Chapter 34 #3
Anne wished briefly for Louis and his sword. But—no. She didn’t want a fight. She wanted these people with her.
She and the unicorn, both small, were concealed in the deepest shadow of a stone house, and Anne suspected that the uneasy unicorn had drawn a different place’s darkness around herself somehow, so they would go unseen.
“Come on,” she whispered to the frightened unicorn, and tried to give her a little of her own courage, her own certainty. A duchess was no duchess if she was alone. It was only many hands, clinging tight to the same rope and pulling, that made a court, that made a realm or a nation.
They went out, together, into the mob.
The nearest lady, with eyes glazed and blank, turned. Awareness came into her face, and she froze. Her stillness swept out like a vast wave into the craning crowd. Heads turned; the noise dropped. Anne whispered, “We need to be higher.”
The slant of the unicorn’s ears was distinctly irritable now, her skin shivering under all the human eyes.
But she leaped, more like a cat than a horse, up to a sort of rolling platform in the middle of the nascent procession, strewn with dead flowers, which brightened under the unicorn’s hooves.
Did they know how long they had been here, playing out their festival night?
Anne was sweating under her gown, despite the wind off the sea. Someone called in harsh, archaic Breton, “Who are you, lady?”
Anne answered clearly, “I am come to ask your help.”
They all moved uneasily. They could not take their eyes off the unicorn.
Her sides were wire-taut; Anne sensed that if this went poorly, she would be thrown to the stone street, all her pretensions dashed to dust, and the unicorn would run clear back into the mortal world.
But for now, the unicorn was still trusting her.
“What help?” demanded another.
“This is not real,” said a voice. “She is anaon, some stray from the Lost Lands.”
“You are in the Lost Lands,” said Anne, and they muttered. “I have come to bring you back into the world, if you will help me.” Abruptly, she slid off the platform and walked straight into the crowd. “Am I a ghost?” she demanded, and put out her hand.
The speaker looked stubborn, half-drunk, exhausted, and afraid. But a lady put out her hand and clasped Anne’s, still warm from the unicorn’s long mane. Anne saw the unicorn’s light reflected in all their staring eyes.
“God in Heaven,” whispered the speaker.
Anne said, raising her voice, “I must go to the citadel.”
Uneasy faces, terror. “Nay, do not go there,” called another voice. “Queen Ahèz’s guards will stop you. They have a short way with any discontent. Criminals’ heads are set upon spears and fastened to the seawall.”
Anne did not at once reply. To her surprise she felt the unicorn’s nose lightly on her shoulder.
The unicorn had braved the crowd to come to her.
The torchlight reddened her coat, shimmered along the pearls of Anne’s dress.
She used the edge of the platform to mount up again, with what grace she could muster.
The crowd’s murmurs grew louder. From her new vantage, Anne called to them, “What is impudent in a mere visit?”
“None are allowed. There is only the lady with her intimates. Some whisper that a korrigan came once, a royal korrigan of great beauty, and the queen fell in love with him. But he only cursed her and now none enter or leave.”
“It is a poor and fearful queen,” said Anne mildly, “to live so far from her own people.”
“She is not afraid!” cried another voice. “She has her knights; she has her sorcerers.”
“A sovereign who lives behind locked gates is afraid. And perhaps she is right. Her guards and sorcerers cannot take every head in the city and set it upon a spear. Are the people of Keris to be crushed flat under the fist of a tyrant?”
“She is a sorceress,” said another voice. “The greatest ever born. Her mother was a korrigan. The queen will do what she likes. She has always done what she likes, and her good father did not see the evil.”
Anne leaned forward, tangled her fingers in the unicorn’s mane, made her voice carry.
“I do not think a queen should please herself at the expense of her people. Do you know that you are caught here with her, night after night, in an enchantment that won’t let you go?
Do you know how long you’ve been in the Lost Lands? ”
Did they know? Anne thought they did, with the haziness of a dreamer who has just realized he is dreaming.
Another voice said, breaking, “We are damned.”
“No one is beyond salvation,” said Anne.
“Who are you, lady?” called several voices.
She stared steadily back at them, past the torchlight shivering on the unicorn’s horn. “I am called Anne of Brittany. And I tell you now that you have been in the Lost Lands for a thousand years, every night the same. But if you help me, we can bring the dawn.”
“Help you how?” said someone.
She said, “We must go together to the palace and demand it of your sorceress-queen. Will you go with me, and not be afraid?”
Noise burst out from the crowd then, a great, growling murmur. Someone shouted, “We are afraid! There are guards. There are enchantments. She is queen of the whole world!”
Anne shouted back, “Only because she has made your world small! Bounded it to the space of a single night, and cut you all out of the living world. But the brave do not tolerate bondage forever. And it is the work of a whole nation to save itself.”
They shouted, a cresting wall of noise. The unicorn reared up in surprise, torchlight caught in her flying mane. Anne moved with her, unafraid now, and her voice cut through theirs. “Will you come with me?”
Their affirmation shook the city. The whole city began to rouse like a dragon coming out of the sea.
More and more people packed the street as word carried, and some of them had weapons, and some rode very beautiful horses.
“They will follow us now,” said Anne to the unicorn, with a ferocity that had nothing to do with that night and everything to do with her entire life.
“This is why I am no good to anyone as a paragon of self-sacrifice!”
The unicorn slanted a listening ear, then turned at Anne’s touch, taking the rising street to the citadel and palace above.
And the city came with them. More and more people massed in the street at her back, riders and walkers pressed together. The streets were paved with slabs of marble, scored for grip, rosy under all the torches.
But the way was not unguarded.
The unicorn was the first to realize; she stopped and threw up her head.
Anne saw it too, barely; a cold light leaping through the nighttime heavens, and then lightning cracked the street before them, a piece of a distant storm, flung to earth by sorcery.
People cried out. Someone screamed, “That is her sorcerers’ doing; they will kill us! ”
Anne saw the wrongness in the edge of the clouds, saw, briefly, the night they’d come from, the whole sea luminous with lightning, the unicorn’s horn glowing with it.
Then she dragged in a harsh breath, and shoved the storm back.
The unicorn’s presence seemed to ease the spike of agony in her head. She rode on.
The next trap was worse; a torrent of stones tumbling toward them, bathed in surreal daylight.
Anne called to the unicorn and they plunged together into that light, put the stones back in their own day, falling down a long-gone cliff. Again, the street lay empty before them. Her head hurt less that time. She thought the unicorn’s living mane, washing over her hands, was helping somehow.
The noise of the crowd at her back was the noise of ten thousand storms; they had seen what she had done.
She called, “Let bells be rung. The night is ending.”
A light came to their faces. All the bells in Keris began to ring.
One man, swept along with his fellows, bleated at her, “What are you doing? The queen will punish us!”
His comrades ignored him. Still they climbed.
White marble was an impractical footing for a city built in a rising spiral, but the unicorn’s cloven hooves were surer than a goat’s. Some people were singing as they went, keeping time by the cry of the bells.
The citadel and its palace crowned the rise of Keris like a great coronal, and finally, the gate of it loomed before them, glimmering white like the road.
Within stood the guard: great men on still greater horses, in armor of scarlet leather, and pteruges like the ancient Romans.
They watched, stony-faced, the approach of the shouting crowd.
Anne took a deep breath. This was a great gate, perhaps inviolable. They could storm it, but people would die.
Had the gates always been there?
She stared into the layers of light and shadow, and thought: No. Once the palace of Keris had been a welcoming place, open to the city, and the city open to the world.
So she reached for that light when it had shone on a great open archway, wrenching the past up against the present. And when she did, the gates disappeared.
She wavered at that, the pain coming back to her head.
But the knights standing guard had also swayed a frightened step back.
She called to the unicorn, who lowered her head and charged, while all the people cheered and poured in behind.
The unicorn shot forward like a falling star, running between the great horses, who shied away from her.
And then the whole city of Keris was spilling, wild, behind her into the palace courtyard, and grooms were running out, calling questions, joining with the people from the city, and they were surrounding the bewildered knights, who had drawn their swords but killed no one.
The unicorn wheeled and Anne felt that they stood together in a patch of sun, though it was deepest night, and the glow of her gown and the unicorn’s horn was reflected in the knights’ armor. One of them put aside his helm and she saw his face beneath: haggard, old, tired.