Chapter I Agnes in Love
I
Agnes in Love
Tisander was grown. He walked—if unsteadily—without his wet nurse’s abetting hand. Waltrude was ever more distant from him, watching only from afar as he stacked blocks and tugged his horse-on-a-string, or plucked flowers and menaced the moths in the garden.
Her milk had dried and withered, as did Tisander’s need of it.
Now it was the lady Agnes who doted upon him.
And endlessly she doted upon him, with the passion of a nun at prayer.
She held the boy to her breast and whispered stories of her own invention, stories in which his horse-on-a-string was a horse of flesh and blood, and he was a knight and a hero; she fed him honey from her fingers; she carried him through the castle halls even when he was large and solid enough to make her arms quiver around him, no longer a babe but a boy.
And he loved no one better than Agnes—she was sure of it. It was the greatest pride of her life.
Their most common retreat was the library.
He had been no more than ten days old, his eyes still gummy with the slime of birth, when Agnes had first brought him to that great golden-lit chamber and raised him high in his bundle of blankets, both revealing to him his domain and flaunting him to the lurking spirits.
He had an aura about him like his father’s, the pulsing, hereditary gleam of his Seraphine blood, and the ghosts all fled in his presence, banishing themselves to cobwebbed corners, or else dissipating where they floated, like tide pools dried to salt in the sun.
Agnes smiled then; she had at last put to rest those silent, lurking specters. Tisander’s birth had cleansed her world of its ghosts.
Tisander had talked before he could toddle, in a clear voice, like a pour of freshest water.
His hair grew in lush curls of dark gold.
His eyes were the deep blue of Seraph’s great lagoon.
In nearly every possible respect, he was his father’s son—and in the small ways he was not, Agnes told herself that it was her doting, her love, that had made him so.
She refused any niggling hint that he was the profit of the woman who had birthed him.
And yet he was a peculiar child. Agnes could not deny it, even if she was the only one who saw his strangeness. As soon as he could speak, he said in that sonorous voice, as eloquent as any man grown, “Are these stories true and real?”
Agnes had stiffened, her arms growing taut around his small body. “What do you mean, my dearest love?”
“Stories of knights and heroes,” Tisander replied. “Did these knights ever draw breath? Do these heroes have statues raised in their honor?”
“Only within the pages,” Agnes said. She ran her finger hesitantly along the edge of the parchment. “Does that displease you?”
“No.” Tisander looked up at her with the steady gaze of the waveless ocean. “But please, tell me a story that is true.”
And so Agnes shucked those books of knights and heroes, of their romances and adventures, and spoke instead from her own memory, from the tales that had been told to her by Pliny the leech. She hoped they were indeed true.
“We sit within the castle of Nicephorus the Sluggard,” she began, “and before that it was the castle of Widsith the Precious, and before that, Berengar Who-Fights-Alone. This is the exalted line to which you are heir, my sweet dove. But Berengar was not always such a great man—or perhaps I should say he was once only a man of great confidence. His house in Seraph was a humble one, a merchant’s house, rather new in its nobility.
He had only smelled the perfume of the Dogaressa at a distance.
He had a modest number of ships. His stores of wealth were small—yet his nerve was boundless.
“When the plague struck the island and its revenants began to ravage the shores of Seraph, Berengar seized his opportunity. He saw the broken vessels of his fellow merchants and heard their groans of calamity. They beseeched the Dogaressa for aid, but she did not deign to answer, glutted as she was on wine and sweets and the flattery of her many suitors. And so it was Berengar alone who took up his sword.”
Agnes paused there; Tisander was tensed with attention in her lap.
She wondered how she might recount the garish violence that followed.
There was no telling of this tale—no truthful telling—that omitted it.
Perhaps a different child would not be able to detect euphemism or falsity.
But Agnes suspected that Tisander would sense the way her tone shifted uneasily with a lie.
“Berengar sailed to Drepane with a small army,” she went on, “and found that the island had gone to chaos, to madness. Revenants roved, mindless with hunger, feasting on the dead and the living alike. The clever nobles shut themselves up in their castles, safe from the savagery of these monsters. The cleverer still were those who managed to exert some control over the revenants, who could use them for their own ends.”
At that, Tisander tilted his head up, eyes questioning. “And how did they do that?”
“I do not know,” Agnes confessed. “That wisdom has been lost to time. All those who did know perished under Berengar’s blade. He could not allow such dark practices to continue, or to stretch beyond Drepane’s shores.”
Tisander was silent a moment. “Why would he not claim such power for himself?”
“Because,” Agnes said, and looked out over the glorious library, with its staircase that spiraled upward like the inner curl of a conch shell, with the spines of the books that gleamed gold in shafts of sunlight from the high, recessed windows, this great treasury of art and knowledge that had been built upon a bed of torrid blood, “because…he was too noble. Berengar knew that this power was beyond what any mortal man would possess. It was a danger, and so he slaughtered this wisdom as he slaughtered the revenants and the nobles who had borne them up from their graves.”
There was a sudden tremor as she spoke the words that had once been treason to her.
As surely as the necklace of teeth lay around her throat, Agnes was still the heiress of its ancient bloodline, once glorious, now shrunken and diminished.
These were not tales that her grandmother would have permitted within the cold walls of Castle Crudele.
Adele-Blanche mangled truth; she chewed it like meat.
But her grandmother was expired, extinct, forever gone, and the necklace Agnes wore was as much pearls as teeth.
If Tisander indeed detected the shift in her voice, he did not remark upon it.
He merely snuggled closer to Agnes, his cheek pressed against the velvet bodice of her dress.
The warmth of his skin pulsed through the fabric, heat leached from his body to her breasts, and she felt—cursing herself—that old, revived sense of bereftness.
Waltrude had nursed the boy, not her. Agnes was still, and would be always, as barren as a shining-white salt flat.
Yet she did not have more than a moment to mourn it. The door to the library creaked open, and Pliny the leech appeared in the threshold.
Immediately, Tisander scrambled off her lap, and in his rather clumsy physicality, he appeared to Agnes as an ordinary child again.
Indeed, when he reached Pliny, he grasped the leech’s robes with tiny fists and excitedly cached himself among them—a little game Agnes had seen him play over and over again.
If he loved Agnes best, then his father, and then his wet nurse, Waltrude, in this ranking of affection it was Pliny who followed closely behind.
The leech rested a gentle hand on Tisander’s head. “It is time for your lesson, my lord.”
Eagerly, and still half ensconced in Pliny’s robes, Tisander followed him from the room. He paused only once, to peer back at Agnes. His gaze was bright and shimmering now, like the ocean made lively with the leaping of fish.
“Goodbye, my dear heart,” Agnes said.
And Tisander waved at her as he vanished through the threshold.
The library was not Agnes’s only place of refuge.
Her days had become rote, though not unpleasantly so—time seeped slowly past her, like amber from oak-wood, each moment a luminous, treasured droplet.
Her footsteps were slow, measured, the low hush of silk upon stone.
The windows gridded the floors with squares of deep-orange evening light.
Agnes passed through them, feeling the brief brush of warmth against her bare shoulder.
She did not need to hurry. He would wait until the death of the world, and perhaps even his soul would wait when his mortal form was desecrated and gone to nothing.
It was only her own eagerness that quickened her steps, as Agnes reached that final, narrow stairwell. She climbed it and pushed open the iron-heavy door.
At once she was soaked in the light of a thousand burning candles. The domed ceiling was dappled with it, as were the hoary stone walls, and in the very center, by the wax-coated altar, stood Liuprand. He was lighting the final wick.
When he saw her, he turned at once, and her name came from his lips in a soft whisper. “Agnes.”
“My love,” she answered.
The door shut behind her.
Agnes joined him there by the altar, as she always did, and together they looked at the lit candles in silent vigil. It was a ritual that had come to pass unspoken, grown at first from their shared sense of guilt, which bloomed outward, tinging the air with a sourness like smoke.
But Agnes was beyond shame now. She had shed its heavy husk. And as the flames leapt and the candle wicks curled and blackened, she reached up, undid the clasp, and shed her necklace of teeth, too. The chain slipped down between her breasts a moment before she caught it in a clutched fist.
Liuprand let out a shuddering breath.
“You know I would come to you already bare, if I could,” Agnes said. She lay the necklace on the altar, in that one small space that was not occupied by candles.