The Unicorn Hunter

by Che Golden

  Seamus in mortal form was a shadow of these creatures. The Tuatha de Dannan, thought Maddy. How did Granda ever think I would be scared?

  She wanted to get down on her hands and knees and crawl to touch the hem of the Tuatha’s cloaks, as dirty and ugly as she was. She could hear sweet music, joyful and aching at the same time, and she turned her head from side to side as her ears strained to catch the notes that always seemed to be on the edge of her hearing. The hedgerow and the trees were full of whispers and giggling and the air was thick with the thrum of gossamer wings. Her eyes were dazzled …

  She was brought back to her senses with a jolt as Granda grabbed the back of her jacket and yanked her to her feet as she tried to lower herself on to her belly. He wrapped his long arms around herself, Roisin and Danny, who looked as moonstruck as she was, and hugged his three grandchildren so hard she could feel their ribs grinding together.

  ‘Don’t be fooled,’ he growled. ‘They are putting a glamour on you! It’s a magic that makes you see only what they want you to see.’

  He squeezed them harder and Maddy heard Roisin and Danny yelp as she did from the pain. Their faces were pressed so close together she couldn’t see their expressions, but she felt her mind become a little clearer as the pain doused her like cold water.

  ‘Look at them now,’ said Granda. ‘Really look at them.’

  As the couples drew closer, they dimmed the light that radiated from their bodies. It settled around them like a cloak and Maddy could see them clearly for the first time.

  They were still beautiful, but their beauty was hard and unnatural to mortal eyes. The colour of their hair was more than blond – it looked as hard and cold as beaten gold. The darker man’s hair was as rich and as unyielding as ebony. They were impossibly tall, nearly eight feet, Maddy guessed, and like many of the faeries their fingers were triple-jointed and unnaturally long. Their faces were triangular, narrowing down into a chin a baby could cup in its palm, while their eyes were huge and round beneath a bulging brow. But it was their expressions that sent a shudder down Maddy’s spine – cold and cruel.

  ‘They look like … they look like …’ stammered Roisin.

  ‘Aliens,’ babbled Danny. ‘They look like aliens out of one of those sci-fi comics, like that guy that landed at Roswell, only medieval, with lots of hair …’

  ‘Shh!’ whispered Granda. ‘Keep thoughts like that to yourselves. Don’t offend them and don’t, whatever you do, get them to notice you. We want to walk away from here tonight without a single glance in our direction.’

  ‘Who are they?’ asked Maddy.

  ‘The monarchs of the Spring and Summer Courts,’ said Granda. ‘The blond couple are King Nuada and Queen Sorcha of the Spring faeries. The dark-haired man is King Aengus Óg of the Summer Court with his wife Queen Niamh. The monarchs are the most powerful of the Tuatha de Dannan.’

  ‘Aengus Óg?’ asked Roisin, her brow puckering as she thought. ‘I’ve read stories about him. The god of love?’

  ‘Among other things,’ said Granda grimly.

  ‘God of love doesn’t sound that scary,’ said Danny. ‘It sounds a bit girly to me.’

  ‘There is nothing girly about Aengus Óg,’ warned Granda. ‘Call yourself a boxer, but I’m almost tempted to let you say that in his hearing just to teach you a lesson. I think we would all prefer that the skin on your back stayed there.’

  Danny swallowed and went quiet.

  Maddy winced as a blast of cold air hit her right cheek. The terror she had left behind in Seamus’s house jumped on her back and squeezed her throat with icy fingers. She forced her fear-stiffened neck to turn her head and see the faerie that haunted her nightmares.

  Liadan, the Winter Queen, who had hunted Maddy, Roisin and Danny across Tír na nÓg last year, was shuffling across the grass with her crippled, dragging step. Her long black hair was piled high on her head and her crown of ice perched on top. Frost and ice radiated from her feet and petrified the ground. Bitter arctic air from her lips blew against the warm air of the Spring and Summer Courts. The clouds of butterflies spiralled into the air in panic, a few stragglers dropping to the ground as the cold iced their tissue-thin wings and stopped their tiny hearts. The Spring and Summer monarchs frowned and their warm golden glow roared into life in a solar flare to clash with Winter’s chill. The air sizzled and steamed, water pattering to the ground and marking a boundary line in mud between them and Winter.

  Now that Maddy could compare Liadan to the Tuatha de Dannan, she could see how weak the crippled Winter Queen really was. Liadan was no Tuatha de Dannan but a bloodthirsty elf who had been given the Winter crown and married to Seamus in an attempt to bring peace to war-torn Faerie when the last Winter Queen disappeared. But it is not easy wearing the crown of a Tuatha. Liadan was an old and powerful elf but she did not have the strength of a god. As soon as the High Queen of the faeries, the Morrighan, had placed the crown on Liadan’s head, the cold of winter entered her body and it had twisted and warped her, ruining her beauty and her mind. Maddy shuddered as the elf sent a cruel smile her way. She would never forget the look of joy on Liadan’s face when she had stabbed ice through Maddy’s shoulder. Or the way her painted lips had curled in a snarl when she had knelt over Maddy and sent waves of ice into her chest in an attempt to stop her heart.

  The leader of Winter’s war band, Fachtna, towered behind Liadan. Maddy felt the world spin around her and her knees buckle as the field roared away and the memory of Fachtna standing over her, lightning flickering over her bone-white skin as she raised her silver sword to drive it through Maddy’s throat, washed over her and drowned her senses. Maddy heard her own voice screaming in her head – ‘You can’t kill me!’ And Fachtna, cocking that long head at her, the fire in her red eyes glowing bright. ‘Let’s find out.’ Fachtna was as tall as the Tuatha and every inch of her skin was covered in grey tattoos. Her white hair was stiffened with lime and formed a high Mohican, her teeth were filed into points and her red eyes burned in her pointed, hook-nosed face. She bristled with weapons and scars and, as Maddy stared at her, the faerie grinned and an unnaturally long tongue curled out and licked her pointed teeth. She had no doubt Liadan still wanted her dead and that Fachtna was tasked to do the deed. The war faerie was probably still furious that Maddy had outrun her hounds last year and that she, Fachtna, had failed to hunt her down for the Winter Queen. She could not boast that she always caught her prey, not any more. Fachtna enjoyed killing, and Maddy was under no illusions that if Fachtna caught her, her death would be slow and painful. The dark faerie gained nourishment in some weird way from the darker human emotions. She would take great pleasure in making Maddy scream and would drink in every drop of her agony like a fine wine. Bile burned in the back of Maddy’s throat and she felt Granda’s arm tighten around her as he held her up, bringing her back to the here and now.

  ‘Breathe, Maddy,’ he said. ‘Don’t give her your fear – it will only make her stronger.’

  The howling of the faeries brought Maddy back to her senses and she wrenched her eyes away from Fachtna’s glowing red orbs and listened in horror as the courts taunted and threatened each other. Steam billowed up where the warm and cold air twisted and fought against each other, cloaking the field in fog. Through the half-light she could see the faeries of all the courts brandishing weapons in paws, claws and hands. Demon hounds, their shapes shifting to flaunt paws, claws, fur and scales all at once while red eyes glowed in shadowy faces, bayed on all sides as the monarchs faced off. You would never know what they truly looked like until they were close enough to bite. A woman behind Maddy cried out, and that one sound was enough to spread fear through the Sighted like a contagion. Maddy could practically smell the panic rising behind her. The golden-haired armoured men of the Spring and Summer Courts began to round up mounted warriors and line them up in battle formation, facing the Winter Court. Fachtna drew her sword and turned to bellow something at the seething dark mass that was the Winter Court faer
ies. She pointed with her sword and Maddy watched as trolls, dark-haired gancanagh, their beauty deceptive, and fir dorocha began to form themselves into ranks. The fir dorocha, the ‘dark men’ of Celtic legend, were a shifting faceless mass, terror whispering from them and oozing over the ground toward the opposing courts. Their shadow hands held the silver chains that restrained the hounds.

  ‘They’re going to charge!’ screamed Roisin.

  Maddy twisted in her grandfather’s grip as she tried to look behind her. Steam obscured her vision and she couldn’t even see if the Sighted were still standing behind them or if they were alone in what was about to become a battlefield.

  ‘Stand your ground!’ barked Granda, as Maddy, Roisin and Danny squirmed like puppies.

  ‘We need to go!’ said Danny, his voice high with fear. ‘We need to go right now!’

  ‘Remember the rules,’ said Granda. ‘Never run. If we run, they’ll chase, and we won’t make it as far as the fence.’

  Maddy froze, her chest hitching with dry sobs, her hair plastered to her head with the condensing steam. She couldn’t think, she could barely see – her whole body shook as she fought the urge to flee.

  ‘Faeries!’ spat Seamus. ‘You can’t have them in the same space for five minutes without them trying to tear each other’s heads off!’ He drew the shadows of the ground into himself and suddenly his mortal form grew and expanded until he was eye to eye with the other Tuatha. A spread of shadow antlers with too many points for Maddy’s terrified brain to count uncurled through the air and pierced the steam.

  ‘ENOUGH!’ he roared, his booming voice rolling across the courts and ending with a clap of thunder that made everyone, mortal and faerie, cover their ears with their hands.

  The silence was immediate and deafening. The Summer and Spring monarchs dimmed their glow and the butterflies rested, trembling, on their clothes. Liadan smiled, a bitter offering, and drew her cold back into herself.

  Maddy heard Danny and Roisin let out a shuddering breath. She could make out whimpers and mutterings behind her. It seemed the Sighted had stood their ground.

  ‘What now?’ she whispered in the quiet.

  ‘Now we wait,’ said Granda.

  ‘For what?’ asked Roisin.

  ‘For Autumn to arrive.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A perfect silence reigned for a few heartbeats before the assembled courts began to grumble among themselves. Aengus Óg drew himself up to his full height and looked down his long nose at Seamus.

  ‘How diminished you are, brother, that you have to construct your true form with shadows and air before you can face me,’ he sneered. ‘Has clinging on to the mortal world weakened you so much?’

  ‘Not so weak that I cannot remember who gave you that crown, brother,’ growled Seamus. ‘Shall we see if I can take it away?’

  ‘Why do you argue?’ cried Queen Niamh, her hands fluttering around her face. ‘How can you argue when such a tragedy has befallen us all?’ She pulled at her long golden tresses, but Maddy couldn’t help but notice that instead of tearing at them she sort of fluffed them up so her hair would look fuller.

  Sorcha rolled her eyes. ‘Luckily the mare isn’t dead yet. A reasonable discussion about what we are going to do would be preferable to bickering like we’re only a few centuries old, but that’s not possible, is it?’

  ‘What are you implying?’ hissed Niamh, her grief forgotten and her blue eyes narrowed to slits. ‘We’re not the ones who blocked treaty after treaty—’

  ‘But you are the ones who made the air burn and nearly ripped Tír na nÓg apart, trying to become the dominant court instead of sharing power as we are supposed to do,’ snapped Sorcha.

  ‘And what would you have done if you had been winning?’ asked Niamh. ‘How noble would you have been, sister, if you had had the upper hand?’

  ‘Peace!’ said King Nuada. ‘We must put aside our enmity and join together to face this bigger threat. Someone has done this to the sacred unicorn. Someone who does not care about tearing apart the fragile fabric that holds our world together.’

  ‘Nuada is right,’ said Seamus. ‘Now is not the time to rake over old fights and hurts. The mortal world and Tír na nÓg are already changing. It is growing too cold too quickly, and if the mare dies we will not see summer again. An eternal Winter of starvation faces us all.’

  ‘And wouldn’t that be wonderful?’ said Niamh. ‘For one of us at least.’ She glared at Liadan.

  The Winter Queen’s face remained as impassive as granite. ‘My sister queen wrongs me. I rule for the good of Tír na nÓg, as does she. I live for balance and prosperity. It would not serve my court for the Land to be thrown into chaos.’

  ‘You lie with every word you speak!’ screeched Niamh. ‘Your whole rule is nothing but disorder and riot! You are not fit to wear a Tuatha’s crown and I will never be your sister.’

  ‘Spare me from the spite of females,’ groaned Seamus.

  ‘Do not include me in those words. I can show a measure of self-control,’ snapped Sorcha. Yells and insults began to rise in the courts as faeries on all sides traded insults and Liadan cocked an eyebrow at Sorcha. Aengus Óg laid a soothing hand on his wife’s arm while glaring at Nuada. ‘Control your wife,’ he said.

  The Spring monarch let out a humourless bark of laughter. ‘I’m not the one who cannot put a rein on my wife’s passion. Or had you forgotten?’

  Aengus Óg’s face turned black with anger. There was clash of swords on shields as the Summer warriors began a menacing beat, faces set as hard as stone as they reacted to Spring’s insult. The glow around the Summer and Spring regents began to swell again as they faced off, Seamus shouting at them to be calm, as a wind began to rise, whipping dead leaves into the air. The wind smelled of rain and it tore around the Sighted, tugging at their clothes and howling in their ears. Maddy began to shiver as it blasted full into her face, its icy touch numbing her skin as if her clothes were made of tissue. Dark clouds rolled in overhead and the air was ripped apart by lightning. Bolts leaped from the purple-black storm clouds and stabbed at the ground, scattering faeries and leaving a stink of ozone in the air. The dead leaves began to form a shape, a whirlwind between the courts that spun faster and faster, rising higher and higher. A clap of thunder crashed and the whirlwind exploded in every direction, scattering leaves, the speed turning them into knives that slashed soft human faces. Maddy screamed and squeezed her eyes shut, and felt Granda curl his long body over herself, Roisin and Danny to shield them from the worst of the blows.

  For a second time there was a perfect silence. Maddy opened her eyes and saw another Tuatha standing where the whirlwind had raged only a moment before. Her hair was as red as fire, thick and matted, and so long it reached to the ground behind her. Her huge eyes were a bright, bright green and she had draped her body in red plaid over a white undershirt, pinned at the shoulder with a golden brooch. Gold armbands gleamed against her milk-white skin and a torc hung heavy around her long neck. A huge shaggy black dog pressed itself against her thigh, its yellow eyes like lamps in the dim light. Three hideous women in greasy grey rags huddled behind her, their scabbed scalps pocked with limp strands of hair, each with one eye gleaming with malevolence in her blue-black face.

  ‘Meabh,’ said Niamh, her eyes blazing with hatred. ‘So good of you to join us. And you must be feeling brave to bring only your storm hags and the Pooka.’

  ‘I did not realize I had anything to fear,’ said Meabh with mock innocence. She gazed around her at the assembled courts while the Pooka, a faerie that took the shape of a giant dog, bared his teeth at Niamh. ‘I thought I was coming to council, not war. Am I not safe here?’

  Seamus stepped forward and offered his arm. ‘Of course, dear sister. We are under a banner of truce – no blood can be spilled. And your skills of witchcraft are much needed.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ whispered Maddy. ‘The Queen of Autumn?’

  ‘The very same,’ said Granda.
/>   ‘Where’s the king?’ asked Danny.

  ‘Meabh’s husbands have a nasty habit of dying in battle,’ said Granda. ‘She has been widowed for the second time since taking the Autumn crown and there are not many volunteers to be her third husband.’

  Seamus walked Meabh over to the body of the unicorn mare, with her mate still standing forlorn by her side. The Autumn Queen bowed her head to the stallion, who lowered his in return. Then she crouched and drew the dart from the mare’s shoulder. The unicorn did not move as the barb was pulled free of her skin; not so much as a ripple shuddered through her silver hide. Meabh pressed her hand to the wound and closed her eyes. She stayed still and silent for a while, the Sighted and the faerie courts pressing closer and watching her face.

  ‘What is she doing?’ asked Roisin.

  ‘Meabh is a necromancer,’ said Granda. ‘As well as having power over the elements, like all the Tuatha, she can walk in the realm of the dead and talk to them there. The unicorn is hovering on the brink of death and Meabh is the only one who can travel to her.’

  ‘So why is she touching the cut?’

  ‘She is looking for the poison,’ said Granda. ‘Poisons are a bit like bombs – the people who make them often put their own stamp on them. If Meabh can recognize the poison then we find the poisoner and we can all go home.’

  Meabh pulled her hand away and shivered. ‘Dark arts did this. Dark arts and a twisted, evil creature to hurt one so pure,’ she said, her eyes darkening in her face. ‘It will be safe nowhere, welcome nowhere, no guest rights can it claim. It is a thing transformed by the horror of what it has done.’

  ‘Can the mare be helped?’ asked Sorcha.

  Meabh nodded. ‘I can turn back the poison, but she is weak and will not survive a second attack.’

  Sorcha paled. ‘Another one? Why do you think there will be another attempt?’

  ‘Whatever creature attacked her, the mare read the whispers of its heart before it struck her down,’ said Meabh. ‘It meant to kill her. I see no reason why it would not return to see the job finished.’