The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(62)

Before Anne could speak again, the korrigan-queen got up, graceful as a deer despite her lined face. Then she stepped back, and back into the light of a different day, and was gone.

Then Anne blinked and her bedside was crowded—Henri and Louis and Isabeau and a confessor, and the incense. The physician with his bloody fleam in his hand. She suspected Elesbed was lurking in the shadows. The sieur de Ch?teaubriant—Madeleine’s father—was there with the rest, wearing the slightly panicked expression of a man whose sovereign is about to die in his hall. A chattering knot of girls were surely Madeleine’s five sisters, all of them agog at that night’s happenings.

Anne’s world wavered and split, seemed to catch into silver flames over and over. It felt like each breath must be the last. She wondered if her dream had spoken truth. About the dragon’s blood, the poison of it. The unicorn. “I have to go outside,” she said.

“You are not well, Highness,” said the priest. “You must confess your sins and put yourself well with God.”

“No,” said Anne, raising herself on one elbow. It took all her strength, and it hurt. “Well, yes—but first I must go outside.”

She tried to struggle upright but the pain in her head was going to split her in half, and she fell back, gasping. “Orléans,” she said. “Louis.”



* * *





Louis knew she was dying. He’d held men in battle, felt the life flow out of them, and knew the life was running out of her too. But then she caught at his sleeve—his—not her brother’s, not anyone else’s in that room. Her eyes were open, dark on his face. “Please,” she said. “Take me outside.”

Isabeau had crawled onto the bed and was holding tight to her sister, but she wasn’t crying. Her face was set. She looked far older than her age. “Take her outside, then!” she cried when no one moved. She rolled to her feet, fierce as a terrier. “That is what the duchess wants. Take her outside!”

Louis could see Ch?teaubriant’s lady already turning to give the orders—perhaps a litter—something comfortable, to do the duchess honor. But he met Anne’s eyes and knew a small flame of hope. Her eyes did not wander, in the way of the dying. They clung to his face, determined. A litter would take time. “Now,” she said. “Orléans—please—now.”

For the third time in that endless day, Louis reached down, and—ignoring the volleying cries of remonstrance and anxiety—picked up the duchess of Brittany. He said, “I begin to feel like your Jonquil, packing you about.”

He said this near her ear, and he felt her smile, and then he also felt her labored breath as he carried her down the narrow stairs and through the receiving-rooms of Ch?teaubriant.

Together they went out into the clear moonset. The new day was merely a change on the dark horizon. An anxious crowd followed. Anne’s head fell back and he gathered her closer, carried her beneath a great rowan-tree, stopped, and knelt there.

Isabeau knelt beside him, and the others waited, bewildered, at a little distance.

Nothing happened. His heart, which had been beating fast with hope, sank once more. Perhaps she merely wished to feel the moonlight and the soil of Brittany, and she was going to die in his arms. “Anne,” he said. “Don’t go.”

But then Isabeau cried, “Look!”

Louis had seen renderings of unicorns, of course. Deer-headed, goat-footed, a lion’s tail, a curling mane. But a drawing could not capture this. A tapestry could not render it.

A stillness louder than cries of wonder fell over the group.

The unicorn walked as though in a summer’s day, with the light pouring through the horn, though there was only moonlight. Though it was dark, the white of her coat seemed to carry faint color, a trace of pink, lavender, green. An absent sun glowed on her skin.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the ferocious sieur de Ch?teaubriant, Madeleine’s father, reaching to take a bow from one of his men. But Henri said, “No,” in a voice like a whipcrack, and Ch?teaubriant hesitated, staring.

The unicorn threw up her head, the light rippling on the horn, and everyone held their breath. “Anne,” Louis said, mouth against the scented weight of her hair. “Anne, look up.”

Anne looked up. She smiled.

The unicorn took two soundless steps forward and lowered her horn to touch the duchess. Louis felt all his muscles go rigid; the horn was sharp as a sword, lingering near Anne’s throat and breast, his own eye. But the touch was light, and Anne reached up to curl her hand around it.

Then she jerked once in his arms, gasping, and the unicorn drew back. A dark eye, sheened in silver, looked into his own. He couldn’t breathe. The beast whirled and galloped, one flawless stride and then another, so that every heart sang with the movement, and then she was running into an impossible sunlight and gone altogether.

Anne stirred in his arms.

“Anne?” said Isabeau.

“I’m all right,” said Anne, her voice thick with emotion. “Although I wish never to feel that again.” She carefully rose to her feet. In her white chemise, she looked so very young. But she smiled at the sieur de Ch?teaubriant, and death was gone from her eyes. Nearly everyone there was crying. Mouths hung open. “My lord, I fear I have inconvenienced you, coming upon you in such disarray. I must get to Rennes.”