‘Zar.’ I sat up, my head spinning. ‘You can’t do that to people.’
Zareen gave a faint, huffy sigh. ‘I didn’t quite mean to. It isn’t something I can do, ordinarily.’
And so I learned that it was my fault. ‘Oh,’ I said, sagging. ‘Sorry.’
‘It isn’t something anybody can do,’ Zareen added, and now she sounded wondering and intrigued. She approached Fenella’s body, and eyed the dead woman with interest. ‘I’ll have to write an essay on it.’
‘It is in contravention of at least six magickal laws,’ Emellana pointed out.
‘Right,’ said Zar. ‘Maybe not the essay.’
‘In the meantime,’ said Jay, with emphasis. ‘What do we do about it?’
‘Do?’ Zareen echoed, blinking.
‘We can’t just leave her like this.’
Zareen shrugged. ‘It takes a lot to keep soul and body separate, if the body hasn’t actually died. She will soon find her way back. Or George will do it for her.’
‘Are you sure the body hasn’t died?’
‘I didn’t do anything to it, so I don’t see how it would’ve.’ Zareen began to sound annoyed.
And exhausted.
Me, I was losing all the good-in-a-bad-way feelings I’d had, and was coming to feel just plain bad. Like I needed to run up a mountain without stopping, and at the same time sleep for about twelve years. ‘Um,’ I said.
Nobody heard me. An argument flared up between Jay and Zareen, he (not unjustifiably) condemning her for her lack of concern over Fenella’s death, she hotly defending her conduct. Emellana, apparently appointing herself as mediator, oversaw the debate; I heard her calm voice chime in from time to time.
It was Alban who picked me up off the floor, where I’d been reclining in a most undignified posture, and steadied me on my feet. ‘Are you all right?’ he said.
‘No,’ I whispered, though his touch soothed a little. ‘I think… I think I’m going to need Addie.’
‘Right.’
‘And quickly.’
Here’s a little secret.
When I first met Adeline, quite a few years ago, she’d been hanging out in a proper Unicorn Glade situated surprisingly close to Home.
When I say “unicorn glade”, I mean that the place was hidden deep inside a tucked-away magickal Dell; it had the full complement of enchanted waters (smelling of nectar), jewel-green grasses, endless sunshine, and singing bees; and its unicorn residents numbered at least five, one of which had been Addie.
No one at Home had ever mentioned there being a Unicorn Glade on the doorstep. Even Milady had never made reference to it, despite knowing all about my friendship with Addie. To this day, I don’t know whether that’s because it is considered to be a deep, dark secret, or whether no one else actually knows about it.
Anyway, I haven’t been back since that one day I went there with the bag of chips, and came out with a new friend. I tried once, but I could not find it again.
Alban got me out of Ashdown Castle. I don’t really know how; I wasn’t entirely with it, anymore. There was rapid motion as I was swept out into the darkening evening beyond the castle’s gates, half-carried by my long-suffering friend, for I was too fascinated by the effects of my overabundant magick to remember quite how to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Every time I took a step, something happened. Flowers bloomed beneath my feet, grew toothy mouths, and tried to bite my ankles. Sparks flew up from the ground, and did their best to set fire to our clothes. I almost drowned in chocolate, when the grass under my feet abruptly turned molten and cocoa-scented, and I had to be hauled out — only to emerge with no trace of chocolate on my shoes.
It went on in this style, proving that while the effects of my peculiar state might be unpredictable and inconsistent, they were certainly going to be persistent. And inconvenient. I definitely heard Alban swearing, at one point.
‘Ves,’ he said, after a little while, and we stopped. We’d gone far enough away from Ashdown as to be out of sight. ‘The pipes? Time to summon Addie.’
‘Right.’ I dug around in my blouse, fumbling everything with trembling fingers.
Politely, Alban looked away.
‘Ha.’ I found the pipes, and held them triumphantly aloft. A stray beam of dying sunlight caught them, and they lit up like… well, like a magickal artefact of indescribable power.
‘Good,’ said Alban, and waited. When I remained where I was, gazing in frozen wonder upon the beauty of my syrinx pipes, he cleared his throat and said: ‘Go on. Play them. Play Addie’s song.’
I did that. The song got a bit more complicated than usual, as though the pipes were more or less playing themselves. ‘Wow,’ I said, when I/we had finished. ‘I’ve never been that good!’
Alban grinned. ‘You’re a mythical creature of limitless power. You’ll have to get used to that.’
‘That isn’t the idea, though, is it?’ I said, watching in fascination as the pipes morphed in my hand. ‘I’m to be drained of magic, like a wet dish cloth.’ The pipes became a conch shell in mother-of-pearl; a magickal Silver thimble; a miniature kingfisher, clad in gold; a rose the size of my fist, made of pure ruby.
In came Addie with a swoosh of her pearly-white wings, and a quadruple thud as her silvery hooves hit the turf. She dashed over to me and shoved me with her nose.
‘I’m fine,’ I lied, and all but fell on her.
She shoved me again, rudely. This wasn’t concern. This was anger.
‘Fine, I’m sorry,’ I babbled. ‘I know I took you far away from home, and got you captured by nefarious evil-doers, and then kind of ignored you for a while afterwards—’
She stepped on my foot. I paused to emit a faint shriek.
‘—but it isn’t that I don’t love you,’ I gasped, my eyes watering. ‘And I don’t even have any fried potato products with me to prove it, but I swear I will make up for that, Addie.’
Carefully, Alban extended a hand and patted Addie’s silky mane. Under his touch, she calmed maybe just a fraction.
‘I need help,’ I told her. ‘Look.’ I held out my left hand to show her. I still had a hand, which was nice, only the skin and muscle and bone was gone. I had a jewelled claw of a hand instead, and if I wasn’t crazy to even imagine it (always a possibility) I might have said it was wrought out of magickal Silver. My fingernails had a most attractive Silvery sheen.
‘This kind of crap is not going to stop,’ I said to Addie. ‘I also may have helped rip a woman into two separate pieces not long ago — physical and corporeal — and though Zar swears she’ll be fine I’m not sure, Addie. I’ve become a danger, old girl, and I don’t like it.’ A tear ran down my cheek, turning to something solid on its way down, and fell into the grass in a brief flash of bright gold.
‘No one’s going to blame you, Ves,’ said Alban, reaching for me.
‘I’m blaming me,’ I retorted. ‘I may not be at fault for my present condition — it’s not like I asked for it — but I am responsible for the outcome.’
‘Okay, but still—’ said Alban.
‘And what kind of a life can I have in this state? I can’t even hug a person without turning them into a sodding hippogriff.’
Alban, unable to produce a rational response, merely raised his brows.
‘It’s happened,’ I assured him. ‘Well, kind of. At the tower Jay was growing feathers and all that, so I hugged him out of it. But we’re all backwards out here, and it isn’t that Jay isn’t magickal enough for the environment, it’s that I am far too much so, so probably the effects will be the other way around too, right?’
‘Ves,’ said Alban, gently. ‘You’re stalling.’ He looked at me with such heart-melting compassion, I could’ve cried.
Forget that. I did cry, especially when he pushed me gently in Addie’s direction. ‘She’s waiting for you,’ he said, and he was right: she’d stopped tossing her head and snorting and stood patiently waiting for me to stop procrastinating and get my act toge
ther.
‘I’m afraid,’ I said, twining my fingers through Addie’s mane.
‘It will be all right,’ said Alban.
Then I was up on Addie’s back, and with powerful beats of her wide, beautiful wings, she bore us both up into the skies.
I stared down at Alban’s big, big frame as he dwindled to dwarfish proportions beneath us, and then vanished altogether. He was waving.
‘Take me somewhere safe, Addie,’ I pleaded, and buried my face in her mane.
She took me to her Glade. We came down softly in a carpet of thick moss, cool beneath my feet in the gathering twilight. I smelled nectar and fresh grass, and heard the soothing ripple of running water somewhere near.
I calmed at once, for the magick of Addie’s Glade had a depth to it; an ancient potency which somehow soothed the runaway chaos inside me. I stamped once, flicking an ear, as the night-time sounds of the peaceful Dell seemed to jump into sharper focus.
A dulcet breeze swept back my mane, and starlight glittered off the tip of my horn.
‘Addie!’ I called, for she was trotting away from me. The sound emerged as a penetrating whicker. ‘Wait for me!’
She looked back over her shoulder, one ear pointed straight up, and whickered back. Hurry up, then.
I hurried.
20
Some unknowable time later, I was dozing by the lily-pool when an unusual scent caught my nostrils.
I lifted my head, so fast as to crack my crown against the low-hanging branches above me. I snorted in annoyance.
Addie pretended she hadn’t noticed, but I could tell by her studiedly serene posture that she had. And she was laughing at me.
‘Addie!’ I hissed. ‘Do you smell that?’
She lifted her nose, and inhaled.
Then she bolted up right, and shot away from the pool at a full gallop.
I followed at a (slightly) more sedate pace, laughing.
I caught up with her at the mouth of our perfect little glade. She had her rump turned to me, her tail swishing, nose-down in a bag of chips. I poked my nose over her shoulder to have a look. They were the fat-cut kind, her favourite. Crispy on the outside, pillowy in the middle, and translucent with grease.
The bag was held by Jay.
‘Okay, this one’s Adeline,’ he called, and I saw somebody else behind him. Somebody tall, and broad-shouldered, with green-tinted skin, emerald-bright eyes, and bronzed, artfully-windswept hair.
My nose informed me that he, too, had brought an offering.
I swarmed past Addie and almost knocked the Baron over in my enthusiasm. Whether it was his presence that awoke such feelings, or the enormous plate he carried in his hands, I couldn’t have said. I mean, that sounds bad, but he’d brought pancakes. Not just any pancakes, either, but troll-sized pancakes; the kind we’d eaten that day at breakfast, when he had taken me out on what turned out to not be a date.
Well, at least the pancakes had been good. Seriously good. And these were the same: dripping in syrup, laden with ice cream, and tooth-achingly sweet.
I was halfway down the plate before it occurred to me to wonder what they were doing in our Glade, or how they had found it.
‘So we’ve found Ves,’ said Jay, laughing.
Alban winced, and steadied himself, almost bowled over by my attack on the pancake plate.
That was new. I, scrawny Ves, was big and muscly enough to knock over a troll.
‘Ves?’ said Alban. ‘That is you, isn’t it?’
I lifted my head, chewing an enormous mouthful of crisp pancake batter and mixed-fruit ice cream. ‘Obviously?’ I said, spraying syrup.
The word emerged as a whinny.
‘Damnit,’ I sighed. Another whinny.
‘It has to be Ves,’ said Jay. ‘You sent her off with Addie, and Addie’s here. How likely is it that there are two pancake-obsessed unicorns living on the Society’s doorstep?’
‘Obsessed?’ I objected. ‘I’m not obsessed. I can stop anytime I want.’ I punctuated this statement with an emphatic gulp of sweet, delicious food, and then took a determined step back, shaking my head.
This was real heroism, I thought, mournfully eyeing the plate. Forget precision-strike raids on ancient magickal towers, and wresting vital magickal history out of the proverbial grave. Refraining from eating the last mouthfuls of pancakes and ice cream? That was the stuff of legend.
‘Fine, I take it back,’ said Jay, grinning. ‘You aren’t in the least bit obsessed with pancakes.’
I nodded my satisfaction, made a lunge for the plate, and swallowed the last morsels in two bites.
‘Right, so,’ said Jay, patting my neck. ‘We’ve found Ves. Now what?’
Alban set the plate down in the grass, and I devoted myself to licking it clean of every last drop of syrup. ‘Milady said to bring her in, no?’
‘I have no idea how we’re going to get her up all those stairs.’
‘Maybe House can help with that.’
‘Might do,’ Jay agreed. Then he added, ‘Come to think of it, I have no idea how we’re going to get her out of this glade.’
‘She does look comfortable,’ Alban agreed.
I beamed. I was comfortable. ‘I was born to be a unicorn,’ I informed them both.
‘Uh huh.’ Jay looked a little wide-eyed as he stared at me. ‘I possibly don’t want to know what you just said.’
I bumped Addie with my shoulder, rubbed my nose against her side, and waited. If I stood here and looked pretty, would someone show up with more pancakes? This approach had been working pretty well for Addie.
‘You want to come with us, Ves?’ said Jay. ‘Milady wants to see you.’
I twitched my tail, thinking it over. Or, I tried. Memories slipped away like the water-weeds I’d tried to eat from the lily pond. I knew these men; they were dear to me. But they belonged to another time, one that faded like a dream whenever I tried to fix my thoughts upon it.
Stray memories of chocolate-pots and endless stairs floated through my mind; of velvet-clad wingback chairs, and heavy piles of books; of a huge desk in a huge library, Val sitting behind it; of a long avenue of trees, sometimes upside-down, and Zareen with a poison-green streak in her hair.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, licking syrup from my lips. ‘It’s peaceful here.’
‘Come on,’ said Jay. ‘Please? The Society needs you.’
I snorted.
‘We need you,’ added Jay.
‘True,’ said Alban. ‘We do. Pup’s lost without you. Val told me she’d chop off your horn if you didn’t come home. And Zareen sent this.’ He held up his phone. Letters on the screen swam about a bit, and came into focus: Ves, get your sorry butt back Home or you’ll be SORRY.
My ear twitched. Nobody wanted to get in the Queen of the Dead’s bad books.
‘The thing is,’ I said, sidling about a bit. ‘I don’t seem to have any hands.’
Jay sighed. ‘I wish we knew what she was saying.’
‘Or feet,’ I continued. ‘Or arms. You can’t be much of an agent without a few things like that, and I’ve kind of lost mine.’
Jay and Alban blinked blankly at me.
‘Do you happen to know how to de-horn me?’ I said. ‘Not in the way Val said. Do you have any idea how to make me Ves-shaped and humanoid? Because damned if I do.’ I wasn’t altogether sure I wanted to be Ves-shaped and humanoid again; I had the vague but settled sense that I had been making a right royal mess of being Ves, lately. I’d been okay as a unicorn. I was good as a unicorn.
‘Why don’t you just come with us?’ said Jay. ‘And we’ll see what happens? Nod once for yes. Shake for no.’
I stamped a foot.
‘Is that yes?’ said Jay.
I gave a horsie sigh, nipped affectionately at Addie’s neck, and stomped off towards the Glade’s entrance.
‘Ooh, we’re going,’ said Jay, and ran after me.
I left the Glade with a dual escort, Jay’s hand resting on the left side of my
neck, Alban’s hand upon my right. I felt fine. I felt great.
Only, once we were over the threshold, everything fell apart. The lovely, fizzy feeling of magick-down-to-my-bones faded away, and with it, my flowing, shampoo-advertisement mane. When I tossed my head, the satisfying thwoosh of my horn slicing through empty air abruptly disappeared. I put up a hand, and groped around atop my own head.
‘Damnit,’ I sighed. ‘Did it have to be that easy…?’
‘Welcome back, Ves,’ said Jay, and I waited in general expectation of being hugged by somebody.
It didn’t happen. My gentleman companions were, if anything, edging away from me.
‘Oh, come on. I don’t get a welcome-back-to-two-legged-kind squish?’
‘Clothes,’ Jay coughed.
I looked down.
There weren’t any.
‘It did feel a bit draughty out here,’ I said nonchalantly. ‘Anybody lend me a something?’
Jay looked helplessly at Alban. Here in the height of summer, nobody needed coats much, and neither of them was wearing one. A jaunty sun bathed us in such balmy warmth, I wouldn’t have minded proceeding without clothes, except that I was clearly making my gentlemen uncomfortable.
‘Alban,’ I said, beaming. ‘I could wear your shirt like a dress.’
I could, too. The hem would probably hit me somewhere around mid-thigh, which was enough to preserve modesty until I could pick up some of my own clothes.
My request had nothing whatsoever to do with a desire to see a certain dishy troll without his shirt. Honest.
‘All right,’ said Alban, and my heart leapt.
But instead of stripping off his white, long-sleeved shirt, he plucked at it with both hands, and made a peeling motion. Another shirt came away in his hands, identical to the first. He shook this second shirt out, and gave it to me.
‘Nice trick,’ I said, and put it on. It might not be Alban’s real shirt (I guess?), but it was still faintly warm from his skin. I rolled up the sleeves a bit more.
‘I don’t have a lot of magick,’ said Alban, with a wry smile. ‘And I can’t do anything useful with it. But sartorial quandaries I can certainly solve.’
The Heart of Hyndorin Page 13
