Isabeau said, “Why is the door unlocked?”
“I do not know. I heard my guards go. I went—I am ashamed to say that I went out, to see what was toward. I went out to the wall-top. But only to listen and breathe the free air. I returned to my room in haste so none should mistrust me. I have felt your mistrust these last days. I would have asked my mirror, but I have none.” He sounded sad about it. “I’ve been trying to see reflections in the wine, but it is nearly useless.”
“Mirror?” said Isabeau. “Is that your means of divination?”
He spread his hands self-deprecatingly. “It is. I am a captromancer.”
Isabeau said, “There was a barrel in the street of Nantes that wouldn’t stop running salt water. No matter what anyone did. People were frightened. Was that the sign of the korrigan-king?”
“Perhaps,” Moreau said grimly. “I hope not. God, I hoped with all my heart that I had been wrong with that message. I’d as lief be a madman as to bring danger upon you or your noble sister.”
Isabeau whispered, “I won’t let any korrigan-king take away my sister.”
Moreau bowed and said, “Brave-hearted lady, I only wish I could help you.”
Isabeau took two eager steps forward and put out her hands. “Maybe you can. Have you remembered anything? Of the Lost Lands?”
He frowned as though in an effort of memory. “No. But—Demoiselle—if you could persuade your sister to give me a mirror? A proper one. I should—I think I should be able to remember more, to do more. Even to help. I understand why I am kept under lock and key. I should do the same, if positions were reversed. But I am not your enemy, and I was a great diviner once.”
Isabeau said, frowning, “Yes, for Ineedyou to help me. I want to talk to the korrigan-king. I have an idea.”
Talk to the—Isabeau had lost her mind. Elesbed, hanging back in the doorway, stared at her in horror.
Moreau hid his reaction better. His gaze flicked from Isabeau to Elesbed, and then he said, haltingly, “I don’t remember the name or the face of any korrigan-king. I do not know if a korrigancancome into castles of worked stone. What would you say to this king?”
Isabeau had her hands clasped, her whole body taut with eagerness. “ThatIought to marry him and not my sister. And for my marriage settlement I want him to use his enchantments to drive the French away, back across their borders, and never come to trouble us more.”
“Oh, no,” Elesbed whispered.
Moreau said, with swift urgency, “Demoiselle, you ought not say such things aloud.”
“I said it aloud because I mean it! My sister shouldn’t leave. The only thing I can do for Brittany is to help her stay here.”
Elesbed found herself listening rigidly to the room’s silence, as though a tall korrigan with clawed hands would step out of the fireplace and claim Isabeau as his bride.
Nothing stirred in the fireplace.
But something moved outside.
There was a hissing step on the stairs. A long, long sigh. A rattling exhale.
Isabeau paled, as though realizing that the consequences of her rashness might walk through the doorway in that very moment. But when the door swung creaking back, it was no korrigan at all. No man even. It was a woman, and she was dead.
She shouldn’t be here in daylight,Elesbed thought. The anaon belonged to the night.
She wore a sort of robe, with an underdress. A veil over her hair and a rope round her neck. The rope had dug into her gray skin. Her eyes started from her head; her lips were black. Her skin seemed lit with cold moonlight, though it was a midsummer day. Her mouth opened and closed.
“Who are you?” cried Isabeau. “Anaon, what happened to you?”
But the woman could not speak, because she had been strangled.
Of them all, only Moreau moved. He darted a hand out to his cup sitting on a coffer. He looked into it, his lips moving, his face white. Suddenly the lady was gone. Just like that. “God in Heaven,” he said fervently, sinking back in his chair.
Another,thought Elesbed.A third dead lady.They said there’d been one in the convent chapel, there was one in the duchess’s chamber. And now this one.
“I don’t understand,” said Isabeau. “Monsieur, did you send her away?”
He was looking down at his own hands in perplexity, touching his thumbs to his fingertips as though relearning how they worked. “That was mere instinct. God, was there ever a more miserable state for man? Some torment of the korriganed, undoubtedly.” Shamefacedly he added to Isabeau, “Demoiselle, I have been using the wine in my cup as a poor mirror. I know it is not sanctioned.”
