“Very well. She must be fetched out.”
Marguerite explained about Anne’s illicit marriage.
“But he has not had her maidenhead, has he?” Charles asked anxiously.
“He has never met her, Sire,” returned Marguerite between clenched teeth. “But that might soon change if we are not careful.”
“That’s all right,” said Charles, patting her arm lovingly. “You’ll contrive the rest, dear sister, as you always do. And I will have my unicorn-horn.”
At supper, when she had her brother to herself, she said, “It might not be so simple as you suppose, Sire.” They were eating in private; the houndsmen and the huntsmen having all, blessedly, decamped, and Charles was giving her half an ear, champing happily on stewed rabbit. “The duchess is not a compliant girl, whatever her reputation. Quite the opposite. And if—whenwe take Rennes, there will be no time for unicorn-hunting, for the duchess must be married instantly. Every hour we wait is an hour where Maximilien of Austria, or some evil chance we have not foreseen, pulls her from our hands.”
“But I am the king,” said Charles patiently. “And I have a mind to get me the horn of a unicorn. I need her for that.”
“Yes, but the horn of a unicorn is not worth all Brittany, Sire.”
He looked puzzled. “No—no, of course not. But we shall have both.”
As his regent, she could have gainsaid him, but that power had gone from her. She was only his sister now, and had, perforce, to yield.
Something of her rage, her creeping sense of impotence, must have communicated itself to Moreau. “Will you not trust me?” he asked her patiently, in her pavilion that night, murmuring into her ears. “Call for this tourney. Your brother likes pageantry; he will agree. Lull them all into a false sense of security.”
“And you can do as you say? You swear it?”
He smiled against her mouth. “My Margot. I swear it.”
Chapter
24
The haruspex, the head ofthe Diviners’ Guild, was summoned to the Guardhouse in Rennes, and Elesbed was allowed to stay in the room with Isabeau, half-hid in a corner. Isabeau was embroidering a small yellow cat on a kerchief, and Elesbed was darning socks with determination, if only moderate skill. “I will make you a present of this,” Isabeau had said to Elesbed, waving the kerchief. “To remind you of your cat.” Butter had been left safely in Nantes with Hawiz. Elesbed missed her cat and had never had a present in her life; she looked forward to her kerchief very eagerly.
The duchess was near the fire with the haruspex, asking him many questions about the nature of enchantments.
The haruspex, flattered by her interest, talked and talked.
Elesbed listened with rising impatience. The haruspex told the duchess kindly that the noble lady’s questions lay in the realm of wonder-tales. For example, that all cats could see sorcerous works and warn their households. That the korriganed were afraid of iron and crucifixes. That Merlin the Enchanter, long ago, could walk into one shadow and out of any other shadow in the world.
“But how?” Anne demanded urgently. “How is it done, to walk into one shadow and out of another?”
The haruspex looked displeased. “I memorized the passages of lore, naturally, when I was a boy. But I really don’t see—”
“What passages of lore? I will hear them,” said Anne, and sat back expectantly.
Elesbed, listening by the fire with Isabeau, thought it strange that a man would call the duchess “Highness” but look displeased when she gave him an order. The haruspex spread his hands in bewilderment, but after a sullen pause, began to recite:
“What place is not touched by the Lost Lands? For those who can see it, the strange country is but a breath away. And once a sorcerer sees the way into the Lost Lands, then he will wish to take the roads thereinto, and when he does, he may perhaps come out again into the world in a different place altogether. And when this ability is mastered, it is what the ignorant call traveling by shadows.
“Longing and grief and memory and desire and even congruency might make the sorcerer a road, for the Lost Lands are only a map of the traveler’s soul. But beware. For the korriganed are malicious and men’s souls contain currents that even they know not and the Lost Lands obey no law of God.
“Many have never come back.”
He fell silent. The duchess sat still for a long moment. And then she rose and smiled, thanked the haruspex, and bade him farewell. But Elesbed saw her face when she turned away; her eyes were on Isabeau, sewing energetically, and she looked afraid.
Elesbed decided she would never sleep at all, ever again. She wasn’t going to let anyone hurt the duchess or Isabeau.
The day the French encircled the city of Rennes, Anne received a letter from Charles of France under a flag of truce. Outside the walls, the French army began to emplace guns and sap trenches and raise pavilions for the officers. Anne still had no word from Maximilien, nor from Louis; her walls were thinly manned, and her time was all but spent.
But the letter from Charles came in the late summer afternoon, andit surprised Anne greatly. “It is not a demand for surrender,” she said, as she sat wearily and let Madeleine comb her hair. She had spent the day in council, coaxing, commanding, reassuring. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “It is an invitation to a trial of arms. A tourney outside the city walls, on the Champs de Lys, under a safe-conduct from the king of France.”
