Chapter 19
Chapter
Anne was not insensible for that ride, but afterward her memories came in vivid fragments and some were perhaps mere dreams. She remembered chill half-moon light—saw it over sea and stone and once over a great white tower, before she blinked herself back to the living night, with the proper light and shadow.
Then she drifted away again.
She felt rain on her face, a cool rising mist. She was on Louis’s saddlebow, wrapped in a cloak, her head knocking against his silk doublet, the collarbone hard beneath.
Once she saw Louis looking down at her. She was cold.
Her life was flowing steadily out of her, as though she’d opened some inward piece of herself doing whatever it was she’d done.
Her lungs forgot to inhale; her heartbeat wandered.
She said, “Don’t let anyone hurt Isabeau.
” The horse’s hoofbeats jarred her bones.
“I won’t,” he said. “But you’ll be there.”
She shook her head, tried to say something else, but her eyes had slid shut again.
There was only his voice talking to her, a slender thread, talking of nothing: hunts and jousts and wars, all the lordly, gilded excess.
But he gave her mind something to cling to, though it wanted to fall away into a long dark.
It had been gift and poison, she thought. That dragon’s blood.
When next she woke, they were in an unfamiliar courtyard that rang with shouts, horrified cries.
She had the vague impression of movement, fire, a bed, but she could not bring herself to care.
She missed Hawiz. Madeleine’s voice rose and fell, with a chorus of girls fluting answers, a single deep slow voice, startled, grim.
She could not hear Isabeau or Henri or Louis.
There was nothing for her to hold on to and she began to slip away.
Flinched as a physician cut her arm, felt the blood run, but it didn’t help.
Her heartbeat strayed even more, and every thud of it seemed to drive her further from herself.
“I don’t want to die,” she whispered, dreaming.
And then, to her surprise, she realized that her eyes were open, and she was alone.
Who left a dying duchess alone? She was almost indignant.
There should be a crowd packing her bedside, everyone making noise, priests swinging incense in great arcs. That was how her father had died.
No, she was not alone. A lady sat by her bed.
It was the abbess. Not the true abbess of Paimpont, the timid creature.
No, it was the false one, the small lady with the seamed face and disconcerting clear-water eyes.
She sat quiet, half-masked by gray shadows, wearing the horned headdress and long robe of a great lady from the last century.
Or the century before. Anne couldn’t recall.
The heavy silk rippled with the lady’s steady breathing.
The lady said coolly, “You will die here if you cannot get out. The unicorn cannot make its way into the houses of men.”
“What?” whispered Anne.
“The unicorn, girl. Why do you think she came to you in Brocéliande? Gave you a piece of herself, so she could find you again? For your pretty mortal virtues—no. They guard the boundary, do the unicorns, and they do not favor virtue, they favor people who can help them. She saw you and knew you, and I think she might save you from this folly of dragon’s blood. If you will only go outside.”
Anne’s mind could not parse this. “Who are you?” She wanted to sit up, tried to roll onto an elbow, found her limbs leaden and thick.
The lady did not move except for a stray breeze that stirred the gauze that veiled her henin.
What breeze, Anne wondered. Are we not behind walls?
The lady was very small indeed, with eyes large and deep-set and the crowds of her teeth very sharp when she smiled.
The light on her face was soft faded daylight.
She answered, “I? No one now. My daughter is dead, and my granddaughter lost to a great madness. My line is ended and I am old and feeble, dethroned and forgotten.” Her mouth did not lose its sly curve.
“Truly it is delightful to be forgotten. I read all the books that men have lost and cultivate all the flowers of the world. It is a fine thing, to be old. But—” A new resonance came into her voice.
“Sometimes, even now, I put my finger on the wheel. Go out to the unicorn, Anne of Brittany. And know that those who have the gift of sorcery are told to avoid the blood of dragons, for it gives them strength beyond their skill but then exacts a price.”
“You are not really here, are you, Madame?” Anne whispered. “And you are korrigan?”
“Yes.”
“Are you the queen?”
She gave no answer.
Anne tried to sit up. “Did your daughter marry the mortal king Gralon Meur? Did you once raise a city from the depths of the sea? Where is this city now?”
“This is what you ask? When you are dying?” The lady’s face had hardened, but not in anger. “My daughter loved, and it killed her. And as for the city—yes. Long ago. The world was different then.”
“Is Keris truly drowned?”
“Such questions. No. But it is lost. Now go outside. And do not be afraid. You will need your courage.” She paused. “And you should remember—the Lost Lands are a map of your own soul.”
Before Anne could speak again, the korrigan-queen got up, graceful as a deer despite her lined face. Then she stepped back, and back into the light of a different day, and was gone.
Then Anne blinked and her bedside was crowded—Henri and Louis and Isabeau and a confessor, and the incense.
The physician with his bloody fleam in his hand.
She suspected Elesbed was lurking in the shadows.
The sieur de Chateaubriant—Madeleine’s father—was there with the rest, wearing the slightly panicked expression of a man whose sovereign is about to die in his hall.
A chattering knot of girls were surely Madeleine’s five sisters, all of them agog at that night’s happenings.
Anne’s world wavered and split, seemed to catch into silver flames over and over. It felt like each breath must be the last. She wondered if her dream had spoken truth. About the dragon’s blood, the poison of it. The unicorn. “I have to go outside,” she said.
“You are not well, Highness,” said the priest. “You must confess your sins and put yourself well with God.”
“No,” said Anne, raising herself on one elbow. It took all her strength, and it hurt. “Well, yes—but first I must go outside.”
She tried to struggle upright but the pain in her head was going to split her in half, and she fell back, gasping. “Orléans,” she said. “Louis.”
Louis knew she was dying. He’d held men in battle, felt the life flow out of them, and knew the life was running out of her too. But then she caught at his sleeve—his—not her brother’s, not anyone else’s in that room. Her eyes were open, dark on his face. “Please,” she said. “Take me outside.”
Isabeau had crawled onto the bed and was holding tight to her sister, but she wasn’t crying. Her face was set. She looked far older than her age. “Take her outside, then!” she cried when no one moved. She rolled to her feet, fierce as a terrier. “That is what the duchess wants. Take her outside!”
Louis could see Chateaubriant’s lady already turning to give the orders—perhaps a litter—something comfortable, to do the duchess honor.
But he met Anne’s eyes and knew a small flame of hope.
Her eyes did not wander, in the way of the dying.
They clung to his face, determined. A litter would take time. “Now,” she said. “Orléans—please—now.”
For the third time in that endless day, Louis reached down, and—ignoring the volleying cries of remonstrance and anxiety—picked up the duchess of Brittany. He said, “I begin to feel like your Jonquil, packing you about.”
He said this near her ear, and he felt her smile, and then he also felt her labored breath as he carried her down the narrow stairs and through the receiving-rooms of Chateaubriant.
Together they went out into the clear moonset. The new day was merely a change on the dark horizon. An anxious crowd followed. Anne’s head fell back and he gathered her closer, carried her beneath a great rowan-tree, stopped, and knelt there.
Isabeau knelt beside him, and the others waited, bewildered, at a little distance.
Nothing happened. His heart, which had been beating fast with hope, sank once more. Perhaps she merely wished to feel the moonlight and the soil of Brittany, and she was going to die in his arms. “Anne,” he said. “Don’t go.”
But then Isabeau cried, “Look!”
Louis had seen renderings of unicorns, of course. Deer-headed, goat-footed, a lion’s tail, a curling mane. But a drawing could not capture this. A tapestry could not render it.
A stillness louder than cries of wonder fell over the group.
The unicorn walked as though in a summer’s day, with the light pouring through the horn, though there was only moonlight. Though it was dark, the white of her coat seemed to carry faint color, a trace of pink, lavender, green. An absent sun glowed on her skin.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the ferocious sieur de Chateaubriant, Madeleine’s father, reaching to take a bow from one of his men. But Henri said, “No,” in a voice like a whipcrack, and Chateaubriant hesitated, staring.
The unicorn threw up her head, the light rippling on the horn, and everyone held their breath. “Anne,” Louis said, mouth against the scented weight of her hair. “Anne, look up.”
Anne looked up. She smiled.
The unicorn took two soundless steps forward and lowered her horn to touch the duchess. Louis felt all his muscles go rigid; the horn was sharp as a sword, lingering near Anne’s throat and breast, his own eye. But the touch was light, and Anne reached up to curl her hand around it.
Then she jerked once in his arms, gasping, and the unicorn drew back.
A dark eye, sheened in silver, looked into his own.
He couldn’t breathe. The beast whirled and galloped, one flawless stride and then another, so that every heart sang with the movement, and then she was running into an impossible sunlight and gone altogether.
Anne stirred in his arms.
“Anne?” said Isabeau.
“I’m all right,” said Anne, her voice thick with emotion.
“Although I wish never to feel that again.” She carefully rose to her feet.
In her white chemise, she looked so very young.
But she smiled at the sieur de Chateaubriant, and death was gone from her eyes.
Nearly everyone there was crying. Mouths hung open.
“My lord, I fear I have inconvenienced you, coming upon you in such disarray. I must get to Rennes.”
No one answered. They all knelt, even Chateaubriant, and Louis saw her take in their homage like a touch, straightening her back.
She added, practically, as though trying to will them all back to earthly matters, “The French are coming after me and there is no time.” The confessor had his hand to his mouth.
“This moment, Highness,” Chateaubriant said at last.
The confessor said, “But you must hear Mass. You have been delivered by God.”
“I hope God will forgive me if I say my prayers when I reach Rennes.” Anne smiled at them all and there was a sunrise in Louis’s heart, his foolish romantic heart, because it was the imp’s smile, with dimples, that he’d thought he would never see again.