Chapter XXII The Chains of Desire
XXII
The Chains of Desire
Gone was Lord Thrasamund and his contingent; gone were the men of the Dolorous Guard.
The great hall of Castle Crudele was empty save for its prince and his mistress.
Agnes was trembling, and now she could not lie and say it was only from the cold.
Her cheeks were too flushed with the heat of blood.
Yet Liuprand would not look at her. He stared only at the threshold where Thrasamund and his retinue had vanished, his bright gaze driving into the darkness of the corridor.
Agnes felt, for perhaps the first time since she had come to be his lover, a pricking of fear as she regarded him.
But she did not fear for her own well-being—she feared what Liuprand might do to himself, what tortures he might inflict upon his person, maddened by grief.
“Please understand,” she began, laying a gentle hand on his arm. “Please—you can see why I have done this.”
Agnes felt his muscles stiffen under her touch, and, at long last, he turned. His face was shockingly pale, all of his puissant golden aura gone white. His eyes were rimmed with tears, unfallen.
“I cannot see, Agnes,” he said lowly. “Just as I cannot see any future that is empty of you. That is no life, for me. It is a form of posthumous existence at most. If you are gone—” He choked. “—then so is all my reason for being.”
She could not look at him without tears leaping to her eyes, as well. “Please,” she managed again. “Do not speak such, I cannot bear it. Your pain is the only thing that might sway me from my course.”
“Then let it sway you!” Liuprand’s voice rose suddenly to a shout, and he grasped her tightly by the shoulders.
It was not rough enough to hurt; he could never hurt her, even in the blackest of rages, but it was unexpected enough that Agnes gasped.
“Let it drive you from this wretched and hopeless turn! You would doom us both to unending misery.”
“No,” she tried, weakly, “it is only that…I can see no other way to make this right again. Thrasamund has rejected every other entreaty. And worse, your name has been sullied, your legacy tainted—all in defense of my honor.”
“I care nothing for my legacy,” he bit out.
“I care nothing for the decrees of men. It is no more than the mindless grumbling of sheep and swine. Let them brand me with any epithet they wish, for good or for ill; I do not care. Let Liuprand of the House of Berengar die, and let me rise again, reborn for the sole purpose of your veneration. That is the only worth of my life.”
Agnes shook her head fiercely. “It cannot be so. All your life you have labored selflessly for the betterment of the island, for the well-being of all who live upon Drepane. I will not have this be for naught.”
Liuprand opened his mouth to reply, then snapped it shut again.
A glazed look came over his face. He released Agnes and stepped back, drawing himself up to his full height, casting his eyes about the great hall.
He fixed his gaze for a moment on the throne, empty for years, ever since King Nicephorus had grown too fat to fill it. He let out a long, tremulous breath.
“And why should I prize their well-being so?” he murmured, almost to himself, in a voice strangled with bitterness.
“Why should I toil endlessly for their advancement, for their happiness, at the expense of my own? They are capricious and dull, crude and witless. I killed one man and they called me just. I near to killed another and they called me cruel. Yet they will say that my greatest crime is loving you.”
Agnes could scarcely bring herself to look at him. A single tear ran a path down her cheek, and spilled to stain the velvet of her gown.
“You have undermined yourself again and again in my defense,” she whispered. “Can I not repay such devotion with a sacrifice of my own? Would you take this choice from me?”
Liuprand’s head dropped. He squeezed his eyes shut, then raised a hand to press hard against his temples, obscuring for a moment his visage. His shoulders rose and fell mightily, and his breathing grew rapid and short. Agnes was terrified that she might, for the first time, see him weep.
“No,” he said, the word muffled by the cover of his hand. “I cannot accept it. Any other torment I could endure, but not this.”
A sob rose in Agnes’s throat, but it did not spill past her lips.
Silence reigned again in the great hall.
Nothing could impinge upon it; even the distant, rote noises of the castle’s daily drudgeries seemed to have gone quiet.
It was as though there were no servants, no scullions, no guards, as though Castle Crudele were empty of all but two.
And in this silence, in this emptiness, the cord stretching between them swelled and thickened.
Its straining seemed to make it only stronger.
Under threat of snapping, it fortified itself.
Agnes sensed this, and finally, the sob tumbled from her mouth.
“So you cannot bear it,” she choked out, through her tears. “I was a fool to think that I could, either. But what can we do? I have made the offer to Lord Thrasamund; it would be perfidy to rescind it now.”
Liuprand let his hand fall from his face, and he looked up at Agnes again. He did not weep, but the anguish was plain in his eyes.
“I do not know,” he said quietly. “We must hope that Thrasamund rejects the offer himself. Perhaps—perhaps we can, in a subtle manner, sway his mind, yet make him believe the decision was his own. I must think on it.”
Still tearful, Agnes nodded. “I will think on it as well. And I am sorry—I am sorry that I have tried to protect you yet only caused you more grief.”
Liuprand drew in a breath, and his great chest swelled. He moved toward Agnes and grasped her by the shoulders again, this time with utmost gentleness. He lowered his head until their faces were close, their noses near enough to brush.
“My grief is a condition of my love,” he said softly. “It is the abject law of humanity, that one cannot exist without the other.” He leaned yet closer, touching his forehead to hers. “Do you love me, Agnes?”
“Yes,” she whispered back. Her heart bragged with the inexorable truth of it. “With every fragment of my being, forever.”
“Then,” he said, and kissed her briefly but tenderly on her brow, “all will be well.”