Chapter XXV Wounded Lion and Trodden Serpent #2
And Liuprand, who lived, and whose mind was still, for some part, intact?
Could he have protested more adamantly this violation?
The deep heart of the matter may never be known.
But what can be said is that he was once a creature who prided itself on its lack of greed, its renunciation of all such low impulses and embodied cravings.
Yet now, in his love, he was ruined. His asceticism had been flayed from him; he was an animal skinned, his abject humanness laid bare.
He desired her body even when her soul was gone from it.
Thrasamund had spoken truly: Her corpse was as beautiful and sensual as her living form had been, and when Liuprand thrust into her, he groaned with relief and with need.
Beneath him, Agnes’s body was jostled up and down the altar, her head rolling limply with each forceful ingress.
Thrasamund’s men had long since removed their hands, and he worked over her of his own accord, panting and heaving with exertion.
His thrusts were long and vigorous and deep, almost violent in their desperation—perhaps this was the moment in which Liuprand’s mind fully escaped him.
Or perhaps he knew he would never see his lady Agnes again and in some hideous way believed that this was the final expression of his great and irrevocable love.
With a strangled moan, he released himself inside her.
He collapsed, shoulders rising and falling in hopeless heaviness.
Blood drenched the place where their bodies were joined.
Still cached in the corner with Offal-Eater, Ninian became ill; she doubled over and vomited all down her frock and onto the floor.
Most of the men, by now, had turned their faces away.
The ones that looked on did so with the blackest, most vulgar arousal in their eyes.
Only Thrasamund watched with little perceptible emotion.
His satisfaction seemed incomplete, insufficient, as if even this gruesome scene had not been as vile a torment as he had hoped.
But he did not allow this discontent to prevent him from action.
He drew his dagger once more and cut the doublet from the prince’s back himself.
Liuprand was as naked now as his slain lover.
“So now it has been proven,” said Thrasamund, his voice low.
“You are no more noble a creature than all the rest, even for your crown and for your precious Seraphine blood. You are base and crude, vile and depraved. What right have you to rule us as if you are a god and we a lowly, lesser race of men? If you had not taken her yourself, I would have given her body to be forced and defiled by my dogs. But you have let your true nature be known. You, Liuprand the Just, golden prince of Drepane, heir to the throne of Berengar, are no better than a beast.”
Liuprand was panting, his eyes flung wide and wheeling with a wild, animal panic; every moment seemed to prove more the truth of Thrasamund’s words.
His face was flush against the curve of Agnes’s throat, near enough that her death wound was dripping its sluggish black dregs upon his tongue.
As if by instinct, he licked his lips, and then—realizing the horror of what he had done—he choked, and another sob wrung from deep in his chest.
“There, have your fill of her,” Thrasamund murmured.
He laid a hand on Liuprand’s naked back, almost a comforting gesture, had he not then squeezed it and raked his nails along it, provoking from the prince a pitiable moan.
“Indulge your every appetite now, for this is the last feast you will ever have. From here on your body will know nothing but ache and longing. Your manhood, too, has spilled its final drop.” A faint, rumbling laugh.
“Would that your father had not needed an heir, else he could have gelded you sooner, kept you like one of Hartwig’s eunuch boy-slaves. ”
Liuprand did not beg—what would he have begged for?
If there is no reason or wisdom to be found in love, there is even less to be found in pain.
His mind had no more capacity for thought than a fish has for flight.
His heart beat, but only to force his anguish gruelingly through his veins.
He grasped at Agnes’s face, turning it toward his, as if he could make her eyes look upon him, her eyes that saw nothing anymore.
He tried to wake her with a kiss, but both their mouths were slippery with blood, and his lips could not find purchase upon hers.
Here was what remained of his once-grand and encompassing love.
It had been a bright thing, lustrous as the sun itself, and it had painted the world all in gold.
Had any saneness remained in him—had he even still the ability to speak—Liuprand might have begged Lord Thrasamund to robe the world once more in its colored vestments, to apply the varnish of passion and romance that made all things charming and luminous again.
For without passion’s tints and romance’s pigments, the world was too repugnant and painful to bear.
Even Thrasamund’s men, who had previously shed all such sentiments, began to feel the chamber’s lack of love and started trembling.
Their faces went pale; sweat dewed their brows.
Those who had looked on with avarice and lust now had the air of illness about them, and they averted their gazes at last. They stared with too-great intent at the torches smoking on the walls, at the flowers drifting across the surface of the water, and at other inhuman things, which were not so alive—or so dead—as to repulse them.
This seemed, finally, to please Thrasamund. His smile was broad and almost artless; for a moment, he was a shade of the jovial man he had once been. He gave the flesh of Liuprand’s back another cruel squeeze and let his fingers sink in deep enough to draw blood.
“Have you the strength for another bout?” he asked, chuckling with unreserved glee. “I can wet her thighs with more blood, if you wish.”
Liuprand only moaned, wordless.
“Very well.”
Thrasamund raised his head and cast his gaze about the chamber.
He beckoned two more of his men, who came to crowd the altar.
At their lord’s direction, they seized Liuprand about the arms and tried to lift him, but his body was huge and iron-heavy, and the prince had gone utterly still.
It took yet another pair of men to heave him successfully from the altar.
His legs, with their garish and oozing wounds, dragged limply behind him.
A trail of blood smeared the floor in his wake.
“You.” Thrasamund jerked his chin toward Ninian, cached in her corner with Offal-Eater.
“Come now. And you may as well bring the wretched creature with you. My men have set upon Castle Crudele with every sword that the House of Eyes can muster, and they are eager to take their vengeance. This thing will have what he was promised, too. Let him tell me if Seraphine blood tastes of honey and wine.”
Silently, Ninian stepped out from the darkness and beckoned Offal-Eater to follow.
He bounded after her, yet she cast one brief, solitary glance back.
It was a look that made her mismatched eyes turbulent, dozens of emotions passing through them like flotsam on the foaming tide, but none among them could be counted as regret.
She loved her mistress with every beat of her heart’s blood, and she had hated her abusers in equal measure, and here was its profit.
She would not be shamed for it. It was too long that she had craved revenge, and the time for any misgivings had passed.
She was a cold creature now, as the princess had trained her, and she had executed her mistress’s orders to their ends.
She slipped through the chapel door and was gone.
The men who had arranged Agnes’s body remained stood at the altar. There was a hollowness to their gazes, and when the one spoke, his voice was hoarse. “What should we do with her, my lord?”
Thrasamund tilted his head. He put a finger under his chin, feigning contemplativeness. This was the bloody theater of his old self, shining once more through the gauze of bitterness and malice.
“What did our ancestors do,” he said, “before the conquerors slit their throats and killed our customs?”
The men exchanged stupid glances.
“Fool of me to expect an answer from you dullards.” Thrasamund let out a revolted breath.
“Did you not have a grandmother, a wet nurse, who whispered to you such stories at their breasts? The old ways may have died, but they were not sufficiently desecrated as to be beyond resurrection. Let this lady be the first in a century to be dedicated in accordance with Drepane’s ancient traditions.
It is the line of Berengar, and his laws, that will be snuffed out now. ”
Thrasamund’s retainers knew no more of Drepane’s bygone customs than a flea knows of the laws of men.
But they were obedient to their lord and they listened.
They nodded as he spelled out his orders and gave not even a whisper of protest. They had no sense of a world before Berengar’s conquest, but their fathers and grandfathers had served the House of Eyes for generations; their loyalty was, too, a groove well worn.
And so they reached for the lady Agnes, whose corpse was beginning to grow cold.
The blood had dried, and it nearly stuck her to the stone.
But they managed, nonetheless, to drag her from the altar and heft her into their arms, one man holding her wrists and the other her ankles, her body swinging between them like a pendulum. Her long black hair brushed the floor.
They carried her through the open door, out of the chapel that now held only the stench of death within, the remains of love corrupted and gone foul.
Thrasamund closed the door soundly behind him, with the quiet rasping of iron against stone.
And then all three men, along with Agnes’s corpse, began their winding descent.