The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(79)

“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 gray light 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?

But Mary had been tall and fair. This apparition was short, and her hair was brown.

It was Anne. He could not mistake her face. His heart turned over. She must have died and this was her pitiful ghost, come to blame her husband. But then his staring eyes met hers. In all those nights of vigil, Mary had never once looked at them. Mary had walked past, smiling, unspeaking, lit by unseen fires, staring at unseen things. A very ghost.

Anne’s gaze went from him to Maximilien. “Who are you?” said Maximilien of Austria, like a dreamer jerked awake.

The girl’s face flushed and paled by turns; her eyes caught the firelight, and she was very beautiful. How could she be here? How?

“It is Anne of Brittany,” murmured Polhaim.



* * *





This room was finer than any chamber of Anne’s castle in Nantes, filled with furnishings of rare wood, hung with tapestries of the hunt, lit by pillars of beeswax.

She locked eyes with her husband.

His face was thin and haunted, his hair coming in gray at the temples. She ought to have pitied him in his grief, and she supposed she did. But she was angry too.

Let him believe her an apparition.

She held her husband’s gaze. In Latin, she said, “Why are you here, Sire?”

He looked tired and lonely. Suddenly the impersonal reality of her task—I must make him help me—collided with this glimpse of a grieving man. He had not abandoned her out of cruelty. Perhaps this was her desert, for using his grief to win his hand.

“You are not Mary,” he said.

She said nothing.

He said, “Where is Mary? Can Mary speak to me too? Why has she not?”

There was no time for pity. Anne let her voice knife into him. “She has not spoken because you are forsworn. You married Anne of Brittany, then gave her no protection.”