by James Comins
Chapter Twenty-Two
Unicorns
or, Any Ideas, You Old Cottontail?
That night she dreamed of the old barn and the pigs and the dragons and the ivy. Brugda was there in her dream, stomping through it, touching all of her private emotions with sloppy careless old hands, like a wild ram butting into a tea party. Rrr. Lenna woke in the big bed, staring at the hotel ceiling. Brugda had gotten into her dream. It felt dirty, as if all of her hidden thoughts were being tainted by that horrible old woman.
She realized that she had hoped, really hoped, that Brugda would be gone from her life forever. She had hoped, privately, that Annie Morgan was her new stepmother and that she would never never see Brugda again. But here she was, the next room over in the bed and breakfast. It was hard to return to sleep; for a little while, Lenna had a dream where the boar was snorting over and over, but it wasn’t the boar. She opened her eyes and heard Brugda snoring through the thin walls of the hotel. The old woman had stuck her nose through the wall and stolen Lenna’s dreams of a perfect world away forever. From now on, her dreams were ruined. She knew they were. Brugda might appear at any moment.
Lenna woke up feeling angry and sullied and intrusioned. Her slip was wrinkled, too, but on the other hand it was warm out and she was only a little nervous about having to do those things for Bres today. After a shower, she headed around and around the meandering hallways till she found the front of the building. Talvi cut her a dry square piece of terrible-tasting crumbly apricot-peach crumble with a shrug. The owners had made it for them, he told her. The chairs were carved round and comfortable to sit in, the table was an enormous green gem like the gems Momma Joukka Pelata had all over the big house, and warm sunlight rosed the room through panes of glass. Andy came in, tried the crumble and made a face. Lenna giggled. Brugda came in groggily and Lenna glared at her for messing up her dreams.
Annie tapped on a windowpane from the outside. She had roosted on the roof for the night. Lenna pushed the window up. “Good morning,” said Annie, upside-down, her black hair dangling.
“Morning,” said Lenna.
“Where do we begin?” Emily asked, marching down the staircase.
“May it be as simple as it seems. A summoning, Little Len,” said Brugda.
“My way?” frowned Lenna.
Brugda nodded.
She stuck her hands out. “I command the Fomor to be here.”
Brugda, Mo Bagohn and Lenna watched as the carpet rose up into a shape. With a cheekful of bad crumble, Andy squinted at the shape in the parlor. He bent one way, then the other, like a cobra following a flute.
The shape that appeared was
“Unicorns!”
There were a number of them, about a foot off the floor, running, stampeding, the color of bed-and-breakfast carpeting, but no matter how Lenna tried to count, she couldn’t tell exactly how many. For a moment it was a herd of galloping fuzzy periwinkle-colored horses with curved periwinkle-colored horns, and then they fell back into the carpet.
“Like looking at one of those Magic Eye books,” said Andy.
“You saw!” Lenna jumped. Then she frowned at Annie in the window. “Miss Morgan, those aren’t rhinoceroses at all. You should read a book about sharks and rhinos and unicorns so that you know about them.”
Annie stuck out her tongue.
“Welllp. There they are,” said Mo Bagohn. “Tulips and daisies, they’re out there. Naturally we still don’t know where. Any ideas, you old cottontail?” she asked Brugda.
“Fetch paper and draw me a map of the country.”
“I’ll do that,” squawked Mo Bagohn. She shuffled away, a confident bushel of red crochet. She seemed to be in much better spirits than she had been yesterday.
Talvi looked across the smooth dark table at Kaldi, who was alone and sulking in the corner of the room, his back pressed to the wallpapered wall, his arms crossed hairily.
“It’s over,” said Talvi.
Kaldi banged a fist on a buffet. Glassware in a cupboard shook. “If I had killed Father, I would’ve killed Binnan Darnan.”
“You didn’t, though,” said Aitta.
“I can’t think ahead. I’m no good at it. Making dinner is all I want to do right now, and it’s breakfast time, and breakfast is already made. Maybe I’ll ask the innkeepers if they’ll let me cook something for them. Gods know they need the help.” Kaldi stomped off to look for them.
Mo Bagohn directed him toward the innkeepers as she made her way back through the hallways with a thin piece of bleached slate and a diamond on a stick. She sat at the IKEA gem table and scratched a map like a sandpapered number eight with the stylus. A few rough ovals at the edges were islands.
Brugda put a hand to it and murmured. The cusp of the eight on the right-hand side exploded outward with a pop, sending up a plume of gray slate dust. A neat round hole was cut into the stone paper. Brugda held it up.
“Dublin,” said Pol.
