Chapter 31
Chapter
The courage of the body—the courage of a tree-climbing child or a hunter coursing neck-or-nothing after a stag—had never been Anne’s.
Isabeau had always been bolder in that way.
When she was old enough, perhaps she would pursue the stag from the front of the galloping pack, heedless of danger, reveling in her speed and skill.
Anne preferred facing dangers that could be bested with the mind alone.
But some courage is born of wild necessity.
Anne took Louis’s hand and flung herself blindly into the memory of the strange light that had accompanied Julien Moreau.
In that moment, her choice was made. Let them depose her, let them do anything, so long as she could save the people she loved.
She pulled Louis with her, their hands clinging tight.
They took that single step, and the great hall was gone.
She was outside, elsewhere. Her eyes watered.
Another step and she tripped, hit the ground, and rolled.
Her masses of embroidered silk skirts kept her from hurting herself, but she was shaken.
She lay gasping, then thought, Moreau, Isabeau, where are they?
She scrambled to her feet.
The world was wholly silent, except for a wind like long, soft breathing. She’d torn her caul and her hair was coming loose, though she still wore the unicorn-hair fillet. Louis was there, searching her for injuries. She looked up at him. “Are you all right?”
“I think so,” he said, stepping back. “I do not know where you have brought us, though.”
She dragged off the ripped caul and let her hair fly, constrained only by the fillet. She turned in a circle, frowning. If she had followed Moreau, she could not see him now. “I know this place,” she said. “But not.”
They had come back to the convent at Paimpont. Or at least, the place where it had stood. The lake still lapped the shore, like quicksilver under a stormy sky. The rain pattered softly down, almost too light to feel on her face, except that she was getting steadily colder.
But where the convent had been stood a castle. A castle of fantastical shapes, fantastical dimensions, rising haphazardly against tree and sky and storm cloud. As though God’s idle hands could fling battlements and towers and buttresses down into a careless heap.
Before that castle stood a woman. Or a creature like a woman. Her face was full-lipped and sharp-chinned, eyes tawny as a beast’s.
She was watching them.
Anne felt Louis tense, staring back. There was still no sign of Isabeau. None of Moreau either. She’d leaped blindly, her heart full of terror, but she hadn’t followed her sister. Or had she? What waited for them in that strange heap of a castle?
“I think,” said Anne, licking her lips, “that—we must ask this lady.”
“That is no mortal lady; she was never of Eve’s getting,” said Louis. He didn’t stir a foot. “That is a korrigan.”
“Nevertheless,” said Anne.
They walked hesitantly across to where the korrigan waited. Louis had her walk a pace behind him, on the side of his shield-arm.
“Madame,” called Anne in cautious Breton, “whose dwelling is this?”
“Why,” said the lady in a high voice, “this is the castle of Never-Was. Here dwells the king of the Lost Lands.” Was there a very faint mockery in that strange voice?
Her eyes were full of night, darker than the day around them; the shadows of her did not quite suit the light.
Her yellow eyes flicked once and then lingered on the fillet in Anne’s hair. Something in her expression changed.
“Is this king a mortal man?” said Anne.
The yellow eyes dropped, found Anne’s face.
“Yes, that is His Majesty,” the lady said, and again there was that tone of irony. Her nails were sharp, and her eyeteeth were sharp, and her veiling hair was thick and coarse and beautiful. “He went to get a bride and has come home with a child.”
Anne said, cold to the heart, “The child is my sister and I must find her.”
“You may try,” said the lady—the korrigan—for so she must be. “But it is very hard to get anything you want in the castle of Never-Was. The king learned this, to his grief, and then forgot again.” She smiled secretly.
Anne said, “I will find her nonetheless.”
The lady laughed, coldly, and said, “As you wish.” She turned toward the door with a great ring of keys in one long, thin hand, the nails curling over her fingertips.
Anne saw then that a strange moon, brilliant with night, hung in that daytime sky, and rain fell upon the castle, though none upon her.
Her stomach knotted. The korrigan put her key in the postern.
Turned it. Then she flung the door open. There was nothing inside. A void.
Anne stood still, feeling Louis breathe beside her. Every instinct cried out against that threshold and the black maw beyond. Anne said to the lady, “Is there any more you can tell us, Madame, of this castle and its king?”
The lady was staring again at the unicorn-thread. But she said, “Nothing. Go in or go away; I merely keep the door.”
“But he is there?”
“Oh, yes. He is there.”
Anne persisted. “And the child? A girl of my height, with dark eyes?”
The lips were like petals, dimpled by skewering teeth. “Ah, yes,” the korrigan said airily. “His fifth bride, I think. If you hurry, you might even attend the feast.”
Oh, that was fear. Fear like wings beating at her brain. She must think. She must be careful. “Will you guide us to this feast?”
“I cannot,” said the korrigan. “For no two people take the same way through the castle of Never-Was.”
Anne and Louis exchanged looks. “Yes,” Louis said, answering her expression. “Of course we must at least try. Here, hold on to me, we shall not be separated.”
They stepped over the threshold. But it was no good. In the next instant his hand was gone from hers; she heard him call to her, heard herself answer, then there was silence. She was, abruptly, quite alone.
She stood in the raw ruin of a castle courtyard, time-rotted, a tree splitting the stones of it and doors on all sides, hanging drunkenly on broken hinges. Leaves lay thick underfoot, heaped in drifts and turning through the cold, sere air. The doors seemed to mock her.
“Orléans!” she called, but there was no answer.
Be still, she told herself. This was a castle built by the korriganed, a place of the Lost Lands that they had made for themselves. Its nature, its hierarchies, its courtesies were all strange to her. But Isabeau was here. Anne must think, and not panic.
Was it within her power to simply step through the shadows to where Isabeau was?
She tried to find it, the step from here to there. But a spike of agony flared, a vision of thorns hemmed her in.
Consider the doors. One was of wood and had been painted green, but the tint was peeling away.
Another was carved elaborately with lilacs and lilies, twined in wild profusion.
Another was carved in a frieze of unicorns with jeweled eyes being set upon by dogs, their heads flung back in terror. She shuddered.
Another was an austere thing of smoke-dark oak, with iron nails. And one looked as though it had been made from the bones of a beast, but it was gilded top to bottom.
Which door? She turned in a circle, thought: Perhaps it does not matter.
She suspected that it did. But she had no way of knowing. She wrenched the nearest sagging door back in a howl of hinges. It was the one with the unicorns. She passed through it and was shocked to find herself standing, not in the ruined hall she half-expected, but in a tumult of light and color.
She was in a great hall. At a banquet. A victory banquet, and to her shock everyone she knew was there seated. Orléans and Dunois, Comminges, Madeleine. Isabeau. And as soon as she stumbled into the room, they all roared in acclamation, and toasted her and called her blessed.
She stood there bewildered. Saw that daylight streamed through high windows, recognized that she was in the Guardhouse in Rennes. They were all congratulating her. The French were defeated. She was sovereign duchess, they said. Isabeau smiled at her.
“Isabeau?” Anne said.
“Do you great honor, sister, on this day of victory,” returned the child, and abruptly Anne stopped hurrying toward her. The small girl’s eyes were deeply yellow.
She turned. All their eyes were yellow, all their smiles showed the points of sharp teeth.
Never-Was, thought Anne. This never was.
She backed up a step, another, and fled across the room to a door in the far wall. She wrenched the door open and stumbled through, gasping. Louis was in the next room, and she stopped short upon seeing him.
Her first feeling was relief. “Orléans, I—” She couldn’t finish. He’d crossed the floor in three great strides, had taken her into his arms and put his mouth on hers. Then he pulled back and said, “My wife. My love.”
She stared. “But I am not.” There was a great bed behind him, his eyes were soft with love.
But his fingers were spindly as spider legs.
She gasped and pulled away. Louis—no, not Louis.
A korrigan stood there, smiling at her quizzically, and his eyes were lambent, yellow as a candle-flame; she could feel the draw of him, like quicksand, knew how easy it would be to imagine that he’d the eyes of a man. The eyes of a lover.
With shaken courtesy, she said, “Monsieur, where is the man whose face you are wearing?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the korrigan, after a pause.
He might have been surprised. “For there are no truths here; no real loves, no real victories, no real kings. But you may choose a dream, one that never was, and live that forever. For do not men number among their losses the things they never had? Will you choose me? I will make you happy.” He reached for her again.
His fingers were as long as a good dagger.
She stumbled back. “No! No, thank you.”