Chapter

1

The French envoy came to Nantes on the last Sunday of Eastertide, when all the Breton court were still at church, when the hiss of rain and the pealing of bells swallowed the hoofbeats and shouts of his company. The court heard Mass unaware of his coming; they schemed and gossiped and took communion just as always, and no one from the pot-boy to the duchess knew that from that year, Christendom would never be the same.

Rain does not fall in Brittany so much as hover, filling the air with vapor, so that the courtiers emerged from the cathedral and were instantly wrapped in cloud. The bells overhead rang loud enough to shake the raindrops crooked. Arrayed in their Easter best, the court glowed in the gray light, though there were fewer of them than there should have been. Many had died in the war with France, many more were still far away awaiting ransom, like ambulatory notes payable in their conquerors’ châteaux.

At the heart of the crowd walked a girl with merry eyes, a floating violet in a sea of cut-velvet and silk hose, cloth-of-silver and the smell of myrrh, concentrating as she held her skirt clear of puddles. This was Anne, duchess regnant of Brittany, her hair caught back in a diadem and a pearl-studded crespine, though she wore no other jewels. They had all been sold to pay her garrisons.

She did not know that a French envoy had come to the castle. Indeed, she was expecting a messenger from quite another direction, and that expectation lit an already animated face. She and her maids-of-honor were playing a game of riddles as they walked.

“I am in all things and through all things,” declaimed the prosiest among them. “I am in candles and lamps and water and dice. I am the word of God; I am the blessing of mankind. I am—”

“Divination,” answered four brisk voices. All of Anne’s maids-of-honor were clever.

Another of them began a different riddle: “Three pears hang, three monks pass, each takes one, yet two remain, how—”

Jean de Rieux had been named Anne’s guardian by her father while the latter lay breathing blood on his deathbed, and now he watched the riddle-game with an indulgent, anxious face. He was of far too sober a mind to make up riddles. He said, low, “Highness, have you seen the diviner this day? What news?”

“Of my messenger? None yet,” murmured Anne, leaning on his arm to dodge another puddle. Rain filled the air; she breathed it in. “I shall ask when I have dry feet. But knowing where he is will not bring him here the faster.”

De Rieux shook his head. “I have warned you against overconfidence, my daughter. This—your—arrangement—” He stumbled on the right word, so great was the secrecy, though the clamor of bells overhead muffled their voices. “It is a notable victory, but you must not sell the bear’s skin before it has been killed.”

“Or in this case married. Let us all pity the bear,” said Anne, and smiled impishly up at him. Ducal dignity could not quite hide her pleased excitement, and she was not yet twenty. “I have not been hasty.”

Before De Rieux could answer, Anne’s sister Isabeau darted up to them, dragging her soaking hem straight through the puddles. She was ten years old, restless as a baby duck; her dark hair had already begun the inevitable process of slithering loose of its careful plaits. She skidded across the stones, De Rieux caught her, and Anne said, “Isabeau, unless you intend to man the battlements yourself, I beg you will not bankrupt me keeping you in shoes. We must pay our soldiers.”

“Give me a spear and I will guard the wall,” retorted Isabeau, swinging an imaginary weapon. She hardly came to De Rieux’s shoulder, barely shorter than Anne, though Isabeau gave every promise of overtaking her. The child was all long, awkward limbs, while Anne was small and glossy as a cat in a dairy.

“Will you? I pity the French,” said Anne, tweaking her sister’s nose.

Isabeau butted against Anne’s shoulder and smiled up at De Rieux, who was her guardian too. They were all crossing the drawbridge that divided the city of Nantes from the vast new ducal keep that Bretons called, simply, the castle of the dukes of Brittany.

Half-tuned music and laughter trickled from the castle windows and from the wall-top as a bright stream of courtiers passed beneath the barbican and crossed the courtyard. The rain was falling faster. Isabeau had been dignified all through church, and Anne saw her trying to be stately again now, though she made a small, irrepressible skip before she caught herself.

Anne said, “Isabeau, if you cannot sit still this forenoon, let you put on a good cloak and run about the garden.” If Breton children were kept indoors when it rained, they’d never go outside. “Only be sure and bring me a posy when you return.”

Isabeau lit up. “Will you come with me and pick the flowers?”

“I will not.” The rain showed every sign of thickening, enough to lay sparkling droplets on her violet bodice. “I am going to sit by a nice fire, embroider my altar-cloth, entertain deputations, and gossip furiously.” She gave her sister an innocent look. “You may come in if you like and hem a kerchief.”

Isabeau shuddered and slipped away at once, turning back to wave, trailed by her exasperated governess and a tutor with a dripping nose.

It was only after Anne, smiling, had watched her sister go that she noticed something amiss in the courtyard.

A string of unfamiliar horses was being led to stabling; an unfamiliar equerry stood by the horse-troughs. A loud blend of strange voices echoed in the Guardhouse. Who had come? A glimpse of banner or shield, tabard or surcoat, might tell her, but rain hovered still, cold and close, blurring the world like a painter’s fingertips. Whoever had come, it could not be her messenger. Her messenger was riding alone, in secret.

She and Jean de Rieux exchanged wary glances as they passed into the castle proper.

Her bastard half-brother, Henri, Baron of Avaugour, met Anne in her garderobe, a private chamber above the oratory, where she entertained her intimates and read documents, sewed and gossiped with her maids-of-honor. The light was gray near the windows, rosy near the fire, wavering in places from the interplay of rain and firelight. Rugs and wolfskin and tapestry softened the stone. Every courtier with a reason to wait upon the duchess was already in the room, passing news in low voices. Henri scythed straight through them all, a high, outraged color on his handsome face.

When Anne was crowned, some had whispered that it was a shame the duke’s only son could not inherit the duchy. Anything, they said, would have been better than giving the realm to poor Francis’s barely grown daughter. Henri just laughed at those people. “Lord,” he’d told Anne, “who’d want it? All those papers to read. Treaties and accounts and letters. And old men talking. You like it, you unnatural creature. They think you live only to frolic, but they don’t see the look in your eye when you preside over that council.”

Anne did like it. Although sometimes she envied Henri, whom God had made tall and broad, a knight and a man. Any or all of those attributes would have made her life much easier.

She crossed the garderobe and planted herself beside the hood of the enormous stone fireplace, nodding at the reverences of a dozen courtiers. “Tell me your news, brother. Who has come? I saw the horses below.”

De Rieux followed them to the fireplace, his mouth downturned and worried. Her council was scattered about the room: Clever, jolly Dunois, whose father was the famous Bastard of Orléans. The Comte de Comminges, and Montauban, her chamberlain, catlike and wary and intensely loyal. They all drifted unobtrusively nearer, while her maids-of-honor raised a chorus of chatter to mask their conversation.

“La Trémoille is here with a grand escort and messages from the French court,” said Henri, low. “He has had word via diviner and rode from the garrison at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier. I think he is come to insist upon the French marriage with no further delay.”

Anne went very still. Her mind instantly darted back to the day of her coronation. She had been too young and red-eyed, her father newly buried.

“I will not marry the king of France,” she had told De Rieux. She knew—everyone knew—that if she were to wed the king of France, there would be no more Brittany. Only France, from the Rhine to the stormy sea. “I promised my father.”

“What choice do you have?” De Rieux had rejoined, with some justice. Her father had lost a war over this very question, and died in the aftermath. Brittany was a fair green jewel rich with the wealth of the sea, and France was ten times its size and coveted it. Brittany was also Anne’s bridal portion, and would go to her husband when she married. Of course France wanted her.

“I will make myself new choices,” she had said then.

And she had. She was sure of it. Her secret messenger from Flanders was carrying Brittany’s salvation even now, sewn up hidden in his saddle-skirt.

“They must have found out,” whispered De Rieux.

Anne’s mind was racing. She said, “Perhaps. Or perhaps not. He would have brought soldiers if he knew, and he has only his escort, hasn’t he?”

“But why else would he have come now?” murmured Montauban.

They were all worried, and she did not blame them. If France laid bare her plans too soon, she would be deposed. Or taken away and married forcibly. She was finding it hard to draw a full breath.

“I can think of a few reasons,” said Dunois, brows drawn together. “But I like none of them.” He took a gasping draught of his spiced wine.

“He has not said why he is here, only asked for audience with the duchess,” said Henri.

Her brother had no head for statecraft. He liked jousting and expensive horses and a well-cut doublet. But he was an easy, kindly man, her father’s mistress’s son.

Anne’s rising heartbeat seemed to shake her whole body; she forced her voice to mildness. “We’ll find out soon enough. Give him my utmost respect and say we honor our cousin of France and wait upon his noble general’s convenience.” She’d given standing orders to treat anyone from the French court with an exasperating degree of servility. She cast a speculative glance at her brother. “Henri, go and put on something more expensive. That vulgar hat with the ostrich plume. I want him to think you have ambitions and have spent all your money.”

“What?”

“Now,” said Anne. “Quick. He’ll probably come in here any moment, when he gets the summons. Hates delays. Don’t you remember? And another thing—” She whispered in his ear.

“I don’t understand,” said her brother dubiously.

“No need,” said Anne. She said it cheerfully, but the firelight kept wanting to go sideways in her vision, to remind her of the stabs of light that roared from besieging cannon. The first time she had seen La Trémoille was from the wall of that very castle. He had been directing the French army that was methodically laying siege to their battlements. Her father had pointed out the three blue eagles of his standard, noted the bombards being drawn into position to fire.

That day was years gone, but the cold fear of it still clung to her.

Henri said, “You should know that my hats are the envy of the court.”

“Now.”

He went off, muttering something incredulous about how their easy-tempered father could have sired such a baby tyrant. Anne smiled as she watched him go, but her smile faded when she met De Rieux’s worried eyes.

* * *

Four years ago, Guillaume de La Trémoille, lieutenant-general of France, had been the architect of the conquest of Brittany, and in his firm opinion, the war had stopped too soon. The Bretons had been defeated, roundly, at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, but France ought not to have heard their suit for peace after the battle. They should not have relented, in the face of Duke Francis’s death. They ought to have driven on, reduced the château at Nantes, taken Rennes, packed off the girls, the ducal heirs, to be wards of the crown of France, and set a loyal man—himself, for preference—in the seat of the duke of Brittany.

That was the way wars were won.

That was how the old king would have won.

But Charles was young and naïve and desired to emulate Saint Louis, his canonized ancestor, in the matter of virtue. Virtuous kings, Charles opined, did not seize territory on the thinnest possible claim, backed with a legion of bloody hired swords. Virtuous kings enlarged their holdings by good, lawful Christian marriage, and both of Brittany’s heirs were girls.

His court agreed in public, but in private they wondered what Charles’s warlike father would have said to his amiable son.

La Trémoille knew very well what the old king would have said and wished with all his might that he could have said it for him.

The only saving grace of it all had been that the new-crowned duchess was a mere slip of a silly child, a puppet on an all-but-bankrupt throne. Charles was young and much given to amorous intrigues; the crown was distracted by wars in Burgundy, and it did not seem so very risky to wait for the girl to grow up a little. She would be less likely to die in childbed.

But now La Trémoille meant to wash his hands of Brittany. He wished never to see another raincloud so long as he lived, wished never again to ride while soaked to his shriveled skin. He wanted to go enjoy his lands and titles, the gifts of a grateful France. Then he meant to raise fresh troops to go and fight a fine plundering war far away in sunny Pavia.

The duchess must marry. She is past old enough, and Charles is crowned king. It must be now, Marguerite had written him. Marguerite of France was the king’s elder sister, his regent before he came of age. The cleverest woman in Europe, the most powerful. Even after Charles’s coronation, she kept a knowing hand on the reins of state. She shared entirely La Trémoille’s views on the danger of leaving Brittany half-conquered. You will go to Nantes and set this marriage in motion. You will frighten them if you must.

With these injunctions echoing in his mind, very grand in a new doublet, Guillaume de La Trémoille went to wait upon the duchess of Brittany, prepared to terrify her and her council if they proved in the least resistant to this imminent and necessary French marriage.

A repast was laid out already on long boards in the duchess’s garderobe. She did not receive all her court here; this was a meal for her intimates. She got smartly to her feet when he made his bow and greeted him with touching shyness.

La Trémoille’s heart sank at the sight of the food: all sugared fruits and marchpane. A meal for a spoiled child. At least she was pretty. Perhaps Charles of France, also something of a fool, would like her. They could be fools together and leave the business of governing to others.

Breathlessly, the duchess encouraged him to try the delicacies, and when he had choked some of them down, she asked timidly, “Monseigneur, have you messages for me?”

La Trémoille shoved the last of the sweets away. “Madame, I am come on behalf of the crown of France, which greatly desires to settle with all dispatch the alliance between Charles the king and his beloved subject Anne of Brittany. I am empowered to do all that is required to facilitate this longed-for union.”

“Oh,” she said, looking tentatively down the table, as though expecting someone to chide her. “I suppose—it’s only—I fear…” She trailed off, biting her lip.

La Trémoille followed her gaze, suddenly alert. He and Marguerite had discussed the likelihood that someone in the Breton court, holding particular sway with the duchess, would delay the French marriage in hopes of a bribe. Was there such a person?

“But not so fast, sister,” said a ringing voice a few places down the table. “You have forgot the unicorn.”

This man, perhaps. A great handsome knight by his clothes, brawny arms crossed over a straining doublet and wearing upon his head the most vulgar heap of dyed ostrich feathers La Trémoille had ever seen.

“Oh—Henri,” said the duchess, looking uneasy. “The general does not care about unicorns.”

This must be the Breton bastard, the eldest child, knighted by the duke and created Baron of Avaugour. Rumor said Francis had got the boy on the old French king’s castoff mistress. A bastard must always be chewing at the doors of power, and a royal bastard doubly so. What would he want for a bribe? La Trémoille almost forgot the duchess, staring at this upstart. “What unicorn?” He was expecting the commission of some tapestry or other nonsense thing.

“Oh,” said the duchess confidingly. “It is only that we have had word that a unicorn has been sighted. In Brocéliande.”

All around the table, voices seemed to drop; the name Brocéliande itself breathed out dark mystery. Men told wild tales of that ancient forest. That the fair-folk, the korriganed, had lived long in its shadows. That an unwary traveler might stray into the Lost Lands, only to vanish forever, or return a century hence, still young while his whole world had spun out from under his feet. And they also did say, with more force than mere rumor, that Brocéliande was one of the last, best places for men to hunt unicorns.

A unicorn was the noblest and rarest prey in Christendom. The fire-drakes, if ever they had lived, had not been seen in living memory, and one could not hunt sea-drakes. Sea-drakes hunted men. At least, that’s what seamen said when ships did not come back. But now and again, one heard credible tales of a unicorn. Like his master the king, La Trémoille loved to hunt. “A unicorn, you say?”

The duchess threw a diffident glance at her brother. “We had a message from Trécesson. A lymerer with his dog, seeking stags for his master, came upon the beast in Brocéliande. Four days ago—or was it five? I thought—I mean, we thought—that perhaps we should try to hunt it. While I am—” She stumbled over the words, going modestly pink.

La Trémoille knew what she was trying to say. To hunt a unicorn required two things. The first was a virgin of high birth and unimpeachable virtue, for bait. And the other was a hunt so extravagant that the mere dazzle of it would tempt the vain beast near.

What better bait for a unicorn than this beautiful, high-born fool? And what nobler quarry for a man than a unicorn? La Trémoille hesitated, remembering his orders. Then he said, “It would be a fine thing, to hunt a unicorn.”

In a hectoring voice, Henri of Avaugour answered, drinking his wine, “Then why do we speak of marriage? Even the breath of coming unchastity might ruin all—it is said that unicorns know these things, Monseigneur.”

The duchess was blushing even more furiously, biting her lip.

La Trémoille considered. Just the chance of it fired his blood. A living unicorn, at bay…“A small delay before negotiations begin might be possible,” he said at last.

A small, odd smile came to Henri of Avaugour’s lips. “I knew you were wise, Monseigneur.”

The bastard was probably still holding out for a bribe, thought La Trémoille. Well, an estate in France could be found for him. But let it be a wretched estate.

The duchess, still scarlet, said, “I shall make of the unicorn’s horn a wedding present to the king of France. You shall take the hide, God willing, for all the world to marvel at, Monseigneur.”

Her look was soft, earnest. And when she put out her hand to be kissed, he did so with less than his usual coldness.

* * *

They got rid of La Trémoille at last. The general had unbent considerably at the thought of hunting a unicorn, though he stared daggers all the while at poor Henri. He even ate some marchpane, though he grimaced, and drank his cup of wine—Anne had made sure it was the sweet kind that gave you a headache—and then took his leave. The servants came in his wake to draw the cloth and clear away the boards and trestles. Soon there would be proper feasting in the great hall.

Anne finally gave in to the fit of laughter that had been trying to burst out of her all that while. When she looked up, wiping her eyes, Henri was grinning too, still wearing that ridiculous hat, and that started her off again. She said, “Let us hope the feast tonight contains a few bearable dishes; one cannot subsist on marchpane.”

“Lord, how do you do it? One moment my sister is there, and the next there is a ninny blushing on cue. And yon Frenchman’s no fool, yet he swallowed that nonsense about future unchastity.”

Anne said, “He was pleased with his own superiority. It makes people unwise.”

She had not let any of her councilors, not even Jean de Rieux, assist at the comedy she played for La Trémoille. Henri was the only one she needed, and a great crowd would merely increase the odds that someone would let something slip. But La Trémoille had not been gone a candle-mark when De Rieux hurried up the stairs. “What did the general say?” he asked urgently. “What does he want?”

Henri was still grinning. “He had no idea what struck him. The duchess has that effect. And, of course, I gave my sister vital assistance.”

Anne had resumed her accustomed chair and was putting minute stitches in the vast watered-silk sweep of an altar-cloth; she said austerely, “We have convinced the general to delay any talk of my marriage to the king of France until after we all go hunt unicorns in Brocéliande.” She turned her altar-cloth in the firelight, wishing for her favorite thimble. Being gold, it had been sold too.

De Rieux looked tolerably blank. “But—why? There are no unicorns. Or, there have been no sightings. Not these twenty years.”

“That,” said Anne, “is entirely beside the point. We have bought ourselves time.”

“To what purpose? You have bought yourself a week or two, no more; it will not make a difference.”

Anne laid the cloth aside. “That’s where you’re wrong. Consider only—” She broke off.

Her court diviner was called Calyx; no one recalled his birth-name, except for some dusty scribe in the Diviners’ Guild. Every diviner took a Latin name upon achieving his mastery. Calyx stumbled into the duchess’s garderobe now, three parts drunk. That was to be expected. Calyx was an oenomancer, who read his divination in the dregs of wine. With a bleared eye, carrying bottle and cup in his slack hands, he said, “You sent for me, Highness?”

Anne leaped up, pausing only to see that her maids-of-honor tidied her altar-cloth away and secured the needle. “You are a welcome sight, Auspex”—that is what diviners were called in the formal language of the court. She pulled him at once to the deep window embrasure, with the rain sluicing past the leaded panes. Diviners needed clear light for their auguries.

Anne had sometimes wished for a court diviner whose gift came in a more practical form—the Guild contained diviners by dice and clouds and water and candlelight—but the Guild also kept a relentless grip on its masters and would not send a gifted young diviner to work in a court as beleaguered as hers. Especially not with its sovereign a woman unwed. Calyx was old and his eyes were bloodshot, his hair swooned greasily from a velvet cap of uncertain cleanliness, his mouth was a sea of wine-stained stumps, and she could wish that his gift did not require quite so much drinking. But her father had liked Calyx. And Anne loved and missed her father.

Divination was a useful and necessary art, although it was neither infallible nor omniscient. It could answer only those questions rooted in the bodily senses. A diviner might be asked, What color are the slippers of the Sultan in Stamboul? every day for a year and never get it wrong. More difficult were moods and intentions; names and numbers were impossible. To divine a place was possible, but only if the diviner could put a place-name to the colors or sounds or smells he found in his augury. Most diviners specialized in a small area.

Who is the betrothed of the duchess of Brittany? was a question that could be answered by a skilled diviner, working diligently—royal diviners kept careful physical descriptions of sovereigns—and one that Anne lived in mortal fear of the French court asking. But it had been Pliny the Younger, a diviner himself, who discovered the chief use of divination. For, as he said in a letter, if the emperor’s auspices can tell him the color of anything in the world, but the name of nothing, then all we must do is assign words to colors.

Now kings and generals and ambassadors and grand seigneurs all communicated via diviner. Diviners carried colored squares of cloth, and each cloth meant something like safe or war or beset or yesterday. The exact code changed from court to court. To send a message, the diviner merely laid down cloths in order and the recipient’s diviner asked his clouds or dice or wine or beetles to tell him, What colors lay today upon the table of the duchess of Brittany’s diviner? Diviners were kept busy relaying such messages all over the continent.

Anne said quietly to Calyx, heart beating fast, “Where is my messenger from Flanders?” Calyx could answer only if the messenger had come near enough to Nantes.

Calyx drained his cup to the dregs, peered at the sludge on the bottom, and said, squinting, “The northwestern road. Will be here by nightfall or a little after if the rain keeps on.”

Anne bit her lip. The plan she was slowly forming was too complex to share via any code of colors. She said abruptly, “Calyx, is it true that there is no divination possible beneath the eaves of Brocéliande?”

Calyx stiffened. The moving rain-light grayed his face and made him seem older. “That is a cursed place for diviners,” he said at last.

Anne leaned forward. “Why? Is it true, then?”

She had the impression that he would prefer not to answer. But he had to. It was one of the codes of the Guild, that a diviner must answer every direct question from his principal, and never lie. He turned his cup in restless hands. “No. Not exactly.”

“What, then?”

Reluctantly, he said, “A diviner can set his inward sight upon Brocéliande. But he sees nonsense. If he persists, he goes mad. The chronicles say that long ago it was just the same if any man tried to use divination upon the korriganed or any piece of their realm in the Lost Lands.”

Anne clasped her hands, pleased. Her nascent plan depended on this peculiar quality of Brocéliande. She did not fear the korriganed. They had not been seen for five hundred years.

“But,” added Calyx, setting down his cup with a click, “the forest is dangerous. Merlin the Enchanter was vanquished there, caught in the coils of the Queen of the Lost Lands, and no man of greater wisdom has lived since the world began. I beg you will not meddle with Brocéliande, Highness.”

“No more than I must,” said Anne, and smiled reassuringly at him.

He did not look reassured.

Anne bade her diviner go and drink something gentler than wine and get some sleep, then turned back to the fire. To De Rieux she said, “My messenger will be here at nightfall. You needn’t fret until then. Go and change, Jean. It may be a long night.”

Something in his heavy face lightened. “That is welcome news, Highness,” he said.

Henri was still lolling in a chair by the fire, now addressing gallant remarks to Madeleine of Châteaubriant, the cleverest of Anne’s maids-of-honor. The lady was wearing a very demure expression that said she was enjoying herself. Damn them both, there was no time.

Anne crooked a peremptory finger at her brother.

Henri came over, reluctantly. “Sister, if you have more schemes involving hats and lying to the French—”

She interrupted, “I need you to go and intercept the messenger from Flanders and bring him here tonight. Secretly. La Trémoille mustn’t know. The northwestern road.”

Henri did not look enthusiastic. Madeleine was very beautiful and the rain had not let up.

Anne said sympathetically, “I know. But you may lounge about in comfort after the realm is preserved.”

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter

2

Anne’s messenger from Flanders was called Baron Wolfgang von Polhaim, a butter-haired and baby-faced Austrian. He met a damp and annoyed young man not a league from the walls of Nantes.

“Hold,” said this young man, pushing back the hood of his cloak. The dyed ostrich feathers on his hat dripped greenish water onto his face.

Polhaim’s hand strayed to the hilt of his sword. Roads were dangerous. The young man did not blink. He added, “You are Polhaim? The messenger from the court of His Majesty of Austria?” The young man’s irritable expression did not quite match the good-natured set of his mouth. He was alone too, riding a very good horse, but with no visible blazon.

“A traveler only,” said Polhaim coolly. His message was secret, after all.

The young man nudged his horse nearer. Low, he said, “I am Henri of Avaugour, the duchess is my sister, and please God follow me now lest we dissolve in this thrice-cursed rain.” He drew his cloak briefly aside, revealing the ermines and sea-serpents embroidered on his doublet, the blazon of Avaugour, with a bend sinister to denote an illegitimate line. The two young men shared a glance, communicating silently.

Polhaim relaxed. “Very well. I would hate to dissolve in the rain,” he said, and touched up his tired horse. “But I fear there is no hope for your hat.”

“Why remind me?” Avaugour muttered.

Avaugour brought them to a pleasant hostelry in Nantes that bore the duchess’s emblems of rope and ermines above the door and stood by, his wet cloak steaming, while Polhaim shifted his clothes. Together they broke some of the hostelry’s excellent bread, sliced with sausages, and Avaugour said between bites, “There are revels in the castle tonight. For the end of Eastertide. Will you go? Or would you rather be here, rolled up in blankets?” Food and dry clothes had rekindled what Polhaim assumed was a habitual spark of humor in Henri of Avaugour’s eyes.

“Not on your life,” answered Polhaim with spirit. He put his cup aside and wiped his mouth. “Will I see the duchess this evening?”

“No,” said Avaugour composedly, although he coughed around his last bite of bread. “She is a virtuous lady who always goes early to bed.”

“Very right, I’m sure,” said Polhaim dubiously. “But I beg you will tell her and her council that I am come with letters from my master. There is little time for revelry.”

“Then let us profit by the night,” said Henri of Avaugour, and pushed back his chair.

* * *

It seemed that neither a sleeping duchess nor the fine spitting rain could dampen the hilarity in the great castle of the dukes of Brittany that night. Laughter and talk and the smell of spilled wine drifted from room to room. Before long, Polhaim was roistering without a care, bellowing in a mix of Latin and French, laughing at Avaugour’s vile German. He finally fetched up, half-drunk, somewhere on the third floor of the riotous château, wondering that the young duchess’s councilors did not rein in these pleasant excesses. There were three people drowsing drunk on the spiral stairs.

But this chamber was delightful. Tapestries of flowers and nymphs seemed to dance in the firelight, and all the women wore court-dress, their hair plaited up in gold nets, the paint on their eyes and mouths smeared with the hour and the feasting. This ducal court was smaller and less stately than the court of Maximilien of Austria, but it pleased Polhaim all the same. Not even a short but violent war, only recently ended, could wholly strip the dazzle from Brittany, that fair green country. A few couples danced the volta, wildly, in the middle of the room.

Polhaim danced his own measure with one girl, flirted with four more, and finally found himself sprawled panting at the feet of the most delightful girl of all. Not one of the stately beauties, to be sure, but a short creature in a violet dress, impish and everywhere curved: round face and rosebud mouth and snub nose and soft breast, hair caught up in a crespine. Her brown eyes had the same luster as the pearls sewn into the fillet round her brow.

She did not see him at first. She was on her feet, leading a game of doggerel verses in which the entrants must extemporize poems on themes chosen by their fellows. Each entry was worse than the one before, the whole room in stitches, until finally the last theme—lances—wound down to its scurrilous end—“and then, I say thrust,” someone bellowed indecorously. The girl, laughing, finally met Polhaim’s eyes.

“Madame,” he said. He stumbled to his feet and swept her a bow.

Her laughter quieted but two dimples remained, like thumbprints in the heart-shaped face. Polhaim was vaguely aware of Avaugour watching them. Well, he’d seen the girl first. She sat down with a strange little jerk, and in a less hazy state, Polhaim would have realized instantly to whom he spoke, but the girl was already talking, dabbing at the sweat on her brow and breast with her kerchief. “They say that you are come from Flanders to see the duchess.”

This was perhaps one of her maids-of-honor. But Polhaim’s mission still called for discretion. Smiling, he said, “To enjoy the pleasures of the court, Madame, and to bring reports of it to my master.”

“Oh?” said the girl, lifting distracting brown eyes. “And who is that, Monsieur?”

“A great gentleman.” Polhaim instantly wished he had not said even so much. He was drunk, and also she was the kind of girl who could loosen men’s tongues.

His master, Maximilien of Austria, was one of the foremost men of Europe. Troubadours already sang of his wedding years ago to Mary of Burgundy, whose lands had lain under the rapacious eye of the old French king. Maximilien had loved Mary and gone to war for her and saved her patrimony, and she had given him two children. But she died in a fall from her horse before she could be brought to bed of the third. Her husband’s grief had darkened all the court. It was a magnificent tragedy.

But now the tragedy had a coda.

Anne of Brittany had sent Maximilien tender condolences in her own cultivated hand. She had sympathized, for her own honored father had also died in a fall from a horse. She had, shyly, asked his advice, admitting that her realm also lay under the grasping shadow of France. And Maximilien, still grieving, had offered his hand to this girl, who was beset by France just as his beloved Mary had been.

Polhaim thought this marriage was too soon and also imprudent, for if France discovered the betrothal untimely, it could mean war. But no one had asked him.

The girl said ingenuously, “It is a long ride from Flanders, isn’t it?” Maximilien was widely known to be in residence near Ghent, on the lands he’d inherited from his dead wife.

“Not so long. I have a good horse.” Extravagantly he added, “And with such beauty at the end, the road cannot seem long.”

He would have continued in this complimentary vein, but Henri of Avaugour, that wretch, appeared and said, “Forgive me, but I must cut you short. There are men of my sister’s council who wish to speak with you.”

Polhaim stared. Now. Now? Was this a joke? He was suddenly, hideously aware of his open doublet, his fingers and lips sticky with wine, his head whirling. He said, collecting himself as suavely as he could, “Very well, but there are documents that I must—” Damnable, frivolous timing.

“No time,” said the baron of Avaugour, unsympathetically.

Polhaim was vaguely aware that the pretty girl was giving Avaugour a look of mild exasperation, but when he turned back to her, he saw only a rueful smile. She put out a hand. “I hope we shall meet again.”

“I hope we shall,” said Polhaim, and meant it. Reluctantly, he followed Henri out of that chamber, back down the tightly spiraling stairs, and into the torchlit night.

They crossed the rain-glazed courtyard with music pouring still from the open casements. Out of sorts, Polhaim stopped at a horse-trough, splashed his face, and smoothed his hair. They climbed a slippery staircase to the wall-top, with the lights on the Loire resplendent below, and then went into the Roman tower, the oldest part of the keep. The door opened onto a round room with a fire already drawing, boards and trestles laid with cloths of damask, good wine in a jug, and sugared fruits like smoke-darkened jewels.

Henri left Polhaim at the doorway and went back into the rain. Polhaim sank into a chair, his head still spinning. A man was already in the room, wearing the court robe of a diviner, a cup of wine in one wavering hand. Four other men entered—the duchess’s council, surely. They all looked tense. Every one of them was sober. Polhaim badly regretted his own wine. He waited stiffly for someone to address him.

Then a slightly uneven footstep scraped on the wall-top outside and the girl in the violet dress came into the room, leaning on Henri’s arm and giving every impression of a sister reading her brother a lecture, never mind the fact that she hardly came to his shoulder. “I absolutely did not say that you were to—” She broke off, lifting her head. The whole room straightened.

Polhaim was shocked. He had seen her face in miniature, when her portrait was sent to his master. But that small, insipid image—brown hair and a prominent prie-dieu—bore little resemblance to this sparkling girl. He would never have dreamed— One did not expect a pretty duchess. One did not expect to meet a duchess incognita, judging bad poetry and laughing. But now, with his head clearing, he recalled how they had all hung on her words. And rumor did say the duchess had a deformed hip, which gave her a limp.

“An inhuman hour, I know,” said Anne, duchess regnant of Brittany. “And yet there was not much help for it.” Someone had refreshed the paint on her face. Her lips were a deep and fascinating rose. She nodded in answer to their bows, and went to the chair nearest the fire. The dimples made a brief reappearance. “Forgive me,” she said to Polhaim. “I had not intended to make a mystery of myself, nor did I tell my brother to be quite so—enthusiastic—in his hospitality.” She shot poor Avaugour a glare. “But there is a French envoy in the castle this night.”

“He will find out about this meeting!” said one of her councilors. “Highness, I told you—”

The duchess looked at him and his mouth closed. Lightly, she said, “The envoy found his marchpane disagreeable, I fear, and has not left his chamber since. But let us conclude our business quickly.”

Polhaim swallowed and bowed. It did not seem likely that this girl was the puppet of her advisers, whatever the world supposed. He recalled that many of the men who might have otherwise tried to control her were prisoners in France.

Anne went on, “France has always meant to have me wed their king, and this envoy has come at last to say that they will brook no more delay.”

Polhaim was sobering fast. “Do they know that I am here?”

“No,” said the duchess. “Nor do they know of our successful negotiations with Maximilien of Austria. But the timing is unfortunate.”

That was a monstrous understatement. “If they do not yet know, I fear they will find out soon enough,” said Polhaim frankly. “If there is an envoy actually in Nantes, pressing for a French marriage, then the gifts of France’s diviners will be fixed on your court, Highness. An Austrian marriage cannot be concealed long enough for soldiers of my king to cross the border.”

What would France do if they found out she had betrothed herself elsewhere? Likely send a message by diviner to the garrison in Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier and come in force to either make the duchess yield or take her forcibly back to France. How could they be prevented? No hope that Maximilien would come in time—he would not make the attempt if he were not already her husband. The risks were too great if he had not yet made sure of his prize. But La Trémoille’s presence made the wedding impossible. This marriage could not go ahead at all. It was too late.

And yet he read undimmed determination in the duchess’s eyes, beneath the luster. A strand of hair had escaped confinement and crept round her jaw. She smelled of myrrh and cedar. Polhaim told himself to be sensible. She went on, “Despite their eagerness, France has this day agreed to delay these negotiations. General de La Trémoille wishes greatly to go unicorn-hunting.” An impudent dimple showed at the corner of her mouth.

Polhaim did not see the significance. He said weakly, “Does he?”

“He does. And the only place where men may sometimes find unicorns in these days is the forest of Brocéliande, a day’s ride from Rennes. The general has agreed that there shall be no more talk of my marriage to France until after a unicorn-hunt.”

Polhaim still didn’t understand. “Highness—what good will this delay serve?” he managed.

The duchess said, “Divination does not work in Brocéliande.”

The Breton diviner nodded confirmation, but Polhaim still did not see her point.

She added impatiently, “If my marriage to Maximilien of Austria were solemnized in Brocéliande, France would have no way to know it; and even if they did, the news of it could not be conveyed by a diviner. It would give my lord of Austria the legal assurance of a valid marriage and time to move his army across our border and garrison Rennes.”

Polhaim answered slowly, still stupid with wine, “But my lord cannot go to Brocéliande. Not in secret.”

“He doesn’t need to.”

Polhaim forced his mind to work faster. “Of course a legal proxy could be designated.” Proxy-weddings were not unknown. “But even then I do not see how this can be concealed if the French emissary is actually in the hunting-party?”

The duchess said, “There is no difficulty. I shall seclude myself in a convent the night before the hunt; France will only applaud my piety. There is a chapel there. It will serve.”

Polhaim could hardly believe this was the same girl he’d met flushed and laughing and frivolous in the castle. She was coiled, intent. Slowly, he said, “I think I must go back to Flanders, Highness, and so learn my lord’s mind. This is too complex for the exchanges of diviners and I do not think you want to trust a letter alone.”

She thought, then nodded. “Go tomorrow. We shall wait for you.” Polhaim found her lifted chin and straight back strangely moving. A determined girl looking out of the duchess’s face. “But I beg you will hurry.”

“I will ride at dawn, Highness.”

When she smiled at him, his blood seemed to slow and thicken. She leaned forward and said, “My thanks forever, and you must forgive my brother. I never once told him to get you drunk. He got a little mixed up.”

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter

3

Later that night, on the threshold of her chambers, De Rieux said, “Anne—Highness—if this goes wrong…”

“It will not go wrong.” They faced each other. Her guard had dropped out of earshot on the stairs below; Anne’s maids-of-honor waited within.

“If it does go wrong,” he persisted, “have you considered the risk to Isabeau?”

“I have,” said Anne. More than he knew. If Anne were killed or deposed, Isabeau would become duchess. But Isabeau was too young. She could not hold Brittany, and she would be taken away, raised in the French court, and then married to Charles. Sometimes princes didn’t even wait when their fiancées were too young. Margaret Beaufort had been married at twelve, had borne her son, the present king of England, at the age of thirteen. The thought haunted Anne’s dark hours, made all her warm courage go cold. “What can I do if not this?” she asked De Rieux, sharp with old fear. “Submit tamely to a marriage that I promised my father I would never undertake? I am not going to be deposed. I won’t let anything happen to Isabeau.”

“Anne,” said her guardian. “Only think—”

“I won’t submit,” she said. “And I won’t be deposed either. Good night, Jean.”

She left him on the threshold before he could say anything else. His fear was contagious.

That doorway opened onto her garderobe. A crowd lingered in this outer room still, but it was all people she trusted: maids-of-honor and attendants, and Hawiz, who had been Anne’s wet-nurse and taught her Breton before she’d learned to speak courtly French.

Skilled hands untied her sleeves, helped her take off her overdress. When they had borne all her finery away, Anne sank at last into her chair, the one already warm from its nearness to the fire. Mostly she contrived to ignore her bad hip, but she’d been on her feet since sunup and the muscle along the ill-formed joint was hard as stone.

Hawiz’s capable hands unclasped the gold and pearls from around her brow and began unraveling the tight plaits. Masses of brown hair slithered down her back, and Anne made a small sound of relief. “When I am an empress, I shall wear diadems every day just for the joy of taking them off.” Maximilien of Austria was heir to the Holy Roman Empire.

Hawiz didn’t answer. Instead she said, “Isabeau, did I not tell you that you’d see her in the morning?” Anne opened her eyes. Isabeau had got filthy in puddles that afternoon and then stuffed herself at the feast; now she stood at the threshold of the bedchamber, the open doors of the paneled bed gaping beyond. Her hair, lighter than Anne’s, massed over her robe and shoulders.

Isabeau’s eyes were rimmed with red. Anne came to her feet in instinctive alarm, staggering a bit as her hip took her weight. Hawiz steadied her. Anne said, “Isabeau, what is wrong? Are you ill, love?”

Isabeau shook her head, seemed to hesitate, and then darted across the room, clinging to Anne like a child much younger. She didn’t say anything.

Anne stroked back the tangles of hair. “Isabeau?”

Isabeau still didn’t look up. “At the feasting tonight—some ladies said—that you will never come back after you have married the king of France. And I told them that you would but they said your husband would not allow you. That I should never see you again, for I must stay in Brittany. I said it was not true. But—is it?”

Anne was silent a breath too long. Very softly she said, “I am not going to marry France. I cannot, for I promised Father.” A mad, impossible promise for a dying man to extract from his half-grown daughter, but Anne had never regretted her oath. “Because if I am married to the French king, then we are conquered. I must marry someone else, someone who can protect us. But that is a great secret. Can you keep the secret?”

Isabeau drew herself up proudly. Her face had lightened. “I can keep a secret. You will live here then? When France is gone and you have married this other king?”

“Isabeau, I must go and live with my husband when we are married.”

Isabeau pulled away a little. In a small voice, she said, “And I?”

Anne realized she was biting blood from the inside of her cheek. “The ladies are right that you must stay in Brittany. But it will not be forever. Only until I have given my lord his heir. Two heirs. Then I am sure he will let me return.” She did not say that it would be years…or never, if she died in childbed.

Isabeau scrambled back, woe turned to wrath. “Let you return? But you belong here!”

Anne did not want to leave Brittany. Her whole heart lay in its earth and gray sea, belonged to its people in their wool and lace, in the language she had learned from Hawiz. If years on her wobbling throne had taught her one thing, it was that the power of good governance was beyond most men’s gifts, however high their birth.

It was not beyond hers.

But she could not govern Brittany and also keep it free.

If she did not marry Charles of France and accept annexation, then she must marry a man who could defy him. Maximilien of Austria was perhaps the only man in Christendom who could. Maximilien would not annex her realm; his own lands were too far away. But Anne would still pay dearly for her husband’s protection: with her presence, her body, her womb, the taxes of her territories, the title of Duke of Brittany.

With the Austrian marriage, she would keep her promise to her father. But the necessity was a cruel one.

Anne whispered, “I am not leaving by choice, Isabeau.” The words came wrenching from her, outside all composure. Then she swallowed and added, quieter, trying for reason, “Father told me once that it is the price we pay.”

“What does that mean?”

Anne tried haltingly to explain. “We shall never go hungry, you and I; we have our secret box of sweetmeats and we wear silk and velvet and have horses and hawks and a palace to live in.”

Isabeau said nothing. She had knelt slowly on the wolfskin hearthrug, head bowed, and Anne sank back into her chair. She made herself go on. “But do you think we are owed that for nothing? No. We pay for it with our lives and our fates and our flesh, which must serve the realm. I cannot serve the realm and stay. Believe me, dearest, if there was another way, I would take it.”

Isabeau was still now, her face pressed against Anne’s knee. She whispered, “I will think of another way.”

Anne had no answer for that. There was no other way. Hadn’t she lain awake every night of her reign, trying to think of another way? “Dearest, it is time for bed. We neither of us will do anyone any good if we fall ill.”

* * *

Anne and Isabeau had shared a bed since they were small. Naturally, each could have had her own suite, separate retainers. But when Anne had taken her place at court, Isabeau simply left her bed in the nursery and came to Anne’s every night, until Anne told her governess to stop trying to fetch her back.

They had shared ever since, and Anne was glad of it. A duchess lived at the center of everything but also at strange remove, every friendship freighted with the knowledge that she could order the friend killed or make their fortune forever.

But that distance did not apply to Isabeau. They’d held each other through the night their mother died, through the endless nights of the siege of Nantes, when the great stone balls from the French bombards came smashing against the battlements and once, memorably, through their window. They’d held hands while their father lay dying.

And now, when Anne’s hair was replaited, her body sponged, her chemise changed, her orders given to be wakened at Lauds, she went to crawl into the great bed and found Isabeau there but still awake, ready with another question. “Are we going unicorn-hunting?”

Anne sighed. “The court is going unicorn-hunting.”

Isabeau made a muffled sound of delight into her pillow.

“Quiet,” said Anne. “You’ll get a scolding from Hawiz. You know you cannot come with us.”

“But I have to.” Isabeau would have shot upright except that Anne, who knew her sister well, had put out a restraining hand. “You need a virtuous virgin.”

“Hardly virtuous, what with filching sweets and refusing to go to sleep. Dearest, you are not going to be unicorn-bait.” She rolled onto an elbow, deadly serious.

“Why not? I suppose you are.”

Anne didn’t answer. Instead, she said, “Isabeau, you have not yet been stag-hunting. Your pony could never course a unicorn. People would wonder why you were there.”

“I want to help,” said Isabeau urgently. “I have to—I want to make everything different.”

Anne reached for her sister’s hand under the quilts. Isabeau’s cold fingers closed around hers.

“I wish I could make it so you stay,” said Isabeau, small now. “Will you love him, at least?”

“My husband?” Anne was taken aback. She’d dreamed of love, of course. Sometimes, idly, she imagined a quick-tongued, fair-haired troubadour, or a knight with green eyes stealing with her in secret to some solitary bower. Years ago, in the last spring of their peace, Louis, Duke of Orléans, had come to Nantes in full rebellion against the crown of France: a famous knight and as beautiful as lightning over a distant sea. For a while, he’d turned all Anne’s dreams from blond and devoted heroes to dark ones with sunburnt faces. But then came the war, hard on Orléans’s heels. All Anne’s dreaming crumbled in the face of it. Besides, Orléans had hardly noticed her, and then he was captured at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier and carried off a prisoner to France.

Anne shook away memory. “I will—respect my husband.” Respect was better than love.

Isabeau said nothing, obviously dissatisfied, anxious, afraid of the looming future. Anne could hardly reassure her, so fast were the fears, plans, memories coursing through her own mind. She said, “Shall I tell you a story?”

Her sister gave a pleased wriggle and rolled to face her. “Oh, yes!”

“You must lie down properly. And close your eyes.”

Isabeau rested her head on Anne’s shoulder. Anne stroked her hair. Let us go far from here, at least for a moment. Her voice took on something of Hawiz’s measured cadence; she changed from courtly French to the soft Breton of their earliest childhoods. “I shall tell the story of Keris, the city of cedar and gold, the city in the bay of Douarnenez that conducted its commerce from the backs of sea-dragons, and entertained delegations of the korriganed, the fair-folk, in halls of white marble.”

Isabeau resettled herself so that Anne had to push her off her ribcage. “I will tell it only if you promise to be still,” she said.

“Very well,” said Isabeau, penitently.

“Once,” said Anne. “Long ago, there was a beautiful king called Gralon Meur who ruled the whole land of Cornouaille from his seat in Quimper, within sight of the sea. This king had no wife. But rather than wed a mortal princess, he rode alone into Brocéliande, and thence by ancient ways into the Lost Lands. There he sought the korrigan-queen’s daughter and asked for her hand in marriage.”

Isabeau shifted her weight. “A queen’s daughter? Was there not a king?”

“Do you want me to tell the story or not?”

Isabeau stilled and Anne went on: “The chronicles do not tell how he won her. They only say that when Gralon Meur was next seen in Cornouaille, he had a korrigan wife, whose name was Malgven, and that the two were greatly in love. But Malgven missed the Lost Lands, missed her mother and her people, and her mother missed her child also. So when Malgven conceived her firstborn, the queen of the korriganed put forth all her strength and made the couple a present for the child’s christening.”

Isabeau was still far from asleep.

Anne said, “Are your eyes closed?”

“Yes,” said Isabeau, lying stoutly.

“The korrigan-queen’s gift was a city entire. Such a city as had never been seen in the world of men. It split the water of the bay of Douarnenez like a spike of pearl, like a heap of jewels. A city raised by sorcery, by arts that the world has since lost. A city that lay upon the twilit border between the mortal lands and the Lost Lands.”

“But how?” said Isabeau. “If the Lost Lands are in Brocéliande, which is far from the sea?”

“I do not know. That is just the story. Perhaps it is a chronicler’s mistake, or else some lore whose nature we have forgotten. Now listen. This city was called Ys, which is a word whose meaning we have forgotten. But the chronicles call the city Ker-Ys, or Keris, for ker was their ancient word for ‘city.’ And now the city is remembered as Keris, the city of cedar and gold.”

Isabeau’s breathing had begun to slow, despite herself, and her head finally got heavier on Anne’s shoulder.

“The chronicles do say that Paris took its name from Keris, that par means ‘like,’ and the old Gauls wished that Paris might compare to Ys, the white jewel of the sea. Well, long may they wish it so.” She paused to grin at Isabeau’s derisive snort.

“For a while, everyone that lived in the realm of Gralon Meur was content. But it could not last. For Malgven was brought to bed of her firstborn, and there she died, leaving only a girl-child to be the heir of Keris and Cornouaille.”

Anne wished she’d not said that. Women died in childbed every day, and it did not matter if you were a queen or a korrigan or a fishwife. The cold hand came for you and that was that. But there was no need to remind her sister.

Isabeau didn’t move.

Anne drew a deep breath. “Gralon Meur, they say, mourned his wife, retreated from the governance of his people, and instead took to wandering the Lost Lands, where all lost things and people and places may be found. Perhaps Gralon sought a glimpse of his lady there and did not trust to the hope of the Resurrection, since he had married a woman of the korriganed.

“All this while, Gralon Meur’s daughter was coming to adulthood. She was called Ahèz, which means key-bearer, for she held the keys to the great seawalls that held back the water in the bay of Douarnenez. This princess was masterful and self-willed, and very beautiful. The chronicles also say that she took no interest in government, but only in the arts of pleasure.

“In those days, Keris was at its height, an enchanted city of gold and sorcery. They kept not a fleet of ships but rather a fleet of sea-dragons, who went all around the world and brought back wonders. And they also bred horses, whose sires were gifts of the korriganed, for Queen Malgven to ride. And these horses could run upon the sea as swiftly as destriers run upon the earth.

“But as Gralon Meur retreated from his duties, the days of Keris darkened. Riches still came in, but their joy crept out. The sea-dragons were no longer ridden by merchants seeking trade but by corsairs who bade their beasts crush ships in their coils and steal their cargoes. At last the sea-drakes fled altogether, and would no longer answer the commands of men. By then Gralon Meur was old and wandering, living like a hermit in some dream of the Lost Lands. It fell to his daughter to raise the city’s fortunes. But Ahèz did not. She loved only her own pleasure.”

Anne broke off. Isabeau was finally asleep, which was as well. The next part of the story, she remembered now, was an evil one. Anne closed her eyes and spoke no more. But still she could not sleep, still the tale unwound in her mind, bright as a cold blue sea, as though Anne was a child again, listening to Hawiz finish the story:

Every night, as the city crumbled into decadence and disorder, the heedless Ahèz held banquets. And in the dark of the night, Ahèz would choose a person from among the revelers, one who particularly caught her eye. She would bid this person put on a mask and follow her to her tower, with its mullioned windows and moonlight streaming in.

Then, smiling, she would peel the mask away with her own hands and lie with her chosen partner, breathing the wind off the sea. But when their joy was over, Ahèz would tell her paramour to put the mask back on.

“That you might go from my tower unrecognized,” she would say.

But the mask was enchanted. When her lover put on this mask a second time, it closed down tight and smothered its victim dead, and then Ahèz’s bodyguard would throw the body over the parapet, into the mouths of the wild sea-dragons.

Until one night a new reveler came to Keris. No one knows who this person was. A hero of legend. A korrigan. A knight. A simple woodcutter. The devil himself. None of the stories agree. But they do all say that when Ahèz gave this stranger her mask, he refused. She begged, for she liked him best of her lovers, but still he refused. Instead, he asked her for another gift, for the key round her neck. The key to the seawall. And Ahèz, drunk and besotted, gave it him.

This guest left her sleeping and went and opened the wall and the sea came. It rose and it swirled and consumed what it touched. The galleries and passages and gardens and streets and stables and markets were washed away in the space of one night.

Now, some chronicles say the city of Keris was not drowned at all, but drawn back into the Lost Lands. Either way, after that night, Keris was lost to the mortal world. Now there is only water in the bay of Douarnenez. And sometimes, at twilight, the sound of bells.

The morning light, which came early at that time of year, crept between the bed hangings. It was dawn, and soon the bells would ring for Lauds. Well, Anne could sleep another night. There was too much to do this day. She rolled softly out of bed and parted the curtains, waking Hawiz from her pallet to go and keep Isabeau warm.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter

4

Wolfgang von Polhaim racked his brain all along the sloppy spring road between Nantes and Ghent, but still he did not know what he would say to his king, did not know how to frame his account of Brittany and her duchess.

She is clever, Polhaim imagined himself saying. She is desperate. She is beautiful. She is young. Bring her to Vienna and that whole court of vipers will eat out of her hand. She would make a good empress when your father is dead.

She is playing upon your emotions, Sire. Your love and your loneliness.

Perhaps you could love her. Your Mary was clever too.

Perhaps she will drag you into a long war that you cannot win.

When Polhaim returned at last to Maximilien, he was summoned informally, behind the stables of the castle of Gravensteen in Ghent, and he came before his master still at a loss for words.

Maximilien of Austria was then styled King of the Romans, heir apparent to the Holy Roman Empire. He was thirty-nine years of age, his skin beginning to slacken over the haughty bones of his face. He was a knight, a warrior, a general, perhaps the last monarch of unquestioned chivalry in Europe. He had seen too much of men to be anything but impatient with them.

All around him the usual sprawl of councilors and courtiers studded the grass like spring flowers in dew-starred velvet. There was a palfrey in work nearby, a mare wearing a silk headstall, turning restless ears as she cantered round and round.

“Sire,” Polhaim said when Maximilien beckoned. He found he could not bring himself to mouth one of the pieced-together sentences he’d constructed on his journey. In silence he laid Anne’s letter in his monarch’s hand.

The king broke the seal. His brows drew together. “A proxy-wedding?” he murmured through pursed lips. “And the French in Nantes, bidding her betroth herself to Charles?”

Polhaim said cautiously, “The duchess—her council—believes that if the wedding is solemnized, as the Bretons suggest, in the chapel of a convent in this Brocéliande, it will not be noted by France’s diviners, and no word of it could be spread via divination. In this way the union may be kept secret until it is a fait accompli. France, for all their insistence, would have no opportunity to do anything but accept that Brittany has been put out of their reach.”

A little humor came into Maximilien’s face, a bright nostalgia. “And thus France shall be confounded again, as it was in my youth. Did the Bretons tell you the day of this proposed proxy-wedding in—Brocéliande?”

“She—they—the Bretons—await word of your willingness.”

Maximilien considered. He had been commanding armies since before his twentieth year and knew all the dangers of delay. “How quickly can you ride to Brocéliande?”

“Sire?”

Impatiently Maximilien said, “You needn’t return to Nantes. We shall send our acceptance via diviner; less chance of accident. Who else but you would be my proxy? You have met the lady, her court, and her council, you shall go and marry her on my behalf. Or do you not wish to be my proxy in this matter?”

Polhaim tried desperately to turn into the shadow so it would not be obvious how fast the color had risen beneath his fair skin. “Your will is mine, Sire,” he managed. He did not want to stand in a church and say sham marriage-vows to Anne of Brittany. Still less did he want to pretend to consummate the marriage, as custom dictated. But Maximilien merely frowned, awaiting an answer, his mind made up.

“A fortnight,” Polhaim said, accepting his doom. “If I could have a diviner for messages and fresh horses ready.”

“Let it be so,” said Maximilien of Austria, beckoning a secretary. “And we shall have my companies muster in the meantime, to march when the word comes.” A little excited color warmed the cheekbones of his austere face. This was his master’s youth all over again, thought Polhaim doubtfully, and Anne was his Mary come back. But Anne was nothing like Mary of Burgundy.

“France will rue the day,” said Maximilien.

“Yes, Sire,” said Polhaim, thinking, I only hope that you will not. And that the duchess will not either.

* * *

After drawing out every frivolous preparation, Anne of Brittany with her court and her noble guests of France set out from Nantes to hunt a unicorn in Brocéliande on a day when the wheat showed like green glaze against the black-ploughed fields.

A rider on a fast horse would have found himself under the boughs of Brocéliande late on the second day out from Nantes, but Anne did not want to run ahead of Polhaim, riding back to them from Ghent. She insisted that a unicorn-hunt must be stately.

Reluctantly, La Trémoille agreed.

Only a select few of Anne’s circle knew all her plans. The rest were just there for the longed-for unicorn, plumes and banners curling in the wanton spring wind, the barding of their horses rippling and shining over their coursers’ glossy necks. It was convincingly gaudy, delightful, magnificent, ruinously expensive. Anne had borrowed money to pay for her part in it; she suspected half her nobles had done the same. But what choice was there? Maximilien could pay her creditors, if only their wedding could be solemnized.

At least the road was drying under the pure light of a rare sunny day, and La Trémoille suspected nothing. He entertained the company with caustic tales while Anne rode beside him and listened meekly. She would have done so, tirelessly compliant, all the way to the edge of Brocéliande had she not happened to turn her head just as they were passing a ruined farm.

The roads of Brittany were studded with ruins in those days; the sight of each one hurt Anne like a fist to the throat. Sometimes it was the work of soldiers, but more often it was the work of brigands. The war had bred them up and turned them loose, and her treasury had not the silver to pay for soldiers to check them properly.

Nothing unusual about this rain-rotted hulk, but when Anne glanced across the fallow field, her eye caught a flicker of movement. A small, ragged head ducking out of sight. Without thinking, she reined her horse.

La Trémoille broke off his discourse. “Highness?”

If that was a woman hiding in this ruin, or a woman with children, she would not reveal herself to armed men. Suddenly Anne wanted, on a flare of pure rebellion, to aid someone with her own hand instead of endlessly talking. She said, “There is someone in that ruin.”

La Trémoille looked baffled. “I dare say.”

“I want to see.” Anne made the utterance childish for La Trémoille’s benefit. She turned her palfrey, Jonquil, and cantered across the fallow field.

Behind her, she could hear De Rieux saying soothing things to La Trémoille, heard Henri spurring after her. “Highness, what now?”

Anne didn’t answer, having come into the ruined farmyard, half her startled party following. The air breathed out smoke and old death; some beast’s bones had been picked clean. Jonquil sidled uneasily. Anne was aware of her courtiers exchanging curious glances. She said in Breton, “Let any who live here come out to me at once. For I am the duchess of Brittany.”

The fresh breeze whistled in the ruined roof. A horse snorted.

“There is no one,” said La Trémoille, who had evaded De Rieux and cantered across.

A small face peeped around a smoke-streaked wall. She could have been ten or five or fifteen, it was hard to know with ill-nourished children. Over a chorus of well-bred murmurs, Anne said, “Are you alone, child?”

The child was staring, as at an apparition. “They’re all dead,” she whispered finally, also in Breton. The folk of the countryside spoke no other language.

Softly Anne said, “God rest their souls. Would you like to ride a horse and have some bread?”

The child nodded once, looking dazed. Anne caught the eye of Peryn, the most reliable of her grooms. He got down and picked up the child before she changed her mind and bolted. He put her on his saddlebow, got up behind her. Anne said, “Child, have you anything to bring with you?”

“No,” whispered the girl, with a face full of frightened wonder. “No, nothing.”

Anne could do no more; La Trémoille was already beginning to radiate confused hostility. She let her mind fill with all the day’s frustration, and when the tears came spilling from her eyes, she put a hand on his sleeve and whimpered, “I just cannot bear it when the children suffer.” The tears smeared furrows in the careful tints on her face. “God tells us to succor them.”

“Indeed,” he said slowly. “Indeed.” And because he was the kind of man who cannot bear a crying woman, he spurred his horse on and left her alone.

“Where are we going?” Anne heard the child ask from Peryn’s saddlebow. He’d produced the heel of a loaf and she was gnawing like a mouse.

Peryn was unflappable. “We are going to the nuns in the forest. Perhaps you may live there and they will take care of you, if you say your prayers.”

“Where the korriganed live?” inquired the girl. “Will they not eat my eyes?”

“I think not,” said Peryn. “There are no more korriganed, and in any case the duchess would not allow it.”

* * *

Near the edge of the forest, the bulk of the hunting-party turned off to pass the night jammed up tight in the castle of the sieur de Trécesson. Anne, with her maids-of-honor, Henri, and De Rieux and a small escort, went to spend the night in a convent called Paimpont.

Polhaim was to meet them there, riding straight from Ghent on fast horses with the marriage-contract, a bewildered bishop to solemnize it, and a letter from Maximilien. He had promised faithfully via diviner to be prompt to his hour. Anne did not know what she would do if he did not come.

The convent, an austere heap of rain-worn stone, lay on the far side of a black mere, gray wall and slate roof, dormitories and refectory and spired chapel competing with ancient trees for its place against the sodden sky. The ground was covered in moss that muffled the sound of hooves, and the trees twisted as they soared, tangling overhead like the vaulted ribs of cathedrals. It had begun to rain, and the day was creeping down to night.

Lights glimmered into being one by one in the convent windows, multiplying like stars in the rippling water. The wind had died and now their spattered banners drooped. Anne’s hip was slowly stiffening.

The maids-of-honor shifted their shoulders uncomfortably in their damp clothes. The horses, sensing a stable nearby, picked up the pace. “Come,” said Anne to them all, finding a smile. “Let us seem a gallant company.”

They passed the convent-gate at last and came to a smooth, grassy place between stable and chapel. Anne searched about eagerly for men, horses, banners, any sign that Polhaim had reached the convent before them.

Nothing. She sat still.

Henri had already slid off his horse. “He’ll be here,” Anne told him before he could say anything.

Her brother’s arm steadied her as he handed her down, and his smile steadied her too, full of undimmed confidence. “I’ve never yet known one of your schemes to go awry,” he assured her. “Let us all find some supper, and he’ll be here before moonrise.”

For a strange instant, the convent lay quiet. Then everything moved at once. Nuns and novices and torchlight came spilling out. The abbess was the shortest and the oldest among them, leaning on a knotted stick. She hobbled toward Anne and said, “Bid you welcome, Highness.”

“Mother, I am glad to be here,” returned Anne politely. “Have you had word of another party? One led by a young man with fair hair?”

“Only you and the birds.”

Anne was silent.

The abbess said, “You are riding with children?” The little girl had caught her eye. The child looked terrified.

The wind slipped cold fingers beneath Anne’s cloak. Wishing only to get indoors, she said, “An orphan. We happened upon her.”

“Ah,” said the old lady noncommittally. “Well, come in and get warm.”

But the little Breton girl would not come in when she was bidden; she sat on the horse, poised with her teeth bared, as though the abbey were a den of wolves and she expected to have to run at any moment. Anne sighed. “Elesbed”—for that was the name the child had told Peryn—“come down off the horse and take my lady’s hand.” She indicated her maid-of-honor Madeleine. “And we shall go inside. There is no supper in the forest.” She paused. “And no korriganed in this convent.”

Elesbed’s eyes narrowed, but she let Peryn lift her down, and under Anne’s minatory eye, she put a timid, dirty hand in Madeleine’s.

“Never fear,” the old abbess told her, and grinned unexpectedly. “While you sleep under my roof, the korriganed dance in the lightning; they don’t come in out of a wild night.”

“That girl is crawling with vermin,” Hawiz said when Anne and her maids-of-honor came to the convent’s guesthouse with Elesbed in tow and a great many people besides, bearing bags and coffers. Hawiz had raised three children in addition to nursing Anne and Isabeau. She steered Elesbed to a stool in a corner of that crowded room. “Sit you there, and if you do not move or touch anything, you will have supper and a bath.”

“What’s a bath?” inquired the child. With no korriganed in evidence, her confidence had risen. “Is it like a baptism?”

Hawiz looked grave, but Anne, warming her hands by the fire, laughed. “Something like. Such long faces,” she told her maids-of-honor. “Soon this will all be over.”

Hawiz, who knew Anne the best, laid her cheek silently against her hair before beginning to plait it up once more for the caul.

Anne was clean, presentable, and in the midst of haranguing Elesbed about how one must behave in a bath—she feared Hawiz would be bitten if she herself did not take a hand—when the door opened upon the ancient abbess herself, startling the room. “Well, Highness?” the lady said, comfortable with their astonishment. “Will you come and share my poor supper?”

The abbess had appalling manners, but Anne would need her cooperation if Polhaim ever came. “Mother, I shall,” she said readily. Anne hoped the repast was only metaphorically poor, a humble figure of speech. She was hungry.

Anne left the room in her usual cloud of attendants, but the way through the abbey was a winding one through many ill-lit rooms, and by the time she came to a door of oak with wooden hinges, her people had all fallen strangely behind. When the oaken door closed at Anne’s back, she and the abbess were abruptly alone, in a room festooned with herbs, hung with dried flowers, moonlight flowing steadily in from a leaded window.

There was no sound. Anne felt her skin begin to prickle. “Well?” she said, her voice sharpening.

The abbess said, “Highness, will you pretend you have come only to keep vigil in my chapel and hunt a unicorn at dawn?” The question came whipcrack-clear, as undimmed by age as her eyes.

Anne stared. “I have offered no harm to anyone in these walls, and I have made a gift to your coffers. My intentions are not your affair, Mother.”

“I have made them my affair,” said the abbess. She had her back to the moonlit window; Anne could not read her face.

Something wholly unnatural about this room, the silence behind the door, her own people’s absence. The moonlight, something about the moonlight. “Who are you?”

“I am mistress here and not you,” returned the lady, her shadow gnarled like a thorn-bush in the blue light. There was not even a candle lit in that room; the fire was only a little red heap in a cold grate. No supper at all.

People had been trying to intimidate Anne ever since she was a girl. Icily, she answered, “I am your sovereign.”

Narrowed eyes held hers despite the darkness. “I have heard tell of the duchess of Brittany. But these tales puzzle me. For folk say she is a giddy fool clinging to an unsteady throne. Yet they also speak of her with love, and you do not seem very giddy.”

“It depends on the hour,” said Anne, wondering if she should call out. But dignity forbade.

“They say you defied your guardian and your council and forced your own coronation when he would have waited out of caution, since you were so young and unmarried.”

That was true. She said nothing.

“I ask again why you are here.”

Anne said, “You have given me no reason to trust you.”

“Perhaps you will never walk out of this room if you do not!”

Anne said softly, “Do you threaten me?”

The abbess paused. Then she said, “Tell me the truth and none shall learn your secret from me. I swear it.”

“It is my life and my realm; I cannot tell you.”

“My oath has never been broken,” said the old lady haughtily.

Anne hesitated. She was angry, but she also recognized this ferocity. She possessed it too. The fierceness of a woman protecting something precious. Was the abbess so afraid for her flock? “Will you swear on the Cross?”

The lady laughed. “I will swear on the shadows and the world’s memory. I swear to keep your secrets.”

That was a strange oath. But Bretons prayed to peculiar saints; their rituals contained half-forgotten words. Anne hesitated. Finally, she found herself saying, somewhat to her own surprise, “I am to be married in your chapel tonight.”

“Ah,” said the lady. “Why?”

Anne told her, brief and precise. When she had finished, the lady replied, “A desperate scheme, then. And why did you rescue that verminous brat?”

“I swore to protect this realm of Brittany. I could not ride by while a hungry child hid. She would have died in that farmyard.”

“What would you do for this land if you were called to it?” asked the old lady, her voice harder still.

“Anything,” said Anne. “Die. If I am called to it.” She was fast losing patience. “Did you ever mean to give me supper?”

The abbess ignored the question. “But would you fight for it?” She leaned on her stick.

“That too,” said Anne.

The lady’s face broke into an alarming smile. She had a dreadful number of teeth. A triumph at her age. “Perhaps you will have the opportunity.”

“Perhaps I will,” said Anne in exasperation. “At court, in Vienna, where I will be able to direct my husband’s resources to my own lands.”

“We’ll see about that,” said the lady vaguely. “Did you know that long ago, men did not hunt unicorns to kill them?” She went to a moonlit corner; Anne blinked and saw a jar and some cups. The abbess poured them both wine, dark as melancholy.

Anne did not drink it. “Why not?”

“Because the unicorn must graze on mortal flowers and also on the leaves of the Lost Lands—take the wine, it isn’t poisoned—for this reason: A unicorn, of all the beasts of the world, can make its way between the two. Some say the unicorn guards the Lost Lands and is the warden of the ways between. And so men hunted unicorns to have their grace, not to make a trophy of their horns.” The old lady put her head to one side. “Do you not wish to go into the Lost Lands?”

Anne sipped her wine. “Why would I want that? The way is long forgotten, and I am no adventurer.”

“No? But there was power there once, for those with hearts to find it.”

Her fingers tightened on her cup. “What power?”

The smile glimmered in the moonlight. “That depends on the seeker. Now come and eat and forgive my churlishness. We do not often have royal guests.”

Anne blinked a second time, wondering how she could have missed the small table in the corner, laden with dishes. She sat, still a little wary, let the abbess serve her with her own hands, and had a hearty supper, with moonlight bright in her eyes. The abbess, smiling genially, talked now of herb-lore, and Anne, who did not care for nostrums but who was fascinated by the dyeing of thread, answered readily, so that the time passed with strange ease.

When she had finished, the door flew clattering open. Anne rose and Madeleine, as though unaware that her sovereign had ever been absent, said, “Highness, Polhaim is come.”

Anne hurried to the door, could hear the shouts and whinnying from the yard. Also the rain falling. The night was stormy, pitch-black.

But in the abbess’s stillroom, there had been such moonlight and no storm at all…

Anne stopped, realizing, and turned back at once to where the moonlight—the impossible moonlight—had spilled so lavishly onto the floor. But the door was already closed behind her and the abbess was nowhere to be seen.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter

5

If there had been a diviner who could look without madness into Brocéliande—and particularly into the chapel at Paimpont—he might have remarked its evil air. As though evil men had been here, and done evil deeds. Anne’s skin prickled as she crossed the echoing flagstones. The inner walls of the nave were painted scarlet. Old graves lined the floor, with names carved in odd characters, mostly worn away. Anne’s modish black skirts whispered over the stones, and a chill prickled up her back. She walked on Henri’s arm, and he gave the chapel a look of disfavor. “You ought to be married in daylight in a cathedral with flowers. If you told me this place was a robber-den I’d believe you.”

Anne could not disagree. But she said consolingly, “My first child will be baptized in a cathedral in daylight with flowers, and when that happens there will be peace in Brittany. The rest doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it? That yellow-haired creature Polhaim is half in love with you,” murmured Henri as they paced together up the aisle. “Didn’t you see his face?”

Anne felt her color rise. “It is easy to be in love with someone you do not know, whom you must rescue from her enemies.” She had encouraged Polhaim, of course; he was Maximilien’s confidant and his courage and dispatch could make or break this scheme. She let her sideways stare convey some of that to Henri, who looked affronted. “Just as you like, go on and break hearts; when I have to kill the fellow who’s finally broken yours, I shall congratulate him before I run him through.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” began Anne, but she had no time for more, because they had drawn near the bishop and the wedding-mass must soon begin.

It was very long and seemed longer because of the hour and their weariness and the mildewed damp of that chapel, the faintly inimical air. Anne stood and knelt and stood again, and all the while her hip wound tighter and tighter. She wished she hadn’t had to do this straight from a day’s riding. Polhaim saw her difficulty, and when next they had to rise, his arm went unobtrusively under hers, helping her stand.

She smiled at him and he flushed. Perhaps he had fallen in love with her, she thought, though she knew she could not love him. Love was the same as trust for her; it was reserved for Isabeau and Hawiz and De Rieux and Calyx, for the people of her innermost circle. And passion? Passion was for ordinary flesh, not for a body that could be bartered and conquered and offered like territory. She would find Polhaim someone to love him, a clever girl as pretty as he himself.

“What God has joined, let no man put asunder,” intoned the rheumy bishop. Anne raised smiling eyes to her proxy-husband, who kissed her hand. “Very well,” she began. “Shall we—”

She broke off, the question dangling. The door at the far end of the nave was creaking open.

De Rieux had posted guards specifically to prevent interruptions.

But a young woman crept through the gap, wearing an open robe of antique cut. Her hair streamed loose over the rose-colored silk. She stopped to listen at the door, taking no notice of the crowd near the altar.

“What the devil?” muttered Henri. Polhaim wore no sword, but the two young men closed protectively, shoulder to shoulder, a brutish wall of muscle blocking her view.

“Stop that, it’s just a lady,” said Anne, craning around them.

The lady listened with frozen face at the door, one jeweled hand laid trembling on the wood. Then she hurried up the echoing nave. Her feet whispered like wings on the stone, on the graves in the floor. She ran past them all without even a glance, straight to the altar, and half-fell to the floor by the font, burying her face in her arms. Her whole body shook.

“Madame,” the bishop tried. Henri and Polhaim, both trained to fight from childhood, were watching the door warily.

“He’s coming,” the lady whispered. She spoke Breton, but in an odd rhythm. With concentration, Anne could understand her.

“What is she saying?” the bishop demanded.

“Oh, God, help me,” the girl whispered. “He is coming. It was all for nothing. I will die like the others. He cannot find a way for himself; I could not find the way for him.” Her laugh was bitter, muffled against the stone of the grave-strewn floor. The very air seemed to lie wrongly upon the earth.

It was because of the light, Anne realized. The light on the lady. Her clothes and her hair were bright, as though she lay before the altar in daylight. But it was the darkest part of the night.

“God,” the lady whispered. “God, please.”

Anne sidestepped her brother and Polhaim and said clearly, in Breton, “What is wrong?”

The lady had not seemed to hear or to see them until that moment. But when Anne spoke, she raised her head. Daylight shone in that lady’s open eyes, streamed through the ruddy floss of her hair. Anne’s skin was crawling. Henri and Polhaim chorused protest at her back.

“Anaon, are you one of us?” whispered the lady. “I have seen the others sometimes. They comforted me. Our sisters. But I never saw you before. He is going to kill me now. Did he kill you? I am glad I will not be alone at least, my sister. Will you stay with me?” The impossible sunlight lit tears in her eyes.

Anaon were the unquiet dead.

Anne did not know what the lady meant, nor what to say. “I am no ghost. We will not let him kill you,” she said at last. “My brother is here; he will not let anyone hurt you.”

Henri tensed: He did not know enough Breton to follow the conversation, but he had registered the words “hurt” and “kill.” “Anne, what is happening?” he said between his teeth. His sword came hissing free of its sheath, never mind the bishop’s protests.

“I cannot see your brother,” said the lady. “And even if I could, he cannot help me. My lord cannot be stopped. Even the korriganed are afraid of him. His power is still growing.”

Anne said, “Who is your lord? Why does he mean to kill you?”

“My husband,” said the girl, so matter-of-factly that Anne, dressed in her proxy-wedding dress, felt all her skin turn cold. “He kills all of us in the end. At least I stole his mirror.” She reached a sunlit hand into her rose-silk robe, beneath the sash, and withdrew an object the size of her palm. It glittered in the light that was not there. “Can you take this? He cannot have it. He ruins everything with it.” The girl was stepping toward Anne—reaching out an arm. All the room shouted, and Henri tried to push in front of her again.

“Be still,” said Anne, pitching her voice to carry. In the startled pause, she reached for the girl. Their fingers touched, and that palm-sized thing, surprisingly heavy, was suddenly fast in Anne’s grip. The girl backed up. Her eyes were as full of death as Anne’s father’s had been when he lay drowning in his blood in that bed at Coiron. “We can help you,” said Anne.

“No, you can’t, fair anaon, candlelight ghost,” said the lady. “Stay in the shadows. But you must keep the mirror.”

Anne hesitated, then pushed it into her sleeve. “Why?” she whispered.

The lady did not answer. “Oh, God!” she cried just as the door burst open. Anne spun toward the sound. No one entered. But the whole chapel changed, grew dark, and now the fire did not flicker along its painted walls. The girl in rose-colored silk stood rigid, but now three other women stood beside her. One was drowned-blue and one was hanged-black, holding her own rope. One threw her head back screaming, for she was on fire, though the fire gave no light. And the girl in the rose-silk robe stared at Anne sadly, and her rose silk bloomed blood from her cut throat and she held a bloody sword. “Beware,” she said, and then all four were gone. The candles burned bright once more.

But the door stayed open, gaping onto nothing. The startled faces of the guards outside peered through the gap. Henri did not sheathe his sword; he strode down the nave and demanded to know what they had seen, and they protested that no one had gone past them.

Polhaim made the sign against evil. He had stayed beside Anne, as though proxy-vows entitled her to his protection. “Are you all right, Highness?” He did not ask what the lady had given her. He did not ask who the other women had been. Could he not have seen? The mirror was heavy where Anne had thrust it into her sleeve.

The bishop said, in revelatory tones, “I think that that was a cursed soul. Highness, you banished it with your holy light.”

That was an—excellent interpretation. Anne hardly knew what had happened. That final glimpse had left her disoriented, nauseated, afraid and trying to hide it. Only one soul. The bishop could not have seen the other women standing dead. She said nothing.

Henri was coming back, having inspected the empty corridor. He sheathed his sword. Polhaim offered Anne his arm. Henri muttered, “Anaon, if I have ever seen one.” Ghosts were not unknown in Brittany. “I knew this place was evil.”

“This place has served its purpose,” retorted Anne, with an effort. She did not want dark rumors to get back to Maximilien. “This night is not over; keep your opinions to yourself.”

* * *

According to Austrian law, a proxy-consummation must follow a proxy-wedding, and Anne would have been embarrassed if she weren’t so shaken by the encounter in the chapel. Or if it weren’t so wholly absurd.

She and Polhaim went straight from the chapel to the guesthouse as quietly as possible with the abbey sunk in sleep. Austrian and Breton attendants watched them, rendered mere shadows beyond the strong light of pillar-candles. A screen gave Anne privacy to take off bodice, skirt, and sleeves; she was left in her chemise, shoulders rippling with gooseflesh.

When she came out, Polhaim kept his eyes studiously averted. He wore full armor, with his right leg and right hand bared. Nothing could have been further from the rose-strewn bower of Anne’s girlish dreaming. But her true wedding-night would be watched too. It would be an affair of state, bloodless as a council meeting, except that she must then do it unclothed.

Polhaim managed a smile and helped her into the high bed, so she would not be ungainly, and kept careful space between them. Ceremoniously, even gracefully—courtiers were taught to be always graceful—Polhaim touched his gold-fuzzed knee to hers, ran a foot privily up to her thigh, looked at her solemnly, then hastily got out of bed.

And that was all. He had touched her under those watching eyes. The marriage was legal. Most of the watchers dispersed in silence. Hawiz put a robe round Anne’s shoulders. Madeleine poured out wine. Anne wanted to laugh, yet felt strangely desolate. “Thank you,” she said to Polhaim, who had guarded her dignity and tried to be kind.

Polhaim bowed to her carefully. He looked embarrassed, in his one-legged armor. “It was my honor.”

Henri didn’t think much of these legal antics. Or perhaps he saw that his sister was sad. He said, “Never mind all that. What did you say to that girl in the chapel? Who was she?”

Only Hawiz and her maids-of-honor remained in the room now; their heads tipped to listen. “I don’t know,” said Anne. Polhaim peered abstractedly into his wine, his yellow hair reddened by firelight, but she knew he was listening too. A breath of the uncanny around any woman could be fatal. Even a sovereign.

Madeleine said, “The restless dead are not unknown in old places, Highness. Did you not remark the strange light she walked in?”

“I remarked it,” said Henri darkly. All the Bretons nodded. Brittany was full of ruins that men ought not visit and crossroads that they should not pass and drifting phantoms in antique clothes. Anaon. One knew them because they stood in the light of their own living days, and not in the world as it is.

But Polhaim was from a more rational country; he seemed astonished at their nodding acceptance. “A ghost, Highness?”

“Yes,” said Anne. “A poor shade of long ago. We are a haunted land.” She did not say that this apparition was strange even for Brittany—anaon did not speak as a rule—nor did she mention the mirror. Not in front of Polhaim. She added, smiling, “Enough for one night. We must save some strength for the unicorn-hunt.”

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter

6

Hawiz, who had Anne’s confidence, was unsettled by this tale of a mirror. She said, tentatively, “In tales of long ago, when men strayed near the Lost Lands, they saw ghosts more often than not, and sometimes lost objects would drift into the world of men like sea-wrack.” She locked the mirror tight into the bottom of a coffer. “Let us think no more of this thing until we are far away from here.”

Anne agreed. But her sleep was full of nightmarish mirrors, each one showing the terrified face of a woman who was not her.

The next morning, she sat in a troubled stupor while her hair was plaited, and her traveling household stirred to life around her. Only when her abstracted gaze met a pair of half-familiar gray eyes peering at her did Anne come properly awake. Elesbed had something under her arm, and her mouth was sticky. She’d been given a pallet for the night, but evidently she had not stayed there.

Anne said, “Elesbed, come here.”

The child seemed torn between the urge to flee and fascination with Hawiz plaiting up Anne’s hair. The previous day’s food had put color in her face. Someone had chopped off the hopelessly matted, lousy snarls of her hair, and someone else had cut a respectable dress down to size for her. Anne eyed the child’s stickiness and said mildly, “I suppose you were not simply handed a honey-jar in the kitchen before dawn and told to help yourself?”

The girl almost bolted, but somewhat to Anne’s surprise, she stilled and said, “No,” guiltily. “That is—no, Highness.” The word was awkward in her mouth. “But I was looking to see if there were any korriganed and I came upon the jar and it smelt so good. I just meant to shoo away an ant.” The gray eyes appealed to Anne’s good nature. “They say anaon was abroad last night and my gram told me that is always the fault of the korriganed.”

Firmly, Anne said, “There are no more korriganed. If you are to live here in this abbey with the holy sisters, you cannot steal their honey.”

The child’s eyes grew huge. “I cannot stay with the sisters! If the korriganed come back, I shall be eaten. They eat your eyes.”

“I doubt that.” But she remembered the abbess’s toothy smile, the haunted look of the ghost in the chapel. The cold, sourceless moonlight. Without thinking Anne said, “Would you rather come back with us to Nantes?”

“Nantes!” said the child instantly. “Hawiz told me a story of the castle as big as the sky where if I am good, I may have meat on feast-days.” And she added in a burst, “Maybe there are korriganed there and you don’t know it. My gram said some people can’t see what’s in front of their own faces.”

Anne said, dryly, “Very well, at least you may be trained as court jester. What is that you have there?” For all this time, the girl had held an indeterminate object tucked under her arm.

“It is mine,” said the girl defensively, clutching the thing tighter. It was a ratty doll. “She’s from home. But I lost her there, when the brigands fired the house.”

“Not so lost, since you carried her here,” Anne said.

“No, I did not carry her,” returned Elesbed. “I found her behind the honey-jar. It is because the Lost Lands are near. Lost things start to come back.”

* * *

They made sure, of course, that Elesbed had not stolen the doll. The child had stolen the honey, after all. But no children lived near; no one claimed the poor ragged thing.

“The Lost Lands?” Anne murmured to Hawiz, as she was helped into her hunting-dress.

“You ought not go farther into Brocéliande, lady.”

“It is too late,” said Anne. “But we will take all precautions.” She remembered her supper the night before, that moonlight. “Have the abbess summoned. I wish to question her.”

But the abbess, when she appeared, was not the same lady as the night before.

She had many fewer teeth and was quite timid, overwhelmed by her company. She said the Pax Vobiscum in a cracked, anxious voice and asked Anne what she desired.

Anne stared in astonishment. No one else seemed to notice anything amiss. “You are the Mother Superior of this convent?”

The abbess, unsure what had disturbed the duchess, answered in half-panicked affirmative. When Anne asked to greet the nuns—there were only ten or so—none of them was the lady she remembered either.

She did not dare mention it. Rumors of madness were just as fatal for a woman as whispers of the uncanny. She wanted only to get away. She was glad Isabeau was not there.

The Austrians had assembled already, dressed for a hard day of riding, checking girths and head-collars. The rain had given way to mist, a soft invisible sky. Polhaim’s butter-yellow hair was bright in the grayness. He had the documents attesting the marriage signed and sewn into the lining of his saddle. With the marriage confirmed, Maximilien would march across the border bearing Anne’s seal, securing garrisons as he came. Then he and she would be united and this anxiety at an end.

She smiled at Polhaim, where he stood by his horse’s chestnut head. “I shall never forget your kindness. You have ridden back and forth like a hero and a true friend.”

“It was my duty, Highness.”

Lower, she said, “I beg you will forgive me.”

He seemed surprised. But he did not pretend to misunderstand. “It is my own fault.”

“And I— Please do not fail me.”

He kissed her gloved fingertips. “I shall not fail you.”

Anne drew off her glove. “Give this to my husband. With all my hopes.”

He bit his lip. “I will.” He tucked it between his doublet and his shirt. Anne stepped back and lifted her hand. The Austrian party mounted. Anne did not speak again. But her eyes were perhaps more eloquent than she knew, because Polhaim said again, “I will not fail you.” He touched his heel sharply to the flank of his restive horse and shot away bright as a bird, cloak streaming in the morning mist, and all his escort followed.

OceanofPDF.com