Chapter XVI Distant Embraces
XVI
Distant Embraces
“It would be best if you did not try to speak.”
By the large, open window of her bedchamber, Agnes sat, slightly hunched, in a chair that had no back.
This was so Pliny could move about her more easily, dabbing on a salve that smelled so bitter as to sting her nose.
Her hair was pinned up on her head in a pearl-enameled clasp.
Pliny pressed his fingers to her sternum and, very gently, adjusted her posture.
Agnes rolled back her shoulders and tried to straighten her neck, but a dull ache pulsed from her throat as she did. She winced.
“Apologies, lady,” Pliny murmured.
Agnes swallowed, and even that—especially that—provoked another bolt of pain. The salve was warming her skin, though the rest of its promised healing properties were yet to emerge. Soon, she thought vaguely, with a hope that was not very hopeful.
“It will take time,” the leech said, as if he had read these thoughts. “Not even a day has passed.”
Agnes heard the words, but could not grasp their meaning.
What had been mere hours felt the length of lifetimes, and yet, in some manner, it seemed as though not a moment had passed at all.
If ever she allowed her mind to wander she was there again, on the lightning-blanched parapet, Marozia’s hands at her throat.
Panic swam up. Her lungs seemed to seize and then wilt like cut flowers. She crumpled forward in her seat.
“Lady?” Pliny’s hand hovered, hesitant, above her shoulder. “Do not mourn. You will be well again.”
Slowly, Agnes sat up. She had not wept but the tip of her nose prickled with heat, as though she might, at the slightest provocation, dissolve into tears. Yet what good would it do, to weep?
Agnes’s gaze slid to the mirror.
The face that stared back at her was one of ghastliness and of horror.
A throbbing necklace of bruises ringed her throat, deep purples mottled with sickly greens and garish blacks.
Each was the shape of a finger, ruthlessly pressed.
Small gauges showed where teeth had been driven into her skin, Marozia’s hands clenched around the regal bauble of their house.
It gave the impression that Agnes had been both choked and bitten.
Her cheeks were pale and wan with lack of sleep, with the food and wine she had vomited through the burning chasm of her throat. And her eyes—the whites were now flooded with red. The look of it repulsed her. Agnes turned away.
Pliny was mixing a poultice of chamomile and honey when there was a knock upon the door. The leech glanced at Agnes for permission. She nodded, and he called out, “Come in.”
It was Liuprand. He seemed to have passed a similarly sleepless night, for there were deep, dark circles under his eyes and his golden aura flickered and waned, like a candle flame blown about by the wind.
He had shed his bloodied garb and came instead in vestments of navy, with a heavy, woolen cape that dragged over the ground.
“Pliny.” He inclined his chin to the leech. Then, as he turned to Agnes, his voice lowered and his gaze grew soft and he said, “My love.”
Agnes swallowed, to yet another scrape of pain, and opened her mouth. She was halfway to forming words when she remembered Pliny’s directives. Her lips fell shut again.
“I have instructed her not to speak, my prince,” the leech said. “It will irritate her wounds and prolong the healing process.”
“I see.” Liuprand’s expression was suddenly awash with grief. “Then furnish her with a quill and parchment, Your Scrupulousness.”
“Yes, my prince.”
As Pliny went to fetch them, Liuprand approached her.
Slowly, unsteadily, Agnes rose from her chair.
It had been a long time, a very long time, since Liuprand had come to her chambers, for fear that such a visit would arouse suspicion.
Agnes felt a cold vise of panic grip her, more instinct than reason.
Because what was the use of discretion now?
Liuprand paused a pace away, eyes wavering.
“Look what has been done to you,” he whispered. “All because of my arrogance and folly. I wish that I could suffer your pain instead.”
Pliny laid out the parchment and quill on her desk. Agnes took it and scratched out a message, then handed the paper to Liuprand.
The fault lies with me. I should not have been so wounded by simple words.
“No,” Liuprand said. “Lord Childeric’s conduct was a grave insult.
Punishment was warranted…but I should not have allowed my temper to rule me.
Perhaps, without the influence of the wine…
” He shook his head. “It is an ignoble man who cannot prevail over his worst impulses. I had never thought I would be such a man. Uncivilized and indulgent, vulgar and weak.”
You are not that man, Agnes wrote, pressing her quill tip firmly to the page. One such lapse in thirty years does not make you a brute. And you acted to defend my honor, not out of arrogance or vanity.
Still, Liuprand grimaced. “Would that I had waited and reproved Lord Childeric in a more suitable manner. Then we would not have lost the confidence of both the House of Eyes and the House of Blood. All your efforts, gone to waste for my impulsive sin. I have kept the truth from my father yet, but when he learns what has transpired…”
Insulate the king from this knowledge now. Intercept all missives until we have come to a solution. It is fortunate that he is all but confined to his bed. Agnes chewed her chapped and bitten lip. There will be some way to repair it. To atone with Lord Thrasamund.
“Perhaps. But it will require cleverness and, on my part, abasement. I already filled Lord Thrasamund’s coffers and paid a dowry to the House of Blood.
There must be more, some other manner in which I can offer recompense.
” He sighed. “To rob a lord of his heir, a man of his birthright, and a parent of their child—it is a beastly thing I have done. At least when I offer my regrets, the message will be heartfelt.”
Faintly Agnes nodded. Fear, as chill as a mountain wind, was prickling her skin.
She was not thinking of Lord Thrasamund, or Lord Childeric, or even of the blood and the shattered goblets.
She was thinking of a young girl with golden hair, and her mother.
She was remembering the sound of their broken sobs.
“I know,” Liuprand said softly—for he could always read her face. “That is another matter that must be addressed. And it is far more vital than the first. Lord Thrasamund is not the only one with whom we have lost confidence.”
What Agnes thought then she did not say, or rather, did not write. In her mind, the words churned queasily, like gray laundry being wrung. That confidence was lost long ago. This was only the truth laid out baldly, at last.
Liuprand took a step forward and closed the space between them. Pliny was busying himself with his herbs and poultices, but Agnes knew that the old leech had sharp ears, and Liuprand knew it, too. He lowered himself so that their faces were level.
“I understand,” he murmured, “that you and the princess have not been allies as of late. That loathing has blossomed where once there was love. Yet I do not believe that so much time has passed, so much distance grown, that you cannot still sense your cousin’s mind.
Her heart.” He laid a gentle hand on Agnes’s chest, where her own heart pulsed and fluttered. “Has she gone completely to madness?”
Agnes’s fingers clenched around the quill. She leaned over, stiffly, and began to write.
I do not think so. Fury, yes. And for fair cause. But even now I do not believe…
She paused, her quill tip halting on the page. A sharp and sudden pain lodged itself between her ribs, causing her breath to catch.
I do not believe that she will act out of malice. She is capricious, but she is not cruel.
Liuprand inclined his chin, rising again to his full height.
“Indeed. She has already had her fit of pique.” Delicately, and without touching her, he gestured to Agnes’s bruised throat.
“And to expose our secret would shame her, as well. She is proud enough that she would not wish for the world to know how her husband and her cousin carried on under her nose.”
Yes, Agnes wrote. If there is one thing that Marozia has yet to shed, it is her pride.
“I dearly wish it had not come to this,” Liuprand said. He let out a soft exhale. “If it were no more than a gash upon my honor, then I could have borne it—but you have been harmed, and that is what I cannot bear.”
With utmost tenderness, he took Agnes’s face into his hands. Indeed, his touch was so gentle that she could almost not feel it at all, and, unexpectedly, it drew from her a great swell of grief. Here he was before her and yet she was apart from him. This was what their folly had done.
“I swear, Agnes,” he whispered, “that I will never let such harm come to you again. I would fall upon a sword before I would let you be pricked by a needle. I am your servant and I am your shield. My soul has been fashioned for the purpose of loving you, and I would sooner welcome death than be stripped of this duty, this design. I would endure the blackest torments, such that my mind cannot even conjure—the most appalling agonies. Do you believe me?”
Her throat burned too much for words, her neck even for so little as a nod. Agnes merely stared up at him, into the eyes of her lover, her protector, the guardian of her honor, the champion of her heart. What had she done to deserve such a being? And what would she do to keep him?
Liuprand could not remain long in her chambers; their secret was still a secret, even if there was now one more mind that knew it. Agnes dismissed Pliny, as well.
Her empty stomach scraped as it churned, but she was in too much pain to consider eating or even drinking.
Her hand darted out for the jug of water that Pliny had left out for her, and then recoiled, as if she had been burned.
Her hair remained pinned up in its pearl clasp.
The thought of letting it down, of feeling it brush against her bruised throat, made Agnes flinch.
She wore only a nightgown, which fell about her limply, a shapeless garment of white linen.
Her feet were bare against the floor’s cold stone.
As she cast her gaze about the room, it landed once more on the mirror, on her own reflection.
The wan, haunted face with its red eyes stared back at her.
It was not a woman’s face. It was a ghost’s, a girl’s.
Agnes’s feet took her out of the chamber and down the corridor. She was not even certain of where she was going until she arrived. Hesitantly, her fingers flexing and twitching, Agnes pushed open the door.
Marozia’s old chamber was empty, as it had been for more than half a decade.
The canopy had been removed from the bed, the mattress stripped bare.
A dense coat of dust lay over everything, and the air was thick and stale.
No candles were lit, and the hearth was long since cold, but the window was open, so the darkness was incomplete, striped with irregular slants of pale light.
Agnes walked forward, though the floor seemed to swallow the sound of her steps.
The silence, unlike the darkness, was complete and unyielding.
It engulfed Agnes in a familiar, almost relieved fashion, as the embrace of a long-lost friend.
She felt the heavy air shift, folding her into this voluptuous grasp.
Slowly, though without faltering, Agnes approached the bed and sat. Like the air, like the silence, the mattress remembered her shape and drew her down. Ignoring the pain of such movements, Agnes lowered herself onto the bed and curled up on her side.
Her mind was flooded then, not with thoughts, not with words, only with images, the bright surging of memories.
They blinked and flashed, one after another.
She saw her hands moving briskly over scarlet cloth as she dressed Marozia.
Scarlet, then bridal white, that long lace train.
She saw her cousin’s collarbone and the shadow of dark curls across it as she fell into Agnes’s arms, weeping.
She saw her fingers, coaxing bread into Marozia’s mouth.
She saw Marozia’s head, pillowed in her lap, sweat plastering her hair to her reddened face, her throat pulsing with each scream of her labor. She saw the flash of white teeth as her lips parted to form these wails. She saw the glaze of wordless agony in her eyes.
What Agnes felt as she lay there, the ghost of Marozia beside her, was beyond articulation. She let her lashes flutter closed, relenting to the dream. She let tears wash her cheeks. Agnes let her thumb slide into her mouth, and she sucked it greedily, until she was lulled to sleep.