The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(57)

Anne whispered, “I saw where the sea-serpent came from. It was noon, the water all silver.”

“Highness—Anne—are you all right?” De Rieux’s face filled with horror. “Anne—have you gone mad?”

“Anne?” echoed Isabeau.

Louis opened his mouth to say something stinging to De Rieux, who was not helping in the least, but Anne managed, “I am— My mind is all right. Merely stunned.” She seemed to banish the haziness from her voice by will alone. “I’m all right.” She still could not take her own weight.

“Stop trying to reassure everyone when you can hardly stand. Let me take you upstairs, for God’s sake,” he muttered.

She didn’t answer. But she closed her eyes again. He caught up all the warm, scented, silver-streaked weight of her and, ignoring both Henri and De Rieux, made for the door.



* * *





Her household was waiting anxiously in her garderobe, people she knew, people she must calm. Anne tried, but she did not think she had succeeded. The shadows would not settle. They caught at the corners of her eye: wrong direction, wrong color, wrong length. It was hard to know where she was. She thought she was a child with a fever, her mother’s face hovering over hers. No. It was the old lady from the convent. No. Winter daylight, summer storm-light, it all crowded up at once before her flinching eyes.

The shadows were hurting her head.

Moreau holding the mirror from Brocéliande. Had her guard gotten it back? De Rieux, talking to Marguerite of France. Had Maximilien marched from Flanders? A sea-drake in the garden, Moreau’s shocked expression. What had happened to Elesbed? What was this malice working in her castle?

Was he watching, this korrigan-king they’d only glimpsed? But his strange face had held nothing but amused and total indifference.

Moreau’s sad, golden eyes. I do not remember any more. Had he lied?

A cat was yowling. Anne wanted to rest, to let the haze drag her under, but the cat would not stop. She opened her eyes. Little time could have gone by, for there were people clustered around her and everyone was talking. The physician was there, trying to peer beneath her eyelids. Isabeau was holding her hand. Orléans had disappeared.

The cat was sitting by the fire bolt upright. It was staring at her.

The light of the fire did not touch its fur.

It yowled again. A familiar cat. “Butter,” she said.

All the talking, arguing, anxious people pulled back when she spoke. “Anne?” said Isabeau gently. “Anne, what is it?” Her face was tear-stained; she was holding Anne’s arm as if she could break it.

“There is the cat,” said Anne. “That is Elesbed’s cat.”

The cat yowled again. The room turned to look.

“Yes,” said Isabeau anxiously. “Yes, that’s right. She’s Elesbed’s cat. She’s been in the kitchen.”

Anne didn’t answer. A strange darkness lay upon the cat. She could see the layer—for want of a better word—of the world that contained it. Anne peered into this darkness, sitting dazedly in her chair by the fire. Her head throbbed. She could not make out much in that darkness. A dusty floor, perhaps. Walls of dressed stone. A place elsewhere. A place in the Lost Lands?

And a shadow. A small disheveled human shadow. It was creeping toward the cat. “Butter?” it whispered.

Butter yowled again, fiercely, never taking her eyes off Anne.

“Elesbed,” said Anne. In her hazy state, it did not seem impossible that she could speak into the dark and be answered. She heard a thin answering cry. Elesbed was in the dark.

“Elesbed, come here.” Anne put out a silver-splashed hand.

Butter stepped, purring, into the proper warm firelight and began to wash her face just as two small dirty hands reached back and caught Anne’s, and she pulled Elesbed tumbling into the room.

Another stab of pain went through Anne’s head as she pulled, and she twisted in her chair with the shock of it, gasping. For a moment, the child was gray with clinging darkness, and then the fire reasserted itself and lit them all with warm gold.

The room filled again with shouting and the noise went straight through her. What had she just done? What did her household think she’d done? She mustn’t swoon; she mustn’t.

Dimly she felt Hawiz’s hands on her shoulders, vaguely she heard Henri say, “Come on, Madeleine, help me get this damned hamper of people out; they aren’t doing her any good.”

The noise died away a little. Anne did not dare open her eyes for fear of the shadows hurting her head.

“What happened?” Isabeau was saying to Elesbed. “Where were you? How did you get back?”

“I was in another castle. A faerie-castle, in the Lost Lands,” said Elesbed. “Moreau put me there.”

“He did what?” Henri sounded dangerous.

Hawiz had moved away; Anne hoped it was to find a bite for the child. And it was; now she could hear Elesbed chewing as she talked. “I don’t know how. He is a man, not a korrigan. But he lived in the Lost Lands and learned terrible things. He knows how to step through the shadows, to go into the Lost Lands whenever he likes. He put me away because I was going to tell the duchess about the mirror. I am sorry,” she added to Isabeau. “I meant to break my oath.”

“Would you’d broken it sooner,” muttered Henri. “Of all Belle’s hare-brained notions.”