Chapter 17 #4
Anne’s knees gave way, her dress drenched in silver blood and the world wavering like water in her hazy vision, a wild mingling of daylight and starlight and winter shadows, as though all the days and nights of the world were happening at once and she had just been granted the eyes to see them.
She caught the astonished eyes of Julien Moreau, then realized she was falling.
Moreau made an abortive gesture, speaking to his guard, but Louis caught her.
Again. “I’m all right,” she said, breathing fast, eyes tight shut, trying to stand again, unable.
She could sense her court beginning to cluster, could hear Isabeau’s voice and her brother’s exclaiming.
She must stand, she must think. If only the world would stop spinning.
Louis was still holding her up; she was smearing him with the sea-drake’s blood.
She said, choking, “The world is not as I thought.” All creation was a writhing knot of light and shadow. She pressed her face to his shoulder to block it out, felt his hand cradle her head. His voice in her ear. “Anne?”
Was there some virtue of madness in the dragon’s blood? She scrambled to collect her thoughts, found her tongue running on without her, whispering, “In the lost city, they rode sea-drakes across all the oceans of the world.”
And then, perhaps mercifully, she fainted.
Marguerite of France was greatly disturbed.
Was this Moreau’s doing? The beast had come lunging out and flown at the duchess, a writhing knot of shining destruction.
But Anne spoke to it and it stopped. The duchess dragged the spear from its mouth, spoke again, and the beast slithered away into nothing.
She had fainted before she could say anything else.
Moreau was staring at the girl with a nakedly shocked expression, surrounded by guards who didn’t know whether he was a threat or not.
The sea-drake was on a different scale than conjuring a rotten picnic in the forest. Had he meant Anne to die?
Or had he betrayed Marguerite? Far from dying, the duchess had amazed all who saw her.
Ballads would be written about it, the girl banishing a dragon with only her voice.
Had Moreau meant for that to happen? To improve the duchess’s position?
No—Marguerite did not think he’d meant for that to happen. She did not think a man could feign such astonishment. What, then, had happened?
A sea-drake had appeared on dry land and answered the commands of the duchess of Brittany. The duchess had touched a unicorn. She was dangerous in ways that Marguerite didn’t understand.
But Anne was unconscious now, and there was no time to waste. Marguerite caught Jean de Rieux’s eye. He was standing over the duchess, who was limp in Orléans’s arms. De Rieux met Marguerite’s gaze. His face was absolutely colorless.
That was good enough.
She crooked a finger at her diviner, Volucris. “Come with me,” she said. “We have much to do this night.”
The duchess lay splashed with silver, unconscious in his arms. Beside her were her maids-of-honor, a few of her councilors, and De Rieux crying, “Highness, speak to me.”
Anne’s eyelids fluttered but she didn’t wake. She had both hands fisted in Louis’s doublet, getting silver on his clothes. “A litter!” De Rieux called, sounding panicked. “A priest!”
“Or I could carry her upstairs,” said Louis, keeping his voice to a tone of hard-held patience. “Where there are beds, physicians, and priests in plenty.”
“Carry her?” said De Rieux, as though he’d proposed carrying the duchess off for ravishing. That brat Isabeau darted up with Avaugour behind her. “Is she all right?”
Anne’s eyes fluttered open, as though her sister’s voice had reached her when theirs could not. She said, “I’m all right, Belle.”
Everyone was riveted, watching her. “Put me down,” Anne told Louis. He hesitated and then set her on her feet, steadied her when she swayed. She bit her lip and straightened her back. He let his arm drop, then caught her when she almost fell.
Anne looked ruefully down at her dress, at the silver on her hands. Her caul was torn, but the plaits, ruthlessly pinned, had not moved. One would have to be near to see how white her face was, how dilated her pupils.
Her maids-of-honor offered kerchiefs for the silver streaks of the sea-drake’s blood, but Anne shook her head at them.
Isabeau said, “That was him—that was him, the korrigan-king.”
Louis could feel Anne trembling.
De Rieux said, “Anne, what did you say to the beast?”
“To stop. In Keris they tamed the sea-drakes once. But I didn’t think it would heed me,” she whispered. “I wonder why it did?”
Everyone was staring, exclaiming, two physicians were circling; there was Hawiz with a cloak for her.
Anne did not seem to see them, and no one seemed to dare touch her but him, splashed and glowing as she was with dragon’s blood.
Her pupils had swallowed her eyes. Was it just shock giving her that unearthly, drunken look?
She kept looking around at the world as though stunned by it.
How many women would look as she did, not fouled and pathetic, but transcendent in splashed silver?
He shook his head to clear it. The blood had gotten on his skin; perhaps it was affecting him too.
Why were they still down here wasting time in talk?
Anne whispered, “I saw where the sea-serpent came from. It was noon, the water all silver.”
“Highness—Anne—are you all right?” De Rieux’s face filled with horror. “Anne—have you gone mad?”
“Anne?” echoed Isabeau.
Louis opened his mouth to say something stinging to De Rieux, who was not helping in the least, but Anne managed, “I am— My mind is all right. Merely stunned.” She seemed to banish the haziness from her voice by will alone. “I’m all right.” She still could not take her own weight.
“Stop trying to reassure everyone when you can hardly stand. Let me take you upstairs, for God’s sake,” he muttered.
She didn’t answer. But she closed her eyes again. He caught up all the warm, scented, silver-streaked weight of her and, ignoring both Henri and De Rieux, made for the door.
Her household was waiting anxiously in her garderobe, people she knew, people she must calm.
Anne tried, but she did not think she had succeeded.
The shadows would not settle. They caught at the corners of her eye: wrong direction, wrong color, wrong length.
It was hard to know where she was. She thought she was a child with a fever, her mother’s face hovering over hers.
No. It was the old lady from the convent.
No. Winter daylight, summer storm-light, it all crowded up at once before her flinching eyes.
The shadows were hurting her head.
Moreau holding the mirror from Brocéliande. Had her guard gotten it back? De Rieux, talking to Marguerite of France. Had Maximilien marched from Flanders? A sea-drake in the garden, Moreau’s shocked expression. What had happened to Elesbed? What was this malice working in her castle?
Was he watching, this korrigan-king they’d only glimpsed? But his strange face had held nothing but amused and total indifference.
Moreau’s sad, golden eyes. I do not remember any more. Had he lied?
A cat was yowling. Anne wanted to rest, to let the haze drag her under, but the cat would not stop.
She opened her eyes. Little time could have gone by, for there were people clustered around her and everyone was talking.
The physician was there, trying to peer beneath her eyelids.
Isabeau was holding her hand. Orléans had disappeared.
The cat was sitting by the fire bolt upright. It was staring at her.
The light of the fire did not touch its fur.
It yowled again. A familiar cat. “Butter,” she said.
All the talking, arguing, anxious people pulled back when she spoke. “Anne?” said Isabeau gently. “Anne, what is it?” Her face was tear-stained; she was holding Anne’s arm as if she could break it.
“There is the cat,” said Anne. “That is Elesbed’s cat.”
The cat yowled again. The room turned to look.
“Yes,” said Isabeau anxiously. “Yes, that’s right. She’s Elesbed’s cat. She’s been in the kitchen.”
Anne didn’t answer. A strange darkness lay upon the cat.
She could see the layer—for want of a better word—of the world that contained it.
Anne peered into this darkness, sitting dazedly in her chair by the fire.
Her head throbbed. She could not make out much in that darkness.
A dusty floor, perhaps. Walls of dressed stone.
A place elsewhere. A place in the Lost Lands?
And a shadow. A small disheveled human shadow. It was creeping toward the cat. “Butter?” it whispered.
Butter yowled again, fiercely, never taking her eyes off Anne.
“Elesbed,” said Anne. In her hazy state, it did not seem impossible that she could speak into the dark and be answered. She heard a thin answering cry. Elesbed was in the dark.
“Elesbed, come here.” Anne put out a silver-splashed hand.
Butter stepped, purring, into the proper warm firelight and began to wash her face just as two small dirty hands reached back and caught Anne’s, and she pulled Elesbed tumbling into the room.
Another stab of pain went through Anne’s head as she pulled, and she twisted in her chair with the shock of it, gasping. For a moment, the child was gray with clinging darkness, and then the fire reasserted itself and lit them all with warm gold.
The room filled again with shouting and the noise went straight through her. What had she just done? What did her household think she’d done? She mustn’t swoon; she mustn’t.
Dimly she felt Hawiz’s hands on her shoulders, vaguely she heard Henri say, “Come on, Madeleine, help me get this damned hamper of people out; they aren’t doing her any good.”
The noise died away a little. Anne did not dare open her eyes for fear of the shadows hurting her head.
“What happened?” Isabeau was saying to Elesbed. “Where were you? How did you get back?”
“I was in another castle. A faerie-castle, in the Lost Lands,” said Elesbed. “Moreau put me there.”
“He did what?” Henri sounded dangerous.
Hawiz had moved away; Anne hoped it was to find a bite for the child.
And it was; now she could hear Elesbed chewing as she talked.
“I don’t know how. He is a man, not a korrigan.
But he lived in the Lost Lands and learned terrible things.
He knows how to step through the shadows, to go into the Lost Lands whenever he likes.
He put me away because I was going to tell the duchess about the mirror.
I am sorry,” she added to Isabeau. “I meant to break my oath.”
“Would you’d broken it sooner,” muttered Henri. “Of all Belle’s hare-brained notions.”
Moreau, Anne thought. They had forgot, because it had been so many years, that some powers went beyond divination, and that men as well as the korriganed once had them.
Perhaps he had merely conjured the korrigan in the garden, as a scapegoat for himself.
How deep did his lies go? Had he allied with France? He was born a Frenchman.
“Let him be arrested!” said Henri.
Isabeau whispered, sounding horrified, “He said he’d help us if I got his mirror for him. He promised.”
“Let him not be arrested,” said Anne. She did not open her eyes. “Send the guards to go and kill him. For I think he is more dangerous than we know.”
A silence fell. Anne forced her eyes open.
They had not responded to her orders. Orléans had come back and was standing in the doorway.
He met her gaze and said, “Jean de Rieux has turned. His guard are opening the gate. There is a French company outside. He has agreed to let Marguerite of France take you away by force, for fear of the power of the korrigan-king.”
De Rieux and Marguerite had a swift conversation in the garden. De Rieux looked very old and frail and exhausted. At last he said, “Yes. I will do it. But there is—there is another complication.”
“Tell me.”
“The duchess is married already,” said Jean de Rieux.
Of all the half-baked plots, Marguerite had not anticipated that one. “To whom is she married?” she asked, with deadly calm.
“She was married in Brocéliande before the unicorn-hunt, by proxy, to Maximilien of Austria.”
It took Marguerite a moment to absorb the scope of this revelation.
How did all of Europe’s diviners not know? But…of course. That unicorn-hunt, its details buried in the glamour of Moreau’s appearance and that pretty glowing skein of unicorn hairs. Anne had used the opportunity to get herself married in the one place where diviners could not see.
All Anne’s luminous-eyed chatter, the Triumphal Entry, the unicorn-hair fillet, had been distractions. The duchess was buying time while her husband marched to her aid.
Had Anne bought enough time? Perhaps she would have, save for that which was beyond her control: Moreau’s sorcery and De Rieux’s treachery. In a measured voice, Marguerite said, “Have the gate open. We will make ready to ride as soon as she is secured.”
“I think she is ill.”
“She will be looked after. Go!”
When De Rieux had gone, his steps wavering like an old man’s, Marguerite hurried up to her own chambers, firing off messages to her diviner as she walked.
But when she stepped into the room, Moreau was there before her, watched by her anxious servants.
The irons from the garden were gone from his hands, and he was unguarded and laughing.
“Was that your scheme?” she asked him without preamble. “That—monster in the garden? Well, you have raised the duchess’s reputation higher still with it and for what? Are her guards looking for you now?”
He swallowed his laughter, but he still glinted with it.
She wanted to bite his laughing mouth. “Does it matter? And no,” he allowed.
“It was only the anaon I summoned. That beast on two legs, with his long white hair. He gave up his patrimony long ago, they say, for his mother was a mari-morgan, and his soul is of the sea. I meant the duchess to think he was her unseen suitor; it would have taken her suspicions from me. I suspect that it was he who called the sea-drake, out of pique. I should have realized. Forgive me.”
“Only if you help me secure the duchess quietly and simply this night.”
“Oh,” he said, and smiled. “There will be no difficulty there, Madame.”