Moreau stood suddenly from his chair, though unsteadily. The wine fell from his hands; the cup rolled clattering and spread a long tongue of red across the stone floor. Anne’s guards tensed. He ignored the wine. His voice changed in timbre and also changed in language, became an archaic Breton with a strong, singing accent. Did theyspeak so, in the Lost Lands? He said, in the manner of a poet reciting, “There is a new king in the Lost Lands, and every day his power grows. This king is charged by prophecy to take a mortal wife. I am commanded to bring the suit of the korrigan-king to the duchess of Brittany and ask for her hand in marriage.”
At first the room did not react, save for the whispers that slid like cats about the chamber as the few who could understand the archaic phrases translated for their neighbors. She had understood him readily enough, but not all her court had learned Breton, the language of the common people. Anne could see when the translation reached Henri and De Rieux, for her brother went scarlet and her guardian’s mouth opened in paternal outrage.
She must say something.
With ready instinct, in a voice pitched to cut across the rising astonishment, she said, “Kings send accredited envoys and earnests of their intentions; how do I know you are not lying?”
Still in that archaic Breton, Moreau said, “The king will send three signs of power. And then he will come for the duchess, according to the custom of his people.” Moreau bowed his head, reverting to French. “I do not remember any more. Forgive me, Highness.”
This part also took a few moments to circulate, courtiers eagerly poking their Breton-speaking neighbors. Henri gripped the back of Anne’s chair.
Anne said to Moreau, “What are these three signs?”
Moreau replied, “Water, fire, and memory. But I don’t know what that means. I am sorry, Highness. I am—” He could say nothing else for he had begun to crumple like a cut flower, just as he had in Brocéliande, and her guard was obligated to catch him lest he crack his head, swooning on the wine-stained stone floor.
Chapter
11
Louis of Orléans would havedone anything to get himself out of Bourges. It had taken all his training, and all his will, not to kneel before Marguerite like a soft-minded fool and say,Yes, anything. I’ll do anythingwhen she made her offer. He suspected Marguerite had known regardless. Mind like a wolf-trap, that woman.
Orléans had tried everything he could think of to escape, or to get word to Charles, who might have thwarted his sister. But Marguerite had chosen her people well and they remained deaf to his stratagems. When Marguerite came to his tower to ask questions about Anne of Brittany, he’d been as close to despair as he’d ever been in his gilded, eventful life.
The tale was preposterous, though he’d kept his incredulity hidden.Unicorn-hunting?A captured lock of a unicorn’s mane? Unicorns were not unheard of, but on the rare occasions they were sighted, they were hunted and brought to bay and killed, not—whatever the duchess was supposed to have done.
Who had charge of her now? De Rieux? His cousin Dunois might have a voice at court. Or Comminges. That old satyr D’Albret had wanted to marry her once. Francis had agreed, but Francis was the most persuadable man Louis had ever known. D’Albret was a man of ripe years and repellent face, with eight legitimate children and fourillegitimate. Anne had threatened to bury herself in a convent and her father had relented. Louis grinned at the memory.
How old was the duchess now? It was years since Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier. He hardly remembered what she looked like. All his memories of those years were distorted by the stress of that time. The chroniclers were already calling it the Mad War: he and Francis trying to hold their seigneuries against the overwhelming fist of France, he and the council trying to hold Brittany together when its docile duke had already let it slip away.
How poor Francis had held to the idea of a free Brittany even as any hope of it faded. He’d spoken eloquently of gathering up all Armorica, as the Romans called the lands from the Loire to the sea, under his banner of black ermines. But Francis had been dragged into war, menaced by a vast neighbor under a flint-souled and clever king, and even as he dreamed, his banner was being trampled in defeat. There would be no free Brittany now.
Part of Orléans’s heart did whisper that he was about to betray everything he and Francis had ever fought for. But ideals became cold, abstract things when a man sat with them, day after day, behind four obstinate walls and a door that might never open.Let her marry France. There are worse things than to be queen.
Two days out from Nantes, Marguerite had a letter from one of her agents, a chandler by trade when he was not doing errands for the crown of France. He had frequent business at the castle of the dukes of Brittany, and his letter astonished her so much that she took the matter to Orléans.
Whatever the duke’s excesses before his capture, there was no sign of them now. On the road from Bourges, he was punctilious, organized, withdrawn. She’d no idea what money he’d scrounged or what kind of credit he was buying on, but his clothes had gotten steadily better as they rode, and when she summoned him that day after her prayers, he came to her like a very prince, in tooled leather and silkhose and a black doublet embroidered with clusters of lavender grapes. He made his bow and stood waiting.
Marguerite mistrusted his silence just as much as she disliked the excesses of his falchion-edged tongue. But she’d already had her secretary decipher the letter; she proffered it and said, “Read this.”
Louis skimmed quickly down the page and then laughed. “The best thing I shall hear today, I am sure. Your informant is to be congratulated.” This letter related an astonishing rumor from Nantes: that in Brocéliande, during her unicorn-hunt, the duchess had met a stranger who had sojourned in the Lost Lands and who had come away with no memory at all of this interesting place, except for a single message whose gist was that the king of the korriganed—whose name and style no man knew—meant to wed the duchess of Brittany. Louis said, still laughing heartily, “His Majesty of France has competition for your unicorn-hunter.”
She was impatient. “Yes, yes, very droll. But my informant is reliable. He would not invent a rumor.”
Louis was unmoved. “Someone whispered a tall tale into a credulous ear and so on.” He handed her the letter back with a bow. “What have you to do with pretty fictions?”
She shoved it into the fire. “Nonetheless I will have her betrothed and out of Nantes as soon as may be. One odd circumstance may perhaps be discounted, but the odd circumstances are proliferating, and I dislike it.”
“I have said I am your servant in this,” said Louis of Orléans.
“See that you are,” she answered.
But to herself, Marguerite thought,Proliferating?The odd circumstances were piling up like leaves around the duchess of Brittany. Unicorns and faerie-kings. Let the duchess live in Blois or Amboise before the wedding, safe in the rational seat of Marguerite’s very rational court. A pox on this wet, green, ghost-addled country.
As she and her escort drew near to Nantes, the first thing Marguerite saw was not the high wall of the city, nor the dazzling spires of the cathedral, nor was it the sunlight on the side of the new castle that Duke Francis had built. No, it was a collection of silk pavilions pitched in the water-meadow beside the rolling Loire, and among them a great hurry of people. In the midst of all this stood a tall beast on wheels, like a Trojan horse.
No, not a horse, but a unicorn, built upon a cart, with a large, ornate, throne-shaped saddle. Around the unicorn lay absurd gilded swags made of plaster, and a mess of silk streamers.
Louis was riding at her heel; she heard him say dryly, “Is there a feast-day we have neglected?”
