Chapter 34 #4
She said, “Sir, whom do you serve?”
“The king who is gone,” whispered the knight. “My mistress the queen.” His eyes were fixed with wonder on the unicorn.
“Your king is gone,” said Anne, letting her voice carry.
“But I have seen him. He went into the Lost Lands in search of his beloved wife. And I found him there and he gave me this gown of pearls that was once worn by his queen. And he gave me also his ring, with the sigil of sea-drakes.” She tore the cord from her neck and held it up where the light seized it.
“And with that he gave me his blessing. For I said I wished to save his city, which has long been lost in the dark. It is a thousand years since Keris was seen in daylight where once it stood, in the bay of Douarnenez.”
Answering cries, anger, affirmation, spread through the crowd. One knight dropped his sword with a clatter. “We are dead!” someone screamed. “We are ghosts.”
“You may choose your own fate!” retorted Anne. “Do you wish to live in daylight again?”
The old knight whispered, “Can you do this thing, fair wanderer? It is not within the power of any sorcery I know.”
“It is within our power together,” said Anne, pitching her voice so they could hear her. She hoped with all her heart that she was right. “And perhaps the queen will be swayed to our cause. Will you open the door of this palace for us? No feast can last forever.”
Still the knight hesitated, weary honor warring with the fear on his face. “I swore my oath to the king, and to his daughter too, when she was crowned in his place. She ordered me to keep the door.”
“Has she kept her oaths to you?” Anne’s voice rang out over them all.
Slowly, the old knight dismounted. He went with a heavy step to the grand doors of the castle and hesitated. The unicorn put her head round a little, and her slanted ear asked a question.
“Will you carry me in?” Anne whispered.
The ear gave an irritable twitch, but the unicorn turned her head back to the door.
The knight threw these doors back and stood aside.
Was that a glimmer of dawn in the east? Perhaps it was merely a scrap of the city’s light, reflected off the open sea.
The old knight walked beside the unicorn. He said, “The queen will want to kill you. To put the smothering-mask on you. She is dangerous, lady.”
Anne did not reply. In truth, her heart was caught with wonder. She had never been so mad for tales as Isabeau, but she had still heard many stories of Keris. And yet the reality of that palace gave every legend the lie.
Never-Was had been built by the korriganed with no mortal logic.
The castle of the dukes of Brittany was made according to the rules of nature—practical, not wondrous.
But the palace at Keris had been wrought with the gifts of both men and korriganed, and so it partook of the best powers of both.
Soaring rooms led gracefully one to the next, and they housed glorious impossibilities.
One room was columned with trees. Another was carpeted with flowers.
A third was lit by a pure and sourceless dawn light.
The unicorn went through them all, though Anne could feel how tense she was, see by the daylit glow in her horn how near she was to fleeing altogether. The crowd ran and sobbed and sang in their wake. She had whipped them up with all her skill; she must control them now, if she could.
Then a door barred their way, a double door of great height, bound in gilded iron and studded with wrought bronze. It was unguarded. A smell of smoke and wine and food gone sour crept from beneath.
“Open it,” said Anne, trying not to let the knight see the tension that knotted her throat.
He threw open the two doors, and stepped aside.
Anne had thought the palace a thing of glory. But the other rooms were nothing compared to the great hall of Keris. The vaults of the ceiling were as irregular and as arresting as tree branches, and they glittered with pale lights. A beautiful chaos of stonework comprised the floor.
And yet it was sticky and stained, chipped in places, and a haze of unpleasant smoke veiled the pale lights. The bells outside still sounded, but muffled, as though the night might reassert itself, here in the heart of this ancient place.
A great crowd packed that room, dressed in sweat-stained robes of silk.
They looked like flowers beneath the stone trees.
When they saw the unicorn, they all stirred as one.
There was something wanton and pagan about the movement of all that fabric, the rhythm of their speech, already reasserting itself in hasty murmurs as they recovered from their surprise.
Anne’s eye was drawn half-instinctively to the object of the court’s furtive glances.
At a high table, on her feet, a young woman stared incredulously at her. She wore a fiery diamond circlet round her brow, jewels at her throat and ears, and furious eyes the color of molten gold.
Ahèz, this queen was called in legend. The lady of keys. Half-korrigan, half-mortal.
The legends spoke of carelessness, and voluptuous cruelty. They never said she was so young.
She looked Anne’s age, no more. Her silk robe was patterned like the foam of the sea where it lingers like lacework near the shore, and it cradled her young body, grazed her breasts, flattered her golden skin.
Her plaited hair was studded with flowers, and her lifted hand had thin, sharp-nailed fingers.
It was like staring into a fair and wanton mirror. Perhaps for Ahèz it was the same, for she stood still, taken aback. People were spilling into the hall behind her, but they all stopped, as though frozen in the queen’s gaze.
“Get out!” screamed the lady, and Anne watched the shifting light, braced for sorcery. None came. The girl’s eyes were fixed on the unicorn. “Have you come at last?” she whispered to the unicorn.
Anne slid off the unicorn’s back and bowed. “Majesty.”
In that archaic Breton, the queen said coldly, “Who are you?”
Anne said, “I have met your royal father.”
A stir went through the room.
“My father is lost,” said the lady, colder yet. “You are presumptuous.” But her hands clenched. Her gaze strayed again from Anne to the unicorn.
“Yes, he is lost. But I found him, if only for a little time,” said Anne. “He would tell you, his daughter, that no city should dwell in the dark forever.”
“It can if I want it to! I like it. There’s a feast every night, and a new person to love me.”
The folk in the room seemed barely to breathe.
The queen added, “My father abandoned me. He went to find Mother. He loved her best; he didn’t love me at all. He has no voice here. I shall kill anyone who speaks with his voice. I shall kill you.”
The hall filled with a stark noon light. Anne had only a breath to react, and only a quick smell of the sea to tell her what was coming. With a wrench of strength she didn’t know she had, she flung herself clumsily onto the unicorn just as the creature dodged sideways.
Then a sea-drake lay twisting on the floor, larger even than the one that had come to Nantes. It lunged, the unicorn caught the edge of its mouth with the tip of her horn, and it recoiled, open-mouthed.
Anne thought, No wonder the sea-drakes abandoned the realms of men, if they kept being dragged forth as the weapons of the mad.
The drake reared up and the unicorn reared in answer, shrilling, and Anne cried to her, “Help me! Can’t you see where it came from? The light on the water?”
The light flared and the sea-drake twisted into it. Anne saw its eye, flatly silver, the size of her two fists and knowing. She felt the cold blood from its mouth as it fell heavily on her cheek.
Then there was nothing but a floor awash in seawater, and Anne felt the heat of the blood already working in her, making her head swim.
She nudged the unicorn, who walked forward until she stood quite near the queen.
Ahèz was looking in disbelief at her own hands, still edged with the light of the day that had summoned the sea-drake. “That is not possible,” she said.
Anne said softly, “My father too left me. His horse killed him, but he had lost all his desire to live. I mourned him; I was angry at him. But it is not an excuse for cruelty.”
“Who are you to speak to me so?” Ahèz demanded. “Why do you have my father’s ring? Impostor! Usurper! Seize this woman and I will have her smothered.” In her eyes was a child’s fatal selfishness that becomes cruelty in men and women.
No one moved.
“Here is your father’s ring,” said Anne, and laid it on the table.
The queen cried, “Will no one kill this woman? Kill the unicorn and bring me the horn. I want them. She has disturbed my feast.”
Anne said, “Do you not wish for daylight, lady?”
“Why should I?” she spat back. “My father loved daylight, and I hate him.”
A different light filled the hall, a new enchantment, the furtive glimpse of another day in that same hall, Queen Malgven of the korrigan, great with child, and her husband, the crowned king Gralon Meur, their hands entwined.
Just a glimpse, two ghosts drawn forth by a lonely child burdened with power.
“They only wanted each other,” said Ahèz.
“I am waiting for my love. I will have my banquets and my dances until he comes. You can have nothing to say to it, vagabond.”
Anne asked warily, “Have you met your love, Majesty?”
“Of course I have! He came to one of my banquets; he told me that he would love me forever.” The bells were ringing louder, audible now through the walls.
Anne said, “He is not coming back.”
“He will!” retorted the girl. “Someone has to come back. Not Father, not Mother, but someone must come back! It’s not fair.”
“It is not fair to be a queen,” said Anne. “But you were born to make justice for others and expect none for yourself. This you have not done. All here will witness it. But you can remedy it now. Help me bring the city out into daylight.”
“I don’t want it,” said Ahèz, crossing her arms. “It is impossible. This night is well enough; I will stay here.”
Anne held the unicorn’s mane and looked into the complexity of lights and shadows, saw the infinity caught within. “Will you?” she whispered. “But your will is not that of your people.” To the crowded room she whispered, “Remember the dawn, and the living world.”
They remembered. They believed in her. They wanted the same thing, and in that moment she was the instrument of their will. With that thought like a blazon in her heart, Anne let her mind fill with the light of day and of the summer sea.
The unicorn’s neck was warm under her hand, there was the dragon’s blood upon her again, and somewhere, just a glimpse, she saw a man of terrible beauty, neither mortal nor korrigan, come unseen to that hall and watch her with cold eyes, the color of a sea-drake’s scales.
She did not think any sorcery could have done this thing. Certainly not hers, all untrained. But these people were wild for their own freedom.
With a strength she did not possess, Anne dragged Keris back to where it had begun, into the lands of men, upon the great bay of Douarnenez. She screamed as the pain of it tore through her, as the dawn light struck the high spire of its palace.
She fell from the unicorn’s back. But there were hands on her now, the strength of others holding her up, helping her stand. When she looked for the strange figure, he had disappeared.
Dawn shone redly through the high upper windows.
Anne felt the unicorn’s horn hot against her face, the agony of healing. She swayed on her feet, sweating and sick, her will bent on Ahèz once more. She said, “Come and be a queen in the light and not the shadows.”
Ahèz just looked at the hard faces of the people, the knights with their swords, the unicorn at Anne’s shoulder.
Her face crumpled suddenly. “Why did you do that? I was happy. The night was perfect.” Her face turned raw with hatred as she stared at the unicorn.
“I hunted over all the fields of the world and you never came to me. My father gave me the keys to the seawalls anyway, but I knew I was not the true queen, for I had never touched a unicorn. I hated my place all the more since it was not mine. I suppose it is yours, vagabond,” she said bitterly to Anne, “and you have come to take it.”
Anne said nothing.
The old knight said, “This lady has the ring and the unicorn’s blessing; Keris is rightly ruled by someone blessed by the creature who walks in two worlds.”
“It is mine!” Ahèz cried out. “I inherited it! My father gave it me.”
With a wild motion, she snatched up the golden mask that lay upon the table and threw herself at Anne. The knight’s sword hissed free, but he was too slow. It was the unicorn who moved quicker; the horn pierced Ahèz’s shoulder and she fell back with a spreading stain on her robe.
The unicorn was still. Gentleness in that dark eye, but no mercy.
“I am queen,” said Ahèz. She held the gold mask between her hands. The smothering-mask. “I am queen,” she said again, and put the mask to her face.
“No!” cried Anne. But the old knight said only, “It is just.”
Outside, the birds were calling. Anne fell suddenly to her knees.
She wondered if she was dying. But it was only weariness.
The blood and the sorcery had not killed her, for she had all the people of that city with her, making her will a conduit for theirs, holding her up.
The knight put out his arm and she struggled to her feet.
She met the unicorn’s eye.
And Anne, still dazed, put her hand on the horn, and whispered, “Thank you.”
The unicorn laid her ears back and ran. Like a deer or a mote of light she ran away into the darkness of the Lost Lands. Her hooves tapped on stone and then unseen moss. And then nothing at all.
Anne was alone with the churning crowd. “The queen is dead,” she said. “And the sun is rising. The long feast is over. Go to bed.”
They did not move. The knight said, “What is it you desire, lady?”
Anne said, “I desire that the people of Keris may live as men and not empty ghosts of the Lost Lands, which was never meant for the habitation of unwilling mortals.”
“And what else?”
“To be your queen,” said Anne quietly. “The unicorn came to me in the hunt, according to your custom.” She could almost feel her answer being passed along, out past the doors, past the wall, and down the packed and squinting streets, full of sunlight and exhausted people.
The silence held and held.
“Majesty,” said the old knight. And he knelt at her feet.