Chapter XX The Master of Eyes
XX
The Master of Eyes
Agnes marked the passage of days by the fading of the bruises on her throat, by the slow and painful reclamation of her voice.
The burst blood vessels in her eyes repaired themselves—whether by Pliny’s tonics and poultices or by the simple progression of time, she did not know.
But when she rose each morning, she felt a more puissant creature, more whole.
She went to her usual haunts, fulfilled her usual duties, yet all the while there was a prickling along her spine, an uneasy churning in her stomach.
When she was with Tisander, she would often fall to distraction, trailing off in the midst of a sentence she was reading aloud.
Frowning, he would turn in her lap and lay a hand gently on her cheek.
He spoke no words, but the question was evident in his too-wise, too-knowing eyes.
“Apologies, my sweet dove,” she would say then, blinking away the film that had fallen over her eyes. “I am well. Let me begin again.”
Agnes came to understand that it was not her body that needed healing but her heart.
And it was no shriveled thing, wrung like a sponge—it was strident and bragged more fiercely than ever.
This was the perplexity of mortal life. The more alive she had become, the more she learned to ache.
When she had been that small, shrinking, gray-clad maiden, she had put away her pain, along with her voice, along with her need, and in that she had hidden herself from love, too.
The lack of it was not even near as agonizing as the surfeit.
She wondered what her arms had even done, before they had held the child. What had her mouth done before it could whisper Liuprand’s name? She had been so stubbornly proud not to feel her heart. She had lived in the dismal safety of dreams. To wake was to grieve.
And grieve she did, for what she had lost, for the world that had broken apart under her feet.
But when she at last surfaced from the dark waters of lamentation, she had known there remained something which she could repair.
It would require a quill and parchment and a willing messenger.
Those she had found easily enough. She knew too that it would require forfeit.
Yet more grief before all was well again. The yielding of her own heart’s blood.
She was with Waltrude in her chamber when the bells of the Outer Wall rang.
The wet nurse jolted, and Agnes turned her head toward the window.
It was the earliest hour of dawn, when the sky was more white than colored, like a pale cheek yet to fill with a flush.
Waltrude dropped the laces of her corset and then fumbled to grasp them again, but Agnes stilled her.
“Not this gown,” she said, and stepped toward her wardrobe. “Another, finer one, with its bustline low.”
Waltrude nodded and proceeded to dress her in silence.
Agnes selected a gown of deep violet, which bared her shoulders and her bust, and especially drew attention to her throat, where the ancestral necklace of the House of Teeth hung.
Her hair was left loose. She wore no other jewelry save the pearl ring, which she never divested herself of, not even while sleeping or bathing.
All the while Agnes shivered, nervousness causing her teeth to chatter.
If Waltrude asked, she would blame it on the castle’s coldness.
Not even the most oppressive summer heat could penetrate the stone.
The days of drought that ravaged the rest of Drepane, that starved the Outer Wall and its environs, had no effect on the inhabitants of Castle Crudele.
When the last lace of her corset had been done, Agnes turned to the door. Before she could push through it, Waltrude’s voice at last rose.
“Shall I come with you, lady?”
Agnes swallowed, and there was the subtlest twinge of pain in her throat. “No,” she said. “Keep watch of Tisander. Remain at his side through all his lessons today. And…” She paused a moment. “…stay within sight of Pliny the leech.”
If Waltrude was perturbed by these unusual instructions, her face did not show it. But the wet nurse had always been too clever for her station. The years had only sharpened her senses and whetted her wisdom. Agnes suspected that now, as always, she understood more than her expression allowed.
Waltrude dipped her head. “Yes, my lady. I will go now.”
Agnes was determined to be quick, so that she would arrive in the great hall before any others could enter.
But she was not quick enough. By the time she reached the chamber, her pulse pounding from her exertions, Liuprand was already there.
Around him were two dozen men of the Dolorous Guard, stiff in their gray armor, swords drawn.
“Agnes!” He strode toward her, breaking the ring of soldiers. “What are you doing? Return to your chambers now; I will have the Dolorous Guard escort you. It is not safe here. A contingent from the House of Eyes has come. They are at the barbican now.”
“I know.” Agnes found it difficult to speak around the knot in her throat. “I have summoned them.”
Liuprand’s eyes widened—first in disbelief, and then in shock and horror. “Why?” he asked, his voice so plaintive that, for a moment, Agnes regretted all. “Why would you do such a thing, and how?”
Agnes drew a breath. She had dreaded this exchange perhaps more than anything else when she had first drawn up her plan.
“I sent a missive to Lord Thrasamund, pleading to treat with him. I—I may have signed it with your name. But I used only words that you have already spoken on this matter. It was a heartfelt plea. I wrote exactly as you would have, yourself.”
Liuprand’s mouth opened, then closed again, beyond speech. He closed his eyes and gave the faintest shake of his head.
“Oh, Agnes,” he whispered. “You should not have done this—you have put yourself in grave danger. If Thrasamund is to discern any trickery, he will grow more embittered, more rageful. He will think he has been wronged once again.” Liuprand exhaled, a thin sound, almost defeated. “I fear what you have begun.”
Agnes wished they were not in sight of the Dolorous Guard so that she might lay a hand on Liuprand’s cheek. That she might comfort him with her touch as well as her words.
“Do not be afraid,” she said. “I have not been reckless in this, I swear. I have passed many days and nights in reflection and preparation. Please allow me to speak to Lord Thrasamund when he arrives. I believe I can soothe his wounds. I believe that I can set all right again.”
Liuprand just stared down at her, brow furrowed as if he were trying to hide the pain of a wound, mouth drawn into a grimace.
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I do, Agnes. Always I do. It is Thrasamund I do not trust. He may have acquiesced to this meeting, but you cannot know his true intentions. I have wronged him gravely. Already I have furnished him generously with gold and arms—what else will he demand, to restore faith and sympathy?”
“Please,” Agnes said. “Keep faith with me. Believe in my art, as you did with the masque. I am not a mere pawn upon the board. I am a player in my own right.”
With these words, Agnes proved her point—she knew precisely how to cut to Liuprand’s heart. He sighed again, more deeply and more gravely this time, and then he said, “Very well. I will allow you to speak with Thrasamund. But you must remain at my side, and behind the Dolorous Guard.”
Relief made Agnes’s knees quiver. “Thank you. Thank you. I will not fail, I swear it.”
It was at that moment that the doors to the great hall groaned open, and the retinue from the House of Eyes poured forth. It was not a small retinue; Agnes had expected as much. Thrasamund, despite his concession to the meeting, would come with all the instruments of defense.
His armored men formed a bastion, closing a tight circle around their lord.
Over their helmets, however, Agnes glimpsed the shining crown of Thrasamund’s bald head and the hard, fierce set of his brows.
Her task was not close to finished. Persuading him to this summit had only been the smallest part of it.
“My Lord Thrasamund,” Liuprand said. He had to raise his voice nearly to a shout, so that it would arc out past the steel wall made by the Dolorous Guard. “I am most grateful that you have come. You are welcomed eagerly and with all the warmth Castle Crudele can offer.”
“Not very much warmth then.”
Liuprand flinched, though only Agnes was near enough to see it. “It is not the most hospitable structure, I grant. But the House of Berengar is glad of your visit.”
“Let us not lose more time to pleasantries. This is no convivial appointment, and I do not wish to remain overlong.” Thrasamund’s words rolled like boulders down a mountain. “You pleaded your apology by ink and paper. I should like to hear it from your mouth as well.”
Liuprand exchanged one last look with Agnes—his gaze was soft, as it always was when he laid it upon her, though now there was the wavering of guilt within it, regret dancing like moonlight on the water.
His chest swelled; he drew himself up to his full height.
And then, clearing his throat, he said to his men, “Part.”
With the clanking of armor, they did, forming but the smallest gap for Liuprand to step through.
He had not been anticipating Thrasamund’s visit and wore his rather quotidian doublet of navy with braids of gold, though it was better this way, Agnes thought; she would not want Thrasamund to believe that Liuprand was swanning his house’s superiority or the wealth of the Crown.
Yet still he was the most majestic creature, closer to a hero in a storybook than to a mortal man.
His beauty was almost beyond description.
The warm aura of light that pulsed from him made one feel blessed merely to be in his presence.
And now, as he bowed his great head, it seemed an aberrance of nature, like a lion cringing before a sheep.
Surely his remorse could not be doubted.
“Lord Thrasamund,” he said, “I offer my most sincere and heavyhearted condolences. I acted rashly and brutishly; there is no excuse to be made. I have long strived to promote goodwill between the great houses of Drepane and the royal line of Berengar. To think that I have brought all my work to ruin with a single act of impulse and barbarity brings me untold shame—yet I know it is still a mere shade of the anguish you must feel, to have lost a son. It is a grief I cannot begin to fathom. I pray you can forgive this lapse of mine, and I pray still more that you can find some manner of peace, even as you mourn Lord Childeric.”
At the conclusion of Liuprand’s speech, silence fell upon the great hall, a very heavy silence.
Agnes began to pick at the white skin around her fingernail before she could stop herself.
Her mind formed no thoughts other than a single word, repeated over and over in a steady, grueling rhythm: Please. Please, please, please.
And then, extraordinarily, from behind the row of his men, there came Thrasamund’s low and throaty laugh.
“You are as eloquent as your father is fat, Prince of Drepane,” he said. “I dearly hope that you do not take offense to that and rob me of yet another child. I do not have any more to spare.”
Agnes saw Liuprand’s fists clench at his sides. “No, my lord. Not again. Never again.”
Thrasamund chuckled blackly. “Well, you speak with resolve; that much I cannot doubt. But mine is a more twisted grief, a perverse mourning for the living. Should you like to see the fruits of your effort, my prince?”
Liuprand glanced at Agnes, brow furrowing. Her heart winced, to see his bewilderment—she had kept this hidden from him, too, else he would never have consented to such a meeting. Agnes did not know if she would ever forgive herself for her deception.
When there came no reply, Thrasamund laughed again, the same brusque, humorless sound.
“Part,” he said to his men.
Greaves and gauntlets clattered as they stepped to the side, arranging themselves into a half circle that revealed, at last, the Master of Eyes in his entirety.
A distinguished lord in all respects, of towering height, even if he was still a head and a half shorter than Liuprand, and robed in a doublet of deep green.
But Agnes did not waste more than a moment’s attention on Thrasamund.
She was looking at the figure to his left.
She had been told, in letters and in vagaries, of his condition, yet even now she struggled to recognize him—so diminished he was in his form.
He sat, not stood, in a large and cumbersome wheelchair, a blanket draped across his lap.
One arm hung down limply, fingertips nearly brushing the floor, while the other was thrown over his chest in an awkward, strained angle that made Agnes’s skin rise with horror.
And his face—his jaw was slack, spittle forming in the corners of his mouth.
A woman, small and hunched, at least half as old as Waltrude, leaned over and dabbed at it with a handkerchief before it could drip.
Yet for all this Lord Childeric’s eyes were gleaming and sharp. They cast about the chamber, nothing muddled in his stare, nothing unfixed or unaware. He saw all and understood. His gaze landed on Agnes, and then on Liuprand, and he remembered.
She would have preferred there to be malice in this stare. It would have been well earned. But instead there was only the flashing of fear.