“I doubt that.” But she remembered the abbess’s toothy smile, the haunted look of the ghost in the chapel. The cold, sourceless moonlight. Without thinking Anne said, “Would you rather come back with us to Nantes?”
“Nantes!” said the child instantly. “Hawiz told me a story of the castle as big as the sky where if I am good, I may have meat on feast-days.” And she added in a burst, “Maybe there are korriganed there and you don’t know it. My gram said some people can’t see what’s in front of their own faces.”
Anne said, dryly, “Very well, at least you may be trained as court jester. What is that you have there?” For all this time, the girl had held an indeterminate object tucked under her arm.
“It is mine,” said the girl defensively, clutching the thing tighter. It was a ratty doll. “She’s from home. But I lost her there, when the brigands fired the house.”
“Not so lost, since you carried her here,” Anne said.
“No, I did not carry her,” returned Elesbed. “I found her behind the honey-jar. It is because the Lost Lands are near. Lost things start to come back.”
They made sure, of course, that Elesbed had not stolen the doll. The child had stolen the honey, after all. But no children lived near; no one claimed the poor ragged thing.
“The Lost Lands?” Anne murmured to Hawiz, as she was helped into her hunting-dress.
“You ought not go farther into Brocéliande, lady.”
“It is too late,” said Anne. “But we will take all precautions.” She remembered her supper the night before, that moonlight. “Have the abbess summoned. I wish to question her.”
But the abbess, when she appeared, was not the same lady as the night before.
She had many fewer teeth and was quite timid, overwhelmed by her company. She said the Pax Vobiscum in a cracked, anxious voice and asked Anne what she desired.
Anne stared in astonishment. No one else seemed to notice anything amiss. “You are the Mother Superior of this convent?”
The abbess, unsure what had disturbed the duchess, answered in half-panicked affirmative. When Anne asked to greet the nuns—there were only ten or so—none of them was the lady she remembered either.
She did not dare mention it. Rumors of madness were just as fatal for a woman as whispers of the uncanny. She wanted only to get away. She was glad Isabeau was not there.
The Austrians had assembled already, dressed for a hard day of riding, checking girths and head-collars. The rain had given way to mist, a soft invisible sky. Polhaim’s butter-yellow hair was bright in the grayness. He had the documents attesting the marriage signed and sewn into the lining of his saddle. With the marriage confirmed, Maximilien would march across the border bearing Anne’s seal, securing garrisons as he came. Then he and she would be united and this anxiety at an end.
She smiled at Polhaim, where he stood by his horse’s chestnut head.“I shall never forget your kindness. You have ridden back and forth like a hero and a true friend.”
“It was my duty, Highness.”
Lower, she said, “I beg you will forgive me.”
He seemed surprised. But he did not pretend to misunderstand. “It is my own fault.”
“And I— Please do not fail me.”
He kissed her gloved fingertips. “I shall not fail you.”
Anne drew off her glove. “Give this to my husband. With all my hopes.”
He bit his lip. “I will.” He tucked it between his doublet and his shirt. Anne stepped back and lifted her hand. The Austrian party mounted. Anne did not speak again. But her eyes were perhaps more eloquent than she knew, because Polhaim said again, “I will not fail you.” He touched his heel sharply to the flank of his restive horse and shot away bright as a bird, cloak streaming in the morning mist, and all his escort followed.
Chapter
7
Guillaume de La Trémoille hadlain awake all night, heedless of the fleas, his heart thumping, picturing the noblest beast in Christendom being brought to bay, imagining himself staring into its eye while his spear thrust home and spilled the heart’s-blood onto the hungry faces of his waiting dogs.
But a unicorn was not a stag. It must be tempted, brought near, and then undone by the maiden. That was the part he did not quite understand, the part he did not know how to fit within the great ritual of the hunt.
When he went to the kennel at dawn, he found the huntsman already there, talking caressingly to his lymers in Breton, pushing back their great ears, while the hounds licked his hands or raised their big, broad-browed heads in the morning air. This huntsman had been voluble in his tale the night before—how he’d been out with his hound leashed, seeking game for his master, when he came into the thicket and saw a blaze of sun on white. How he’d thought it a leftover patch of snow, then a white stag, already a magnificent prize, and then he saw the horn. He described its length, the spiraling ivory chased with pink like my lady’s pearls, the fall of its mane, the build of its body, a little like a horse, a little like a deer. Fairer than any other beast, Monseigneur, the noblest game ever seen.
“And,” added the huntsman stoutly, as La Trémoille’s translator fought to keep up, “I do tell you that it lies up in the flowery meadows and not in thickets. Always near silvery pools that it cleans with its horn. My grandsire said so. He said that the unicorn will be the hardest to catch of any beast, for if not caught quick, it might retreat into the Lost Lands.”
