“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?”
“Sheis 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.
