Ascendant (45 page)

She examined the label then blushed. “Gordian Pharmaceuticals. What is this, payment?”

“The opposite, actually.” So I told her about the Remedy, and Brandt’s part in it. She didn’t look me in the eye the entire time I spoke.

“I didn’t want to be a unicorn hunter,” she said when I was finished. “He told me how dangerous it was. He told me about the wounds he’d seen… .” She looked at me and shrugged. “I cannot say that seeing you makes me regret my choice.”

I grimaced.

She bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I did not mean to offend you. Your life looks as if it is very difficult.”

“No,” I said, “I understand. And I envy you. There are reasons I cannot …”

Marikka raised her eyebrows. “Oh, really? Me, too,” she said. “But you just make the decision and go through with it. It wasn’t so bad.”

She meant sex with Brandt. Which was a topic so awkward I’d hoped never to bring it up. I wondered if Brandt had known that Marikka was my half sister when he’d bedded her or if Isabeau had just given him a name and an address and he’d gone off on his hunt. Perhaps we weren’t so very different, he and I? After all, no one had ever told us hunters about the lives of the unicorns we were sent to kill. No one had stopped to question if the re’em on the mountain was just protecting her young, rather than viciously murdering any hiker who happened to wander by.

“And anyway,” Marikka said, “I don’t have time for unicorn-hunting training. I’m studying to be a physician.”

The revelation hit me harder than Jumps’s hoof in my gut. I took a deep breath and centered myself. “How wonderful.”

Well, the coffee was done, the Remedy was delivered, and it was well past time for me to leave this poor woman alone and go find some park to cry my eyes out in.

She reached across the table and placed her hand over mine. “Truly, you might consider doing it as well.”

I blinked at her. “Doing what?”

“Sleeping with a man. It isn’t so bad, and it will release you from your duty. It’s very odd. It’s been many years since I ever thought of myself as a virgin. The magic has a very old-fashioned philosophy, doesn’t it? Very limited.”

My mouth formed a little O. So
that’s
what she’d thought I meant when I said there was a reason I was still eligible. The lesbian loophole. “I see,” I said. Well, who’d have thought that? There was knowledge that might come in handy for two hunters I knew. “No, I’m just a plain old virgin. No boyfriend
and
no girlfriend.”

“Oh.” Marikka leaned back. “That is very sweet.”

“Yeah.” We sat in some more awkward silence.

“Are you … all right? “ Marikka asked me. “I mean, do you have a place to stay?”

“I have a train ticket,” I said, gesturing to my backpack. “Lots of Remedy to deliver to lots of distant relations.”

“Right.” She nodded, then sat up straight in her chair. “I have something to show you. You’ll like this. Wait here.” She dashed from the room and I heard her feet on the stairs, then an opening door, then more stairs.

Now was my chance. I should leave. I should leave now before I was totally overcome with jealousy for my sweet, pretty, intelligent, studying-to-be-a-doctor lesbian half sister. I should leave before she caught me wailing hysterically at her kitchen table. I pillowed my arms on the table and laid my head on top of them, the material of my hood blocking out the morning light.

The sense of magic prickled across my scalp and down my spine, radiating outward along the whorls of the scar on my back. With it came serenity, like the feel of cool cotton sheets beneath your body after a long fever. I took a deep breath and raised my head as Marikka came into the room with a linen-wrapped bundle in her hands. Magic sputtered from the package like sparks from a dying fire, and my whole body yearned to snatch it from her hands.

“My grandmother had this hanging over our mantel,” she said as she began to undo the bits of twine holding it together. “But I put it away in the attic when I redecorated. I think it belonged to that ancestor of ours. The Llewelyn.”

Marikka pulled back the linen coverings. Within lay a small horn bow, gray and shiny with age. Perhaps four feet long unstrung, with a slight recurve and a grip made of creamy wood worn to a shine.

“There were arrows once, too,” she said, “but I can’t remember where I put those.”

I reached out to touch the bow with trembling fingers. “It’s beautiful.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Marikka said. “I don’t like weapons very much. But here, look. It’s carved.” She turned the bow on its side and indeed, I could see a faded engraving curving down the inside of both limbs, the part that would face the hunter whenever she went to shoot.

ANIMAM COGNOSCERE ANIMALIS

“Do you know what it says?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yes. It’s a prayer.” Or a wish, or maybe just a hope.

The hope I’d had when I stood on the side of the road in the Alps and watched my einhorns disappear forever. The prayer I’d murmured every night above Angel as he slept in the enclosure. The only thing I’d wanted since the moment I’d been forced to kill my first unicorn and known both that I’d had no choice and that I hated nothing more. It was the dream I hadn’t wanted to admit I’d held, the power I was just beginning to wield.

This was Clothilde’s bow. I had the whole set: knife, sword, bow. And now I knew why she made the choices she had. Now I knew why, despite my training, despite the danger, despite all the hideousness and savagery I’d somehow managed to survive, that I was making the same choices. There were two sides to being a unicorn hunter, two gifts that made up our magic, and neither should take precedence over the other.

DOMITARE UNICORNE INDOMITUM:
To Vanquish the Savage Unicorn.

ANIMAM COGNOSCERE ANIMALIS:
To Know the Soul of the Beast.

 

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