Chapter 23
Chapter
The French closed upon the city of Rennes as quickly as men could be induced to march, and with them rode the grand lady Marguerite of France. And also a stranger called Julien Moreau, whose sly, sorrowing eyes were often downcast, always deep in thought.
They hurried because France feared that Maximilien of Austria would have a fair wind to Saint-Malo and reach Rennes before them.
“Where is Maximilien now?” Marguerite demanded of her diviner, Volucris.
Her question was a little unreasonable, for no diviner could be accurate across the distances in question—anywhere on land or sea between the city of Ghent and the port of Saint-Malo.
But she was hungry for information, and Volucris could at least tell her whether Maximilien had sailed or still tarried ashore.
“I do not know, lady!” cried Volucris, with more emotion than ever he showed.
They had stopped that day’s march at the end of a long afternoon and he’d set out his sand tray in the sunny potager of a convent where they were to pass the night, setting his beetles to run on the hot sand.
For this was his method of divination, to read truths in the tracks of beetles.
He was pale, sweating, a sickly green. Marguerite was relentless.
Where was Maximilien? She expected and feared a trick.
All her spies brought were rumors, and none of them made any sense.
Volucris squinted at his beetles, a wheeze in his breath. “The beetles say only dark and cold and lost. Dark and cold and alone. All alone!” His voice pitched up shrill, bringing every head in the garden round. Moreau strolled into the potager and overheard. His brows rose.
“Red walls,” muttered Volucris. “Thorns…” The sweat dripped from his pallid face.
“No,” said Julien, in a strange voice, “you cannot—” just as Marguerite said, “What ails the beetles?” They had begun to run in wild circles.
“It’s the thorns,” Volucris said, his voice choked suddenly, his tongue sagging purple from his mouth. “Thorns thorns thorns…”
Moreau strode forward, so suddenly that the guards’ hands twitched for their weapons, and seized Volucris’s beetles.
He crushed them one-two-three in his hands, then swept clawing fingers to obliterate the marks in the sand.
Finally he shoved Volucris away. “Men cannot divine the korriganed,” he said coolly as Volucris fell back, panting, the sweat pouring sickly down his face.
“You go mad if you try. Or die.” Volucris had fallen to the sward, a terrible dull blue flush coming into his face.
“The korriganed?” said Marguerite. “I thought—” That they stayed in their own lands. That Moreau had used the seeming of them for his own ends, and the fact of them could be safely forgotten.
Moreau spoke lightly, wiping the carapaces of beetles from his gloves.
But she thought he was disturbed. “For example, when one attempts to divine anything connected to the korrigan-queen, the diviner sees only thorns. They say it is an enchantment she put on herself long ago. If Volucris has divined thorns, it means the queen has her hand on the king in Ghent now. God knows why.”
“Is this—this lady—this korrigan—is she aiding the duchess?” demanded Marguerite, a cold finger of fear down her back.
Moreau’s gesture was dismissive but his face was tense.
“Why should she do so? Men are as birds to the korriganed; they fly past and are gone. She’s old as the trees; she was the one who seduced the enchanter Merlin in the long-ago.
She has had many names and many lives.” Doubt crept into his voice.
“But I had not—thought she cared anything for the world anymore.”
Volucris was being led away. His eyes were unfocused. Moreau added, “Your diviner ought to go and drink wine and sleep. His mind is still on the thorns. That will run him mad in the end. Go and get him drunk.”
Marguerite nodded at the attendants and they vanished, half-carrying her diviner.
Somewhere in the quivering summer air, cooling now with the drawing-on of night, the bells summoned the nuns to Vespers.
The convent loomed above the garden, softly gray, as were so many things in Brittany.
Marguerite said, tensely, “Why would one of these—these creatures—a korrigan—why would it meddle?”
He shook his head. “I have no notion. Isn’t it exhilarating?”
“I do not like powers I don’t understand.”
The expressive eyes opened wide. Clearly he’d put his momentary unease aside. “Do you dislike me, then, lady?”
Despite herself, their gazes locked. His eyes were warm, questioning. Marguerite swallowed and said, “What if this—queen—is aiding the duchess?”
“She is not,” said Julien, his voice suddenly hard. “She is a cruel old bitch who despises her own kin, and she is ancient besides. And if she meddles, I will best her.”
“Will you? As you bested the duchess in Nantes? Find me Maximilien of Austria if you are such a master!” Any other man would have flinched at the whipcrack of her voice. She could feel her attendants eyeing her sidelong, but she cared naught for them.
Softly, he said, “Do you mean to frighten me? I have learnt crueler lessons at crueler courts than yours. Would you have me go mad too, divining what cannot be seen?”
She breathed, and breathed again. Her anger was unseemly. “I would not,” she said.
“Don’t be angry,” he murmured, coaxing now, stepping near enough to drop the words light as feathers into her ear. “We must be allies. You do not trust me yet because I failed to capture the duchess. How can your trust be earned? Surely you do not think me wholly a mountebank.”
She was exasperated. Her common sense had survived ten years of regency without yet faltering, and now he seemed to have overturned both the logic of her mind and the order of her world.
Her whole body had broken out in gooseflesh at his nearness.
“How can my trust be earned? Secure me the duchess, see her married to Charles. Only that will put an end to this farce.”
“I have said it shall be done.” Flaring anger now caught in the softness of his voice, but she could not bring herself to upbraid him to go.
She ground her teeth. “Will it? How?”
“As grandly as you could wish. I wish to astonish you, my fair queen.”
“I waited for you to astonish me once, and you failed.”
He bowed his head. “That is true. Very well, here is what I shall do: I shall call the knights of Brittany out to a tourney, and that same day the city of Rennes will fall.”
“We do not have time for games.”
He still had not moved away; his body was animal-warm through his doublet. “I swear you will have time for this. If I am indulged, then I will swear you my loyalty, lady—not to France, but to you. Only to you. Can that not count for something?”
She stood still, remembering fire in the night, living roses pulled from the air. No, he was not a mountebank. He was a power the world had forgotten, if only she could learn to wield it. “A tourney?” she said.
“A tourney.”
A day later, Marguerite’s brother the king of France met them on the road, riding with Guillaume de La Trémoille in colorful panoply, a grand escort prancing and sweating at their backs.
The king dismounted to greet his royal sister in the highest of good humor, the faint sun catching the diamond buttons beneath the turned-up brim of his hat.
A great strutting heap of knights pranced along behind him, prinked all over with jewels, the tufts of their velvet bristling like the ruffs of fighting-dogs.
“I see you have come ready to wed,” said Marguerite to her younger brother, smiling.
“I have come ready to hunt a unicorn before the wedding,” Charles returned, with gusto. “La Trémoille has said that the duchess of Brittany is sure to call a unicorn if she is brought again to Brocéliande. And we are sure to catch it and mount its horn in my hall.”
Marguerite wondered, sometimes, if she’d allowed her young brother too much license after their father died. She said, “Sire, the duchess is behind fortified walls in Rennes.”
“Very well. She must be fetched out.”
Marguerite explained about Anne’s illicit marriage.
“But he has not had her maidenhead, has he?” Charles asked anxiously.
“He has never met her, Sire,” returned Marguerite between clenched teeth. “But that might soon change if we are not careful.”
“That’s all right,” said Charles, patting her arm lovingly. “You’ll contrive the rest, dear sister, as you always do. And I will have my unicorn-horn.”
At supper, when she had her brother to herself, she said, “It might not be so simple as you suppose, Sire.” They were eating in private; the houndsmen and the huntsmen having all, blessedly, decamped, and Charles was giving her half an ear, champing happily on stewed rabbit.
“The duchess is not a compliant girl, whatever her reputation. Quite the opposite. And if—when we take Rennes, there will be no time for unicorn-hunting, for the duchess must be married instantly. Every hour we wait is an hour where Maximilien of Austria, or some evil chance we have not foreseen, pulls her from our hands.”
“But I am the king,” said Charles patiently. “And I have a mind to get me the horn of a unicorn. I need her for that.”
“Yes, but the horn of a unicorn is not worth all Brittany, Sire.”
He looked puzzled. “No—no, of course not. But we shall have both.”
As his regent, she could have gainsaid him, but that power had gone from her. She was only his sister now, and had, perforce, to yield.
Something of her rage, her creeping sense of impotence, must have communicated itself to Moreau.
“Will you not trust me?” he asked her patiently, in her pavilion that night, murmuring into her ears.
“Call for this tourney. Your brother likes pageantry; he will agree. Lull them all into a false sense of security.”
“And you can do as you say? You swear it?”
He smiled against her mouth. “My Margot. I swear it.”