Anne found herself asking Elesbed, just as she would have asked one of her maids-of-honor, “How can it follow us?”
Elesbed said, “The edge of the Lost Lands is like the edge of the sea, my gram said. It ebbs and flows. But I never knew what she meant. I’ve never seen the sea.”
Anne whispered, “What happens near this edge of the Lost Lands?”
“Well,” said Elesbed, “lost things reappear, like I told you.” She was looking at the embroidered kerchief. Her hands clenched. “And other things are lost forever.”
Chapter
10
Anne doubled the guard onthe stranger, and on her own doors. She bade de Rieux go and stir up the guard on the wall and bid them be wary.
After Isabeau had gone to bed, she also asked Elesbed, quietly, to join their household.
Elesbed said, “I do not know what that means.”
“Hawiz will teach you what it means. But you are a true-hearted girl and you know stories that we behind our walls have forgotten. I want you to help my sister.”
Elesbed did not immediately consent. It was the Breton in her, a people slow to recognize any authority outside their own.
Elesbed said, “Isabeau said you will leave Brittany, Highness. She was crying about it.”
“I know,” said Anne. “She will need people to help her and love her when I cannot.”
“Isabeau found that kerchief. The stories say that when the Lost Lands are near, it is children who disappear.”
Anne did not need a new thing to fear. “I hope you will watch over her.”
“I will,” said Elesbed, carefully. “Highness.” Her cat, lounging on the warm hearth, started to purr.
In the morning, Calyx waited upon Anne hard on the heels of morning Mass, pressing his way through the hamper of courtiers and councilors with a diviner’s privilege. He was glassy-eyed and listing sideways with wine, which meant something of note had happened. He bent near and spoke for her ears alone: “Highness, Marguerite of France is coming here to Nantes. I had the message in my colors. She will be here in a week.”
Anne had been duchess too long to show her instant disquiet, but her hands faltered a little on the work in her lap. Marguerite of France could be coming only because she had overridden La Trémoille’s desire to kill a unicorn, and the French marriage was still to be forced rapidly into motion. Was this a disaster? Maximilien wasn’t in Brittany yet. Marguerite had a reputation for implacable brilliance; how wassheto be deceived?
“Thank you for telling me,” she said to Calyx, who bowed and departed.
Anne straightened the thread in her lap, trying to arrange her thoughts. She’d taken up her distaff that morning, beginning the painstaking work of spinning the unicorn hair into embroidery-thread. As she worked, she calculated: Polhaim to arrive in Ghent with her marriage-contract around the same time Marguerite arrived in Nantes, Maximilien on the march soon after. He was an experienced campaigner; he would not delay.
But neither would Marguerite of France.
She stroked a finger over the silky hair. Thought,Perhaps I say this encounter with the unicorn has left me reluctant to wed, since then I fear I should never see the unicorn again. Perhaps I insist I have changed my mind and wish to take the king of France hunting, which will take much time.
Perhaps I make a fuss over my virtue.
Perhaps I can outface her yet…
An interruption came in the shape of the court physician, bowing and eager. “The stranger from Brocéliande is awake, Highness. Heawoke at dawn and took food and now he says he would like an audience with my sovereign lady. I told him that he was not to be so forward, but he—”
“Go back to him,” said Anne, interrupting, “and see that he is dressed. Bring him here if he is able.”
When the stranger appeared in Anne’s garderobe, he was upright and dressed in fresh clothes, though he still wore the look of a man who knew not which nightmare he wandered in. His long hair grazed his haggard face and strayed over his doublet.
Anne sat with her maids-of-honor, dressed in verdant green, with thick vining embroidery to conceal the places where the pearls had been cut off her sleeves to sell. She had put her distaff aside. She watched the stranger enter, escorted by priest and physician and by the suspicious Henri, looming large.
The stranger made an old-fashioned reverence and swayed as he straightened. Exhausted eyes, long-lashed and tipped at the corners, stood out in a glaze of faded freckles.
Anne offered him a chair, in view of his infirmity.
