Innamorata

I

The body of Adele-Blanche

No corpse could be left to lie long enough for maggots, but there were leeches. There must be leeches. As befit a woman of her stature, fourteen leeches stood gathered around the body of Adele-Blanche, two furnished by each of the great houses of the Septinsular Covenant. They wore sepia-colored robes, the shade of teacloths stained with tea.

In order to give the leeches room to work, the noble guests stood at a distance, on smooth, elevated pews of marble, which formed an oval around Adele-Blanche’s body. Her body lay on the ground as the mud from the previous night’s rainstorm cosseted and fondled her bare limbs. The mud pooled in the hollow place between the two halves of her rib cage, each half thrusting upward like a crested white bird. Her breasts sagged like empty waterskins, only loose, wrinkled flesh with no fat to engorge them. Her nipples were shriveled chestnuts.

It bothered Agnes only a little that her grandmother’s nakedness was on display. The dead were afforded no dignity in Drepane.

The leeches stood about with arched backs, their spines compressed like a snake before it strikes, as the Most Esteemed Surgeon tottered up to his dais.

He could not ascend without assistance, and it was one of the leeches who offered his hand. The hood of the leech’s robe fell back to reveal his bald, age-speckled head. There, just at the crease where the back of his throat connected to his skull, he had a very large, raised, and jagged birthmark in the shape of a leaping fish. At least, that was what it looked like to Agnes, from her vantage point. She supposed that Marozia, who was standing to her left and a bit forward on the pew, might think it looked like a sickle or a sliver of melon or a half-smiling mouth.

At last, the Most Esteemed Surgeon was settled and standing upright. He cleared his throat four times. Agnes didn’t blame him. It was an especially moist morning, with mist oozing between the black tree branches.

“This woman is dead,” he intoned. “Expired. Extinct. Forever gone.”

When his voice reached Agnes’s ears, it fizzled like water dissolving on a hot pan into steam and nothingness. Her mind generated its own words to fill the space.

Adele-Blanche, Mistress of Teeth, ruled her noble house for a very long time. Agnes did not know her grandmother’s exact year of birth, as it was forbidden to record such figures, so her mind supplied a rather poetic estimation. Her eyes had seen at least three-quarters of a century. She outlived her two daughters, Manon and Celeste. She is survived only by her grandchildren, including Marozia, heiress to the House of Teeth.

Agnes did not include herself in this accounting of her grandmother’s life. She was unsure of where she belonged. But she held fast to these facts as if they were a piece of parchment that threatened to be snatched from her hand by a vicious gust of wind.

As her own private, silent remembrance ended, the voice of the Most Esteemed Surgeon reasserted itself.

“May you be consumed as a coal upon the hearth. May you dry up as water in a pail. May you become as small as a linseed grain, and much smaller than the hip bone of an itch-mite, and may you become so small that you become nothing.”

Then it was time for the desecration. By decree of the Septinsular Covenant, this process required adherence to the strictest of tactics and the most ordered of schemes. Yet it had been performed upon all the dead of Drepane for a hundred years or so, and thus there was no hesitation among the leeches, who sank to their knees before Adele-Blanche’s body, immediately sullying their sepia robes.

First came the leeches from the House of Blood. Their task was the most elaborate, their equipment the most baroque. One leech carried under his arm a fluted vessel, girthy at the bottom and then narrowing to a minuscule hole, an aperture too small even to accommodate a traditional wine cork. What it did accommodate, however, was the end of an extraordinarily thin leather tube. This tube at first hung as the limp cord of pig viscera that it was, until the leech blew into it and it inflated at once, as rigid as a man-at-arms. The other end was then fixed to a glinting metal spigot, hardly larger than a sewing needle but much sharper. This pierced the flaccid throat of Adele-Blanche.

Given that the pig-viscera tube was translucent, all the attendants could clearly observe Adele-Blanche’s blood sluicing from her veins and into the fluted vessel. It was rather pulpy, and each time the tube clogged, one of the leeches flicked it with a single finger, the way one might repel a horsefly.

A curious thing occurred as the blood dripped into the vessel, though it happened inside Agnes’s mind, where no one else could see. All of a sudden the blood became a quotidian liquid, like bathwater or soup broth. The blood was not her grandmother. Her grandmother was gone.

But just as suddenly as the realization occurred to her, with all its lovely weightlessness, it vanished again. Her grandmother’s posthumous existence—that awareness, that truth that even in death she was not truly gone—dropped down upon her shoulders like a hissing, heavy house cat. She swallowed and tasted the bitterness of black henbane, the tongue-curling sweetness of mandrake.

Beside her, Marozia watched their grandmother’s blood drain. She did not blink; her dark eyes did not even glisten.

Oddly, there was no representative from the noble House of Blood itself in attendance, only an ignoble member of their household guard. The leeches had some difficulty bringing him the now-filled vessel. It swayed between them like a pendulum, and the mud sucked lecherously at their boots. These three servile delegates then departed wordlessly, vanishing into the dense wall of mist.

“An insult,” Marozia whispered, her lips barely moving. Her fingers reached out and gripped Agnes around the wrist. “Don’t you think?”

Agnes touched her cousin lightly on the shoulder. Then she tipped her head to indicate the retinue of gray-clad guards standing on the other side of the mud pit.

Marozia inhaled sharply. “An insult to the prince, you think?”

Agnes nodded.

“Well.” Marozia’s mouth thinned. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it? That already the Master of Blood equates our house with the Crown?”

Agnes stared down at the increasingly lugubrious mud. Perhaps she made too much of the House of Blood’s absence. Perhaps it was no more than coincidence that the Master of Blood, their venerable patriarch, could not attend himself. But even if illness or other business prevented him, surely he could marshal up a son or nephew to appear in his place? It was hard to deny the overtness of this breach of etiquette.

Still, she did think it must be directed at the Crown, if it was indeed an insult. It was the royal family who so ardently enforced the articles of the Septinsular Covenant, day in and grueling day out, corpse after corpse after corpse. Her grandmother would not have minded if the other houses declined to partake in this service. In fact, she would have been gleeful to know that her blood would not be drained and carried away in a fat-bellied cistern, would have been pleased at some glimmer of rebellion.

Yet rebellion it would be. The prince’s line had won Drepane by blade, and the laws of the Covenant they forged must be executed. Even in the Master of Blood’s rude absence, the ritual was fulfilled.

Thrasamund, Master of Eyes, fancied himself a man of exceptional charisma, so as his leeches set to work, he orated.

“How many gentle faces in attendance! The gentlest, of course, is of our dear prince. He has journeyed through reeking swamps and up miserable cliffs, through the gloomy stench of mist, to the peak that upholds the Peake. What a dreadful odyssey. But the House of Teeth has always enjoyed its inscrutable isolation. Let us hope for the sake of the honorable and merciful prince that there will be no more deaths within Castle Peake for a good long time.”

“There will not be,” Marozia said.

It had started to drizzle. Thrasamund grinned widely under his beard. The beard was itself a momentous thing. It draped over the curve of his stomach in wry, fox-red curls. As if to maintain some sort of filamentary equilibrium, the hair on his head was entirely gone. His baldness shone like the back of the silver spoon his leeches used to scoop out Adele-Blanche’s eyes.

Luckily, the task of his leeches was quite simple, and so they were spared more of his speech. The eyes, once removed, were placed inside a leather purse. Staggering out of the mud pit, the leeches handed the purse to their master.

Unluckily, Thrasamund and his leeches did not depart. The Master of Eyes rocked back and forth on his heels and watched in a serene manner as the leeches from the House of Teeth descended upon their mistress’s corpse.