Ascendant (29 page)

“Give them my love, too,” I said. “And if at all possible, don’t tell Phil about the whole Brandt-nightclub thing.”

“Right.” Cory grinned. “I think there’s enough to talk about without getting into that.”

After they left, I did my rounds at the einhorn enclosure, then went back to my room to study, without much success. There were too many thoughts whirling through my head. The karkadann, Cory and Valerija, the meaning of our magic, Cory’s mysterious illness, my fight with Giovanni … At long last, I gave up and wandered downstairs to find Isabeau in her library, reading.

She looked up from her book as I entered. “I was hoping I’d see you again tonight. I am afraid I may have given you the wrong impression this morning. I think you are very responsible, Astrid. I hope you know that.”

“Thank you,” I said stiffly.

“And I know that things that seem inappropriate are not always so, just as you said. You are not a stupid girl. And I do not expect you to make stupid choices.”

“Brandt is a stupid choice?” Not that I was
choosing
Brandt.

She gave me an incredulous look. “I know that Brandt is very handsome.” When I said nothing, she went on. “But what of this boyfriend of yours in America?”

“Giovanni,” I said. “He’s great. There’s nothing going on with Brandt and me, you know. He’s my ex. We’re just friends.”

Isabeau closed her book and looked up at me. “Your Giovanni. Does he respect your duties as a unicorn hunter?”

“Of course!” I said. “I wouldn’t be seeing him if that weren’t the case.”

“Hmm.” Isabeau tilted her head to one side. “He sounds like a very nice young man. I’m sure it is not easy for him.”

I looked away. “Easier if he lives on the other side of the ocean.”

“Indeed. But he is devoted to you?”

“I don’t know. I guess he is. He said he would be.”

“It is difficult to have a long-distance boyfriend. Especially when you are both so young. And the fact that he respects your role … He sounds very special, Astrid.”

Way to make me feel even more guilty. “Thank you.”

“Brandt would not,” she stated, and returned to her book.

My mouth dropped open. “I—”

She didn’t look up from her pages as she spoke. “I tell you this not as a warning, Astrid, but as a reminder. If at any time you wish to leave your life as a hunter behind …”

“I don’t.” I said. “I … made a commitment.”

“You are too young to make a commitment that will last you the rest of your life.”

“Isn’t that what I’m doing, though?” I asked, my voice unable to conceal the bitterness. “If I die, if I’m maimed—won’t that last the rest of my life, too?”

She nodded. “This is true. And you
can
leave. Many have. But if you do make this decision, do not go to Brandt. Be with your boyfriend, for he must love you. And you,
ma petite chère
, deserve to be loved.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so after a reasonable amount of awkward silence, I asked her what she was reading.

“A funny old book of medical cures,” she said. “Not unlike the book of Hildegard’s. As I said earlier, I find it quite amusing that these old medics were wrong as often as they were right.”

“Have things changed much? “ I asked. “It seems that we’re still discovering that things we thought were good for you were bad or vice versa.” Like margarine and butter.

“True, Astrid.” She smiled. “I was just reading the most horrible passage, though. Ironic, given our discussion. I was reading about an old wives’ tale that said a man could cure himself of venereal disease by sleeping with a virgin girl.” She shuddered. “Can you imagine?”

Unfortunately, I could. People could be real sickos. Phil could attest to that.

“The virgin’s purity was thought to be so overwhelming that it would cleanse her lover of his sickness.” Isabeau clucked her tongue. “And yet all it would really do was confer upon her the same suffering.”

I made a face. “That’s so gross. I’m glad people don’t think like that anymore.”

Isabeau looked down at the page. “Indeed.
Si près et pourtant si loin.”

So close and yet so far
.

I awoke to screams of anguish, and it was several moments after I sat up in bed that I realized the sounds were entirely inside my head. My body flushed with magic—a unicorn in the enclosure was crying out in pain. I hurried to dress and ran out the door.

The moon was obscured beneath a bank of clouds tonight, leaving the woods bathed in darkness. Were it not for the magic, I probably wouldn’t be able to see my knife hand in front of my face. The mind-scream continued as I rushed toward the enclosure and keyed the new combination into the gate locks. After the sabotage, police had come to question the protesters about their involvement, but I didn’t know if they’d made any arrests. And yet, were they to try breaking in again, surely it wouldn’t be a unicorn that ended up in pain? They were trying to save the animals, not hurt them. I remembered the man who’d thrown me his first aid kit after I’d hurt Breaker.

Once I’d crossed the electronic barrier, I could sense the einhorns more clearly. Many were awake, their thoughts focused on the suffering one: Fats.

Had she fallen? Had she been attacked by one of the others? Had her illness suddenly turned acute?

Another scream rent the night air, one that existed in the physical world. It was followed by bellows and grunts, and I banked right and ran into the center of the woods, toward the origin of the noises.

By the time I arrived, it was all over. Fats lay huddled and panting beneath the wilting leaves of a scraggly bush, and nestled between her twining hooves was a tiny, hornless einhorn, its downy, paper-soft hide still slick and shiny.

I stopped dead, and the knife fell from my hands.

The baby’s eyes were shut, tissue-thin lids closed over impossibly large black orbs that jutted from either side of its face. It mewled, snuffling at its mother’s belly until it found her teats. Fats licked the baby all over, nosing it softly until it was pushed fully against the warmth of her body.

I dropped to my knees in the leaves, tears springing to my eyes.

Fats lifted her head and faced me, blinking slowly and holding my gaze as I struggled to speak. Some magic greater than unicorns choked my senses, burned everything but the vision of this infant, drowned all but the swell of protectiveness emanating from Fats and flowing straight into me.

I crawled toward mother and baby on shaking limbs, feeling as faint as the first time I was poisoned by a karkadann. There was nothing else in the world beyond these woods and these einhorns. The moment in the pool dissolved; my awkward, aggravating conversation with Giovanni melted away; the thwack of the arrows into the heart of the target faded; Cory’s bombshells vanished into the air. I had never existed before this moment; there was nothing more important than this unicorn.

It was only in some dim, distant, human part of my brain that I realized these thoughts were not my own. They belonged to Fats. She was
making
me feel them. Her child, her love, her fundamental instinct to protect this infant at all costs.

I drew in a breath and reached out my hand to touch the baby.

Yes. It was as soft as I’d thought, and as warm, and as sacred. Fats curved her neck over the child, the blinking lights on her collar a crude barrier when she nuzzled against its skin. She turned to face me again, only a few inches away this time.

“Yes,” I said aloud, though this was nothing like talking to the karkadann. There were no words in my brain to translate, just a vital need. “I’ll help you. I’ll protect her.”

Fats sighed and lowered her head, exhausted by her ordeal. And I stood guard over mother and child all night, watching the baby twitch and nuzzle against its mother, watching until the first rays of dawn broke through the trees and made the baby’s bare white skin glow as if lit from within. It was then that I named it.

Angel.

O
f course, Angel was a terrible name for a man-eating monster, but somehow that didn’t matter as the days passed and I kept up with my secret vigils. I saw the baby through Fats’s eyes—it was tiny, not terrible; sweet, not savage. The short days and long nights of winter made it easy for me to keep an eye on mother and baby, and I took to regularly spending my evenings in the enclosure. With Brandt still out of town and Isabeau increasingly wrapped up in her research, there was no one to talk to after my classes were over and no one keeping a close eye on whether or not I slept in my own bed.

The dangers to Angel and Fats were twofold. With the constant food shortage among the einhorns, it was difficult for any individual unicorn to get enough to nourish itself, let alone enough to sustain a nursing mother. Though Isabeau had increased the unicorns’ food allotment twice on my request, it seemed that no amount would keep these animals satisfied. They’d already consumed all the creatures—rabbits, badgers, stoats—that had once lived in the forest. They needed a larger territory to hunt and survive.

This difficulty was a product of their species—traditionally, it was known that unicorns could not be captured, only killed. Bucephalus had even told me of his suffering when he rode with Alexander. The truth was, they would wither in captivity, even if they were given all the fresh meat in the world.

And what of Angel, born into a cage?

Above all, it was vital that no one in the château discover there was a new unicorn in the enclosure. I didn’t know if I could bear to place an electronic collar around the baby’s neck, but I was positive I would never be able to inject Angel with any of the new serums I knew the Gordian scientists would soon be ready to try again. Angel may live on their lands, but I balked at the idea that the tiny unicorn was their property.

Then there was the danger it faced from the other einhorns. More than once I’d noticed some of the other unicorns skulking nearby as I stood guard over mother and child. Some seemed only curious—like Breaker, Stretch, and Tongue—but there were others, like that angry one, whose thoughts tended toward the violent. I worried what might happen if the angry one came upon them when I wasn’t there. Fats was weak all the time, losing weight rapidly and constantly exhausted from feeding her baby; and Angel was utterly defenseless with no horn. Defenseless, fat, and probably very tender.

I asked Isabeau to give the animals even more food.

“With the colder weather now, they need to bulk up and protect themselves from the elements,” I argued. “Also, I’d be happy to take it to them myself.” Perhaps a peace offering of massive amounts of meat would keep the more threatening einhorns at bay.

Isabeau agreed, and the strategy seemed to work—for a while at least. The einhorns ignored Angel in favor of the chunks of meat I threw at them, and I was able to give Fats a larger portion of food that was strictly her own and didn’t require scrambling to snatch out of the jaws of the other unicorns. She began to lose that famished look that had turned her name into such an irony, and I rested better during the few hours of sleep I caught each morning between the dawn and my first classes with Lauren.

Angel grew like a weed, with silky white hair and spindly legs so long I began to entertain myself with notions of the unicorn’s paternity.
Stretch, you rascal
. After a few weeks of nursing, the baby began eating regurgitated meat from its mother’s mouth, which was a lot more difficult to witness, but still fascinating from a scientific standpoint.

I suppose after you’ve seen unicorn guts, unicorn vomit isn’t so disturbing.

And meanwhile, there were those stretches of dreamtime, alone in the woods with nothing but Fats’s soft thoughts and the near-silent flicker of the baby’s impressions in my brain. I immersed myself in both, marveling at the way they swirled together, their connections to each other far stronger than my magic-induced link. My gift had nothing on Fats’s natural ability. The tiniest twitch of Angel’s consciousness registered to Fats, even if they weren’t together, even if she was out foraging for food she’d never find, leaving Angel alone in the brush with nothing but a besotted unicorn hunter for protection.

Though I recognized the influence Fats’s own maternal instincts had on my emotions, I allowed it to continue. After all, this was my job. I was supposed to be attuned to the state of the unicorns. When they were scared or anxious, I remained alert.

When they were calm and passive, I could relax and devote my mind to other things. I was employed as a unicorn keeper, and in protecting the baby, I was keeping the unicorns as best I could.

The fact that I was keeping this one a secret from my employer? Well, let’s leave that aside for now.

“You seem tired,” Isabeau said to me one morning in mid-December as she found me staring bleary-eyed into the coffee press.