Chapter 10
Chapter
Anne doubled the guard on the stranger, and on her own doors. She bade de Rieux go and stir up the guard on the wall and bid them be wary.
After Isabeau had gone to bed, she also asked Elesbed, quietly, to join their household.
Elesbed said, “I do not know what that means.”
“Hawiz will teach you what it means. But you are a true-hearted girl and you know stories that we behind our walls have forgotten. I want you to help my sister.”
Elesbed did not immediately consent. It was the Breton in her, a people slow to recognize any authority outside their own.
Elesbed said, “Isabeau said you will leave Brittany, Highness. She was crying about it.”
“I know,” said Anne. “She will need people to help her and love her when I cannot.”
“Isabeau found that kerchief. The stories say that when the Lost Lands are near, it is children who disappear.”
Anne did not need a new thing to fear. “I hope you will watch over her.”
“I will,” said Elesbed, carefully. “Highness.” Her cat, lounging on the warm hearth, started to purr.
In the morning, Calyx waited upon Anne hard on the heels of morning Mass, pressing his way through the hamper of courtiers and councilors with a diviner’s privilege.
He was glassy-eyed and listing sideways with wine, which meant something of note had happened.
He bent near and spoke for her ears alone: “Highness, Marguerite of France is coming here to Nantes. I had the message in my colors. She will be here in a week.”
Anne had been duchess too long to show her instant disquiet, but her hands faltered a little on the work in her lap.
Marguerite of France could be coming only because she had overridden La Trémoille’s desire to kill a unicorn, and the French marriage was still to be forced rapidly into motion.
Was this a disaster? Maximilien wasn’t in Brittany yet.
Marguerite had a reputation for implacable brilliance; how was she to be deceived?
“Thank you for telling me,” she said to Calyx, who bowed and departed.
Anne straightened the thread in her lap, trying to arrange her thoughts.
She’d taken up her distaff that morning, beginning the painstaking work of spinning the unicorn hair into embroidery-thread.
As she worked, she calculated: Polhaim to arrive in Ghent with her marriage-contract around the same time Marguerite arrived in Nantes, Maximilien on the march soon after.
He was an experienced campaigner; he would not delay.
But neither would Marguerite of France.
She stroked a finger over the silky hair. Thought, Perhaps I say this encounter with the unicorn has left me reluctant to wed, since then I fear I should never see the unicorn again. Perhaps I insist I have changed my mind and wish to take the king of France hunting, which will take much time.
Perhaps I make a fuss over my virtue.
Perhaps I can outface her yet…
An interruption came in the shape of the court physician, bowing and eager. “The stranger from Brocéliande is awake, Highness. He awoke at dawn and took food and now he says he would like an audience with my sovereign lady. I told him that he was not to be so forward, but he—”
“Go back to him,” said Anne, interrupting, “and see that he is dressed. Bring him here if he is able.”
When the stranger appeared in Anne’s garderobe, he was upright and dressed in fresh clothes, though he still wore the look of a man who knew not which nightmare he wandered in. His long hair grazed his haggard face and strayed over his doublet.
Anne sat with her maids-of-honor, dressed in verdant green, with thick vining embroidery to conceal the places where the pearls had been cut off her sleeves to sell.
She had put her distaff aside. She watched the stranger enter, escorted by priest and physician and by the suspicious Henri, looming large.
The stranger made an old-fashioned reverence and swayed as he straightened. Exhausted eyes, long-lashed and tipped at the corners, stood out in a glaze of faded freckles.
Anne offered him a chair, in view of his infirmity.
He declined and stood waiting.
Anne said, “What is your name, Monsieur?”
He held his body stiff, as though braced for a blow. “Highness, I was born Julien Moreau. But when I was at court, I was a diviner called Miravi.”
“At what court?”
“At the court of His Majesty King Philip, called the Fair.”
Murmurs throughout the listening room. Anne said, “King Philip the Fair died long ago.”
“Yes,” said Moreau, in a frayed voice. “But it was long ago when I rode away from Paris to seek my fortune in the forest of Brocéliande.”
“How do we know you are not lying?” De Rieux demanded. The others of Anne’s council exchanged glances.
“You have no way to know,” said Moreau. “But I am not.”
Anne’s education had included the history of courts and courtiers. “Miravi disappeared,” she said slowly.
“Yes.” Moreau’s voice was bitter.
De Rieux cried, “You have not one proof!”
“There might be one,” said Anne. To Moreau she added, “You say you were a diviner. Can you prove yourself in divination?”
“I can.” He straightened his back. His eyes were full of torment, but there was no fear in them.
She said, “You understand that in order to be tested in divination, you will be sent to the Guild? That they have their own justice for men who profess gifts they have not? If you fail, you will be put to torment and then death.”
He smiled just a little, strong teeth incongruous between his cracked lips. Anne frowned. But he said only, “I understand.”
Another murmur went round the room, scented heads put together to whisper.
Anne said, “Very well.” She could not decipher the look in his eyes. “You say you passed those years in the Lost Lands. Tell us of them.”
His gaze rested abstractedly on the window behind her, as though he could peer through into a different day.
“I only recall setting out. I was once the finest diviner in Europe, but I wanted more. Our chronicles spoke of gifts beyond divination. That it was possible not just to see the world, as diviners do, but to alter how other men perceive it. This skill was called enchantment. And some went even further. Some could alter the material facts of the world without use of the hands or voice or any skill of the mortal body. This art was called sorcery. But all men said that the learning of these arts was possible only in the court of the korriganed, deep in the Lost Lands. They said that once there was a guild of sorcerers at Keris, the city by the sea, where men rode the waves on dragon-back.” Distant longing in his chalky face.
He swayed a little, standing, seemed like to collapse. “But Keris is gone.”
Exasperated with his pride, Anne said, “A chair for this gentleman.” To Calyx, she murmured, beneath the servants bustling with the chair, “Are there chronicles in the Guild that tell of such things? Enchantment and sorcery?”
“Only in the manner of a wonder tale, Highness,” he murmured back. “They are not admitted as fact.”
Moreau had been forcibly put in the chair and given spiced wine. Anne waited until he had a little color back and then said, “You set out to learn these arts for yourself?”
His voice was bitter, and he held the remainder of his wine between his hands, not drinking. “I had a fine journey from Paris in spring. The orchards were in bloom. I remember it well.”
“And then?”
“I rode into the wood. That is the last thing I remember.” Grief in his voice.
“I saw you, Highness. You told me the year and I knew what had happened. I suppose I was tricked by the korriganed, so I would not remember anything. But I was there, I could swear I was there. You said it is fourteen ninety; it is two hundred years, then, since I rode away. Two hundred years, where else could I have been?”
Anne wondered if he was sane, if he could possibly be telling the truth.
Moreau went on, “No. I do remember one thing.” The court hushed itself.
Moreau’s gaze turned inward. The wine cup sagged in his hands.
“Perhaps the korriganed cast me forth from their halls for this purpose, to tell you, Highness. I know not. I have nothing else.” He stared into his sloshing cup, and then he raised his head and met her eyes.
His were tawny, a rare color. Almost unnatural.
Henri was drawing up tensely now, fixed in alertness. Anne said, “What purpose?”
“It is a message.”
“Tell us.”
Moreau stood suddenly from his chair, though unsteadily.
The wine fell from his hands; the cup rolled clattering and spread a long tongue of red across the stone floor.
Anne’s guards tensed. He ignored the wine.
His voice changed in timbre and also changed in language, became an archaic Breton with a strong, singing accent.
Did they speak so, in the Lost Lands? He said, in the manner of a poet reciting, “There is a new king in the Lost Lands, and every day his power grows. This king is charged by prophecy to take a mortal wife. I am commanded to bring the suit of the korrigan-king to the duchess of Brittany and ask for her hand in marriage.”
At first the room did not react, save for the whispers that slid like cats about the chamber as the few who could understand the archaic phrases translated for their neighbors.
She had understood him readily enough, but not all her court had learned Breton, the language of the common people.
Anne could see when the translation reached Henri and De Rieux, for her brother went scarlet and her guardian’s mouth opened in paternal outrage.
She must say something.
With ready instinct, in a voice pitched to cut across the rising astonishment, she said, “Kings send accredited envoys and earnests of their intentions; how do I know you are not lying?”
Still in that archaic Breton, Moreau said, “The king will send three signs of power. And then he will come for the duchess, according to the custom of his people.” Moreau bowed his head, reverting to French. “I do not remember any more. Forgive me, Highness.”
This part also took a few moments to circulate, courtiers eagerly poking their Breton-speaking neighbors. Henri gripped the back of Anne’s chair.
Anne said to Moreau, “What are these three signs?”
Moreau replied, “Water, fire, and memory. But I don’t know what that means.
I am sorry, Highness. I am—” He could say nothing else for he had begun to crumple like a cut flower, just as he had in Brocéliande, and her guard was obligated to catch him lest he crack his head, swooning on the wine-stained stone floor.