“Praise God,” said Louis dryly. “For you have driven me near enough to madness as it is, my dragon-tamer, my unicorn-hunter.”
He kissed her one last time before he set her on her feet and steadied her. The coiled tension had not left his body, but his voice wascomposed again, creating a little necessary distance. “I need a horse,” he said, “if I am to joust for you. My Kestrel is still in Nantes.”
She looked up. “Of course. And you may ride with my favor if you ask, but it will not make France more likely to forgive you.”
“I am not asking their forgiveness. Brittany is not France. Nor was Orléans, nor Burgundy. The old king and Marguerite his daughter seized them because they could. The world understands only strength, and your father and I were not strong enough. And now you must try to buy strength elsewhere that I cannot give you, and the coin is your flesh and your inheritance. Do you wonder that I am angry?” His studied calm had frayed. His mouth almost touched hers, close enough that she could whisper a truth of her own into the space between them.
“I am also angry,” she said. “I will go to my wedding angry that all my roads led me there, to a loveless bed and a life lived far from home. But there is nothing to be done. I will try to be happy, whatever happens.”
He was silent. Then, with a very visible effort, he let her go and left her there.
Chapter
25
It was days since Annehad slept properly without drifting half-awake. But that night she did sleep, wrapped in warm memory. And that night, despite all the house’s watchful care—guards and locks and unsleeping servants—Isabeau disappeared.
Anne woke with only a little dew-fall softness in the air to tell her that dawn was not far off, and knew that the great bed was empty.
She threw the curtains back and rolled to her feet. “Isabeau?” she said, straining her eyes in the dark.
In the antechamber the guard heard Anne call, and there was a swirl as tapers from the fire were borne in to light the great pillars of candles around the bed. Someone went to the half-dead fire and broke the coals with a jab of the poker. Light flared red, then gold. Elesbed sat up blinking on her pallet by the hearth.
Isabeau was not in the bedchamber. Nor was she in the solar. “Isabeau?” said Anne again. Elesbed was on her feet.
To the room at large, Anne said in blood-freezing tones, “Where is my sister? Did she go past you? Alone?”
The maids wrung their hands in bewilderment; the guards looked as though they wished to. “No, Madame. She has not come past at all.”
“Find her,” said Anne in a voice that shocked them all. She turnedback into her chamber to dress as the house was roused suddenly to violent life. Terror choked all Anne’s senses; how could she haveslept?
And even as she thought all those things, she knew that Julien Moreau had found his means to persuade her, just as he’d threatened.
Commotion spread through the house, a chaotic search beginning, but Anne stood rigid before the renewed fire, trying to think.
Her new diviner was an aleomancer, a diviner by dice, with the skill of finding near Rennes. He bustled in and accorded her a well-drilled courtesy, but she missed Calyx fiercely.
She almost said,I think you will endanger yourself trying to divine my sister’s whereabouts,but she did not. The aleomancer threw his dice with all proper urgency. The room was airless with massing candle-flames, all the tapers lit at once so he could read his dice.
The aleomancer finally whispered in hoarse bewilderment, “The dice say—that the lady is on a ship in the deeps of the sea. And riding the back of Leviathan.” The color was draining steadily from his face; sweat stood out and he choked, falling to his knees.
In a voice that did not soften, Anne said, “Take him away and minister to him.”
Her body felt bloodless, her heart shuddering as it beat against the frightened void in her breast. Where was Isabeau? Anne thought of Elesbed, caught in that black shadow, and how Butter had stepped out of it, shown Anne where to look with all a cat’s insouciance.
She remembered the strange seeing that had come to her with the sea-drake’s blood. It had nearly killed her. But what choice did she have but to look again?
She turned her face into the farthest reach of candle and firelight, where dark and light mingled. Tried to find the layers in the world. It had been easy with the dragon’s blood on her. Now it was not.
But it waspossible.She was sure it was possible. She went and got her unicorn fillet and used it to tie back her loosened hair. Remembered how she and the unicorn had stepped so easily between the mortal lands and the Lost Lands on the day of the hunt in Brocéliande.I traveled by shadows that day.
Determinedly, Anne searched.
Slowly—too slowly—the world showed its depth to her: layers of daylight and darkness. Her head started to ache. Anne strained her eyes, strained her untrained mind, until the headache spiked and she felt the reality of the world dissolving. Shadows without corresponding lights crawled across her face, darkened her eyes, spread black across the floor.
There.
There was the same dark place. Anne struggled to see more, thought she caught just a glimpse of Isabeau’s plaited hair. She fought to make of the shadows a threshold she could reach across, the way she had caught Elesbed’s hands.
