Chapter 1The French envoy came to Nantes on the last Sunday of Eastertide, when all the Breton court were still at church, when the hiss of rain and the pealing of bells swallowed the hoofbeats and shouts of his company. The court heard Mass unaware of his coming; they schemed and gossiped and took communion just as always, and no one from the pot-boy to the duchess knew that from that year, Christendom would never be the same.
Rain does not fall in Brittany so much as hover, filling the air with vapor, so that the courtiers emerged from the cathedral and were instantly wrapped in cloud. The bells overhead rang loud enough to shake the raindrops crooked. Arrayed in their Easter best, the court glowed in the gray light, though there were fewer of them than there should have been. Many had died in the war with France, many more were still far away awaiting ransom, like ambulatory notes payable in their conquerors’ châteaux.
At the heart of the crowd walked a girl with merry eyes, a floating violet in a sea of cut-velvet and silk hose, cloth-of-silver and the smell of myrrh, concentrating as she held her skirt clear of puddles. This was Anne, duchess regnant of Brittany, her hair caught back in a diadem and a pearl-studded crespine, though she wore no other jewels. They had all been sold to pay her garrisons.
She did not know that a French envoy had come to the castle. Indeed, she was expecting a messenger from quite another direction, and that expectation lit an already animated face. She and her maids-of-honor were playing a game of riddles as they walked.
“I am in all things and through all things,” declaimed the prosiest among them. “I am in candles and lamps and water and dice. I am the word of God; I am the blessing of mankind. I am—”
“Divination,” answered four brisk voices. All of Anne’s maids-of-honor were clever.
Another of them began a different riddle: “Three pears hang, three monks pass, each takes one, yet two remain, how—”
Jean de Rieux had been named Anne’s guardian by her father while the latter lay breathing blood on his deathbed, and now he watched the riddle-game with an indulgent, anxious face. He was of far too sober a mind to make up riddles. He said, low, “Highness, have you seen the diviner this day? What news?”
“Of my messenger? None yet,” murmured Anne, leaning on his arm to dodge another puddle. Rain filled the air; she breathed it in. “I shall ask when I have dry feet. But knowing where he is will not bring him here the faster.”
De Rieux shook his head. “I have warned you against overconfidence, my daughter. This—your—arrangement—” He stumbled on the right word, so great was the secrecy, though the clamor of bells overhead muffled their voices. “It is a notable victory, but you must not sell the bear’s skin before it has been killed.”
“Or in this case married. Let us all pity the bear,” said Anne, and smiled impishly up at him. Ducal dignity could not quite hide her pleased excitement, and she was not yet twenty. “I have not been hasty.”
Before De Rieux could answer, Anne’s sister Isabeau darted up to them, dragging her soaking hem straight through the puddles. She was ten years old, restless as a baby duck; her dark hair had already begun the inevitable process of slithering loose of its careful plaits. She skidded across the stones, De Rieux caught her, and Anne said, “Isabeau, unless you intend to man the battlements yourself, I beg you will not bankrupt me keeping you in shoes. We must pay our soldiers.”
“Give me a spear and I will guard the wall,” retorted Isabeau, swinging an imaginary weapon. She hardly came to De Rieux’s shoulder, barely shorter than Anne, though Isabeau gave every promise of overtaking her. The child was all long, awkward limbs, while Anne was small and glossy as a cat in a dairy.
“Will you? I pity the French,” said Anne, tweaking her sister’s nose.
Isabeau butted against Anne’s shoulder and smiled up at De Rieux, who was her guardian too. They were all crossing the drawbridge that divided the city of Nantes from the vast new ducal keep that Bretons called, simply, the castle of the dukes of Brittany.
Half-tuned music and laughter trickled from the castle windows and from the wall-top as a bright stream of courtiers passed beneath the barbican and crossed the courtyard. The rain was falling faster. Isabeau had been dignified all through church, and Anne saw her trying to be stately again now, though she made a small, irrepressible skip before she caught herself.
Anne said, “Isabeau, if you cannot sit still this forenoon, let you put on a good cloak and run about the garden.” If Breton children were kept indoors when it rained, they’d never go outside. “Only be sure and bring me a posy when you return.”
Isabeau lit up. “Will you come with me and pick the flowers?”
“I will not.” The rain showed every sign of thickening, enough to lay sparkling droplets on her violet bodice. “I am going to sit by a nice fire, embroider my altar-cloth, entertain deputations, and gossip furiously.” She gave her sister an innocent look. “You may come in if you like and hem a kerchief.”
Isabeau shuddered and slipped away at once, turning back to wave, trailed by her exasperated governess and a tutor with a dripping nose.
It was only after Anne, smiling, had watched her sister go that she noticed something amiss in the courtyard.
A string of unfamiliar horses was being led to stabling; an unfamiliar equerry stood by the horse-troughs. A loud blend of strange voices echoed in the Guardhouse. Who had come? A glimpse of banner or shield, tabard or surcoat, might tell her, but rain hovered still, cold and close, blurring the world like a painter’s fingertips. Whoever had come, it could not be
her messenger. Her messenger was riding alone, in secret.
She and Jean de Rieux exchanged wary glances as they passed into the castle proper.
Her bastard half-brother, Henri, Baron of Avaugour, met Anne in her garderobe, a private chamber above the oratory, where she entertained her intimates and read documents, sewed and gossiped with her maids-of-honor. The light was gray near the windows, rosy near the fire, wavering in places from the interplay of rain and firelight. Rugs and wolfskin and tapestry softened the stone. Every courtier with a reason to wait upon the duchess was already in the room, passing news in low voices. Henri scythed straight through them all, a high, outraged color on his handsome face.
When Anne was crowned, some had whispered that it was a shame the duke’s only son could not inherit the duchy. Anything, they said, would have been better than giving the realm to poor Francis’s barely grown daughter. Henri just laughed at those people. “Lord,” he’d told Anne, “who’d want it? All those papers to read. Treaties and accounts and letters. And old men talking. You like it, you unnatural creature. They think you live only to frolic, but they don’t see the look in your eye when you preside over that council.”
Anne did like it. Although sometimes she envied Henri, whom God had made tall and broad, a knight and a man. Any or all of those attributes would have made her life much easier.
She crossed the garderobe and planted herself beside the hood of the enormous stone fireplace, nodding at the reverences of a dozen courtiers. “Tell me your news, brother. Who has come? I saw the horses below.”
De Rieux followed them to the fireplace, his mouth downturned and worried. Her council was scattered about the room: Clever, jolly Dunois, whose father was the famous Bastard of Orléans. The Comte de Comminges, and Montauban, her chamberlain, catlike and wary and intensely loyal. They all drifted unobtrusively nearer, while her maids-of-honor raised a chorus of chatter to mask their conversation.
“La Trémoille is here with a grand escort and messages from the French court,” said Henri, low. “He has had word via diviner and rode from the garrison at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier. I think he is come to insist upon the French marriage with no further delay.”
Anne went very still. Her mind instantly darted back to the day of her coronation. She had been too young and red-eyed, her father newly buried.
“I will not marry the king of France,” she had told De Rieux. She knew—everyone knew—that if she were to wed the king of France, there would be no more Brittany. Only France, from the Rhine to the stormy sea. “I promised my father.”
“What choice do you have?” De Rieux had rejoined, with some justice. Her father had lost a war over this very question, and died in the aftermath. Brittany was a fair green jewel rich with the wealth of the sea, and France was ten times its size and coveted it. Brittany was also Anne’s bridal portion, and would go to her husband when she married. Of course France wanted her.
“I will make myself new choices,” she had said then.
Copyright © 2026 by Katherine Arden. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
