by Julia Ember
“We have to go,” I hissed. “They’re all running toward a huge tent on the ridge. It has to be where Arusei took your father and Tumelo.”
Kara cradled the foal against her chest. “We can’t just leave them here! We don’t even know if the gunshot is related to them. It could have been a slave running away, for all we know. Get your gun. Let’s go. We’ll go see what’s happened and take them with us.”
I shook my head. “If the stone isn’t in the pavilion, I’d bet it’s in the tent. Maybe one of them found it and that’s why this is happening. We need to make a distraction, get the stone and go. But we don’t have time to saddle all the horses, and even if we did, how far could we ride before they caught us? We have to bring my father.”
“How can we leave them? Especially if one of them just got shot? How can you think about stealing the damn stone right now?”
“If someone shot them, they’re already dead. There’s nothing we can do for them now if that happened.” My jaw tightened. The image of Tumelo lying dead flashed through my mind again, and I fought to stay focused while everything about the new life I’d been building seemed to crumble away. My training in how to stay calm during an attack on safari took over. I focused on what we had to do. I looked through the bars of the stables, at the unicorn mare’s lifeless corpse, and an idea formed.
Kara stared at me disbelievingly. “How can you say that?”
“Tighten Brekna’s girth and get on him,” I barked, racing out of the stable block again. I knew she would resent me for belting out commands, but there was no time to explain.
I whistled toward the remaining overseers. “The unicorn!” I called, waving my arms about, demanding their attention. “She’s foaling. Come quick! I think the baby’s stuck. If we don’t do something now, the birth will kill both of them!”
The overseers exchanged glances, seeming to deliberate whether it would be worse for them to disobey whatever orders their leader had given them or to let two of Arusei’s prized unicorns die. In the end a throng of them sprinted toward the stable block as I ducked back inside. Though Elikia wasn’t wearing her bridle or saddle, I’d ridden her enough times to know she would look after me without them. I threw open her stable door and vaulted onto her back. Kara sat on Brekna, as I’d asked, but her arms were crossed over her chest and angry tears spilled down her cheeks.
The overseers raced right past our horses and into the end stall that had held the unicorn. Seeing her still body, and the blood, they began shouting at one another, arguing over whose responsibility it was to cut open her belly and rescue the foal inside.
With Brekna following closely behind, I nudged my horse and she sprinted forward. Kara continued to glare at me, jabbing her heels angrily into Brekna’s sides. She wore the foal slung over her shoulder.
We burst out of the stable block at a gallop. My hands gripped Elikia’s long mane to stay aboard as my seat slipped on her sweaty back. Arusei and a handful of his other men had appeared at the front of his tent, squinting down at the stable block to see what had happened and who was yelling. None of them carried rifles. I couldn’t see either Tumelo or Mr. Harving among them.
Sudden fear made me abandon any plan to race away. Tumelo wasn’t there. He could be lying inside, choking on his last gasp. I changed directions, and we charged toward them, our horses devouring the distance in a few easy strides. At first I think Arusei expected us to stop, dismount, and come inside to see the famous dancing girls perform like he promised us. He stood waiting, his hands on his knife belt, a patient, half-bemused smile on his face. Only at the last second did he or his men see the blood on our clothes and understand that neither of us intended to slow down. All they could do was leap aside as we galloped directly into the ornate tent. My foot connected with a tentpole, and half the structure came down behind us, sealing the entrance.
The inside of the tent was almost empty, but in the middle of the floor stood a cage. It was gilded with gold leaf, but the bars were of solid iron. Tumelo and Mr. Harving sat inside it, naked flesh of their backs pressing against the bars. Both of them had been fully stripped. A trail of blood flowed from Tumelo’s lip down his chin, and a puffy bruise already swelled below his eye. An equally ornate chair sat directly in front of the cage, gold and encrusted with gems. I covered my mouth. The throne reminded me of even more stories from my childhood—of kings who used to rule all of Nazwimbe and half the surrounding territories beside. Those kings harnessed the mythical battle-fever of the unicorns and used them to drive chariots of fire. I swallowed. In those legends, the kings had possessed a moonstone, with powers never seen before or after, that drove the unicorns into frenzy. I swallowed. Those things were all just stories.
“How?” Mr. Harving gasped when he saw Kara, his eyes scanning her from head to toe, taking in the sight of her bloodstained clothing. “Are you injured? What happened?”
Kara shook her head, tears coming too fast for her to speak. She held up the foal for her father to see. A ghost of a smile appeared on Mr. Harving’s face.
“We heard gunshots… we thought maybe one of you…,” I said. I paced around the cage, looking for a way to open it. The small door at the side was bolted fast with a series of padlocks. I rattled them uselessly, looking around the tent for the key. “How were you caught? What did he ask?”
“He knew when we arrived it was wrong,” Mr. Harving said, shaking his head. “When he brought us up here, he had his thugs strip us and throw us in here. Tumelo tried to fight them off, so they hit him.”
“Mnemba.” Tumelo cut Mr. Harving off. His voice was overly firm, the way he often sounded right before he ordered me to clean out the latrines or scrub down the stable block. I braced myself against whatever he was about to say. Elikia shifted nervously underneath me. “You have to get out of here—now. If you stay here and get caught, we’re all dead. We’re stuck in here. Get your father. That’s the only chance we have.”
“The moonstone,” I said, staying rooted on the spot. We couldn’t leave without it. Not if there was any chance that the legends could be true. From the looks of things, Arusei believed that they were. “Have you seen it? Anywhere in here?”
“Look at the chair. The stones.”
Outside I heard men shouting and the fabric of the tent shuddered. A knife blade pierced the fabric sides. We were running out of time.
My eyes scanned over the gilded chair again and rested on the seat. Directly under where Arusei would sit was an enormous opaque moonstone, polished and fitted to the chair as if the throne had been designed to house it. I flung myself down from Elikia’s back. I slid my nails into the crevices along the moonstone’s outline. It lifted easily from the chair, leaving behind a crater of gold. Hastily, I buried it with our clothes in Brekna’s saddlebags.
“We’ll come back,” Kara promised her father. Snot and tears made tracks down her dirt-stained cheeks.
“Go,” Mr. Harving said, settling back against the bars again. He looked at me, eyes glassy with resignation. “Take care of her.”
Tumelo grimaced at me through the bars. I reached in and grasped his arm, knowing he would break if I cried too.
Holding to her mane for my life, I kicked Elikia, and we charged through the fabric at the rear of the tent. I heard rattling of bars behind us, scaring the horses forward. I wrapped my arms around my mare’s neck, and we galloped away, never looking back.
ELIKIA’S HEART beat so fast her ribs shook against my legs. Sweat from her back soaked through my trousers and foam dripped down her dark chest. My own legs felt like mortar, heavy and impossible to move, molded to the mare’s shape. Beside me, Brekna and Kara gasped for breath. Steam rose from the stallion’s wet back. The unicorn foal struggled in the shawl, whinnying to be fed.
As soon as we’d burst from the tent, Arusei’s men had tried to chase after us. But our horses were too fast and well fed, and even the smallest of the poachers outweighed us by stones. I’d lost track of how many miles we’d galloped
across the savanna, weeds tangling around the horses’ legs as they ran. I’d made sure to lead us across rivers and dry soil, to make us harder to track. Now that we had reached the road, our tracks would blend with the well-trampled path, and we could finally afford to slow down.
“How far is it? To your father’s village?” Kara asked, her voice coming out as a dry rasp. We needed to find water, for ourselves and the horses.
“A few hours from here, still,” I wheezed. “We’ll need to stop and find water. To drink, give the horses a break, and clean ourselves up if we can. If someone sees us on the road, they’ll have us arrested with all this blood all over us.”
Kara glared at me and then looked away, mouth set in a tight line. “We should never have left them like that, and we deserve whatever happens now. We should never have asked them to go. What were we thinking? Thinking we could just go into a poacher’s camp and get information like a couple of amateur detectives.”
She looked out over the savanna behind us, grinding her teeth.
“Hey,” I said, halting Elikia so I could look her in the eye. “Don’t talk like that. We’re going to get them out of there.”
“They’re probably dead already, like you said they would be. What use does Arusei have for them? And it’s our fault.”
“What chance did we have to free them on our own? We didn’t have the key to that cage, and you saw how fast those men came after us. Besides, if Arusei was going to just kill them, he would have done it. Not strip them and lock them in a cage. He’s using them to make sure we come back.”
Kara shook her head, shutting her eyes. Tears leaked under her lids. “Me and my stupid adventure.”
That stung. I bit my lip and tried not to show how hurt I felt. “It’s not your fault…. He wanted to do it. He knew what he was getting himself into.”
“He never would have even known about if I hadn’t insisted on going on that stupid stakeout. I’ve been so self-centered. All I wanted was to have a bit of fun before he forced me into marrying Timothy, and now that might have killed him.”
I looked away from her, unable to listen to anything else she might say. A bit of fun. A stupid adventure. Her comments played over and over in my mind, growing more painful every time I repeated them.
Tears welled up in my eyes but anger helped me blink them back. I had been so stupid to allow myself to get attached to her. She was a tourist. I’d known the whole time she was leaving, and this was temporary. And what could I offer her anyway? If every time she tried to kiss me, to pull me to her, I pushed her away. But to hear her say it like that made it real. She dismissed me like a round of cards or a horse race.
“So have I just been ‘a bit of fun’ to you?” My heart trembled, but my voice was firm.
“What else could you be? Even if I wanted something else, I’m not allowed to have it. I have to marry Timothy. It’s the law. And because I selfishly tried to just forget that, now my father is imprisoned by a crazed warlord, and I might never see him again.”
“I thought you might like me,” I spat. I felt petty for thinking about myself, considering what her father and my cousin were going through, but the words and feelings tumbled out. “So I’m the stupid one.”
“I do like you!” she shouted, sweat-soaked hair falling across her face. The sleeping unicorn foal’s head jerked up. “But what can come of that? Look where it’s got us so far! I can’t afford to let my feelings stretch any more than that.”
The fire of anger cooled into a sadness in my chest. She liked me. She’d actually said it. But she was right. What could come of it? I folded my arms across my chest, wishing I had the courage to reach for her. Kara bit her lip. It was so chapped by dry wind and heat that it started to bleed.
I pushed Elikia another step forward, so that Kara and I sat parallel to one another. Gently, I swung my leg over Brekna’s flank and settled into the space behind her saddle. The horse sighed at the extra weight but stood still. I took a deep breath as Kara’s body tensed, and I half expected her to push me away. Instead she closed her eyes, and I slipped my arm around her waist.
In Nazwimbe, we have a saying: what has been sealed in blood cannot be undone. The bond between a mother and the child she conceived, a murder, a rape, the cut of a vicious whip… all these are actions that no one can take back. When I pressed my lips to hers, tasting the salt-iron sweetness of the blood on her lip, I knew there was no going back for me.
One way or another, I’d find a way around the laws that bound her to her fiancé. I needed to be more than her one adventure. I needed her to help me heal.
I FILLED my canteen and let the horses have a long drink from the stream before I stepped into the freezing water to wash myself. Kara fished through our saddlebags for extra clothes to put on. We’d packed extra linen clothes for Tumelo and Mr. Harving, so that they could change out of their hot formal attire the second we left Arusei’s camp behind. Wincing, I watched her pull out Tumelo’s favorite, sky-blue tunic.
“Wear that one,” I urged as I scrubbed my arms. I didn’t want to wear Tumelo’s clothes or let her wear her father’s. People’s scents always had a way of lingering inside clothes. Knowing Tumelo, the fabric would be perfumed with essence of cigar whether it was clean or not.
She nodded and pulled the tunic over her wet hair. It fell to her knees, and she tied it at the waist like a dress. Taking a seat by the stream, she watched me wash with a small smirk. “You should ride naked. Like a goddess.”
I snorted. “Right. Ride naked all the way to my father’s house.”
“We could stop again before we get there.” Her eyes gleamed with mischief, and I was so happy to see any emotion in them other than pain that I almost agreed to her ridiculous proposal. I imagined the look Mama would give me and smiled. But the thought of washing horsehair out of my private regions made me shake my head. There are some places fur should never go.
I went to the saddlebags myself and pulled out Mr. Harving’s spare clothes. He’d packed two sets of trousers and a green cotton shirt. I pulled out the smaller of the trouser pairs. The moonstone sparkled beneath the pile of linens. I tucked it back into Kara’s remaining shawl and tugged Mr. Harving’s trousers up my legs. They swamped my body, but at least they were bloodless and nobody who passed us on the road would fear us as criminals.
On the other side of the stream, a male grelbok lowered its head to drink. It looked like an antelope but more delicate with a light, arid build. The grelbok fed on minerals in addition to grass, its body processing them and using them to build elaborate horns of gold and aluminum. They were more elusive even than the unicorns. I’d never managed to find one before. I moved slowly, so that it wouldn’t run, and pointed the creature out to Kara.
“It’s good luck, to see those,” I said. “At weddings, a man dresses up like a grelbok and dances. Sometimes he hides in the bushes and bursts out later to scare the drunks away. Seeing a real one is supposed to bring good luck for life.”
The grelbok raised its horned head, white muzzle twitching as it sniffed the air. It stood and watched us, cocking its head as if something about our smell confused it. The unicorn foal whinnied.
“Well good,” Kara said, taking my hand. “If we’re going to rescue my father and your crazy cousin, we need all the luck we can get.”
THE SUN started to set again by the time we reached the outskirts of my home village of Sagadi. I leaned down to unlock the perimeter fence that surrounded the village. A chest-height structure made of overlapping wooden planks, it kept the cattle and sheep enclosed and some of the lesser predators out. The lock was a simple iron fastening. My father welcomed all human travelers openly.
As I closed the latch behind us, an old gray sheepdog jumped up, barking and licking at my feet. His tail wagged so hard his entire body shook. Grinning, I looked around for his owner. A gangly goatherd came racing toward us, staff raised, his goats bleating as they trotted after him.
“I’m so sorry, miss,” he
said, batting the dog away. “He’s not usually so overfamiliar with strangers.”
“Have I become a stranger, Jelle?”
The goatherd lifted his hand to his eyes to shield them from the sun and squinted up at me. Then a smile split his face. “Mnemba?”
I grinned, leapt down from Elikia’s back, and embraced him. Our town had less than a thousand people, and as the chief’s daughter, I knew everyone, or at least, I used to. Jelle was a year older than me. As a child, I used to spend whole afternoons chasing him through these fields while his father and brothers minded their goats. Always, Grapf, his shaggy gray shadow, accompanied us.
He swung me off my feet, and then he rubbed the back of his head. “Sorry, Mnemba. I know I should be more proper with you being Chief Adebayo’s daughter. But it’s been ages…. I started to think I wouldn’t see you again.”
I clapped his shoulder. “I know. I’ve been away a long time.”
“I don’t blame you for having to get away. At least that bastard’s getting what he deserves now.” He glanced up at Kara, eyes widening at the sight of her.
Occasionally, a spice merchant with white skin might pass through Sagadi, but I could count the times that had happened in my lifetime on two hands. Usually, our townspeople had to take their things to a bigger village to trade. After working with Tumelo and our tourists for over a year, it was easy to forget how strange it must be for people in remote Sagadi to see someone who looked like Kara. And even I had never seen a white woman with hair the color of hot copper and cerulean eyes like hers.
