by Sean Platt
Jack flew directly at them and Edward, still shell-shocked, stared up, and held his breath. The big unicorn wasn’t trying to engage them. Instead, he broke hard and threw his wings forward, clapping creatures against one another between them. Gargoyles fell to the ground like black rain.
Edward shook himself off and charged forward, feeling terrified but moving anyway. He’d never used his magic aggressively and didn’t know how, then realized he didn’t know how to form shields either, and that the one that had saved him had simply sprung out of him through need. He remembered long, long ago lifting that first stone with his adult horn to throw it into the pond. It was the same as he used his magic on a daily basis; he just intended for something to happen, and it did.
Edward thought at a group of assassins from the Nation of Warriors (dressed in blue; it was becoming a cyclone of color), and something came out of them, faded red in color, knocking a hole in the gathering.
Edward ran into the gap. It closed behind him. He saw the big red thing with the horns coming, but it was knocked down by a trio of running unicorns. The humans were useless but surprisingly (and admirably) fearless. They ran behind the unicorns with their weapons, mostly just garden implements. There was a shout, and Edward turned (parrying and erecting shield to deflect an assault of white-robed damsels with daggers) to see Cyrus leading a band of men and women. All had — and here, Edward had to double-take — slingshots.
He looked at the band of humans for long enough that a jester in an orange uniform impaled him with a long lance. The impact stung, white hot. Edward spun in place with the lance still in his side. The jester tried to hang on, but the stuck lance knocked him to the ground, where Edward struck him with a spell that felt like a fist. The jester was reduced to a swirl of white smoke, but then six more were on him, all swinging bolos overhead. Edward took the time to shake his head. The idea of coming after a unicorn with a bolo was absurd. He put on a magic hand and flicked them back, and the jesters flew through the air like motes of dust under wind.
The way cleared, and again Edward saw the band of people behind Cyrus. They must have been wearing the slingshots all along or had just rotated them into position at their sides, but now he could clearly see them, just as he’d last seen the same on David. At the slingers’ left sides were slingshots in pouches. At the opposite sides of their bodies were smaller horizontal pouches that had to hold rocks or alloy balls.
Cyrus drew first. His hand was like lightning. Edward didn’t think he’d ever seen a human move so fast and thought at first that his hands must be magic. They weren’t, though; they were just very, very quick. The others joined him. Spells blasted over their heads, but they stood their ground without flinching. Right hands found the alloy balls, loaded, and fired in one smooth motion, over and over. Again Edward was speared, this time by a warrior’s sword. Multicolored blood painted his side; he turned to fight, but the warrior was gone.
Creatures were already falling under the hail of the slingshot brigade. Shot after shot after shot, felling royals and jesters and legends. Many were magic and came up as surely as Edward had healed himself, but many stayed down. The slingshots, he realized, seemed to be magic as well. The balls weren’t stopped by obstructions. Shields split. An orange-skinned witch ducked behind a building, and one of Cyrus’s crew knocked her down anyway, the ball not remotely deflected as it passed through wall and stone and wood.
Somewhere in the distance, Edward could hear yelling that sounded like Rowen, telling the Army to stand down, but nobody was heeding the cry. The battle raged from the front lines, with the unicorns circling overhead. But only the front lines had engaged, and Edward realized that once the rest of the Army began to fight, the unicorns and humans would be sunk. There were too many. It was a no-win situation. Right now, he could see rank after rank of the Seven Nations beginning to stir as they came to the fore and others fell in front. They weren’t supposed to be fighting. But the three armies were too engaged in battle to stop and consider, even as elders among the unicorn armies circled above and screamed, yelled for them all to shield up and back off, hoping that calm would prevail.
Suddenly a cloud-like spell spilled out across the battlefield, and everything went silent as if all sound had been stolen from the world. Swords meet without ringing; punches landed without slaps or exhalations of breath. An explosive spell struck and unseated a behemoth, but no bang came with it.
“STAND DOWN!” boomed a voice above the silence.
The silence and then the yell surprised every combatant, and in the second of confusion Rowen slammed his staff into the ground. A great bubble spread outward from it, and as the bubble met the Army, all either fell or staggered back. Then, suddenly, there was only Rowen, standing in the middle of the battlefield with the three brigades spread out around him, laid flat like the petals of a blooming flower.
The moment broke. Hostilities ceased like a room of colts and fillies shamed to quiet by an angry elder’s roar.
With the silence now voluntary — broken only by the surprised chatter and shuffle of all three sides — Rowen repeated, slightly less loudly, “STAND DOWN! We have not engaged! There has been enough bloodshed and death. I command this Army, and we have not engaged!”
The heads of the Seven Nations watched Rowen. His old features wrinkled with disapproval; his lips turned down. Swords found their sheaths. Daggers found their pouches. Staves and wands were put away. All around the battleground, winged creatures rustled down to stand in the dirt. The unicorns’ horns stopped glowing, and Cyrus’s group holstered their surprisingly deadly weapons.
Rowen looked at Edward across his parting Army. Edward looked at the unicorn elders, clustered into a tight knot.
The gray-robed sorcerer with his pointed hat and staff strode toward Edward. He stood before him, his posture relaxed slightly, and reached into his robe pocket. Edward flinched in readiness, but Rowen wasn’t reaching for a weapon. It was a long pipe — too long for its pocket.
Rowen slipped the pipe between his lips. It lit without having to be lit, as he leveled his gaze at Edward.
“We should talk,” he said.
CHAPTER 31
THE GENESIS TREATY
“We didn’t want to tell you, Edward,” Fiona said. “We didn’t want to tell anyone. You must understand that what we withheld, we withheld for our race first and for you second. Neither argued for us to speak up.”
They were in the largest meeting place the unicorns had — a sort of semi-haven near the river that had hurriedly been enlarged by unicorn workers just minutes before. They needed the room; the place was the only physical location the Blessing ever used to meet when forced to meet corporeally. Now it held more than the Blessing’s seven unicorns. It held a single representative from each nation in the Seven Nation Army, plus seven humans, including King William and his brother Cyrus, simply to keep sides equal. Seven was a spiritual number, as was three. No one had ever said twenty-one was anything special, but three groups of seven couldn’t help but be lucky, and they’d need a lot of luck right now.
“Two more for even more fortune,” Cerberus had ridiculously added when he and Edward had come along.
Edward’s head was low. He couldn’t seem to pull his gaze from the dirt. He could sense Cerberus beside him. His presence was just a body on four legs, but to Edward it felt like judgment.
“You deserved to know, I imagine,” said Fiona. “Clarence and Rigby proposed telling you, after we found the location of the break and saw the signature of their magic. It was simple. The axial world, as we understand it, really is like an axle when there’s a tear — like a needle through a stack of cloth. A tear in the bottom of one world’s ocean, its scope magnified through the dimension, was enough to cover the rest. When the tear healed, the magic pulled what belonged in each world back into that world’s proper constitution — except for out-of-place beings like you, of course, who had will enough to decide what they were and where they wanted to go. But magic
always leaves residue, Edward, and once our investigation was over and we’d found the source, we realized who had caused it.”
Edward looked up at the other unicorns. They weren’t kidding, and he didn’t think they were lying. There would be no reason to lie. The notion that his grammy and grappy were turning from pariahs to traitors in front of his eyes was crushingly shameful — not just to Edward but to the entire unicorn race. Unicorns were proud and arrogant above all, and arrogance could only come from a sense of superiority — a surety that the unicorns knew more, controlled more, and were simply better than those around them. Adam and Eve had always been those who’d let the Darkness into Mead, but now they were the cause of the largest catastrophe to ever hit the worlds.
“Maybe they had a reason to do it,” said Edward in a small voice.
“Of course they did,” said Clarence. “To wash the worlds clean. That’s all we can guess. Your grammy and grappy had been saying some crazy things before the flood. There’s no way you could have known, Edward, because you were just a colt at the time. But they spoke of dying. Intentionally returning to the Wellspring. They said they’d lived long enough. They could have kept living, but they said no one should hold magic forever — not even unicorns. We can just keep holding on and holding on, but they wanted to go. We think they wanted to make the decision for a lot of the rest of us. They kept spouting off about disturbances in the magic. Adam was crazy, Edward. He thought the end of the worlds was coming. He spoke of a new bubble — a new dark tree. It got worse and worse. Eve raised the alarm, running around talking to anyone who would listen. But there’s a reason they lived all the way out in their haven. They could never fit in with the rest of us. Because although they started our species, they were our secret shame. I know you loved them. But you must understand that this had been brewing, and that we knew who they were. And when they’d been outcasts for long enough and nobody would listen to them rant and rave about the separation of the magic by the humans, and our own separation by default, well … they took matters into their own hooves. It must have been both of them, working together. The world was enormous and would have been simple to open from above, but they were below so it had to take both of them, working together, opening a door where one didn’t belong.”
Edward began to kick at the dirt with his forehoof. He felt watched by twenty-two sets of judgmental eyes, all blaming Edward for his family line. There were fourteen beings present who weren’t even unicorns. This felt private, but now the other species would know. Unicorns could keep a secret; they’d kept this one for untold centuries. But humans and the seven representative from other worlds would not. Adam and Eve would become one of their stories, distorted beyond truth and fairness. He’d been beaten enough. The entire race had been beaten enough. Now they could move on and talk again about the humans’ transgressions, but still Clarence continued.
“Once the rip was large enough, it was self-perpetuating and grew larger and larger. If you pierce a thin water sack with a knife, it will leak. But if the bag is big enough and you cut it wide enough, the force of the water escaping will widen the tear and rip the sack from end to end. That’s what happened with the worlds. We see their magic signature through a scar in the sky, but beyond that is simply sunder. They knew what they were doing. Their original gash was huge because a small gash would only fill our oceans. They wanted to fill all of the worlds with water, and to tear holes across all that remained. Humans had unsettled the worlds. They’d run that needle through the stack by their separation of magic, as Adam and Eve were so concerned about. But those holes were minor, and it was through them that we first saw opportunities for trade with the Dark Forest and the other revolving worlds. We even discussed it with your grappies, but they were incensed. They said the worlds should be repaired, not exploited for trade. They said that magic needed to circulate, but that we were going about it in a perverse way. There were smaller, natural pores that allowed ideas and magic and stories to percolate from world to world. But these rips were big enough to walk through — to send emissaries and couriers through. Like the raconteurs.”
Edward looked up. “Raconteurs?”
“We’ll get to that,” said Fiona. She looked out at the humans and the seven other beings, whom Edward had almost forgotten were in the room. To Rowen, who was representing the magic users, she said, “I’m sure you’ll want to change that relationship.”
Rowen nodded.
Fiona turned back to Edward. “The humans’ misuse of magic had an upside. But it bothered Adam and Eve. So they left. They built their haven and grew increasingly ideologically distant. Dangerous, even. They stopped attending Blessing, despite being the founders.” Fiona’s big, blue eyes were almost pleading as if they wanted to apologize for his blood traitors. “We wanted them to stay. They were the first among us. They were the instruments of Providence. They helped to create Mead, and they were like appies to us all. But they were terrified, and they made us terrified — of them. So we let them go, and they continued to rage.” She sighed. “As far as we can tell, they finally decided to end the rips in the only way possible — to open them so far that they were unhealable. They took that needle and dragged it farther through the cloth, widening the purges. And the water came. And the water, through its force, did the rest.”
Edward waited to see if Fiona would go on, but she seemed to be finished. Finally he looked up, sensing Cerberus beside him. Had he known? During the tunnels’ construction, Cerberus had spent a lot of time at Blessing. He didn’t like the idea that his oldest and best friend (the friend who’d shut him out of the tunnel project, Edward recalled with displaced anger) knew of his shame before he himself had. Only it wasn’t just Edward’s shame — it was all of their shame, and Edward’s blood had caused it.
He looked up. Rowen the sorcerer had come forward, his staff tall at his side. His gray beard looked wise, like that of an elder unicorn. His wrinkle-bound eyes were serious but kind. They looked concerned, not judgmental. Edward had gotten at least one thing right in the tirade that had caused the battle to erupt: Rowen and his kind hadn’t been in the dark about the still-open doors between the worlds. They’d known about and supported at least part of what they’d come to complain about.
“Tell me the truth about the tunnels, Fiona,” said the sorcerer.
Edward looked at the old unicorn. There was no mistaking how Rowen had said her name. He’d only introduced himself earlier for the benefit of the Army. The two had clearly already known each other.
“We knew you’d find out eventually,” she said. “And when you did, we thought it would solve a few issues at once. The Realm was a problem. They didn’t know moderation, and the trade of the raconteurs wasn’t enough. Involving the humans early on was a mistake. They had to learn that there were consequences to greed and sloth. They had to see what they’d made and fight because of it. They had to take a stand or relent — to be forced into decision. Building the tunnels was not something we were trying to do in secret. You must see that.”
Rowen nodded. “I do now.”
The humans seemed restless, but the king didn’t know what to do, and five of the others didn’t appear bold enough to speak before he did. Cyrus came forward, his blue eyes and the language of his soul reminding Edward of a young boy he’d found sitting on a stone a hundred years before.
“Maybe it’s time you all-knowing, superior beings let us know what you were playing at,” said Cyrus. “You act like we have no minds of our own. You shove us from place to place. You don’t talk to us; you manipulate us into doing what your grand aims require. Did it never occur to you to speak with us? To open discussions?”
“We tried, but you never listened,” said Cerberus, his face forming a snarl. He’d been working on the tunnel project for months, studiously avoiding The Realm’s humans the entire time. Privately, he thought of them as animals. The one thing that nobody questioned of Adam and Eve’s heresy was that the humans, with their mixture of light an
d dark, were a problem. Cerberus took that opinion to its logical extreme.
Cyrus shook his head. “Are there no lazy unicorns?” He looked at Rowen, a beautiful dark-haired damsel, a broad-shouldered warrior with long golden hair, and the rest of the Seven Nation Army’s representatives. “And among you? There are no legends who do little? No magic users who would rather not rise to righteousness?” He looked at the representative of the royals — a crowned woman holding a scepter with an alloy blade at one end. “No nobles who lack nobility?”
Cyrus shook his head then began to pace the gathering’s center. “You have impossibly low opinions of us. I even understand why. It is sometimes earned. But there is also greatness among us, if you care to look. The curse of being how we are is that we must constantly fight between doing what is right and what is easy. We were given magic rocks, unicorns, and you told us not to use them. Couriers supplied us with stories, yet you judged us for not doing the hard work of ignoring them and drawing our own from … from wherever they come from. Can you really not understand — you, with your unblemished white magic? We have both light and dark within us, and no inherent magic. We have a fight inside us that you don’t share. Yet there are some of us who win that fight, as hard as it is. The Realm could not have been built by idle hands, unicorns. There have always been great ones among us. But you didn’t seek them out. Are you really so blind?”
Edward almost wanted to speak up — to describe the feeling he’d had when encountering David, and now with Cyrus. There was something in these wild, lazy creatures, and an attuned unicorn could sense it like sun on a summery day. But he remained mute. He felt beaten. Who wanted thoughts from the descendent of traitors and saboteurs?
