“Only you and the birds.”
Anne was silent.
The abbess said, “You are riding with children?” The little girl had caught her eye. The child looked terrified.
The wind slipped cold fingers beneath Anne’s cloak. Wishing only to get indoors, she said, “An orphan. We happened upon her.”
“Ah,” said the old lady noncommittally. “Well, come in and get warm.”
But the little Breton girl would not come in when she was bidden; she sat on the horse, poised with her teeth bared, as though the abbey were a den of wolves and she expected to have to run at any moment. Anne sighed. “Elesbed”—for that was the name the child had told Peryn—“come down off the horse and take my lady’s hand.” She indicated her maid-of-honor Madeleine. “And we shall go inside. There is no supper in the forest.” She paused. “And no korriganed in this convent.”
Elesbed’s eyes narrowed, but she let Peryn lift her down, and under Anne’s minatory eye, she put a timid, dirty hand in Madeleine’s.
“Never fear,” the old abbess told her, and grinned unexpectedly. “While you sleep under my roof, the korriganed dance in the lightning; they don’t come in out of a wild night.”
“That girl is crawling with vermin,” Hawiz said when Anne and her maids-of-honor came to the convent’s guesthouse with Elesbed in tow and a great many people besides, bearing bags and coffers. Hawiz had raised three children in addition to nursing Anne and Isabeau. She steered Elesbed to a stool in a corner of that crowded room. “Sit you there, and if you do not move or touch anything, you will have supper and a bath.”
“What’s a bath?” inquired the child. With no korriganed in evidence, her confidence had risen. “Is it like a baptism?”
Hawiz looked grave, but Anne, warming her hands by the fire, laughed. “Something like. Such long faces,” she told her maids-of-honor. “Soon this will all be over.”
Hawiz, who knew Anne the best, laid her cheek silently against her hair before beginning to plait it up once more for the caul.
Anne was clean, presentable, and in the midst of haranguing Elesbed about how one must behave in a bath—she feared Hawiz would be bitten if she herself did not take a hand—when the door opened upon the ancient abbess herself, startling the room. “Well, Highness?” the lady said, comfortable with their astonishment. “Will you come and share my poor supper?”
The abbess had appalling manners, but Anne would need her cooperation if Polhaim ever came. “Mother, I shall,” she said readily. Anne hoped the repast was only metaphorically poor, a humble figure of speech. She was hungry.
Anne left the room in her usual cloud of attendants, but the way through the abbey was a winding one through many ill-lit rooms, and by the time she came to a door of oak with wooden hinges, her people had all fallen strangely behind. When the oaken door closed at Anne’s back, she and the abbess were abruptly alone, in a room festooned with herbs, hung with dried flowers, moonlight flowing steadily in from a leaded window.
There was no sound. Anne felt her skin begin to prickle. “Well?” she said, her voice sharpening.
The abbess said, “Highness, will you pretend you have come onlyto keep vigil in my chapel and hunt a unicorn at dawn?” The question came whipcrack-clear, as undimmed by age as her eyes.
Anne stared. “I have offered no harm to anyone in these walls, and I have made a gift to your coffers. My intentions are not your affair, Mother.”
“I have made them my affair,” said the abbess. She had her back to the moonlit window; Anne could not read her face.
Something wholly unnatural about this room, the silence behind the door, her own people’s absence. The moonlight, something about the moonlight. “Who are you?”
“I am mistress here and not you,” returned the lady, her shadow gnarled like a thorn-bush in the blue light. There was not even a candle lit in that room; the fire was only a little red heap in a cold grate. No supper at all.
People had been trying to intimidate Anne ever since she was a girl. Icily, she answered, “I am your sovereign.”
Narrowed eyes held hers despite the darkness. “I have heard tell of the duchess of Brittany. But these tales puzzle me. For folk say she is a giddy fool clinging to an unsteady throne. Yet they also speak of her with love, and you do not seem very giddy.”
“It depends on the hour,” said Anne, wondering if she should call out. But dignity forbade.
“They say you defied your guardian and your council and forced your own coronation when he would have waited out of caution, since you were so young and unmarried.”
That was true. She said nothing.
“I ask again why you are here.”
Anne said, “You have given me no reason to trust you.”
“Perhaps you will never walk out of this room if you do not!”
Anne said softly, “Do you threaten me?”
