“My reports said there was no essential deformity.”
“No. Surely there are easier ways to learn all this than to visit my tower.”
She said, “The duchess is now of age, Charles is now king, and she must marry him.”
He raised his brows. “I expected as much. Why come to me?”
“Because the marriage must be accelerated and I fear obstruction.” She told him, in a few words, about the unicorn. “You know the Breton court. You know what pressure to apply. You know the duchess herself; perhaps she preserves a girlish fondness for you.”
Orléans did not dignify that with a reply. He merely waited. There was only one thing, short of torture, that would get her the help she wanted from him.
With her jaw clenched, she got out the words: “If you come with me to Nantes and see this unicorn-catching duchess wed withoutdelay to the king of France, I will let you go back to Orléans, under strong oaths of fealty. Otherwise, you may stay in Bourges until you rot.”
Louis’s face became quite expressionless, though his silence was its own answer. He was not a man meant for locked doors. He had qualities innumerable, but patience was not one of them.
“All right,” said Louis of Orléans, sitting very still. For once there was no mockery in his voice.
Chapter
9
When the duchess and allthose sparkling people rode into her ashy farmyard, Elesbed had thought they were angels and that she was being assumed into Heaven. That sounded pleasant. Certainly, there would be good things to eat in Heaven, and her belly was swollen from eating grass and birds’ eggs and the last scrapings of scorched grain from cracks in the floor of the ruined barn.
And then she learned that the small lady with laughing eyes was not an angel but a duchess. That was nearly as good, because Elesbed was given food just as good as might be had in Heaven—broth and bread—although Hawiz would not let her have very much, so she would not hurt her stomach.
Then she learned the duchess was going to Brocéliande. Elesbed hadnotwanted to go to Brocéliande. All children who lived in the forest’s shadow knew the tales of that place.
There is a terrible lady there who dwells by a pool in the wood, and she sings and laughs and plaits flowers in her hair and is very beautiful. But she lies in wait for travelers, and when she finds one, he is hopelessly enchanted and lost forever to his own kin.
There is a sorcerer-king of monstrous aspect who is called the king of Comorre, and he takes wives, wife after wife, and when his wife gets with child, he kills her, for there is a prophecy that says he will die by the hand of one of his own.
They say Merlin the Enchanter lies somewhere asleep in the depths of the Lost Lands, with the roots of trees tangled up in his beard.
Once there was a city, the greatest city in the world, our city, a Breton city, in the bay of Douarnenez, and some say it was drowned by wickedness. But some say it was merely taken away, behind the veil, behind the rain, to the Lost Lands, and there it remains.
Beware the Lost Lands, my child. You will know they are near because lost things will start to come back, washed up from the shores of that far country. No—the return of lost things is not so nice as it sounds. What of folk who have died? When we see them, we call them anaon, the unquiet dead. What if you meet yourself on a crossroads on a dark night? That is called the fetch, and it is a harbinger of death that drives men mad.
It all comes from the Lost Lands.
For Elesbed, though, it had seemed better to go with the duchess—even to Brocéliande—than to starve to death in the ruins. And the convent had not been so terrible. It had given her back her doll. Still, Elesbed did not think much of this scheme ofhuntingin Brocéliande. It seemed to her that it gave the korriganed a fine chance to lure you in. But no one had asked her.
Later, Elesbed thought that they should have.
After the hunt, when the hunters came at dusk to the tall house where they all were to pass the night, the duchess was not riding her own horse anymore, but double with the big man, her brother, the rosiness all gone from her face. Even her lips were pale. Elesbed felt a hard jolt of terror that the kindly smiling duchess would die.
The child was forgotten, naturally, as the whole courtyard came to cluster round the duchess, and that was when Elesbed saw the stranger. He had ruddy hair and he’d been bound to the horse with a rope between his stirrups, his expression sick and lost. He didn’t speak when they took him off the horse, and his legs folded beneath him, right there in the mud of the courtyard. He was carried inside. He didn’t see her at all.
They brought the duchess indoors to a big chamber with a fire. Elesbed crept in quite unnoticed and hid behind the biggest tapestry.The chaos ebbed and it flowed, full of the incomprehensible French, but then finally Elesbed understood the words again, because the duchess and Hawiz had begun speaking Breton.
The duchess said, “I’d have taken a thousand more wettings for the sight of a unicorn.”
“If you don’t take a chill,” said Hawiz.
“How can I, with so many blankets and hot bricks?” The duchess sounded happy. Had she truly seen a unicorn? She added, “No one will wonder for a moment what I was doing in the forest. All they will remember is the unicorn.”
“I doubt the beast gave you a lock of its mane to make you great among men,” said Hawiz, and Elesbed didn’t understand what that meant.
The duchess said, “When our lands are secure, I will ask myself why. But until then, everything that comes is just a tool to survive with, my Hawiz.”
