The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(95)
The watchful crowd of korriganed parted suddenly, interrupting this interesting monologue, to reveal a small old lady, dressed in beautiful, archaic clothes. “And that is the abbess,” Elesbed whispered triumphantly to Isabeau.
Anne made a reverence, cautiously. Isabeau elbowed Elesbed and they did the same. Louis and Henri bowed. Louis had no means to sheathe the blue sword, but he lowered its naked point.
“Majesty,” Anne said, and felt Louis stiffen beside her.
“Oh, no,” said the lady. “We have different titles than mortals, and those years are gone from me now anyway; they belong to the Lost Lands. I only took a hand because there seemed no other recourse to rid us of yon madman. He was growing more powerful with every change of the moon, with every murdered bride. The true king has not been seen since—oh, I don’t know. Since the sea-drakes disappeared.”
“King?” said Anne. “So there is a king of the korriganed after all? Not just Moreau the pretender?”
“Oh, yes, there is a true king,” said the lady. “My nephew, I suppose you’d say, but his mother was a mari-morgan, a creature of the sea. After Keris was lost, he went looking for the sea-drakes and has not returned. In the meantime, here was that fool calling himself king, growing ever stronger, going mad, learning the secrets of this castle all the while, searching for a unicorn to guide him. And then he burst into the mortal lands like the plague. If he’d kept more of his sanity, you and we would have been in real danger.”
Anne was watching this lady warily. “The danger felt real enough.” Her arm was still about Isabeau’s shoulders.
“And yet there you are, alive,” said the lady. “And that is a famous sword in your lover’s hand. Aren’t you pleased?”
Anne said nothing, though she felt her face color. She knew perfectly well that Henri was giving Louis a censorious look behind her back. She said, “What is the castle of Never-Was?”
“The royal seat,” said the lady airily. Anne blinked, and for an instant, in a different layer of light, she thought she saw the throne, made of stone and living trees. Then it was gone. The lady’s eyes on her were sharp and knowing. “Most mortals who come here never attain the throne room, but wander dreaming until they die. Some win past it. Some even drink in friendship with the korriganed. Will you dine with us, children?”
Anne said, “Did Julien Moreau find the throne room?”
“No,” said the lady. “Not the true one, though he thought he had. But his greatest desire was for power, and his sorcery was very great, and so he did not die. Above all things he wished to find lost Keris, but that he never could. When he asked the mere for a prophecy, the lady in the water said that only a woman he offered for in marriage would find the way. So he took women to wife and slew them when they could not do it, and each time his mind broke a little more, until all his paths in the Lost Lands led to the same room, where he had buried his dead.” The lady’s face was quite unmoved.
Anne said, “How can we be sure that you will not also drive us to madness if we drink together? All our stories of the korriganed are of tricks and cruel deceptions.”
There were smiles all round that ring of watching faeries, smiles full of teeth. But the lady said, “We do not deceive so much as live in a land whose nature is too far removed from the nature of men. I think your tales also note that we are unable to lie.”
Anne exchanged glances with Henri and Louis. She asked, “Will time pass in its accustomed way? We cannot feast for a hundred years. Or even one.”
“That, I think, is still in my power to promise,” said the lady.
* * *
So they sat down at a renewed banquet, though there was no dish or meat that any of the mortals recognized. At the end of it, Isabeau and Elesbed fell asleep, leaning on each other. Henri and Louis had cobbled together some common language with the korriganed and stood with their knights in the open center of the great hall, making fencing passes with their swords and sometimes laughing.
Anne looked the lady straight in the eye and said, “Where is the drowned city? Where, then, is Keris?”
The korrigan-queen looked profoundly unsurprised that Anne had asked. “In the Lost Lands, of course.”
“But can it be brought back to the mortal world, as other lost things have been?”
“Who is to say?” said the queen. “It is not like any other place. I do not know who first built it—some people long gone. There was only the city, standing empty, in the far reaches of the Lost Lands, where I found it in my wandering days. I pulled it into the living world, to be a gift for my daughter. But I am sure there was sorcery in its first making, and sorcerers numbered always among its citizens. Its queen was my child, Malgven, after she was married to Gralon Meur.” Anne heard pain in her voice. “But Malgven bore her daughter and died of it, and that daughter, Ahèz, grew to love pleasure and cruelty, and to make no distinction between them. The city had become a place of horrors when my nephew bathed in the blood of a sea-drake and put forth his strength and took the city out of the bay and back into the Lost Lands. There it remains, forever, just as it was on the night it disappeared.”
“And if I wish to draw it into the world?” said Anne. “If Moreau’s prophecy was a true one, then I might be able.”