Chapter 17 #2
Moreau answered with sudden passion, looking her in the eye, “Is it unnatural that I would put my own realm of France before hers? What can I do to make you trust me? Here—shall I tell you the nature of enchantment?” He caught her hands in his; to her own surprise, she let him.
Gravely—and quite honestly, she thought—he whispered, “This knowledge is the fairest thing I have, and the only thing that is mine. But I will share it with you now. Will you hear me? Shall I tell you what I learned in the Lost Lands? And then will you trust me?”
She thought. “Tell me,” she said. “And to answer your other question, if you bring about the Breton marriage and carry these secrets of magic to France, I shall make you great among men.”
“Among men,” he said, with a strange smile. “That is all I have ever wanted these many years.”
“Did you escape?” Marguerite asked, unable to contain her curiosity. “Are they cruel, the korriganed?”
“They are as unlike men as chalk from cheese,” said Moreau. “Will you hear my secrets? I shall lay them like pearls at your feet.” His eyes burned wildly.
What had it cost him, this knowledge? She turned away, seated herself. Her heart was beating fast. “I will hear.”
He steepled his fingers, earnest as a scholar at viva voce. “Men nowadays know of only one sorcerous art. That is divination. But logic alone tells us that there must once have been others. For what is the ritual of transubstantiation during the Eucharist if not the relic of a lost power?”
Marguerite, intent, did not reply.
“In the Lost Lands, there are in fact three sorcerous arts.” His voice was not quite steady in his eagerness; he was like an alchemist with a pig of lead. “The first is divination. This is the art of learning by signs what the senses do not perceive. It is the simplest.”
She shifted on her chair, unable to take her eyes from his face.
“The second is enchantment. This is the ability to influence the senses of others—chiefly, but not always, sight—to show folk what they otherwise would not see.
“The third and greatest art is sorcery. And this art is not just to influence the senses, but to make manifest new things in the world. These two latter arts are drawn from the Lost Lands, which contain in their untracked vastness everything that mankind has ever lost. A clever sorcerer can reach into the Lost Lands and draw out anything he pleases. Sights—sounds—textures—things—men—beasts. It is said that the queen of the korriganed once found an empty city in the Lost Lands, and set it into the living world as a gift for her daughter.”
Marguerite’s head whirled with the possibilities. “That is—that is wondrous,” she said at last. “Can you prove it?”
Moreau smiled. “Observe, Madame.”
The light of the fire glimmered in the dark depths of the mirror in his hand. His eyes were soft with sudden pleasure, as though his truest and purest heart was given only to this skill he had yielded up his whole life to master. “Look,” he breathed.
Marguerite followed his gaze, and her throat closed.
The far corner of the room had been empty.
But now a girl knelt there, crying. She was heavily pregnant.
Her clothes were rich and archaic—a robe and henin such as Marguerite’s grandmother might have worn.
Her clothes and hair and headdress were sopping wet.
She wrapped her arms around herself and sobbed.
Marguerite looked wildly at Moreau.
“She’s not real.” He sounded amused. “She is enchantment. You might call her a memory. The Bretons call them anaon. Sometimes they stray out of the Lost Lands. But an enchanter can call them forth.”
Marguerite bade her heart still its wild beating. “Could you summon a crowd?”
“An army, Madame, to deceive your enemies,” said Moreau. “Or a fleet upon the sea.”
Visions of power bounded before Marguerite’s eyes. She who had been Regent of France, but was now merely a great lady, a wife, and a woman.
The girl screamed soundlessly.
She said, “If—if the Lost Lands contain—contain infinity, as you say, how do you find what you wish to conjure?”
A strange flicker in Moreau’s eyes. “One finds connections. Some lie in memory, in emotion, in congruency. It is different for everyone, the korriganed say, what an individual may conjure, what ways a mind interacts with the Lost Lands.” A flicker of anger in his voice, as though that did not please him.
The girl he had conjured had crumpled to the floor, curling around her belly.
She looked the same age as Anne. Would Anne be weeping so one day, in some solitary chamber at Amboise?
As though I’d feel pity for her. She is going to be queen of France.
Moreau’s fingers fell on her arm, and only then did Marguerite realize that she’d stepped toward this sobbing girl. Her heart would not be quiet.
“You can’t touch her,” said Julien sharply.
“Or you can, but she will not know it. She is in the shadows, beneath a different light, can’t you see?
” And now Marguerite saw the reason for the brightness in the girl’s hair.
It was as though she knelt there in a shaft of sunlight. But the sky outside was thickly white.
“The sorcerer can go further than the enchanter,” whispered Julien into her ear. She could have sworn she felt his mouth there, grazing the edge of her ear, but she could not take her eyes from the ghost. “From seeming he can move to being.”
He left her, walked across the room to a coffer that stood in the corner beside the weeping girl. A coffer that had not been there.
With a flick of long fingers, Moreau opened the coffer and withdrew a brooch of fine enamel, poppy red, with a device of a scarlet flower above a pair of letters interlocked, done in diamonds.
He drew it forth and crossed the room with it and knelt before her like a supplicant and laid it in her trembling hand. It was cool and heavy and real.
Moreau closed her flinching fingers around it and held them there, looking up into her face. It was as though he was looking into a fire that was not in the room; his face was golden and strange.
The girl, whose back had been to them all that while, raised her head and turned.
For a moment, it seemed that her face was blue, her mouth black, her eyes dead, water streaming down her face.
Then she and the coffer evanesced like the dew at dawn, and Marguerite told herself it was a trick of the light.
Marguerite stared down at Moreau. He got to his feet and his hand came up to cup her cheek and she let it. His thumb pressed into the pulse there and she wanted this power. He was beautiful.
His one reaching hand traced her collarbone, then he pried her gripping fingers open and their eyes tangled over the jeweled thing.
He said, “When I heard you speak on that wall-top, your voice was the first thing in two hundred years that reminded me of home. I will be yours, and France’s, if you will heed my counsel. ”
Marguerite didn’t move. Her father had cobbled together great pieces of bloodily acquired earth and then knitted them up strong with roads and sensible governments.
Had doubled, or nearly, the kingdom of France.
And now? What greater thing could his daughter do?
If she had as her ally these arts that men had long since forgot?
She couldn’t take her eyes off the jeweled brooch between them. “Will this disappear?”
“Perhaps,” he said, looking into her face. “There is no saying when. Things drawn from the Lost Lands do not always remain found. But I can draw forth more.”
His mirror lay suddenly in his palm and he frowned, letting go her hand. He breathed a word half to himself and stared into the glass. “Ah,” he said. “I must go. Madame, will you help me?”
“Help you how?”
“I beg that you in this hour go down to the courtyard.”
“Why?” she said.
His smile was full of mischief. “To see the final sign, my lady, and to give me countenance if the Bretons doubt.” He kissed her hand, and then bit, very softly, the tender part of her wrist. They both heard her gasp and saw her fingers curl. He let her go.
“Moreau,” she said.
He turned back, courteously, though she could see now where his fingers tapped his thigh, in haste to be gone. “How do you come and go unseen?” she said.
He did not smile again, but his eyes brightened boyishly.
“It is like conjuring, but the other way around. One may make anaon of oneself, if you know the way of it. One steps into the Lost Lands and then steps back, in a different place, in the world of men. It is,” he added gently, “remarkably convenient.”
As though to prove his point, he stepped into a shadow and was simply—no longer there.
Shaken, Marguerite looked again at the jeweled thing in her hand. Her mind leaped with grand visions, but her body had fixed upon his hands, gripping that mirror, touching her face.
Anne went down the spiraling stairs and outside, following Isabeau and Henri, her court, her councilors.
“You could leave,” De Rieux told her apart as they walked. “You could leave this day. Surely this—this curse will not follow, whatever its origins. There is no telling what is to blame.”
“Where would I go, Jean?” Anne’s eyes were on Henri and Isabeau, walking just ahead of her.
De Rieux hesitated. “Anne—you know France would protect you. They would treasure you; they are the mightiest nation in Europe. This thing that haunts us is—uncanny, it’s evil—”
She stopped to stare at him. “France would not protect me for nothing,” she said at last. “They would give me to Charles. I am married already. I swore an oath. I promised my father.” Her voice cracked.
“Is even France not better than these dark enchantments?” De Rieux retorted, his face taut with fear for her.
Anne said, “We have seen nothing of this korrigan yet. Only pranks to frighten children. I am not giving up!”