Chapter 25 #2
Isabeau dropped the sword and Anne caught her, trembling.
They had to go back. Now, now. How had the shadows lain, how had the candlelight filled her bedchamber? There was an altar here in this red-walled chapel. Almost like— She remembered the swaying of the candlelight on her own altar in her private oratory in the Guardhouse.
Congruency, the haruspex had said.
As she thought it, memory became a road, from there to here; suddenly this altar was that altar.
Moreau had recovered, staggering to his feet. He was actually reaching for them when Anne pulled Isabeau forward, stepping into another candlelight.
They fell, alone again, to the ground in the oratory of the Guardhouse in Rennes. Anne could hardly get her breath. She clung to her sister, panting. “Isabeau, are you all right?”
“Can he follow us?” cried Isabeau. “Can he— Henri!” she cried, loud as she could yell, and next moment there were footsteps above taking the steps two at a time.
In a moment Henri and Louis and Anne’s guardsmen were all there shouting questions.
Let Moreau come; they’d chop his head off.
Anne could close her eyes for a moment at last. She could not stop shaking, and neither could Isabeau.
They retired to Anne’s chambers. She was covered in fear-sweat and could feel her wrist coming out in bruises where Moreau had gripped her. Louis saw the red marks, and his eyes went sharply to her face. He did not speak, but she could see that his composure cost him; his shoulders were rigid.
Isabeau told them what had happened, soberly. “I woke up somewhere else—”
Anne was fighting a headache, trying not to shake.
“Four anaon?” Henri sounded bewildered.
Anne roused herself a little. “I think he married these women and killed them. Like the king in the faerie-tale. He was looking for a wife to make him king of Keris, and they could not.”
“Maybe he is the reason for the faerie-tale,” said Isabeau.
Anne said nothing. Louis watched her, perfectly still.
“It is like the story,” added Isabeau. “The king of Comorre had four wives and one was strangled and one was drowned, one was burned and one died by a sword.”
Elesbed, seeing their stricken faces, got up and went away and came back hoisting a rug of rabbit fur that she could barely lift.
She draped it decisively over Anne’s shoulders.
Anne sank under the weight of it into her accustomed chair near the great hearth and smiled her thanks.
Isabeau came and sat on the wolfskin rug at her feet, and Anne pulled a fold of the rabbit around her.
“Elesbed, come get warm too,” said Isabeau.
They sat shoulder to shoulder. Louis and Henri were both standing, watchful as sentry-dogs. Madeleine had taken the other chair, her hands knotted together.
Anne found herself straining her eyes on the shadows, as though each could contain a watcher, an illusion, a cold snatching hand.
Maximilien was not coming, and all Rennes buzzed in anticipation of the French tourney, thinking it meant that there would be no war.
Anne felt danger on every side, and she didn’t know what to do.
Her only recourse that night had been a power she ill-understood and could hardly use.
She stroked her sister’s hair and bade herself stop shaking.
Isabeau said, “Was Moreau in the Lost Lands too long? Could he be mad, do you think? Or getting worse? He seemed more—sensible. Before. Today he had a wild look. I told him I would marry him if I must. But I told him that he had to save Brittany from France first, so that you could stay here. He didn’t answer.
Then you appeared.” A single tear ran unguarded from Isabeau’s wide-open eyes before she dashed it angrily away.
“Isabeau,” Anne said very quietly. “No one is marrying him. For God’s sake, we are haunted by the ghosts of his first four wives. He is fit for execution and nothing more.”
Biting her lip, Isabeau said, “But what are we going to do now? What if he comes back?”
Anne didn’t know. In the spring of that year, she had laid her plans so carefully.
A marriage, a victory. But that was before she learned that the world contained enchantment and sorcery and a madman wielding both.
A madman who called himself the king of the korriganed, a madman who wanted her, who would try again to have her.
And now? A low throb of pain still filled her temples.
She closed her eyes. Louis stood just behind her chair, and she wished he would speak.
Henri said, “But, sister, I still don’t understand how you found her.”
Anne said, “The haruspex told me of it, as though it were a wonder-tale. That the old sorcerers could travel by shadows. So I have done.” God knew what the consequences would be.
Then she thought, We left from this chamber, and came back to the oratory. We traveled in the living world, yet crossed no distance.
A wild idea filled her mind.
“Anne?” said Henri.
“It’s all right,” said Anne, her heart beginning to race. “Come, Isabeau, let us see if you can’t sleep a little more.”
Elesbed and Isabeau slept, and Anne left Henri and Madeleine to watch over them. Her brother and her maid-of-honor had stopped bothering to be discreet in their affection. Her head lay against his shoulder.
Louis waited for her just outside, his eyes tired.
“Did he hurt your wrist?” Louis asked her, before she could say anything. His eyes were hard.
“What— Oh.” She flushed. “Yes. But it’s not important.”
“Anne—”
“Not now. Do you understand what happened? I left one room and returned to another, passing through the Lost Lands.”
He rubbed his face. “Anne, it is not dawn yet. What are you thinking? Tell me plainly.”
“I am going to try again.”
Horrified alertness finally came to his face. “Try—to do what you did—again? Just disappear? Why? What if you never come back? What happens to your sister?”
“You will have to protect her. If she does not want to be duchess, Marguerite will let her abdicate, I am sure of it. She may be a private lady. But I will come back.”
She took up his hands. He looked from their locked fingers to her face.
“Anne, I don’t understand.”
“I am going to go and talk to Maximilien of Austria.” Somewhere in the liminal space of shadows she thought she sensed the unicorn, watching her, gleaming like a far, cold star.
Disapproving, Anne thought, though she didn’t know why.
I doubt the beast gave you a lock of its mane to make you great among men, Hawiz had said.
Anne shook away the memory. “I must persuade Maximilien myself. If he doesn’t come, I am lost.”
“But how can you possibly talk to him? Anne—” Louis didn’t seem to know whether to put her in chains or call a physician.
“Will you trust me?” she whispered, echoing his own plea back to him.
He was silent.
“Wait for me. Watch over Isabeau.”
He released her hands, reluctantly. There was a terrible fear in his face. “Shall I not come with you?”
She shook her head. “This is between myself and—my husband.”
At that his face closed; he nodded and stepped back.
What connection could Anne find in the Lost Lands that linked herself and Maximilien? There was no memory; she had never met him.
But they had both lost someone, and in the same manner. Her father had died in a fall, and so had his wife.
Anne squinted through the jumble of the world’s lost things, searching for a specific quality of remembered light. The particular gray haze of that incense-thick room where her father had lain dying.
Louis coughed. She realized that she could actually smell incense; the room was filling with pungent vapor and that deathly gray light. Anne’s heart was beating so fast she could hardly breathe. “Anne?” Louis whispered.
Had Maximilien watched over his dying wife in this same light? She did not think he would have forgotten it. She did not know if this would work. But she could think of no other means to reach for a victory in her defeat.
Before she could lose her nerve, Anne stepped into that haze.
Her own chamber vanished and she stood beside her dead father, lying slack, that incense-thick light crusted like paint on his face.
Almost it seemed his great bed lay alone in a wood, a piece of detritus foundered in the Lost Lands.
She pressed a hand to his face. “Father,” she whispered to the memory.
Then she imagined a beautiful woman, a dead queen, lying with that same pallor, in the same light.
She blinked, and the figure on the bed was a woman.
Her beauty lingered, though her face was sunken in death.
Someone moved on the far side of the bed.
Anne looked up from this lady’s face and saw Maximilien, staring fixedly down at her.
Anne knew him by his portrait; the thin nose and lips could not be mistaken.
But here? In the Lost Lands? Like a man in a faerie-tale, driven by longing out of the living world. Did he think he was dreaming?
All around him, cutting through the haze of incense, glowed a particular candlelight. Candles tall as trees, pillars of flame. The gray light of the Lost Lands was on Maximilien’s face but that other light—that other light…
Anne, breathing hard, eyes closed against the gathering pain in her head, stepped not toward her husband, but into the candlelight that wrapped him and anchored him, into the candlelight of the mortal world that lit the night in Ghent, where her husband kept vigil for the dead.
Polhaim wondered grimly how it would all end.
Maximilien was hardly sleeping, and his fleeting glimpses of Mary had only increased his obsession.
He had not obviously gone mad, was not distrait in ways that were obvious to his attentive court.
But the fine marks of sleeplessness had begun to lay themselves thickly around his mouth and beneath his overbright eyes.