“What— Oh.” She flushed. “Yes. But it’s not important.”
“Anne—”
“Not now. Do you understand what happened? I left one room and returned to another, passing through the Lost Lands.”
He rubbed his face. “Anne, it is not dawn yet. What are you thinking? Tell me plainly.”
“I am going to try again.”
Horrified alertness finally came to his face. “Try—to do what you did—again? Just disappear? Why? What if you never come back? What happens to your sister?”
“You will have to protect her. If she does not want to be duchess, Marguerite will let her abdicate, I am sure of it. She may be a private lady. But Iwillcome back.”
She took up his hands. He looked from their locked fingers to her face.
“Anne, I don’t understand.”
“I am going to go and talk to Maximilien of Austria.” Somewhere in the liminal space of shadows she thought she sensed the unicorn, watching her, gleaming like a far, cold star. Disapproving, Anne thought, though she didn’t know why.I doubt the beast gave you a lock of its mane to make you great among men,Hawiz had said. Anne shook away the memory. “I must persuade Maximilien myself. If he doesn’t come, I am lost.”
“But how can you possibly talk to him? Anne—” Louis didn’t seem to know whether to put her in chains or call a physician.
“Will you trust me?” she whispered, echoing his own plea back to him.
He was silent.
“Wait for me. Watch over Isabeau.”
He released her hands, reluctantly. There was a terrible fear in his face. “Shall I not come with you?”
She shook her head. “This is between myself and—my husband.”
At that his face closed; he nodded and stepped back.
What connection could Anne find in the Lost Lands that linked herself and Maximilien? There was no memory; she had never met him.
But they had both lost someone, and in the same manner. Her father had died in a fall, and so had his wife.
Anne squinted through the jumble of the world’s lost things, searching for a specific quality of remembered light. The particular gray haze of that incense-thick room where her father had lain dying.
Louis coughed. She realized that she could actually smell incense; the room was filling with pungent vapor and that deathly gray light. Anne’s heart was beating so fast she could hardly breathe. “Anne?” Louis whispered.
Had Maximilien watched over his dying wife in this same light? She did not think he would have forgotten it. She did not know if this would work. But she could think of no other means to reach for a victory in her defeat.
Before she could lose her nerve, Anne stepped into that haze. Her own chamber vanished and she stood beside her dead father, lying slack, that incense-thick light crusted like paint on his face. Almost it seemed his great bed lay alone in a wood, a piece of detritus foundered in the Lost Lands. She pressed a hand to his face. “Father,” she whispered to the memory. Then she imagined a beautiful woman, a dead queen, lying with that same pallor, in the same light. She blinked, and the figure on the bed was a woman. Her beauty lingered, though her face was sunken in death.
Someone moved on the far side of the bed. Anne looked up from this lady’s face and saw Maximilien, staring fixedly down at her. Anne knew him by his portrait; the thin nose and lips could not be mistaken. But here? In the Lost Lands? Like a man in a faerie-tale, driven by longing out of the living world. Did he think he was dreaming?
All around him, cutting through the haze of incense, glowed a particular candlelight. Candles tall as trees, pillars of flame. The graylight of the Lost Lands was on Maximilien’s face but that other light—that other light…
Anne, breathing hard, eyes closed against the gathering pain in her head, stepped not toward her husband, but into the candlelight that wrapped him and anchored him, into the candlelight of the mortal world that lit the night in Ghent, where her husband kept vigil for the dead.
Polhaim wondered grimly how it would all end. Maximilien was hardly sleeping, and his fleeting glimpses of Mary had only increased his obsession. He had not obviously gone mad, was not distrait in ways that were obvious to his attentive court. But the fine marks of sleeplessness had begun to lay themselves thickly around his mouth and beneath his overbright eyes.
On that night he sat upon his carved chair, tensely waiting. The small circle of his intimates sat near him, waiting too, as was their duty. Polhaim thought of Anne of Brittany, even now far away besieged, and he was ashamed. Maximilien had pledged his word and he had broken it.
Then Polhaim thought his restless mind had actually conjured Anne of Brittany in some wild-eyed vision, for she had just stepped out of the shadows into that room’s candlelight.
No, it could not be. Was this that damned inconvenient ghost of Mary of Burgundy?
