Chapter VI Milk, Teeth
VI
Milk, Teeth
Agnes was alone in the library today. Tisander had gone with Pliny to the beaches outside Castle Crudele, where, barefoot, they would walk carefully along the sand and see what creatures they could find.
Pliny knew of every plant and animal on the island, all carefully accounted in his encyclopedia.
Agnes had pleasant visions of Tisander, crouching before a tide pool, tracing his finger gently over the piebald shell of a crab or pointing in delight as a cormorant took flight from the rocks.
Smiling to herself at this thought, Agnes took a book down from the shelf and settled in at her usual place at the long oaken table.
But she read for no more than a quarter hour before she was disturbed. The library door opened, and there was Liuprand.
She half rose from her seat in shock. “You should not be here,” she said, in a thick voice that could not disguise her true pleasure. “It is a risk—”
“One I will take,” Liuprand said. He walked toward her through the path of a beam of sunlight, which lit up his hair and each gilded tassel and button on his jacket.
Agnes knew every contour of his body beneath it, but even observing him covered completely, her breath caught at his beauty.
An impossible beauty, fed from the blood of Seraph. “I must see you.”
“Will we not see each other tonight?” Agnes asked. “In our usual place?”
“No,” Liuprand said. “Not tonight.”
He reached the table and stood before her, and though their distance was small, it felt infinite in this unsafe place, where anyone might enter at any moment.
The library was not often visited, but it was not unknown, not like the chapel.
To muffle the instinct to reach for him, Agnes instead stroked nervously through the ends of her hair. “Why not?”
“I cannot say,” he replied, “for I wish it to be a surprise. But when we convene there again tomorrow, I hope you are pleased. More than pleased.” He leaned forward, and the ghost of a kiss brushed her cheek.
Agnes’s skin prickled with both desire and danger. “Not here,” she whispered, unconvincingly, for she could not bring herself to rebuff his touch.
“No, you are right.” Liuprand pulled away and Agnes instantly was bereft. “But I have come to you about another matter as well.”
She arched a brow. “Oh?”
Liuprand pulled out a chair and sat, while Agnes lowered herself back into her seat.
They were just far enough from each other that she could not touch him, even if she extended her arms. She suspected it was for both his benefit and hers, that they might resist the temptation to fall upon each other, as they did in their secret meeting place.
“As you know,” Liuprand began then, “the other houses will arrive in sixty-four days to celebrate the marriage of Meriope. Preparations are already under way among the servants, of course; we expect to host retinues of twenty for each master, and more for the House of Blood. It will be the first time in near a decade that all the houses will be gathered beneath one roof. It would be a shame for this moment to pass without putting it to full use.”
Agnes frowned. “How do you mean?”
“All through my father’s reign, the royal family has held the nobility of Drepane at a distance,” Liuprand said.
“Little effort has been made to promote true unity among the houses and the line of Berengar. Some effort,” he admitted, a flush tinting his cheeks, and Agnes looked away, for she knew that he hinted at what they both dared never speak of aloud.
His marriage. “But as we are witnessing yet another yoking of the Crown to one of the noble houses, I thought we might make of it a special celebration.”
Agnes looked down at her hands in discomfort.
She did not know precisely what her cousin thought of this marriage, because they no longer spoke.
Marozia kept to the east wing of the castle, and Agnes to the west. But it did not take great wisdom to guess.
Her beloved daughter, summarily removed from her arms and carted off to a distant house to be made a strange man’s wife.
Or—perhaps not entirely strange. Agnes remembered the boy Gamelyn had been, the green eyes she had gazed into while they stood in Fredegar’s cellar.
She remembered, with a chill, how hateful those eyes had been.
She did not know, however, if or how he had changed in these intervening years.
He was a boy no longer. Would he be as kind a man as his grandfather?
Or as cruel a man as his father? And would he ever forgive the Crown, the House of Berengar, for what had been taken from him? The father slain, the childhood stolen?
Agnes looked up to find Liuprand watching her intently, brow furrowed with concern.
“I am well,” she assured him, swallowing hard. “Now go on.”
“I propose this only because I believe you are fitted to the task, and that it might bring you joy,” he said.
“I thought perhaps you might be persuaded to write and prepare a masque, to be performed before our gentle guests. The subject of this theater would be, of course, the joining of the royal house with the nobility of Drepane. It would celebrate unity and promote a hopeful vision of the future.”
As Agnes looked upon her lover, she was suffused with pride and affection.
Liuprand the Just, he had been named, but he could just as easily be called Liuprand the Good or Liuprand the Wise.
Generous, he was, clever and kind. She was glad to be his wife, even in secret. A smile pushed itself onto her face.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course I will do this. It is a great honor that you would think me suited for the enterprise.”
“Why should I not? Your mind is sharp, your imagination colorful, your knowledge immeasurably vast. You will write something superb, such as those stories you scribbled as a girl; I know it.”
It required all the strength of Agnes’s will not to take Liuprand’s face into her hands and kiss it.
Yet she need not feel entirely bereft, for what followed was one of her most treasured occurrences—a small and humble thing, but vivifying nonetheless.
Liuprand relaxed back into his chair while Agnes rose and began searching among the shelves for a book that might inspire her masque.
She returned with an armful, spreading them out across the table. She picked up one, Liuprand another.
And then, as they had once before, a long, long time ago, when Agnes was still silent and Liuprand yearning against all hope, despite all odds, they read together.
Not a word needed to be spoken between them.
Their love was an airborne thing that could be felt, like the mists of the Dogaressa’s perfume, a gift from one of her many suitors.
It was the scent of roses, sweetest just before the moment of rot.
Agnes could even be contented not to reach out and take her lover’s hand.
His nearness was enough, the pulse of his golden warmth.
In the midst of this moment, which seemed to stop time itself—or at least make it roll slowly, languorously past—Agnes managed to half convince herself that it would last forever.
That night, when Agnes returned to her chamber, her mind was abuzz with ideas; her thoughts spread out in all directions, like dark-veined rifts racing out across an expanse of cracked ice.
Below the surface of that frozen water, so many creatures lay in wait: a calico shark, a blood-red squid, a whale as black as midnight.
Whimsy, passion, death. Every element, every facet of existence, would make an appearance in Agnes’s masque.
As Waltrude undressed her, she found herself shivering in anticipation.
But still, she sensed the wet nurse’s distraction.
Her motions seemed almost too rote, bordering on brusque, and she kept her gaze lowered to the floor.
Agnes’s gown fell away from her body, and Waltrude did not quite catch it in time, leaving the deep-purple silk to drift to the ground, like the blown petals of an orchid.
“Apologies, my lady,” Waltrude said, bending to pick it up.
Agnes, standing nude before the mirror, saw herself frown. “You seem ill at ease,” she said.
“No. I am not.”
Stubborn as a carriage wheel in the mud, Waltrude was not one to argue with in such a manner.
Agnes instead regarded her reflection. There had been a time when she had looked in the mirror and loathed with every aspect of her being the creature that looked back.
But that was long ago. That gray, silent, wilting flower of a girl had been coaxed to blooming life by Liuprand’s hands.
If she had been a girl then, she was most certainly a woman now, near thirty herself.
When she had come to Castle Crudele she had come pale, her skin stretched tautly over her bones, her rib cage pressing upward through her flesh.
Now fat had filled her once-sunken cheeks, and love had painted them with the most delicate flush.
Her breasts had grown to pert and modest peaks.
Agnes came to appreciate her own beauty—as though she were seeing herself through Liuprand’s eyes—and her frown lifted into a smile.
Waltrude was not smiling. She was folding Agnes’s dress with the same brisk ministrations and placing it on the chair to be washed. With the wet nurse’s attention averted, Agnes plucked her own nightgown from the wardrobe and put it on, the gauzy silk gliding across her bare, supple skin.
“Where has your mind gone?” Agnes asked, approaching Waltrude. “Speak.”
There was a subtle rising of her shoulders, like the bristling hackles of a cat, and then Waltrude turned.
Her lidded eyes were watchful and too knowing.
Agnes remembered how, at their first meeting, she had been surprised to see how lively they were, how clever, for a woman so old and otherwise weary looking.
Now she sensed again that Waltrude knew too much.