Chapter 32
Chapter
The hall Anne returned to was not the one she had left, and at first she thought she’d made a terrible mistake. These walls were not red, but green as leaves, and the firelight made jewelry of the inlay on the floor.
Yet Louis and Henri stood there panting and bloodied and holding their stolen swords, surrounded by silent korriganed. There was more blood on the floor.
As Anne and Isabeau stepped out of the shadows behind them, Elesbed crawled out from beneath a table where she had taken refuge. “Butter!” she cried.
Anne was still holding the sword. To her surprise, the korriganed drew back, wordless, and left the way clear to Louis and Henri.
Watching them warily, she stepped forward.
Henri’s mouth pursed in a whistle as she proffered the sword to Louis, who took it up with a reverent hand.
It didn’t weigh very much, and the blade was a deep blue, with folds in the steel like the grain in wood, a plain crosspiece, leather grip, the pommel sculped in the shape of a sea-drake’s head.
A little of the tension bled from the room. Henri said, “I beg you will make this child Elesbed a countess at least, for she has the courage of ten knights, and a very clever cat.”
Anne was smiling. “Brother, I am glad to see you.”
Elesbed was already with Isabeau, saying, “And then the abbess asked what I should like and I said I wanted Butter and she came to help me—made us go through a door all made of metal. I could hardly see but I came out into a beautiful room and saw the baron in his armor. He had gone on a noble quest, but only in his mind, and all the people were korriganed. He didn’t see me until Butter jumped on him and I kicked him.
I said we had to save you and he followed me.
The big doors don’t work, they just lead to pretty places that aren’t real, but there are little doors all hidden too.
My cat knew just where to go because she’s the cleverest cat—do you think she’s a faerie-cat? ”
The watchful crowd of korriganed parted suddenly, interrupting this interesting monologue, to reveal a small old lady, dressed in beautiful, archaic clothes. “And that is the abbess,” Elesbed whispered triumphantly to Isabeau.
Anne made a reverence, cautiously. Isabeau elbowed Elesbed and they did the same. Louis and Henri bowed. Louis had no means to sheathe the blue sword, but he lowered its naked point.
“Majesty,” Anne said, and felt Louis stiffen beside her.
“Oh, no,” said the lady. “We have different titles than mortals, and those years are gone from me now anyway; they belong to the Lost Lands. I only took a hand because there seemed no other recourse to rid us of yon madman. He was growing more powerful with every change of the moon, with every murdered bride. The true king has not been seen since—oh, I don’t know. Since the sea-drakes disappeared.”
“King?” said Anne. “So there is a king of the korriganed after all? Not just Moreau the pretender?”
“Oh, yes, there is a true king,” said the lady.
“My nephew, I suppose you’d say, but his mother was a mari-morgan, a creature of the sea.
After Keris was lost, he went looking for the sea-drakes and has not returned.
In the meantime, here was that fool calling himself king, growing ever stronger, going mad, learning the secrets of this castle all the while, searching for a unicorn to guide him.
And then he burst into the mortal lands like the plague.
If he’d kept more of his sanity, you and we would have been in real danger. ”
Anne was watching this lady warily. “The danger felt real enough.” Her arm was still about Isabeau’s shoulders.
“And yet there you are, alive,” said the lady. “And that is a famous sword in your lover’s hand. Aren’t you pleased?”
Anne said nothing, though she felt her face color. She knew perfectly well that Henri was giving Louis a censorious look behind her back. She said, “What is the castle of Never-Was?”
“The royal seat,” said the lady airily. Anne blinked, and for an instant, in a different layer of light, she thought she saw the throne, made of stone and living trees.
Then it was gone. The lady’s eyes on her were sharp and knowing.
“Most mortals who come here never attain the throne room, but wander dreaming until they die. Some win past it. Some even drink in friendship with the korriganed. Will you dine with us, children?”
Anne said, “Did Julien Moreau find the throne room?”
“No,” said the lady. “Not the true one, though he thought he had. But his greatest desire was for power, and his sorcery was very great, and so he did not die. Above all things he wished to find lost Keris, but that he never could. When he asked the mere for a prophecy, the lady in the water said that only a woman he offered for in marriage would find the way. So he took women to wife and slew them when they could not do it, and each time his mind broke a little more, until all his paths in the Lost Lands led to the same room, where he had buried his dead.” The lady’s face was quite unmoved.
Anne said, “How can we be sure that you will not also drive us to madness if we drink together? All our stories of the korriganed are of tricks and cruel deceptions.”
There were smiles all round that ring of watching faeries, smiles full of teeth. But the lady said, “We do not deceive so much as live in a land whose nature is too far removed from the nature of men. I think your tales also note that we are unable to lie.”
Anne exchanged glances with Henri and Louis. She asked, “Will time pass in its accustomed way? We cannot feast for a hundred years. Or even one.”
“That, I think, is still in my power to promise,” said the lady.
So they sat down at a renewed banquet, though there was no dish or meat that any of the mortals recognized.
At the end of it, Isabeau and Elesbed fell asleep, leaning on each other.
Henri and Louis had cobbled together some common language with the korriganed and stood with their knights in the open center of the great hall, making fencing passes with their swords and sometimes laughing.
Anne looked the lady straight in the eye and said, “Where is the drowned city? Where, then, is Keris?”
The korrigan-queen looked profoundly unsurprised that Anne had asked. “In the Lost Lands, of course.”
“But can it be brought back to the mortal world, as other lost things have been?”
“Who is to say?” said the queen. “It is not like any other place. I do not know who first built it—some people long gone. There was only the city, standing empty, in the far reaches of the Lost Lands, where I found it in my wandering days. I pulled it into the living world, to be a gift for my daughter. But I am sure there was sorcery in its first making, and sorcerers numbered always among its citizens. Its queen was my child, Malgven, after she was married to Gralon Meur.” Anne heard pain in her voice.
“But Malgven bore her daughter and died of it, and that daughter, Ahèz, grew to love pleasure and cruelty, and to make no distinction between them. The city had become a place of horrors when my nephew bathed in the blood of a sea-drake and put forth his strength and took the city out of the bay and back into the Lost Lands. There it remains, forever, just as it was on the night it disappeared.”
“And if I wish to draw it into the world?” said Anne. “If Moreau’s prophecy was a true one, then I might be able.”
“Very possibly,” said the lady. “But if you embark upon that quest and you don’t succeed, you will die, or go mad, or return to your own world two hundred years hence. There are no half-measures.”
Anne considered her, the firelight in that pale hall adding a sparkle of youth to the lady’s old face. “Would you help me?”
“Why should I? Perhaps I think that Keris is better off lost to the world.”
Anne turned her cup a quarter-turn upon the stone table. “What happened to your granddaughter?”
The lady was silent a moment. “She is still there, so far as I know, still feasting, living in a night that will never end. We do not live by years as you know them in the far reaches of the Lost Lands.”
“And are all her people there too?”
The lady looked up, gave her a narrow look. “Presumably.”
“Then,” said Anne, “I wish to free them.”
“Why?”
For mercy? There was that, but it was not the only answer, and Anne, clever liar though she was, did not dare lie to this lady. She said, “Because it is my only chance now to chart my own destiny. And my father dreamed of ruling a land called Armorica, and perhaps sometimes I dream his dreams.”
The lady considered her thoughtfully. “An honest answer. Perfect in neither virtue nor vice. And perhaps the unicorn would help you. Not to give you mortal power, but because your gift can preserve the border between your own world and the Lost Lands.”
“If I am successful,” said Anne, “I will keep the border. And there will be peace between mortal men and the korriganed, if you wish it.”
“Yes, yes, it is all quite beautiful when there is harmony between us. But what will you do if my nephew comes to claim your sister’s hand?
She announced aloud that she meant to offer herself to the king of the korriganed, you know.
That is my nephew, if it is anyone. It is no small thing among the korriganed to announce that you will marry.
He will have a claim on her, always, unless he renounces it. ”
Anne stiffened in surprise. “A child’s foolishness.”
“Yes, now,” said the lady, unruffled. “But the words remain. And what will happen when the child becomes a woman?”
“Then that bridge will be crossed,” said Anne. “But not an instant before. I am not my father, to play games of power with the betrothals of children.”
“As you say,” said the lady. “As you say. Well, my nephew may speak for himself as well. And I will set you upon the path to Keris, if you mean to try to walk it. But it is a crooked, riddling path; you will very likely fail.”
“I will ask leave of my sister,” said Anne. “And if she consents, I will dare the path anyway. And if I go, I ask a further boon of you.”
“You are a saucy girl,” said the lady, amused. “Ask.”
“Take my family home for me, out of the Lost Lands.”
The lady laughed. “Am I a donkey? Why should I?”
“Because,” said Anne with an edge. “Allies come to each other’s aid. And it might—might—incline me to look upon your nephew’s suit with more favor, should he pursue it one day. Or is there no family-feeling among the korriganed?”
The lady laughed, but then the ancient craggy face softened. “My daughter was a saucy girl too,” she said.
When Isabeau and Elesbed woke from their drowsing, the hall was empty but for Anne and Louis and Henri and Butter, sitting quietly on cushions beside a great golden fire. Anne was leaning on Louis’s shoulder.
Isabeau shuddered as the whole night came flooding back. “Moreau is dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes, dearest,” said Anne. “Or as good as. He will not trouble you again.”
Isabeau looked tentative. “Are we going home, then?”
“That depends on you.”
Anne could feel Louis and Henri listening, for she had bidden them wait until the children woke before she told them where they might go next.
“We can all go home, tonight,” said Anne.
“Back to our castle in Nantes, and sleep in our own beds. But I do not know what will happen after. Possibly I will be considered a mere victim of all this wicked sorcery and then given to Charles of France. Perhaps Maximilien will fight a war for me, perhaps not. But at the end of it all, I shall go away to Vienna or to France and be married to one man or the other.”
Isabeau opened her mouth to protest, but Anne interrupted.
“No, it is true. Out there, in the mortal world, my only power is my choice of husband. It might be Charles, it might be Maximilien, but either way I am the realm, and my only choice is to whom I yield myself up, and the duchy with me.”
Elesbed listened, stroking Butter, as Anne went on.
“If we go back, you, Isabeau, will stay safe in Brittany with Henri as your guardian. Louis will have to flee far away, for he struck the king of France in the Guardhouse in Rennes.”
Anne could feel Louis’s shoulder rigid beside her. Isabeau had not reacted. Her eyes were fastened on Anne’s face. “Or?” said Isabeau. It was barely a breath. “Anne—now we know the world has enchantments, and I won’t believe it, that all we have is sacrifice. I won’t.”
“Yes,” said Anne. “There might be a path of power instead of sacrifice. But it is dangerous.”
Isabeau clasped her hands together but Anne sobered her with a look.
“If I dare this, then the lady of the korriganed will take you in secret to our castle Guérande by the sea. And there you will live quietly for a time, in secret, with Henri as your guardian. And meanwhile Louis and I”—she swallowed—“Louis and I will go deep into the Lost Lands, in search of the drowned city of Keris. If he and I can do what the sorcerer could not, and bring this city back—then I will be able to return to Brittany. But there is every chance that we will not succeed.”
A light had dawned in Isabeau’s face. “Yes, you must go,” she said at once. “And you will succeed.”
“Think of it a moment longer,” said Anne. “If I am not successful, you will never see me again.”
“That will happen anyway, if you marry Charles or Maximilien,” said Isabeau, fierce. “But I don’t think you will fail. You will win, and you will be queen. I always knew something like this had to happen.”
Anne turned to look a question at Louis.
“Do you need to ask?” he said to her, low. “I forfeited my life by striking the king of France; I think it is only the queen of Armorica who can spare me now. Besides”—he touched the blue sword—“blades like this must be earned.”
Henri said, “I too should like a hopeless quest in the Lost Lands.”
“I am sorry, brother,” said Anne. “You must safeguard Isabeau. And Elesbed, who saved your life.”
“Could I do anything else?” said Henri resignedly. “Even if that brat did so by kicking my shins.”
Elesbed squeaked with indignation.