He said this near her ear, and he felt her smile, and then he also felt her labored breath as he carried her down the narrow stairs and through the receiving-rooms of Châteaubriant.
Together they went out into the clear moonset. The new day was merely a change on the dark horizon. An anxious crowd followed. Anne’s head fell back and he gathered her closer, carried her beneath a great rowan-tree, stopped, and knelt there.
Isabeau knelt beside him, and the others waited, bewildered, at a little distance.
Nothing happened. His heart, which had been beating fast with hope, sank once more. Perhaps she merely wished to feel the moonlight and the soil of Brittany, and she was going to die in his arms. “Anne,” he said. “Don’t go.”
But then Isabeau cried, “Look!”
Louis had seen renderings of unicorns, of course. Deer-headed, goat-footed, a lion’s tail, a curling mane. But a drawing could not capture this. A tapestry could not render it.
A stillness louder than cries of wonder fell over the group.
The unicorn walked as though in a summer’s day, with the light pouring through the horn, though there was only moonlight. Though it was dark, the white of her coat seemed to carry faint color, a trace of pink, lavender, green. An absent sun glowed on her skin.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the ferocious sieur de Châteaubriant, Madeleine’s father, reaching to take a bow from one of his men. But Henri said, “No,” in a voice like a whipcrack, and Châteaubriant hesitated, staring.
The unicorn threw up her head, the light rippling on the horn, and everyone held their breath. “Anne,” Louis said, mouth against the scented weight of her hair. “Anne, look up.”
Anne looked up. She smiled.
The unicorn took two soundless steps forward and lowered herhorn to touch the duchess. Louis felt all his muscles go rigid; the horn was sharp as a sword, lingering near Anne’s throat and breast, his own eye. But the touch was light, and Anne reached up to curl her hand around it.
Then she jerked once in his arms, gasping, and the unicorn drew back. A dark eye, sheened in silver, looked into his own. He couldn’t breathe. The beast whirled and galloped, one flawless stride and then another, so that every heart sang with the movement, and then she was running into an impossible sunlight and gone altogether.
Anne stirred in his arms.
“Anne?” said Isabeau.
“I’m all right,” said Anne, her voice thick with emotion. “Although I wish never to feel that again.” She carefully rose to her feet. In her white chemise, she looked so very young. But she smiled at the sieur de Châteaubriant, and death was gone from her eyes. Nearly everyone there was crying. Mouths hung open. “My lord, I fear I have inconvenienced you, coming upon you in such disarray. I must get to Rennes.”
No one answered. They all knelt, even Châteaubriant, and Louis saw her take in their homage like a touch, straightening her back. She added, practically, as though trying to will them all back to earthly matters, “The French are coming after me and there is no time.” The confessor had his hand to his mouth.
“This moment, Highness,” Châteaubriant said at last.
The confessor said, “But you must hear Mass. You have been delivered by God.”
“I hope God will forgive me if I say my prayers when I reach Rennes.” Anne smiled at them all and there was a sunrise in Louis’s heart, his foolish romantic heart, because it was the imp’s smile, with dimples, that he’d thought he would never see again.
Chapter
20
After Châteaubriant, they drove theirhorses hard; Anne and Isabeau put up their hoods to fend off the ever-present mist, not quite rain, that blew into their faces. They stayed off the main road and went as fast as the horses could manage. Elesbed was mounted behind one of the escort that Châteaubriant had sent with them, bouncing like a flour sack, clinging to his belt, looking down at the galloping horse with acute suspicion. She didn’t know how to ride.
When Anne closed her eyes, she still saw the horn, shining and tipped like a sword, against the skin of her throat. Felt again how her inward wound, torn open by sorcery and the touch of that sea-drake’s blood, had closed again. Every breath felt like a miracle now.
But still she was furious with herself. She’d trusted De Rieux to see her interests as she did. And she hadn’t imagined that Moreau had such power, nor that he would move so quickly to ally with the French. She’d made mistake after mistake, and now she was fleeing, her choices narrowing, her young sister in flight beside her.
She pressed her borrowed horse along the road in silence.
The cavalcade was walking to let the horses blow when Louis’s horse came abreast of hers; she glanced at him, behind the curve of her deep hood. He had carried her outside, hadn’t flinched at the unicorn’s horn.
He had put his future in her hands.
Louis caught her eye, and his smile was crooked. No point at all in pretending that she hadn’t been watching him. Anne gathered her courage, nudged her horse nearer until they were stirrup to stirrup. Gravely, she said, “What will you have of me?”
She did not see him startle at the formality in her voice, but she did see his altered balance in the set of his horse’s ears. She went on, as sensibly as she knew how, “Now, here I am with a debt, and no means of repayment. You saved my throne and my life, at great risk. We would not have escaped Nantes without you.”
