The 12 months is 1490. The peninsula of Brittany is fiercely unbiased, and would very a lot like to stay that manner. Nevertheless, having misplaced the Mad Battle two years prior, their duchess Anne is contracted to marry the French King, Charles VIII. When she does there can be no extra Brittany, solely France: an ideal engorged kingdom stretching from the Rhine within the east to the stormy seas within the west.
Anne, disarmingly fairly and politically calculating, doesn’t need this. She promised her father on his deathbed she would by no means wed France; collectively together with her bastard brother Henri, her cussed youthful sister Isabeau, and Nantes’ inhabitants of loyal Bretons, she has a plan: She is going to marry in secret Maximilien, King of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor, repay the Pope to uphold it, and use his armies to maintain Charles away. On a private degree, Anne advantages little; she’s going to nonetheless must dwell at her husband’s court docket, leaving her household and her verdant Brittany behind, her duties diminished to producing male heirs. However Brittany will survive; it’s the position of a sovereign to present all they’re for his or her individuals. (Isn’t it?)
It would work. There isn’t a love misplaced between Austria and France; with time to maneuver his armies and put together, Maximilien will defend her. However the French envoy is urgent for marriage now. Anne wants to purchase herself that point, which she does with a narrative of a unicorn noticed within the mysterious forests of Brocéliande: the noblest and rarest prey in all Europe, whose horn and conceal would dazzle the throne room of any king, and whose hunt requires a virgin of unimpeachable delivery and excessive advantage. Anne can’t even entertain speak of marriage if they’re to hunt it. After all she’s mendacity by her tooth—there hasn’t been a unicorn seen in over twenty years—however France’s envoy, the sunshine of greed in his eyes, buys it. Off they trot, Anne doing every part she will to sluggish the proceedings.
Anne means to make use of the magical nature of Brocéliande as not more than a defend, sending France on a wild goose (effectively, unicorn) chase and performing her proxy-marriage ceremony with Maximilien there, the place diviners can not see. However the magic of the Misplaced Lands is unpredictable and capricious: The convent the place Anne stays is beset by ghosts (“anaon”, the unquiet lifeless), the moon won’t shine appropriately, and, deep within the glades of Brocéliande, what stumbles into Anne’s path however an actual unicorn, pursued by a fey hunt. Anne rides with it and units it free, however its passage leaves one thing else behind: a diviner named Julian Moreau, pale and skinny and horrified, who tells all of them he’s been trapped within the Misplaced Lands for 200 years.
Worse, the Misplaced Lands’ magic trails them again to Nantes, threatening to unravel all of Anne’s cautious planning. Emperor Maximilien is haunted in Flanders by his lifeless spouse Mary; he refuses to depart her behind to sail to Anne’s support. Omens of pouring saltwater and dashing flames herald—in keeping with Moreau—that the fey king additionally has marriage designs on the duchess of Brittany. And Moreau himself, a person steeped in that magic greater than anybody else residing, has his personal loyalties; it appears he could not have stumbled again to the human realm absolutely accidentally.
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The Unicorn Hunters
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Anne of Brittany was an actual individual, however her story is a tragic one. Born beneath the cloud of encroaching French rule, her sister Isabeau killed by pneumonia at eleven, she nonetheless tried at 13 to interrupt free via proxy marriage to Maximilian I of Austria. Nevertheless, Maximilian was too busy in Hungary to come back to her support; France invaded Brittany once more, laying siege to Rennes for 2 months, and at fifteen Anne was compelled to marry Charles VIII of France. She did every part she might by the wedding contracts to keep up Brittany’s independence, however she would spend the remainder of her life nearly repeatedly pregnant, and died at thirty-six. However, Katherine Arden writes in her afterword: “It’s not possible to examine this younger girl and never admire her… what if every part had been totally different? What would have occurred had this younger and courageous and passionate lady had the ability to chart her personal future?”
After all this jogged my memory of Man Gavriel Kay’s Written on the Darkish, one other alt-history story of medieval France that seeks to rewrite a few of its ignobler moments, on this case the assassination of Louis I, Duke of Orleáns, and the burning on the stake of Joan of Arc. It’s an attractive concept to take the injustices of historical past, right them, and permit the intelligent, cornered, outmatched poets and duchesses to win out over the forces of cash and energy and metal. Not fairly our personal world, not fairly fantasy; a world that solely might need been. However the place Written on the Darkish spans many years, keen on how occasions cascade and ripple by years, The Unicorn Hunters takes place over not more than two months, targeted on a single second in time that might have—ought to have—been higher.
Arden’s admiration for Anne of Brittany additionally shines by within the character work: Anne is a deeply charming, entertaining protagonist, making the most of those that underestimate her to navigate Fifteenth-century court docket politics. Even with out understanding her historical past when first studying The Unicorn Hunters, it’s not exhausting to need her to discover a manner out of the quagmire she’s been caught in.
Take her first interplay with the French envoy, La Trémoille, instructed from his perspective. Simply pages in the past we had been launched to Anne, cheerful however sober and with a pointy thoughts for statecraft, ready impatiently for Austria’s messenger. However La Trémoille is given a infantile banquet of candy meals and marchpane, and when Anne receives him she is breathless, blushing, and completely guileless, earnestly confiding in him the key of the unicorn. The reader is in on the joke—we snicker alongside at La Trémoille’s blithe ignorance that this empty-headed lady might have ulterior motives—and when the scene’s concluded, Anne’s brother Henri sums it up greatest: “Lord, how do you do it? One second my sister is there, and the subsequent there’s a ninny blushing on cue… [La Trémoille] had no concept what struck him.”
Levity, journey, and magic balances out the precarity of the ebook; Anne is endlessly outrunning a dozen totally different dooms (together with that of her real-life historical past), carrying all of Brittany on her shoulders. The Unicorn Hunters is a driving, atmospheric fantasy that, like its Misplaced Lands, will entice you after which not let go.
The Unicorn Hunters is revealed by Del Rey.
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