Ascendant (41 page)

He nodded without looking up. “But don’t you see, Astrid? That’s how I know I love you.” And now he raised his eyes to mine and started moving forward again. “It’s not the Remedy when it comes to you. I liked you before, I like you still, and I like you even knowing I can never have you. Knowing that until you’re cured of your brain damage, I can never, ever be with you, because we have to protect you… .”

I lifted my sword again. “I am
not
some delicate flower. I do
not
need your protection.
Ever!
Do you hear me?”

He backed away, lifting his hands in surrender. “No, of course not. That’s what I love about you! You’ve always been so brave, so strong. You saved my life. I just mean, the magic … your mind …” He trailed off. “God, your eyes. They’re hypnotic, Astrid… .”

“Shut up!” I cried. Everything out of his mouth was a lie. Isabeau had told me the truth. All he wanted was a taste of power. Just not the way I’d thought.

Silence reigned in the bedroom while I worked this all out in my battered brain. Poor Neil. All along he’d been out there looking for hunters, and Brandt had been tracking them down using unicorn magic and seducing them out from underneath us. And as sickening as it was, what could we say? These girls were allowed to make their own choices. We couldn’t begrudge them relinquishing their magic, whether they did it with someone they truly loved, like Zelda had planned to, or some actaeon off the street who offered to unburden them of—

Wait. Why? Why was Isabeau trying to sabotage Cloisters recruitment? Marten had struck a deal with a rogue band of kirin: disable the Llewelyn hunters in the Order, and they would assist him in his quest for power. But Isabeau
was
a Llewelyn, and she’d protected me from Brandt’s advances. Plus, I knew the einhorns. They were nothing like kirin. It made no sense.

“I don’t get it,” I said at last. “Why would you do this? What are you gaining from it, except for random one-night stands?”

“I told you,” he said, “I’m an actaeon.”

“I know what an actaeon is. I just don’t see why it’s a job.”

He smiled then. “Then no, Astrid. You have no idea what an actaeon is.”

I leaned on my sword hilt and placed a hand on my hip. “Excuse me? I’m in the Order of the Lioness. We were the ones to come up with the name. We were the ones to kill them with our zhi whenever we caught them in the act.”

He sighed. “You think that’s all they did? Just deflowered your hunters? You think that they risked life and limb for a little sex? No, Astrid. That’s so naive. They were thieves.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of virginity?”

“Of the Remedy.”

I dropped the sword to the floor.

He went on. “There’s nothing magical about virginity. There’s nothing special about sleeping with a virgin.
Usually
. But people like you … you’re different. You know that. The virginity of a unicorn hunter
is
magical. And so is taking it.”

I backed against the wall as the room swirled around me. I almost wished the fog would come back, but my mind was as clear as a bell.

Phil, standing in the center of the Cloisters chapter house the night after she was raped, surrounded by bones that would never sing for her again.
But that was enough. For whoever decides these things
.

Seth disappearing on the Gordian dime.

And then, a few short weeks later, Marten Jaeger, cowering before the karkadann in the courtyard, pleading for his life.
I know the secret of the Remedy
.

Last winter, Isabeau in the study, telling me the crazy story of the men who used to sleep with virgins to cure their illnesses.

And then, worst of all, tonight: Isabeau, down in the lab, looking me in the eye and telling me how rare the ingredients for the Remedy were.

Brandt was still watching me.

“You get it from us,” I said. “The secret of the Remedy isn’t the unicorns.”

“No,” he said. “It’s the unicorn hunters.”

U
nicorns were a dime a dozen, Brandt had explained. A thousand doses of the Remedy could be made from the materials gained from a single unicorn. Claudia, Isabeau’s mother, had figured out the basic formula by piecing together the medical memoirs of her hunter ancestors. Not that it mattered much to her, as there had been no unicorns around. But no one had been able to interpret the
meaning
of some elements of the formula, particularly the mystical
viriditas
.

And perhaps it meant nothing. After all, many old medieval cures were utter nonsense, and sometimes so-called important steps in medieval alchemy were nothing but a waste of time.

I remembered Cory and Isabeau’s conversation about Hildegard von Bingen and her obsession with
viriditas
, which literally meant “greenness.” And now—only now—I remembered how quickly Isabeau had changed the subject.

For Hildegard,
viriditas
had meant the power of God, the power of life, freshness, vitality. For a long time after the Reemergence, Brandt explained, Gordian scientists had feared their inability to create the Remedy was a product of the
freshness
of the unicorn materials they used. Maybe the unicorn specimens had to be alive. Or maybe they could be gathered only in a particular season, or maybe they needed some special green herb to stir into the compounds.

Nothing worked.

And then, about nine months ago, Isabeau had a brain wave. One she shared with her husband. Once upon a time, there was a disease called “greensickness,” which was actually just a type of anemia that most often affected young women. Another name for this disease was “virgin’s sickness,” and the cure was believed to be—wait for it—deflowering. Because naturally, the cause of their illness was the burden of their greenness, of their virginity.

Maybe, Isabeau had thought, the
viriditas
of Hildegard wasn’t the same thing listed in the formula of the Order of the Lioness. Maybe the creation of the Remedy required a mystical alchemy involving the virgin hunters themselves.

Marten took that idea and ran with it. Enter Seth and Phil. Isabeau was horrified at his methods, but she couldn’t argue with the results. They’d discovered the secret to the Remedy.

Even though it would never do them any good.

Magic could not be synthesized. They’d never be able to make more than a few vials of the Remedy. There was only one dose per unicorn hunter.

It was midnight in France, and I stood at the fence of the einhorns enclosure. I’d kicked Brandt out of my room and changed into more appropriate breaking-and-entering clothes. I needed to be with the unicorns tonight. I needed to get my head on straight.

But the code for the lockbox had been changed. I was trapped outside the fence. I began wandering the perimeter, pressing my face up against the links and willing the unicorns to draw closer. They’d never be able to cross the boundary, of course—I’d never be able to touch them—but out here, with the magic, things already seemed clearer. I would never accept the Remedy.

How could I? Brandt had been right. Actaeons were thieves. They stole the …
essence
of the hunter’s virginity and they kept the resulting Remedy all to themselves. That was why the hunters, as a group, hated actaeons. If a hunter chose to leave on her own, if she chose to marry and settle down—
her
Remedy was her own to keep, to sell or use as she saw fit. The Remedy we’d used on Brandt had been the one belonging to Clothilde Llewelyn.

These girls, these hunters that Brandt approached—they knew nothing of the Remedy. All they knew was that Brandt was sweet, clean, and discreet. He’d unburden them of their powers and disappear into the night.

Bearing with him something that might one day save their lives.

Isabeau had lied to me. She hadn’t kept the secret of the Remedy from me due to a technicality of not being able to reproduce it. She’d kept it from me because she knew I wouldn’t approve of her actions.

I could not use it. The Remedy didn’t belong to Isabeau to dispense to her friends. It belonged to each person who had helped make it possible to create.

No, the only option was to try it myself. I could ask Isabeau to do it for me. I’d sleep with someone—Brandt maybe—then make the Remedy, then take it and … see what happened.

But what if it didn’t work? Isabeau had already warned me she had no proof that the Remedy was potent against brain damage. And if I lost my virginity, I’d also lose the magic. If the Remedy didn’t work, I’d be stuck in my fog forever.

Was that a chance I was willing to take? Even if it meant the only alternative was stealing someone else’s personal cure?

Sacrificing Angel was bad enough. I couldn’t sacrifice a sister-at-arms.

“Who’s there?” said a voice. I turned, and with the clarity of unicorn magic, I saw René standing about twenty yards down the fence line.

“Astrid,” I said, and stopped.

He came forward, a beam from his flashlight cutting through the night. Its glare hit my eyes. “Astrid,
le chasseur des licornes
. You look terrible.”

“A wild unicorn,” I said. I circled my ravaged face with my finger. “See, this is why you shouldn’t be so eager to see these monsters released.”

“That does not deter me,” he replied. “If you were to go inside and see them, you would know that they do not have much time left. They cannot survive any longer in captivity. You must help us.”

“I
must
not do anything.”

He came closer and examined me, my shorn head, my long scar. “I have looked you up, Astrid Llewelyn. I have seen your mother on the television.”

“Well, that should be your answer right there.”

“And I have spoken to your cousin. I am a friend of Philippa.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. With the help of the magic, I could see him clearly in the dark. He did not look like he was lying.

“I am a conservationist, just like her. I have helped her with her battle to protect the unicorns. I have read her papers. I have listened to her cry when she thought her cousin—her best friend—would never wake up.”

My eyes began to burn, and I couldn’t trust myself to speak.

“I know you can make it over this fence with my help. I saw you do it the night the electricity went down. I want you to go inside and see the einhorns. You
will
help us,” he said. “I know you will.”

The dust puffed up around my feet as I landed hard in the dirt on the other side of the fence.

I turned to René. “How am I supposed to get out of here when I’m done?”

His face fell. “I had not thought of that.”

I rolled my eyes. Great. “Never mind. I’ll just tell Isabeau that I felt the need to spend the night with the unicorns.” She’d understand that. I’ll say it kept my head clear while I considered her offer.

An offer that I wished above anything I was the type of person to accept. But I could never live with myself if I wasted a dose of the Remedy when there was someone else out there who really needed it. Someone else it actually belonged to.

I crossed the electronic boundary and headed into the woods. Around me, the unicorns slept, not even stirring as I approached them. This was strange, like the sedation I’d felt in the labs with Angel. Had they somehow figured out a way to manage the unicorns’ rejuvenation-happy body chemistry?

As I reached the outermost trees of the grove, I sensed a new smell, one even stronger than unicorn. Rotting meat. A few steps farther in, I practically tripped over a burlap food bag filled with moldy steaks. Another sack lay nearby, torn to shreds, with scraps of meat scattered about the ground and going bad.

I stared at the food with a sense of growing unease. It was impossible that Gordian had taken to feeding them
too
much. So why was this here, going to waste?

A few yards on, the smell grew even stronger, and I came upon the corpse of an einhorn. Several days old from the look of it. Its bowels had been ripped out, and its insides were hollow and mushy. Its fur was patchy and its skin raw in places, but I didn’t know if that happened pre- or postmortem. Its face was covered in gore. I couldn’t recognize it … or I didn’t want to.

I sidestepped the mess and kept walking, trying not to gag on the stench. Did no one at Gordian know what was going on here? Food rotting while the unicorns turned on one another? I sensed a conscious presence off to the left and turned. The bushes rustled, and I saw a flash of white. More than that, I tasted familiar thoughts.

Fats. I called to her in my head, but she cowered deeper in the bushes. I wondered what she’d been through in the past few months, if she missed her baby, if she’d fought when they took him from her the way the re’em had fought us when she thought we’d threatened her offspring.

“Fats,” I cooed, and held out my arms.

Nothing. Her mind radiated only suspicion. I came closer, and she sprang out, snarling and tossing her head, then raced off. I saw her white hindquarters vanishing into the forest, her long, lionlike tail now replaced with a bobbed stump.