Chapter 27
Chapter
Wolfgang von Polhaim came to Rennes under a flag of truce; he bypassed the French siege, bearing his safe-conduct, and passed the great lists for the jousting set in the Champs de Lys, the green meadows before the city. The tournament would be held on the morrow.
The postern-gate was opened for him and a guide found to take him to the residence of the duchess of Brittany, where he was admitted without fanfare. Anne went to greet him herself, smiling.
“My lord is aboard ship, with a fair wind,” said Polhaim. “I came in person to bring you word.”
“I am glad to hear it, and glad to see you,” she said.
They took counsel: Polhaim and Anne and Louis and Henri and Madeleine and Dunois, who had defied all the French army to ride to her.
Isabeau was there too. Anne was proud of her sister, who sat in this council with perfect gravity, listening as Polhaim was told the tale of their days in Nantes, their flight to Rennes, the dark powers that Moreau had brought out of Brocéliande.
They did not speak of what Anne had begun to learn to do, though Polhaim could not have forgotten.
His face was troubled when he looked on her.
“Moreau must die,” said Anne in the end. “For my own and my sister’s sake. But to attempt it is dangerous.”
As though that would stop Louis or Henri. Even Polhaim said merely, “You are my liege now too, Highness, and this man is a danger to you.”
Their plan was laid, and refined, and when it was done, Anne thanked them and put her hands in theirs in turn. Henri said, with a brother’s privilege, “Go to bed, for God’s sake, Anne, unless you mean the French to take fright and run from your haggard face.”
“If I thought that that would suffice, I’d stay awake from Sunday to Sunday,” said Anne. She gave Polhaim a smile. “And beg my husband’s forgiveness afterward.”
The three men left.
But Madeleine woke her in the dark before dawn. “He wishes to see you,” she said.
Anne, half-awake, startled up and went into the antechamber, stopped after closing the bedchamber door softly behind her. “You came,” she said to Louis.
“As though I’d not crept into better-guarded houses in my time. Mercers, for example—they guard their daughters like fiends.” He was talking just to say something. Her hair tumbled and whispered against the embroidery of her robe. His eyes drank her in, asked a silent question.
She went to him, also silent, and his arms closed round her, hard, and he buried his face in the masses of her long hair. She leaned into his shoulder, as she had not been able to do while Polhaim was there, while they laid their plans, when the world must see her pure and strong.
He drew patterns on her spine with his fingers and did not speak.
The antechamber was almost entirely dark, except for the low-burning fire, and the very first hint of dawn at the window outside.
Her fear was trying to turn, molten and inconvenient, to want.
Perhaps his was doing the same, for his breathing had changed.
But Polhaim had come to Rennes directly from Maximilien.
They could not, and indeed neither of them did, move at all, except for his hand straying over her back.
“Where does it end, Anne,” he murmured into her ear, “if you have learnt to do enchantment?”
It was not a question she was expecting.
But it was the question she’d asked herself every dark night since the night Isabeau disappeared.
“I don’t know. I hardly know what to do with it, and I’ve no one to ask.
I’m so afraid—” She swallowed. What a strange thing, to admit her fears; she couldn’t recall the last time.
His hand closed on the back of her neck, beneath her hair. He said, “I will not let anything happen to you.”
It was a promise he could not be sure of keeping. Even if this between them was love, the thing poets described, it could not stop armies or time or fate or the capricious will of God. And yet she let herself be comforted by it.
Then the temptation became too great; she put her mouth on his, and his hand in her hair tightened, tilting her head so he could kiss her.
For a long heartbeat the world went away, and her skin, which cried out to be held, overrode her sense.
She clung to him, frantic for his hands, heard the answering sound low in his throat.
Then she remembered her husband’s emissary. Louis must have done the same, for he drew away. They looked at each other with the same thought. He swore softly.
Anne said, “Common sense is an unkind master.” This was almost certainly the last time she would see Louis in private.
He laughed darkly. But with fair composure, he said, “Henri and I shall watch over you and Isabeau today at the tourney. And that pretty baron will do the same. He is a true knight. This will soon be over.”
“Be careful,” she whispered.
“Do you think I can’t manage myself in this sea of vipers? We were whelped the same, you and I.”
That was true. But— “Don’t get killed, or locked up again.”
“When you become Holy Roman Empress, the queen of the world, you can spring me free forthwith.”
She managed a smile.
Then he kissed her and kissed her again, and for three breaths they really did abandon all sense. His tongue was in her mouth, his body hard against hers, her hands tangled in his hair.
But her common sense was still there, as inconvenient as ever.
She let go and took a step back. She thought that she’d remember him always like this, with his hair a mess and a flush over his cheekbones and his eyes on her.
He bowed, then pressed his lips to the palm of her hand.
“My lady,” he said. Then he slipped out the door and away.