Keeping her eyes on her feet, Claire tried to ignore the snippets of sound.
“Estelle, don’t do this!” a boy’s voice urged.
She stopped in her tracks, fear momentarily forgotten. Estelle! Claire’s heart pounded. She knew coincidences happened, but the queen had continued to appear along her journey: on the Spinner boat, in Fyrton’s library, in the wyvern’s cave, and now, here. It was almost as if Queen Estelle were guiding her. Protecting her.
Straining her ears, Claire listened, hoping the echo had caught the queen’s voice.
“Put your ax down,” the same female voice ordered.
“I won’t,” the boy replied. “You can’t!”
“I must, Martin. There is no other choice. You missed much when you deserted my armies.”
Claire’s heart picked up speed as she stepped in the direction of the conversation. If she had to guess, she thought she was hearing a conversation between Estelle and her younger brother, Prince Martin. This must have been shortly before Martin was killed—a little before the queen had done her grand deed.
“No, you don’t,” Prince Martin said. “There are other ways. Alloria Malchain says—”
“Alloria Malchain does not understand.”
There was a pause, and Claire thought she’d lost the conversation. But then Prince Martin’s voice spoke again.
“I’ll stop you, then,” Prince Martin said. “I swear I will. I cannot let you kill Arden’s last unicorn.”
Confusion crashed into Claire, tugging her down into churning white bewilderment. She tried to hold her breath so she could hear properly, because it was clear she wasn’t hearing things properly at all. Hadn’t Nett said Martin died near the end of the Guild War, and that it was his death that led to Queen Estelle’s quest to save the last unicorn from the hunters?
“The last unicorn is mine,” Queen Estelle’s echo hissed. “His heart is mine. Stand aside, rebellious brother, or I shall have to kill you as well.”
“No!” Claire’s cry burst from her and flew into the empty trees. The phantom trumpets and shouts began again, concealing the rest of the conversation. She spun wildly in all directions, trying again to catch a snippet of Queen Estelle’s cool voice. But all she heard was the hunt.
Gripping Fireblood tight, Claire tried to keep following the path. Kleo, the Royalists, the poems … all of Arden had been wrong. The hunter in the poem hadn’t been a nameless person at all—he’d been Prince Martin of Arden and it wasn’t he who’d wanted to kill the unicorn … And Estelle hadn’t saved the unicorn by transforming him into rock.
The last queen had killed the last unicorn herself.
The sounds of the hunt grew into a crescendo. Claire broke into a run. The eternal echoing screams of unicorns filled Claire’s ears as she imagined them galloping toward the Sorrowful Plains, where Claire knew they would meet their death. The hunts that drove the unicorns to extinction must have been arranged by the queen, too.
Claire fought to escape the echo she was caught in, but no matter where she turned, she couldn’t break the sound. For an instant, she wondered if the screams weren’t coming from the past at all, but were erupting from her.
She dropped to the ground, covering her head with her arms while Fireblood clattered to the stone ground. She needed a way to break the echoes. She needed to drown them out.
“Once upon a time,” Claire whispered, her voice so soft she could barely hear it over the thunder of unicorn hooves, “there were three little pigs …”
There was a sharp neigh. “Got it! Hand a knife … ”
Claire scooted to her knees and raised her voice. “Their mother sent them off in the world to seek their fortunes …”
Though she could still hear voices, the unbearable screams were muffled now, as if the hunt were moving away. Hurriedly, Claire continued the story. By the time she got to the first “Huff and puff and blow your house down,” the Petrified Forest was quiet except for the sound of her own voice.
Relief coursed through her, but she dared not stop.
She finished The Three Little Pigs and then went through Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty in rapid succession. As Claire spoke, she wished she’d thought to fill her canteen with water. In the heat, her throat was drying up quickly. If only Nett were here—he’d have stories to tell.
After two more princess stories and a haphazard rendition of The Ugly Duckling, she longed to break, but she couldn’t. She pushed on through the thin path in the bloodred forest. Taking a deep breath, she began a new tale.
“Once upon a real time, there were two girls, sisters. The little one followed the elder like night follows day, and they were as different from each other as sun and moon, but like the sun and moon, neither would be the same without the other …”
Claire told the trees the stories of her and Sophie’s adventures. The time they’d followed the Amazon River (in reality, a drainage ditch) two neighborhoods over and their parents had called the police to search for them. The time Sophie had decided she wanted to be a pastry chef and they’d spent a weekend trying to learn French from flash cards. (Claire still knew how to count to ten.) She told the stone ears about Sophie’s papier-mâché diorama and how the paper-paste concoction had plugged all the plumbing in their home.
Were the trees thinning? Claire didn’t look too closely; she didn’t want to know if they weren’t.
And finally, she told one more story. A story of the little sister watching the older one close her eyes in a gray bed, tubes and needles stuck into her as though she were a display in a children’s museum. How even then, when Sophie couldn’t speak and barely breathed, she’d squeezed Claire’s hand. Still comforting her. Still taking care of her.
As she neared the end of this tale, she stepped onto something soft.
Grass! Actual grass that smooshed under her weight.
Looking up, Claire saw a plain. Dust blanketed the yellow grass that spread out before her like a tattered fan, reaching toward a hazy horizon. Nothing broke the monotony except for two obsidian monoliths: Unicorn Rock and Queen Rock. They were encircled by a ring of smaller stones, the shortest of which was at least as tall as Sophie.
Claire sucked in her breath. The formation reminded her a little of Stonehenge, another set of mysterious rocks that had enthralled Sophie and had kicked off a monthlong obsession with Camelot and star charts.
Scanning the plains, she searched for movement. But there was none. It was eerily still—no rustle of hidden mice or squawk of birds in the air. But then again, there was no sign of men with double-headed axes.
Not sure whether to feel relieved or scared, Claire slowly let out her breath. Estimating by the slant of the sun, she guessed that there was still time to search before it would set and wraiths would appear.
Giddily, she addressed the stone branches above her. “And that’s why the youngest sister went after the oldest, as annoying and impossible as she was. The danger was worth it, for Sophie.”
For the first time since Claire had started talking to herself, she thought she heard the trees whisper again. “For Sophie … Sophie … Sophie.”
An echo of Claire’s own voice.
Suddenly, as though the echoes had conjured it, Claire saw a clear footprint in the dust, then another, and another, leading toward the center of the plains—toward the great obsidian rocks.
With a triumphant shout, she put Fireblood back on her hip, and burst out of the forest. Joy mixed with hope rushed through her blood, seeming to give wings to her feet.
The squiggly lines of the footprints could only belong to a tennis shoe. And only one person in all of Arden wore tennis shoes.
Sophie was here.
CHAPTER
25
The sneaker prints stopped at the rocks.
Claire circled the stones, apprehension adding energy to her steps. She had missed something. It didn’t make sense that there was only one set of footprints in the dust that led to the rocks, and none that led aw
ay from them. The only mark she could find was a solitary hoofprint in the dust. Did it belong to Malchain’s horse? Or to something else entirely?
She wove between the monoliths, checking behind each one. Then she looked a second time. And finally a third.
Even though Claire knew now that the tale of the unicorn and the queen was only a myth, she could understand why the Royalists believed there might have been something more to these stones. Beetle-wing black, they stood defiantly in the plains, two stark gravestones for the Unicorn Massacre.
But there was no Sophie to be found.
What, she mocked herself, did you think Sophie would just be standing here, waiting for you?
In her heart of hearts, Claire had.
Because up until the revelation of the queen’s true nature, Claire had thought that maybe Arden’s magic was working with her. That it would somehow reunite her with her sister. Because that was how these stories, tales of magic, were supposed to end.
Anger crackled around her edges. How could she have been so naive? How could she have thought that Sophie would just be here? That Anvil Malchain hadn’t already kidnapped her sister?
She threw her rucksack on the ground and its contents spilled out. Fighting the urge to kick the small jars of herbs across the plains, Claire instead whirled around and hit one of the monoliths.
“Why aren’t you real?” she yelled. “Why can’t you be a unicorn and find Sophie?”
Her hand smarted, and the pain made her even more angry.
“Where did you go?” she yelled again. “Why did you leave?”
But of course, there was no reply. She was alone. She’d come all this way to find Sophie and had failed. Somehow, she’d misunderstood. Somehow, she’d gotten it all wrong—she’d gotten Sophie all wrong.
Maybe she’d never really known her sister in the first place.
The weight of that notion crushed her chest, and soon, a sob shook loose. The tears came, and she let them.
After all, there was no one here to call her a baby.
Claire cried for her loneliness.
She cried for Nett, who had risked a poisonous swamp to help her. And Sena who’d not only given her Fireblood, but had taken time away from her own search to help find Sophie instead. She cried for kind old Francis, who had stood up for her at the Hearing Hall, and had just wanted everyone to be safe.
Most of all, she cried for Sophie, the sister she had nearly lost once, and now, Claire feared, had lost for good.
She cried until she was too tired to cry any more, until the dark crests of clouds loomed at the edge of the sky, dragging evening behind them like a tide.
Finally, there were no more tears to be wrung out. She felt uncomfortably exposed, and disappointment shuddered through her, pushing out the anger and leaving only exhaustion.
Claire dried her eyes with her sleeve and looked at the mess she’d made. Gingerly, she bent to repack the rucksack. She picked up Sena’s warming coin and palmed it, trying to glean the same comfort she had once felt from her pencil. It wasn’t the same, but she squeezed it tight, hoping Sena and Nett had made it to Dampwood.
Wondering if her next stop should be to try to meet them at the village, Claire decided to consult the map. She reached for a piece of tattered parchment, but it wasn’t the map, it was her drawing of the unicorn mother and foal—the one she’d made in Chimera Fields.
Last time she’d looked, the foal in the drawing had been staring straight at her, but now its head was turned left, horn pointing somewhere in the distance, its expression grave and ears pressed flat, as though in warning. Claire turned her head left, too.
Movement skirted the outlines of the plains.
For one heart-stopping breath, Claire thought it was wraiths. But though the sun was low, it hadn’t yet set. Wiping her nose with the back of her hand, she scooped up her rucksack and crouched behind one of the smaller boulders that ringed Unicorn Rock and Queen Rock. As quietly as she could, she removed Fireblood from its scabbard.
Soon, Claire could make out voices, then the soft thud of people walking on grass. As quietly as she could, Claire kneeled and peered from behind her rock. Ten or so cloaked figures had arrived at the center of the stone ring. They would have seen her if they had not all been so focused on Unicorn Rock and Queen Rock.
“The artifact?” a woman’s voice demanded. From the volume of the speaker’s voice, Claire guessed the woman was standing just in front of her boulder.
“Here,” a man responded. “Where would you like it?”
“At the foot of Queen Rock,” the woman replied crisply.
There were soft discussions as the hooded figures walked by, and Claire slowly slid onto her stomach. From her new vantage point, she could see about twenty pairs of booted feet and the white trim of their midnight-blue cloaks.
A hooded figure bent down, placing an object at the foot of one of the monoliths. When the figure stepped back, Claire could finally see the object: a mahogany harp with a unicorn’s head arching from its pillar and pearly white strings glowing in the dimming light. The Unicorn Harp.
Heart beating rapidly, Claire tried to squirm a few inches back. She knew now who hid behind these cloaks: Royalists.
Her thoughts raced. Thorn had said the Royalists met each blue moon—there must be one tonight. Claire let out her breath slowly. She should have thought about this! Only last evening, she’d noticed how round the moon was, and she’d known, thanks to Thorn and Kleo, that Anvil Malchain and the Royalists were on the move.
“Are we all here?” the woman asked.
“I count only nineteen, Fray,” a gruff voice said next to her.
“Then it is time to see which of us has not heeded the call. Remove your hoods.”
Claire peered around the boulder to watch as the figures revealed their faces in eerie synchronicity. They were mostly old, bowed with age as though their intense hope in Queen Rock was slowly grinding them down.
From where Claire hid, she could only see the back of the woman who had spoken. Her long, white-and-gold hair tumbled down her back in a mass of braids and ribbons. A gray quill was tucked behind her ear—a quill that exactly matched the one Claire had seen Kleo use to scribble down their story.
Claire stifled a gasp. Could it be that the leader of the Royalists was none other than Kleo’s teacher, the famed storyteller Mira Fray?
No wonder she hadn’t needed her boat this summer. The Spinner was busy trying to find—and steal—unicorn artifacts. But Fray wasn’t the one Claire needed to see.
She shifted a few inches, desperate to catch a glimpse of another: the face of the man who had chased Sophie through the Petrified Forest and out onto the Sorrowful Plains.
But none of the figures circling Queen Rock matched the man she’d seen in the Looking Glass.
Disappointment mingled with relief. Claire was glad she didn’t have to face Anvil Malchain’s battle-ax quite yet, but if he wasn’t here, she was no closer to locating Sophie.
Though she was itching to get away from the Royalists, Claire was trapped behind the boulder. There was no way she could dash across the plains unseen. She would just need to hide here and wait for the Royalists to do whatever they were going to do, then leave once they were gone.
She glanced toward the sky. The sun would set soon, and then the wraiths would come. Even a secret society would need to finish by then.
A Royalist pointed in the distance. “He’s coming!”
Claire’s drifting attention suddenly snapped into place like the last piece of a puzzle. Anvil Malchain was coming!
Sitting up as much as she dared, Claire looked to where the Royalist had pointed. Just beyond the circle of stones, she saw a hunched figure hurrying toward them.
“Francis!” Fray called out as Francis Green puffed toward the cloaked Royalists. “You’re late.”
Shock exploded across Claire’s back in a tidal wave of pinpricks. Francis was a Royalist!
“My apologies.” Th
e old Tiller smiled weakly, then bent over, clutching his side. “I had to travel discreetly.”
Fray walked over to him, and now Claire could see her face. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were translucent white, making it seem as though she had none. The overall effect was reptilian.
“Where’s the girl?” Fray asked.
Claire’s mouth went dry as Francis’s eyebrow raised in an umbrella of surprise. “Don’t you have Sophia?”
Fray shook her head, her ribbons and braids clacking together in disapproval.
“But”—Francis looked around the circle, as though Sophie might step out from behind one of the Royalists—“I thought one of us had taken her into safekeeping. When she disappeared, I assumed you’d taken her on your narrowboat, Fray.”
“Correct me if I misunderstand,” Fray said, the tone beneath her words searing, “you finally found a descendant of the royal family, and you managed to lose her?”
Francis took a step back, almost tripping on one of the boundary boulders. “You—you really don’t have Princess Sophia?”
There was a strange ringing in Claire’s ear. Princess Sophia?
“She is not in our possession,” Fray said.
“But”—Francis pointed toward the Unicorn Harp, which lay at the base of the stone—“you have the harp. How do you have that, but not the girl?”
Fray’s unblinking eyes did not move from the old Tiller’s face. “Yans bought it off-market.” Her hand slowly drifted to her braids. Sena’s voice came back to Claire: Spinner’s hair, beware.
“I was warned,” Fray continued as she undid a thin braid, “that you might grow attached to the girl, and compromise our centuries-long endeavor. Answer me truly: Have you hidden the princess to keep her blood from us?”
“No!” Francis said. He looked as tired and worn as a shriveled onion peel. “I swore to eradicate the wraiths. I’d do anything to avenge my son’s death, Fray, you know this!”
His son’s death? For a moment, Claire was confused, but then she remembered: Nett had told her Francis had raised him after his parents—Francis’s son and his son’s wife—had died from a wraith attack.
The Unicorn Quest Page 20
