The ghostly knight reappeared. He returned to his place in the lists, awaiting a second challenger. But none appeared. Darkness gathered fast. The world was plunged into twilight. Was this some night in the Lost Lands, dragged into the living world? Anne tried to find the ordinary daylight in the layers of the world, to drag it back. But it was too big, too strange, her knowledge too small. Moreau was ready for her now, and she could not. The day got steadily darker. “Isabeau, take the guard, go back inside the walls,” she said.
“Not without you,” breathed her sister. They were holding hands.
The crowd’s murmurs became frightened cries. Another French rider faced the phantom stranger. Their two horses bolted down the lists, the two lances came down. Dust flew in spiraling clouds from beneath the hooves of the French horse, in thick clots of mud from the challenger, and the whole world turned gray. In the fast-rising shadows, the French horse missed its footing and somersaulted, a parabola of doom in the growing darkness.
“Treachery!” screamed a dozen voices.
“A judgment!” someone screamed in French. “A judgment of God!”
The fallen French knight crawled toward his writhing horse.
A few stars could now be seen. Terror spread like cold, flooding fog. People rose to their feet shouting; priests made the sign against evil. Some were fleeing.
What was the goal of this chaos? Wherewashe?
The night-birds were beginning to sing. On the other side of the lists, Charles shouted something.
Anne tried again to see the day, to throw back the dark.
Almost she did. But suddenly, she saw flames. The French stands had caught fire. Someone on the French side shouted, “An attack! An attack!”
Her concentration shattered.
The fire was climbing the stands, setting people to stampeding. A few knights dropped their jousting-lances—made to break—and drew their bitter-edged swords. Two men were fighting, then four, and then there was a general mêlée, the clatter and screech of swords on armor.
What could she do?
She sat still, staring straight ahead, pushing through the layers of the world. “Anne?” said Isabeau. “What’s wrong? The light is changing in your eyes.”
Anne couldn’t heed her. Rain—the ghost-knight had been in the rain. She sought the light of that day, pale and sodden. With her eyes half-closed, she wrenched the rain to herself, from whatever lost day it had fallen upon.
The rain came.
It fell without warning, a great deluge, soaking them all at once, extinguishing the fire, veiling all the field in curtains of silver. People were still screaming, and the world was wholly out of joint: the darkness too heavy, the air too cold. The French and Breton knights were fighting in earnest now, never mind the danger of taking a sword-cut on their lighter jousting armor. Her own guard had closed tightly around her and Isabeau. The king of France was nowhere to be seen, hidden by the rain.
There came a familiar cry. Elesbed had wriggled through the guard. She had a great red mark starting on her face and a split lip. She shouted, “I saw him! He went up to the lady of France.”
The lists had become a battlefield. The Breton archers crowded the walls of Rennes, but they were unwilling to shoot while the citizens were in full stampede, shrieking treachery against the French.
From within Rennes came the sound of running feet, clashing steel. Who was fighting? The city’s approaches were guarded, its other gates shut. Anne’s guard was trying to get her and Isabeau away. Isabeau was clutching Elesbed by the hand.
Someone sprinted up and cried that the French were inside the walls.
“Impossible!” Dunois bellowed back.
“Nay—they opened the old tunnel beneath the walls, the one from the last war.”
“But that tunnel was collapsed long ago! Who even remembers where it was?”
Lost, the tunnel had been lost. But it had existed, and nothing stayed lost. Not now.That was the scheme all the time,Anne thought in horror.To overrun Rennes.Isabeau’s hand was torn from hers, but one of the guards had her. Better so. Moreau was the architect of this and he had to be stopped.
Anne remembered how light had lain upon the battlefields outside Nantes during the siege. The low, unmistakable warlight. Not allowing herself to think, she stepped into that light and found herself separated from her guard, on the battlefield that the lists had become.
A body lunged in front of her just as a sword came down. A huge man, with a mace, upon a rearing horse, was beside her, swearing. A head went rolling past, and all was confusion and terror, and then the huge man dismounted, his shield arm bloody, and she realized that it was her brother, with Louis of Orléans at his shoulder.
And Polhaim? Polhaim was at her feet, his skull open. He’d caught the downstroke of an attacking knight. “No,” she whispered.
Henri pulled her away. Louis was saying, “Avaugour, get her out of here!”
