The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(81)

Suddenly they weren’t standing in her pavilion anymore. Instead they were in a chapel with a worn stone floor and oxblood walls and a line of graves in the floor.

She had begun to shake despite herself. She turned in a circle. “What is this? Where are we?”

He whispered, “They think to rule me, but they are only ghosts. I am the king of the korriganed.”

“What is this place?” demanded Marguerite. The chapel was hideously cold.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You will help me, won’t you? They must know I am not afraid.” He pulled her near and kissed her. “I am not afraid. I will come here if I like and do what I wish, and what can they do? They are only ghosts. You are only ghosts!” he screamed.

She wrenched her head away. Her breath came shallowly. “What are you doing? How have we come here?”

He hitched an impatient shoulder. “The shadows, of course. But do not ask questions. Not tonight.” He touched her cheek, dug his fingers in beneath her jaw, cut off her air. “I cannot bear it tonight.” He let her go just before the darkness came.

Use your brain, child, said her father’s precise voice, somewhere in the depths of her memory. Her lip had split against his teeth. She said, trying to make him reasonable, “We have a plan. The tourney. You promised me a victory.” He bit her ear and she jerked away.

He said, “But I need you. Would it were you with the favor of the unicorn and the power of sorcery instead of the little Breton.” He was worrying her shoulder with his mouth. “We must indeed have the tourney,” he said. “Then she will know.”

“What will she know?”

“That she is beaten. They will all know. Then she will yield.”

“Julien,” she said at last. “Julien, I’m cold.”

He pulled away. Marguerite could not slow her panicked breaths. His eyes were gold and hardly human. “I will keep you warm,” he said, and licked her tears away.





Chapter


27

    Wolfgang von Polhaim came to Rennes under a flag of truce; he bypassed the French siege, bearing his safe-conduct, and passed the great lists for the jousting set in the Champs de Lys, the green meadows before the city. The tournament would be held on the morrow.

The postern-gate was opened for him and a guide found to take him to the residence of the duchess of Brittany, where he was admitted without fanfare. Anne went to greet him herself, smiling.

“My lord is aboard ship, with a fair wind,” said Polhaim. “I came in person to bring you word.”

“I am glad to hear it, and glad to see you,” she said.

They took counsel: Polhaim and Anne and Louis and Henri and Madeleine and Dunois, who had defied all the French army to ride to her. Isabeau was there too. Anne was proud of her sister, who sat in this council with perfect gravity, listening as Polhaim was told the tale of their days in Nantes, their flight to Rennes, the dark powers that Moreau had brought out of Brocéliande. They did not speak of what Anne had begun to learn to do, though Polhaim could not have forgotten. His face was troubled when he looked on her.

“Moreau must die,” said Anne in the end. “For my own and my sister’s sake. But to attempt it is dangerous.”

As though that would stop Louis or Henri. Even Polhaim said merely, “You are my liege now too, Highness, and this man is a danger to you.”

Their plan was laid, and refined, and when it was done, Anne thanked them and put her hands in theirs in turn. Henri said, with a brother’s privilege, “Go to bed, for God’s sake, Anne, unless you mean the French to take fright and run from your haggard face.”

“If I thought that that would suffice, I’d stay awake from Sunday to Sunday,” said Anne. She gave Polhaim a smile. “And beg my husband’s forgiveness afterward.”

The three men left.

But Madeleine woke her in the dark before dawn. “He wishes to see you,” she said.

Anne, half-awake, startled up and went into the antechamber, stopped after closing the bedchamber door softly behind her. “You came,” she said to Louis.

“As though I’d not crept into better-guarded houses in my time. Mercers, for example—they guard their daughters like fiends.” He was talking just to say something. Her hair tumbled and whispered against the embroidery of her robe. His eyes drank her in, asked a silent question.

She went to him, also silent, and his arms closed round her, hard, and he buried his face in the masses of her long hair. She leaned into his shoulder, as she had not been able to do while Polhaim was there, while they laid their plans, when the world must see her pure and strong.

He drew patterns on her spine with his fingers and did not speak.

The antechamber was almost entirely dark, except for the low-burning fire, and the very first hint of dawn at the window outside. Her fear was trying to turn, molten and inconvenient, to want. Perhaps his was doing the same, for his breathing had changed. But Polhaim had come to Rennes directly from Maximilien. They could not, and indeed neither of them did, move at all, except for his hand straying over her back.

“Where does it end, Anne,” he murmured into her ear, “if you have learnt to do enchantment?”

It was not a question she was expecting. But it was the question she’d asked herself every dark night since the night Isabeau disappeared. “I don’t know. I hardly know what to do with it, and I’ve no one to ask. I’m so afraid—” She swallowed. What a strange thing, to admit her fears; she couldn’t recall the last time.