Marguerite’s head whirled with the possibilities. “That is—that is wondrous,” she said at last. “Can you prove it?”
Moreau smiled. “Observe, Madame.”
The light of the fire glimmered in the dark depths of the mirror in his hand. His eyes were soft with sudden pleasure, as though his truest and purest heart was given only to this skill he had yielded up his whole life to master. “Look,” he breathed.
Marguerite followed his gaze, and her throat closed.
The far corner of the room had been empty. But now a girl knelt there, crying. She was heavily pregnant. Her clothes were rich and archaic—a robe and henin such as Marguerite’s grandmother might have worn. Her clothes and hair and headdress were sopping wet. She wrapped her arms around herself and sobbed.
Marguerite looked wildly at Moreau.
“She’s not real.” He sounded amused. “She is enchantment. You might call her a memory. The Bretons call them anaon. Sometimes they stray out of the Lost Lands. But an enchanter can call them forth.”
Marguerite bade her heart still its wild beating. “Could you summon a crowd?”
“An army, Madame, to deceive your enemies,” said Moreau. “Or a fleet upon the sea.”
Visions of power bounded before Marguerite’s eyes. She who had been Regent of France, but was now merely a great lady, a wife, and a woman.
The girl screamed soundlessly.
She said, “If—if the Lost Lands contain—contain infinity, as you say, how do you find what you wish to conjure?”
A strange flicker in Moreau’s eyes. “One finds connections. Some lie in memory, in emotion, in congruency. It is different for everyone,the korriganed say, what an individual may conjure, what ways a mind interacts with the Lost Lands.” A flicker of anger in his voice, as though that did not please him. The girl he had conjured had crumpled to the floor, curling around her belly. She looked the same age as Anne. Would Anne be weeping so one day, in some solitary chamber at Amboise?As though I’d feel pity for her. She is going to be queen of France.
Moreau’s fingers fell on her arm, and only then did Marguerite realize that she’d stepped toward this sobbing girl. Her heart would not be quiet.
“You can’t touch her,” said Julien sharply. “Or you can, but she will not know it. She is in the shadows, beneath a different light, can’t you see?” And now Marguerite saw the reason for the brightness in the girl’s hair. It was as though she knelt there in a shaft of sunlight. But the sky outside was thickly white.
“The sorcerer can go further than the enchanter,” whispered Julien into her ear. She could have sworn she felt his mouth there, grazing the edge of her ear, but she could not take her eyes from the ghost. “Fromseeminghe can move tobeing.”
He left her, walked across the room to a coffer that stood in the corner beside the weeping girl. A coffer that had not been there.
With a flick of long fingers, Moreau opened the coffer and withdrew a brooch of fine enamel, poppy red, with a device of a scarlet flower above a pair of letters interlocked, done in diamonds. He drew it forth and crossed the room with it and knelt before her like a supplicant and laid it in her trembling hand. It was cool and heavy and real.
Moreau closed her flinching fingers around it and held them there, looking up into her face. It was as though he was looking into a fire that was not in the room; his face was golden and strange.
The girl, whose back had been to them all that while, raised her head and turned. For a moment, it seemed that her face was blue, her mouth black, her eyes dead, water streaming down her face. Then she and the coffer evanesced like the dew at dawn, and Marguerite told herself it was a trick of the light.
Marguerite stared down at Moreau. He got to his feet and his handcame up to cup her cheek and she let it. His thumb pressed into the pulse there and she wanted this power. He was beautiful.
His one reaching hand traced her collarbone, then he pried her gripping fingers open and their eyes tangled over the jeweled thing. He said, “When I heard you speak on that wall-top, your voice was the first thing in two hundred years that reminded me of home. I will be yours, and France’s, if you will heed my counsel.”
Marguerite didn’t move. Her father had cobbled together great pieces of bloodily acquired earth and then knitted them up strong with roads and sensible governments. Had doubled, or nearly, the kingdom of France. And now? What greater thing could his daughter do? If she had as her ally these arts that men had long since forgot?
She couldn’t take her eyes off the jeweled brooch between them. “Will this disappear?”
“Perhaps,” he said, looking into her face. “There is no saying when. Things drawn from the Lost Lands do not always remain found. But I can draw forth more.”
His mirror lay suddenly in his palm and he frowned, letting go her hand. He breathed a word half to himself and stared into the glass. “Ah,” he said. “I must go. Madame, will you help me?”
“Help you how?”
“I beg that you in this hour go down to the courtyard.”
“Why?” she said.
His smile was full of mischief. “To see the final sign, my lady, and to give me countenance if the Bretons doubt.” He kissed her hand, and then bit, very softly, the tender part of her wrist. They both heard her gasp and saw her fingers curl. He let her go.
