Chapter 4 #2
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.