The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(80)

For an instant it seemed that the forest of beeswax candles was in fact ancient trees, and that between her and Maximilien, like the spring memory of snow, stood the unicorn. The unicorn’s eyes seemed to summon her back out of her own world altogether. Stop playing these games.

This is what I was born for. Anne stayed where she was. A hoof scraped the unseen earth; the beast wheeled and vanished—had never really been there—and the trees were merely pillar-candles.

Anne, shaken, tried to concentrate. “Sire, succor your living wife. For the dead, you must wait upon the Resurrection.”

Maximilien’s face was blank; he looked lost.

Lost? Anne remembered her glimpse of him at his wife’s bedside. Now she saw that the shadows lay wrongly on his face; he still stood half in the incense-hazed smog of his Mary’s death-chamber. In the story, King Gralon Meur went into the Lost Lands looking for his dead wife. How many people drift away from the world thus, propelled by longing?

Anne added more gently, “I fear you have sickened with grief. Your lady would wish me to heal you.”

“Heal me?”

Anne put out a hand. This might be a terrible mistake. His attendants were exchanging frightened looks. What if she took his hand and he would not let her go?

Maximilien’s lips firmed and he crossed the room. He hesitated and reached for her outstretched hand. “You are a fair apparition,” he whispered.

She dared not speak. But she drew him forward into the proper candlelight of his own hall and away from the gray, incense-filled haze that clung around him.

Abruptly his eyes cleared, and she saw the fierce, hawklike face of the man who had commanded armies. He frowned. His hand tightened and tightened again, so she could not pull free. Panic spiked through her. In a moment he was going to understand she was not an apparition at all and demand to know what she was doing, how she got there.

Polhaim’s voice cut through the room. “Sire!” he called sharply. Maximilien was startled; his hand opened. Anne hastily stepped back and back again, fastening her eyes on the pillar-candles, trying to see them flickering in her own bedchamber in Rennes. She tried to hide the whistle of her frightened breathing. Her eyes met those of Polhaim. She saw them full of silent wonder, regret, farewell.

He had known her.

Anne whispered, “It is not meet to dwell only in memory, Sire.”

Maximilien’s eyes mirrored the fire and she realized they were wet. “But I love her beyond death, fair messenger.”

“She knows,” said Anne.



* * *





“You let her do what?” Henri was saying to Louis.

It was at that opportune moment that Anne stepped back out of the shadows and stumbled, sweating, to a chair and collapsed into it. She was almost paralyzed with headache.

They surrounded her. Louis was too overwrought to keep his distance then; he knelt before her, pushed back her tangled hair, looked into her face. “What happened?” he asked. “Anne, what happened?”

“I found him,” she whispered. “God, my head.”

“Of all the insane notions,” Louis said. She didn’t open her eyes. Madeleine had fetched a cool cloth; she hesitated, then gave it to Orléans and he pressed it to her aching face.

Anne said, “I had to. My husband was enchanted. It was my duty. I think he is coming now. I do not know if he will be in time. But he will try. We shall ask the diviner tomorrow if there is a message for me.”

She wanted very badly for Louis to hold her, to take her to bed somewhere safe.

She sat still, eyes closed. “But I am still afraid of Moreau, for I think he knows more of sorcery than anyone has known since the Age of Enchantment. And his longings have driven him wholly beyond reason.”





Chapter


26

    Julien Moreau came to Marguerite in her pavilion, pitched amid the tents of her protective household, with the king and his attendants snoring not so far off and the entirety of a French army dreaming and grunting and murmuring all around. Grooms were stirring already, to feed the horses, and in the distance came the clang of an armorer’s bench, a shower of golden sparks in that grayness before dawn.

But despite them all, no one saw Moreau pass between the horse-lines, over the dew-starred grass, and to the tent of Madame the king’s sister. As ever, Marguerite herself had no warning of his coming. She merely looked up from her bed, her maid snoring outside, and saw him watching her from the shadows. The only light was the brazier keeping off the night’s chill.

Startled, a little displeased, she said, “Why are you here?”

Something had changed about him. His eye was wild, and all the edges of him stood out wrongly against the light of the ordinary world. He took a silent step toward her cot and she saw that he was limping.

“I have been a traveler in the Lost Lands this night,” he said.

“I do not know what that means. Why have you wakened me?”

He smiled and the outline of his body seemed suddenly to accord better with the room. But his eyes still flickered brilliant and then dark. He said only, “I need your help.”

“What help?”

He didn’t answer. He came closer and she saw an uncontrollable excitement in his wild eyes. Anger? Fear? Delight? She didn’t know. He was smiling down at her, tenderly. But it was as though something—something other—that he’d ably concealed was breaking its way out anyway, through his eyes and the gaps in his teeth. When he walked toward her, the shadows on his face writhed, as though he stepped beneath trees that were not there. She scrambled instinctively to her feet. He put out his hand to her, and his shadows crawled over her body too. Then the whole world seemed to be slinking away, dissolving, except for his hand straying up her back.