Chapter 13
Chapter
Marguerite, having approved her chambers in the castle, went up the battlements with her diviner, Volucris, to escape the orgy of unpacking. She wanted to think, and perhaps watch a little of this Triumphal Entry.
But on the corner of the wall-top nearest the town, just beside the Roman tower, she encountered a stranger with russet hair.
He was holding a plain cup and squinting into its contents.
He did not turn as she approached. One of her guards stirred the man with his foot and said, “Knave, this is the lady of France.”
The stranger turned, sweat on his face, eyes amber, made larger with shadows. “Forgive me, Madame,” he whispered, bowing. His French was crisp, but the accent and intonation were unexpected.
Volucris stiffened. “He is auspex.” A diviner. They often knew one another on sight.
But this man wore no robe, no mark of his trade. She said, “Who are you?”
The deep-set eyes were sad. He held the cup almost ceremonially between his two hands. “I was a diviner.”
Then he must be— “You are the man who came out of that forest. I thought they were keeping you locked up.”
The stranger bent his russet head. “I was Miravi when I was a diviner, but I do not like that name anymore, for it reminds me of what I lost. I am Julien Moreau.” He bowed again.
Volucris knew when Miravi was supposed to have lived; he was bristling with disbelief. “You were not born two hundred years ago.”
Moreau said nothing.
“Never mind that,” said Marguerite. “Was it you who told the duchess some farrago that the king of the korriganed desires her hand?” Why were they just letting this man roam loose?
Fine white hands spread out helplessly and Moreau looked weary. Even ill. “I did. But I know not why. Believe me, I should like the answers more than any man alive, I assure you, Excellency.”
“Then divine for your answers,” said Volucris impatiently, “if the Guild has made you free of your gift.”
Moreau turned his cup restlessly in his hands. “Don’t you remember your chronicles? Nothing can be divined in Brocéliande, or about the korriganed, lest the diviner go mad.”
“Why are you on this wall?” Marguerite demanded.
He rubbed a hand over his face. “Why do you think, Madame? To watch for a sign from the korriganed. Even I do not know whether I told the duchess the truth, for I cannot remember how I came to know what I told her. But I am greatly afraid.” As he spoke, the shouting in Nantes rose to such a pitch as to be audible even on the walls of the castle of the dukes of Brittany.
“Is that revelry?” whispered the stranger, looking into the city.
“Or have they had a sign after all?” He raised lovely amber-gold eyes to her face.
He turned back. “Can you save the duchess? I do fear she is in danger.”
“I intend to,” said Marguerite grimly. “In the meantime, I wish to hear your story.”
The diviner bowed. “Then I will contrive to visit you, Madame,” he said.
“I wonder you are not guarded,” she retorted, and was disquieted by his very faint smile.
Elesbed, who had left Butter asleep before the kitchen fire and crept out to see the elephants, bolted back to the castle when the Triumphal Entry dissolved into chaos.
She had hardly regained the courtyard when she heard the clatter of enormous hooves and the baron of Avaugour galloped in with Isabeau on his saddlebow.
He handed her down and said something to her in French, and Isabeau nodded.
“Go up to Hawiz,” added Henri, and Elesbed understood that.
Her French was improving fast. Avaugour wheeled the horse round, thundering back out across the drawbridge and into Nantes.
Elesbed ran over to Isabeau.
“Oh, it’s you,” said Isabeau. She caught Elesbed’s sleeve. “There was a sign from the korrigan-king at the Entry. I’m sure of it. An enchantment! It happened! Did you see?”
Elesbed had had eyes only for the elephants. “Your brother will keep your sister safe,” she said, trying to be reassuring.
Isabeau did not seem to hear. “I have to talk to Moreau again.”
“What? Why?”
“Never you mind. It is just that I have an idea. We must go now, while everyone is in Nantes.”
“Don’t you want to wait for the duchess?”
Isabeau shook her head instantly, her whole body set in lines of stubbornness.
Elesbed said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Then you may go back to Hawiz and darn socks.” Isabeau was being haughty, which meant she was uneasy.
Elesbed didn’t answer. Nor did she go back to Hawiz.
Only chance had got Isabeau past the stranger’s guarded door last time, but this time she armed herself with a basket of marchpane and a look of untold ferocity. Elesbed hoped it wouldn’t work.
But when Elesbed and Isabeau came to Moreau’s room in the old Roman tower, there were no guards at all.
The door was slightly ajar. Faint shadows crawled down it, as though rain spattered some window nearby, but it was not raining.
Elesbed clutched Isabeau by the arm, which, she remembered belatedly, was not something one did to great people. She said, “Something is wrong.”
Isabeau just shook her off, squared her shoulders. “We meet all dangers bravely,” she said, to Elesbed’s annoyance. “Come on.” She pushed the door open.
But the room contained no dangers. Moreau was sitting quietly on his chair, alone near the fire, his head tipped into his hand. He was holding a cup loosely in the other. He looked quite well, if thoughtful.
He started up when they walked in. Isabeau halted so that Elesbed almost ploughed into her, clutching the basket to her chest.
“What has happened?” he asked them urgently. “I heard a great noise in the city and my guards all left me.” Then he seemed to recognize Isabeau. He bowed. “Demoiselle, forgive my appalling manners. Will you sit down?”
Isabeau said, cautiously, “I brought you marchpane.” She put the basket into his hands.
He smiled. “You are kind, Demoiselle.” He ate a piece.
Isabeau said, “Why is the door unlocked?”
“I do not know. I heard my guards go. I went—I am ashamed to say that I went out, to see what was toward. I went out to the wall-top. But only to listen and breathe the free air. I returned to my room in haste so none should mistrust me. I have felt your mistrust these last days. I would have asked my mirror, but I have none.” He sounded sad about it.
“I’ve been trying to see reflections in the wine, but it is nearly useless. ”
“Mirror?” said Isabeau. “Is that your means of divination?”
He spread his hands self-deprecatingly. “It is. I am a captromancer.”
Isabeau said, “There was a barrel in the street of Nantes that wouldn’t stop running salt water. No matter what anyone did. People were frightened. Was that the sign of the korrigan-king?”
“Perhaps,” Moreau said grimly. “I hope not. God, I hoped with all my heart that I had been wrong with that message. I’d as lief be a madman as to bring danger upon you or your noble sister.”
Isabeau whispered, “I won’t let any korrigan-king take away my sister.”
Moreau bowed and said, “Brave-hearted lady, I only wish I could help you.”
Isabeau took two eager steps forward and put out her hands. “Maybe you can. Have you remembered anything? Of the Lost Lands?”
He frowned as though in an effort of memory.
“No. But—Demoiselle—if you could persuade your sister to give me a mirror? A proper one. I should—I think I should be able to remember more, to do more. Even to help. I understand why I am kept under lock and key. I should do the same, if positions were reversed. But I am not your enemy, and I was a great diviner once.”
Isabeau said, frowning, “Yes, for I need you to help me. I want to talk to the korrigan-king. I have an idea.”
Talk to the— Isabeau had lost her mind. Elesbed, hanging back in the doorway, stared at her in horror.
Moreau hid his reaction better. His gaze flicked from Isabeau to Elesbed, and then he said, haltingly, “I don’t remember the name or the face of any korrigan-king. I do not know if a korrigan can come into castles of worked stone. What would you say to this king?”
Isabeau had her hands clasped, her whole body taut with eagerness. “That I ought to marry him and not my sister. And for my marriage settlement I want him to use his enchantments to drive the French away, back across their borders, and never come to trouble us more.”
“Oh, no,” Elesbed whispered.
Moreau said, with swift urgency, “Demoiselle, you ought not say such things aloud.”
“I said it aloud because I mean it! My sister shouldn’t leave. The only thing I can do for Brittany is to help her stay here.”
Elesbed found herself listening rigidly to the room’s silence, as though a tall korrigan with clawed hands would step out of the fireplace and claim Isabeau as his bride.
Nothing stirred in the fireplace.
But something moved outside.
There was a hissing step on the stairs. A long, long sigh. A rattling exhale.
Isabeau paled, as though realizing that the consequences of her rashness might walk through the doorway in that very moment. But when the door swung creaking back, it was no korrigan at all. No man even. It was a woman, and she was dead.
She shouldn’t be here in daylight, Elesbed thought. The anaon belonged to the night.
She wore a sort of robe, with an underdress. A veil over her hair and a rope round her neck. The rope had dug into her gray skin. Her eyes started from her head; her lips were black. Her skin seemed lit with cold moonlight, though it was a midsummer day. Her mouth opened and closed.
“Who are you?” cried Isabeau. “Anaon, what happened to you?”
But the woman could not speak, because she had been strangled.
Of them all, only Moreau moved. He darted a hand out to his cup sitting on a coffer. He looked into it, his lips moving, his face white. Suddenly the lady was gone. Just like that. “God in Heaven,” he said fervently, sinking back in his chair.
Another, thought Elesbed. A third dead lady. They said there’d been one in the convent chapel, there was one in the duchess’s chamber. And now this one.
“I don’t understand,” said Isabeau. “Monsieur, did you send her away?”
He was looking down at his own hands in perplexity, touching his thumbs to his fingertips as though relearning how they worked.
“That was mere instinct. God, was there ever a more miserable state for man? Some torment of the korriganed, undoubtedly.” Shamefacedly he added to Isabeau, “Demoiselle, I have been using the wine in my cup as a poor mirror. I know it is not sanctioned.”
Isabeau whispered, “You banished that—that wicked ghost with wine in a cup?”
“I—think I did. The wine makes reflections, a little. If I had a proper mirror, I could do more. Perhaps remember more. God smite me, but I am sure I learned something in that place, though it is all forgot. Perhaps I myself learned enchantments, and I could help you and the duchess with my own hands. I do not know. I have no way to make trial of it. And the duchess is rightly cautious. But I beg you will not offer yourself to the korrigan-king.”
Isabeau only said, “If I find you a mirror, you will help us?”
The knuckles of his hands tangled white in his russet hair, and then he whispered, “Yes. With all my heart.”
“Swear on the Blessed Jesu that you will help us. And on your immortal soul.”
“I swear.”
“Then I will find you a mirror.”
His answer was a look of piercing gratitude. But as they left the room and climbed down the narrow stairs, Elesbed said, “I think we ought to tell the duchess.”
“If we tell her she might say no. She might learn I offered to be the korrigan-king’s bride and be angry. I don’t think we should tell her.”
“She would be right to be angry!”
“Maybe,” said Isabeau. “But you see, I have to save my sister, even if she doesn’t want my help.” Isabeau turned to face Elesbed in the concealing shadows at the base of the wall. The main chateau glimmered on the other side of the courtyard. “And you are not to tell anyone. I order it.”
Elesbed said, “Don’t you know what you’ve done? Invited him. All the stories say that’s what gives them power over you. He is a wicked bad creature, the king of the korriganed.”
“You don’t know that!” flared Isabeau. “And it doesn’t matter.
I’ll make that bargain, if he can keep my sister in Brittany.
It is what I am born for, what I must do because I have horses and pretty dresses and a castle.
Sacrifice. My sister told me. We are born for sacrifices.
My life is not mine, I will give it for my realm.
And the best thing I can do for Brittany is keep my sister here. ”
“You can’t make bargains with the korriganed!” Elesbed had been told at some point that servants didn’t shout, but she was too incensed to care. “They’ll twist your words, they’ll trick you. You know this. You know as many stories as I do.”
Isabeau just looked mulish.
Elesbed said, coaxingly, “Think of how sad the duchess would be if you disappeared.”
“She’d be all right,” said Isabeau stoutly. “She’d have Brittany. And Henri.” She had a trick of keeping her eyes stretched wide so her tears didn’t fall. “And maybe enchantments,” she added and sniffed. “Maybe we can save all the realm with enchantments.”