Chapter 24
Chapter
The haruspex, the head of the Diviners’ Guild, was summoned to the Guardhouse in Rennes, and Elesbed was allowed to stay in the room with Isabeau, half-hid in a corner.
Isabeau was embroidering a small yellow cat on a kerchief, and Elesbed was darning socks with determination, if only moderate skill.
“I will make you a present of this,” Isabeau had said to Elesbed, waving the kerchief.
“To remind you of your cat.” Butter had been left safely in Nantes with Hawiz.
Elesbed missed her cat and had never had a present in her life; she looked forward to her kerchief very eagerly.
The duchess was near the fire with the haruspex, asking him many questions about the nature of enchantments.
The haruspex, flattered by her interest, talked and talked.
Elesbed listened with rising impatience.
The haruspex told the duchess kindly that the noble lady’s questions lay in the realm of wonder-tales.
For example, that all cats could see sorcerous works and warn their households.
That the korriganed were afraid of iron and crucifixes.
That Merlin the Enchanter, long ago, could walk into one shadow and out of any other shadow in the world.
“But how?” Anne demanded urgently. “How is it done, to walk into one shadow and out of another?”
The haruspex looked displeased. “I memorized the passages of lore, naturally, when I was a boy. But I really don’t see—”
“What passages of lore? I will hear them,” said Anne, and sat back expectantly.
Elesbed, listening by the fire with Isabeau, thought it strange that a man would call the duchess “Highness” but look displeased when she gave him an order. The haruspex spread his hands in bewilderment, but after a sullen pause, began to recite:
“What place is not touched by the Lost Lands?
For those who can see it, the strange country is but a breath away.
And once a sorcerer sees the way into the Lost Lands, then he will wish to take the roads thereinto, and when he does, he may perhaps come out again into the world in a different place altogether.
And when this ability is mastered, it is what the ignorant call traveling by shadows.
“Longing and grief and memory and desire and even congruency might make the sorcerer a road, for the Lost Lands are only a map of the traveler’s soul. But beware. For the korriganed are malicious and men’s souls contain currents that even they know not and the Lost Lands obey no law of God.
“Many have never come back.”
He fell silent. The duchess sat still for a long moment. And then she rose and smiled, thanked the haruspex, and bade him farewell. But Elesbed saw her face when she turned away; her eyes were on Isabeau, sewing energetically, and she looked afraid.
Elesbed decided she would never sleep at all, ever again. She wasn’t going to let anyone hurt the duchess or Isabeau.
The day the French encircled the city of Rennes, Anne received a letter from Charles of France under a flag of truce.
Outside the walls, the French army began to emplace guns and sap trenches and raise pavilions for the officers.
Anne still had no word from Maximilien, nor from Louis; her walls were thinly manned, and her time was all but spent.
But the letter from Charles came in the late summer afternoon, and it surprised Anne greatly.
“It is not a demand for surrender,” she said, as she sat wearily and let Madeleine comb her hair.
She had spent the day in council, coaxing, commanding, reassuring.
Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “It is an invitation to a trial of arms. A tourney outside the city walls, on the Champs de Lys, under a safe-conduct from the king of France.”
“Will you agree to it?” Madeleine asked.
“Why have they offered? If France had word of Maximilien coming, they would make immediate trial of our defenses, not take time for play.” The comb caught on a snarl in her hair and she winced.
“It’s a mark of their confidence, maybe,” said Madeleine grimly, working loose the tangle.
But Anne didn’t think that Marguerite of France cared for such marks of confidence as that. What was their plan? She felt Maximilien’s absence as a panicked hollow deep inside.
Anne made Madeleine no answer, but a new voice answered from the doorway. “I fear their confidence is justified. Maximilien is not marching. At least, not anytime soon. I have his letter.”
Anne looked up and her breath caught.
His hair was matted, his face dusty, his eyes heavy-lidded with weariness and smoldering anger. Henri was behind him, ushering him through the door of the garderobe, looking pleased with himself. “See what I fished out of the moat!” he crowed. “Would there be any supper at all?”
“Orléans,” said Anne to Louis, trying to draw a full breath.
His eyes traced the line of her loosened hair.
She didn’t know what to say. He had come back.
Against hope, common sense, all expectation.
He had come back. “Of course it is you demanding supper, glutton,” she told her brother, trying to hide her confusion.
“Not the man who has ridden here these hundreds of leagues.”
“Perhaps we should feed him too,” said Henri magnanimously, clapping Louis on the back. “Orléans got through the French lines on foot and we brought him over the wall. Like landing a pike.”
“Charming. We shall add a pike to his standard in memory of the occasion,” said Anne, finding her tongue. “Put it with the hedgehogs, in quarterings. I think it would look well.”
“As you say,” drawled Louis. Something in his eyes had lightened.
“But I have not money to change all the standards, I assure you. Jeanne endowed a power of convents in the early days of our unprosperous marriage. Lately I pass my days galloping about God’s creation, trying to stir to action a man under enchantment. ”
At that, every eye in the room swiveled toward him. But he looked only at Anne. “Enchantment?” she said.
“Supper first, I beg; the leagues were long from Flanders. And,” he added darkly, “it is a tale that I hardly know how to tell.”
Anne was still searching for words. It was Isabeau who said soberly, “You should take off your cloak—it is very dusty. And then sit there, Monseigneur.” My sister has grown up, Anne thought.
“Demoiselle,” he returned, politely, and sat. Anne went to the ewer and poured wine into her own cup and brought it to him.
Isabeau said, still serious, “You saw my brother-in-law?”
“I saw him,” said Louis, leaning his elbows on his knees with a grimness that made Anne’s heart sink.
“Do you wish to read his letter before supper comes, Highness?” He drew it out, sealed with the Roman eagles, and handed it to Anne.
She held it, felt the soft grain of the paper, the brittle wafer of wax.
But she did not break the seal. “After supper, I think,” she said. She saw now how truly tired he was.
“Thank you, Highness,” he said. “I’ve not had a bite since daybreak.”
They ate, then took more wine. Louis drained his second cup more slowly.
He leaned back, looking more human now, with new color in his sun-glazed face.
“My lord of Austria is in Ghent,” he began.
“He will not leave, for he has been seeing the ghost of his dead and beloved wife in the corridors of the palace.”
Anne stood abruptly and went to the window. That was the reason for his absence? He had chosen his dead wife’s ghost over her? She could feel her family watching. She imagined the pity in their eyes. She had known that Maximilien loved Mary of Burgundy, but Anne was alive and Mary was not.
Louis was still speaking quietly.
“Yes—I kept watch with Maximilien one night, at his insistence. He waits up in his own chamber, with the fires burned low, and sometimes his lady walks past. When I saw her, she was”—a delicate hesitation—“dressed for bed and smiling. I have never seen such longing in a man’s face.
At other times she is in court-dress when she comes.
This dead lady does not speak, nor does she tarry, and she vanishes when he tries to touch her.
He is as a man lost. I tried to change his mind, but eventually he became angry and refused to receive me.
He has convinced himself that you will wait for him, Highness, that your difficulties are not so great. ”
Anne felt ill. After all her planning, it had come to this.
Louis went on, “I left my horse near Rennes, and came the rest of the way on foot to avoid the scouts. Avaugour and I had arranged a signal in case of need, and the men on the wall knew it and hauled me up.”
“Has Moreau done this?” demanded Isabeau. “Made the dead lady appear? Can he do that? He made a sea-drake appear.”
Cold to the heart, Anne answered, “I do not think the apparition of this dead lady can be an accident.”
No one spoke. A king enchanted was something out of a story, not, God in Heaven, a part of modern statecraft.
Finally, Anne cracked the seal on her husband’s letter and read it.
Henri shifted restlessly. “What does it say?”
She said, in a colorless voice, “My lord of Austria begs me be patient.”
“Patient!” muttered Henri.
The bells rang for Vespers, and they all startled at the lateness of the hour. “Isabeau, get you to bed,” said Anne with finality, putting the letter aside. “There’s no more to be done tonight.”
Slowly, the room emptied. Henri heaved himself to his feet in Madeleine’s wake, but his eyes slid sideways just briefly to Orléans, who was still staring into the fire. Then he stalked out as well.
Formally, even stiffly, Anne said to Louis, “If this is a trap, there is no reason for you to be caught in it. You’ve done all that friendship could do for me. If you leave tonight, I think a way out could be found; it is not a close siege.” Not yet, she didn’t add.
His eyes flicked to hers. “No reason at all?”
“No sensible reason,” Anne amended.