Chapter 9 #2
When Elesbed went to sleep, she was smiling too, for the first time since the brigands came.
Butter rumbled against her chest. But Elesbed’s last sight was not of the duchess.
It was of Hawiz, awake, sitting by the newly leaping flames, keeping watch over the duchess during the darkest part of the night.
They rode back to Nantes on one of those days when the sky played coy with the sun. The stranger from Brocéliande was still insensible, borne tidily in a cart, well wrapped, with people to watch over him.
“It is no sickness,” Anne’s court physician, who traveled with the hunt, had said. “It is some kind of madness, a poison of the brain. He raves in his dreams, speaks of a message. Sometimes of a curse. I do not know if he will ever properly wake.”
“Tell me if he does,” said Anne, frowning. At least he could not do them any harm lying bundled in a cart. But did he mean them harm? Or had he been a prisoner?
Would his captors want him back? She remembered sourceless moonlight, and a second pack of hunters, galloping under an impossible sun.
La Trémoille rode in silence. He gave her brooding looks, and Henri kept his horse between them. Once Henri said to Anne, quietly, “That Frenchman has suffered a bitter disappointment. Far worse than if there had been no unicorn at all. What do you think he’ll do?”
“If we are fortunate,” said Anne, “he will try to force another hunt, and so delay the marriage-negotiations still more. Perhaps he’ll even enlist Charles of France to that purpose.
They say the king loves to course a stag.
” She too had seen the disturbing light of obsession in La Trémoille’s eyes. “But we can only wait and see.”
La Trémoille and his French hunters left the party not far from the walls of Nantes, and the Bretons were pleased to see him go.
The walls of the chateau seemed to close around Anne like an embrace from her father.
Isabeau was waiting for them in the courtyard, holding off tutor and governess with practiced ease.
She flung herself, all limbs, upon her sister.
“I missed you! Who is that?” Her eye had fallen on the stranger from Brocéliande, who had given them no name yet.
He was being half-carried from one of the baggage-carts, his face blank as unmarked parchment.
Anne smoothed her sister’s rumpled gown. “I missed you too. I will tell you everything, but later, because I must speak to the council. What have you been doing while I was away?”
“Oh,” said Isabeau absently, her eyes on the insensible stranger.
“I have been helping to train a tiercel. Such a great ball, like a heap of frayed yarn with a sharp beak, and her eyes still seeled”—sewn shut, for the bird’s training.
“Who is that girl?” Isabeau asked, with a sudden flare of jealousy.
“You said I was too young to go. I think she is younger.”
Elesbed, her cat wrapped possessively around her ankles, stood open-mouthed beside the cart, taking in the height and scope of the keep.
“You were too young,” Anne said. “That is Elesbed, an orphan whose family were all killed by brigands. I brought her away so she would not perish. Wait awhile. I will tell you everything tonight.”
Every night was broken into two periods of sleep.
One went to bed with the sun, and woke quite naturally in the dark hour between Matins and Lauds.
This wakeful hour was called the watch and was cherished by all.
People told stories in the slow, firelit dark, or fed their children, or made love in the shadows.
That night Anne spent the watch with the people she trusted most: Isabeau and Hawiz, Calyx, De Rieux, Henri, and Madeleine.
She sat near the fire in her own comfortable chair, with Isabeau curled on the wolfskin near the hearth, her dark head against Anne’s knee.
Anne had told them all the story, from the night in Paimpont to the night when Elesbed thought she saw a ghost. The mirror was passed around and exclaimed over.
“Elesbed might have been mistaken about what she saw last night,” Anne added, judiciously, at the end.
“But I think that between us we may vouch for the rest.” She did not think the child was mistaken.
She thought that Elesbed was a clever and level-headed child.
Hawiz had taken her to live in the kitchen, whose scullions slept warm and where she might learn a trade.
Anne was drinking hot wine with sugar and dried orange peel, and her feet were dry and her clothes were dry and her hair was tidy and she decided she might just never leave home again, even if the wild world did contain unicorns.
When she was not sipping her wine, her hands were moving, carding the skein of unicorn-hair very smooth, separating the individual hairs.
It was fine as silk, with a moonlit sheen; she had it in mind to spin it into embroidery-thread.
Everyone in the room watched her moving hands.
De Rieux said, “I mistrust this stranger. I even mistrust this”—his gesture took in Anne’s work—“that you say is a gift of the unicorn. I was never so afraid as when I saw you vanish in the wood, my daughter.” Horror lingered in his voice.
“Do you think the stranger is a korrigan?” Isabeau demanded.
There was a pause. Henri said, “No, chick, he is not. Or at least not by any measure we know. We took him into the chapel. He was blessed with holy water, and quite failed to burst into flames. We tried him with iron too. He is not a korrigan.”
Isabeau frowned. “But he lived in the Lost Lands. He lived there for a long time. He must have lived with the korriganed, he must know all their ways.”
No one replied. There was an uneasy pause; the fire popped and settled and Henri went to stab it with the poker.
Anne said, “We will know when he wakes and is able to speak.”
“The korriganed are gone,” said Henri, breaking a half-burnt log and adding another. “Don’t you heed when Hawiz tells you stories? They passed into the hollow hills; they dwell with the other lost things.” Anne wasn’t entirely sure of that anymore, but she held her tongue.
“Gone isn’t dead!” Isabeau retorted passionately. The fire flared, fretting her with light. “Don’t they live forever? Perhaps he knows all about the enchantments that men have forgot. Perhaps we can learn his enchantments and use them to repel the French and then our sister may stay in Brittany.”
Everyone glanced again at the seafoam-white fibers aligning under Anne’s hands, otherworldly in their beauty. She said, looking up, “I am married now, Isabeau. I have made a promise that I cannot break. I will not be able to stay in Brittany.”
Isabeau lurched to her feet, unappeased. “You won’t even try? Not even if there were enchantments? The world would be all different if it were so. You will not even ask this stranger?”
“Isabeau,” said De Rieux, “child, we feel your grief, but some things cannot be changed.”
Hawiz spoke unexpectedly. “And wise children do not wish for the interference of the korriganed. They cannot be trusted. They draw you into their realm, and if ever you escape and return whence you came, a century has passed. The korriganed cannot accept God because the ordinary turnings of the year, the calendar of the liturgy itself, are impossible to follow in the Lost Lands.”
Isabeau glared at them. “Why aren’t you helping? It’s as though you want her to go. When we all need her here!”
“Isabeau,” said Anne gently.
But Isabeau was suddenly crying, gasping; she turned from them and ran from the room. Her feet pattered down the stairs.
Henri shook his head. “She sounds like me in my heart, only I’m too old to give voice to such thoughts. And I am not fool enough to go and ask the korriganed for help. If they are even alive, in their hills.”
Anne rounded on him with unaccountable anger, white threads tangling between her fingers.
“Do you blame me for leaving? What choice do I have? Is it better to be conquered? Do you not think I’d have found another way if there was one?
Do you think I want this?” She broke off, already regretting her loss of control.
Vivid in her memory was the night of her proxy-wedding, all those impersonal eyes.
She bent over the mess of her work, not daring to let them see her face.
“No, little sister,” said Henri, after a pause. He sounded kind, and tired. “I know you don’t. And I know you’d walk through hellfire for the rest of us. You just haven’t noticed how much the rest of us don’t want you to have to. I’ll go and find Isabeau.”
Elesbed had thought at first, quailing inwardly, that they had put her to live in the kitchen as punishment.
But no, she soon realized, it was because, as Hawiz told the cook, that it was best the child learn a skill.
And the kitchen was full of food and smelt nice and the cook had a face like a ripe apple.
“Come, child, you’re skinny as a cricket,” she said. “We shall begin with supper and a sleep.”
Elesbed ate to bursting. The kitchen delighted her, with its steams and good smells.
The kitchen delighted Butter too, who instantly fought a duel with the other kitchen cat, both of them yowling while everyone cheered and Elesbed hopped from foot to foot with anxiety.
Butter emerged triumphant, and the other cat fled the field.
Butter proceeded to kill three mice and then went to the hearth and sat expectantly.
The cook gave her a saucer of cream while Elesbed wept over the cat’s scratches.
“It’s all right, they’ll tolerate each other now,” said the cook comfortably.
“And your fine lady is a mouser if I ever saw one. She is welcome, and so are you.”