Ascendant

I
n
ancient times, royalty hunted unicorns for sport. They’d sally forth from their castle, gaily dressed, armed with spears, bows, knives, dogs, and their secret weapon: a virginal maiden. Without this girl, the unicorn could never be captured. Noble of birth and pure of body and heart, the virgin would enter the depths of the forest and allow the men to tie her to a tree. There she would wait, chaste and silent and still, until the elusive unicorn, attracted to her as if by magic, would come forward and lay his head in her lap
.

Once the unicorn was subdued, the virgin would grasp its horn and trap the beast with her. The men would spring forth from their hiding place and stab the dangerous unicorn as it lay in the gentle virgin’s arms. And so it was that brave and glorious men would be able to kill a unicorn
.

Never mind that it was the virgin who had its blood on her hands
.

T
he unicorn drew its last breath. Within its chest, its heart shuddered and stopped. Twenty yards away, I felt it die, and the world settled into normality. Fire and flood ebbed, the tunnel widened, and my thoughts became my own. I lowered my bow and ran to the corpse—a human run, at a human pace, sluggish compared to the recent rush of hunter-granted speed. I bent over the body and withdrew my arrow. It had pierced both lung and heart, and the alicorn arrowhead was soaked in the almost black arterial blood of the kirin. Steam escaped from the corpse at my feet, twisting around my legs and mingling with the early-morning mist in the field. I wiped the arrow off on the grass and returned it to my quiver. These arrows were not so common that we could afford to lose any. I withdrew my knife and knelt by the unicorn’s head. Its yellow eyes were flat now, snuffed of the bloodthirst that had so recently filled us both.

I was carefully carving into its skull by the time Cory arrived. “Didn’t need backup after all, then?” she puffed.

“For a single kirin? “ I replied without looking up. Over the past month, carving out an alicorn had become a perfunctory postmortem operation. In through the eyesocket to the orbital, a quick jab up to break the nasal cavity, and then use the alicorn itself as leverage to shatter the top part of the skull and peel back the ligaments and skin protecting the base of the horn. In the early days, we’d simply sawed off as much horn as we could grab, but now we were trying to dig as deeply into their heads as possible to retain the venom reserves.

Cory watched me work. “How many kills does this make for you?

“On this hunt?” I asked, and cracked the alicorn free.

“Four?”

“Four?”

Cory said nothing. I swung my braid back over my shoulder with my less-bloody hand and looked up at her. “You?”

“Zero.”

I stood. “Really?”

She gave me a tight smile. “Someone always marks them before I get a chance.”

If the statement was intended to sting, I could hardly feel it over the burn of alicorn venom. Beneath my sweater, droplets of sweat prickled the tender skin of the scar at the base of my shoulder blades. “It’s not a competition,” I said.

Her smile grew even more strained. “All evidence to the contrary.”

Together we doused the ground around the unicorn with flame-retardant, then took out our vials of gasoline and lit the corpse on fire. It was the only way to deal with the bodies, we’d learned. No vultures, no bugs, would touch unicorn carrion. The bravest among us had even tried the meat, wondering if—as with so many other aspects of the animals—hunters possessed a higher tolerance to unicorns. But apparently the flesh was vile. Even Grace, who ate Roman-style tripe with glee, spat it out. So cremation was our only option.

Cory and I returned to the rendezvous point without further conversation. In all honesty, I couldn’t see the source of her pique. When I took a unicorn, it was more out of reflex than anything else. The magic took over. It was just me, my prey, and my weapon. There was no discussion with the other hunters about whose “turn” it was. Hesitation might result in one of us ending up dead. A unicorn moved too fast for us to stop and think about how many kills we’d each gotten. If I had a shot, I’d take it. The alternative was a horn in the gut.