stiff peaks, and they shuddered with each of the prince’s savage thrusts.
Yet there was no cruel edge to this savagery; Pliny saw only desperation, the rough and crude abandon of reason, of reluctance.
Agnes gasped and moaned, and the prince twisted his hands into her hair, tipping back her head so the sounds could pour out of her, unobstructed, something else for his senses to feast upon.
This scattered the silver clips about the floor, and the white flowers, those petals of stubborn mourning, were shaken free and cast into the fire.
Lord Fredegar’s hold upon her, released.
Pliny watched it as though it were the most stunning of metamorphoses, a butterfly cracking open its cocoon, an infant breaching its gray birth caul.
The prince’s love—could it be called love?
—was changing her in such an astonishing way that it would have beggared his belief if he were not observing it now with his own eyes.
The prince’s thrusts deepened as he grew close to his release, battering his hips against the lady’s.
He groaned, a low sound of pure need, and Agnes seemed to answer with her own whimper.
His hand found her juddering breast and kneaded it, coaxing another moan from her mouth.
His lips moved along her jawline and down her throat, in a manner almost worshipful.
Pliny was then possessed by the notion that it was beautiful.
This highest of treasons, this act of perfidy, which could break all of Drepane and sink the island into the sea—both Agnes and the prince were wise enough to know this, and yet they feasted upon their own pleasure as though it were a banquet upon an endless table.
And Pliny understood that it was more than lust, for they both could have satisfied that need elsewhere and not risked the very order of the world.
He knew, down to the marrow of his austere and ancient bones, that what he saw before him was no less than love.
And for being love, the danger was immeasurable.
This cold fear clutched at Pliny, like the grasping of ghosts.
Liuprand spilled his seed within the lady and choked—nearly sobbed—with relief.
Agnes collapsed against him, shoulders rising and falling, as if she could not breathe around the knowledge of her treachery, as if she were being strangled, slowly, by her apostate heart.