Ascendant

by Diana Peterfreund

  He came out and slammed the door shut behind him, breathing heavily. He ran his fingers through his dark, wavy hair then noticed us. “All right, Astrid?”

  “Hi,” I said. I looked from Neil to Phil. “Should I … ?”

  “I can’t deal with her defiance,” Neil said to Phil. “She refuses to see me as an adult.” He sighed. “In her eyes, I’m not her uncle and guardian telling her these things; I’m her bossy older brother.”

  “You’re her only family,” Phil replied, coming close. “She’ll come around. She always does.”

  Neil didn’t look convinced. “I need a coffee.” He spun and headed off down the corridor to the break room, and Phil followed, leaving me alone. I watched them move down the hall, saw Phil place her hand on the small of his back in comfort.

  I entered the ward. Cory was making a valiant attempt to get out of the hospital bed, flailing around with crutches and wincing every time she had to bend.

  “Careful,” I said. “You’re not going to heal so quick this time.” Her shirt was folded up, and thick bandages wrapped all the way around her waist. There were other bandages on her arms and legs, and several bruises sprouted on the fair skin of her face. Her mop of brown curls lay flat and listless against her head.

  She glared at me, her eyes overflowing with tears. “Did you hear what he said to me?”

  “I think the entire village heard.”

  “How dare he!” she said. “How dare he—” She cut off then turned away, burying her chin into her chest. “I’ve been hunting unicorns for months. I’ve killed kirin, I’ve killed re’em—it would be rather foolish if I were killed by a zhi. Just like my mother.”

  I nodded, and kept my voice soft. “It was wrong of Neil to say that. He didn’t mean it. He was just so frightened to see you like this. We’re all scared about what this might mean—”

  “Oh, I know what it means!” she said. “It means I have to leave. It’s too dangerous for me to stay at the Cloisters if I can’t be a proper hunter, if Bonegrinder will leap on me as soon as look at me. And Neil says he’ll go with me, since we’re already a ring short. I’m too young to be a proper don, so I’m the one who has to go. Not Phil. Me.” She sniffled.

  My mouth opened. “But you can’t leave!”

  “I know. I practically rebuilt the Cloisters, stone by bloody stone. And this is how it ends! I didn’t do anything wrong! I don’t know why this is happening to me. I don’t know why I can’t …” She seemed to collapse over her crutches, defeated. “This isn’t fair. There’s no reason I should be losing the magic.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. It wasn’t fair. Not in the least. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re quite the doctor, Astrid,” she snapped.

  “Well, maybe you should go see a real doctor!” I cried. “Maybe you’re sick—something completely normal and non-magical, but your hunter powers are suppressed the same way that, I don’t know, your immune system might be depressed from some other illness.”

  “Like what?” she asked. “Like a cold? I don’t have a cold.”

  I remained quiet because “like cancer or something” wasn’t going to go far in calming her down.

  “And look at this!” she cried, and thrust out her arm. A brand-new, glistening red alicorn scar peeked out from beneath the edge of her sleeve. “I’m still immune to the poison. It’s just the hunting that I can’t muster—why?”

  “That’s what I mean,” I said. “It’s too dangerous for you to go. We don’t know what powers are still working for you. I mean, look at it this way: if you were in a coma, you’d be unable to hunt, but you’d still be a hunter. You’re still going to draw unicorns to you. That’s why we need to train all the girls with hunter abilities. Even if they don’t stay here, don’t work for the Order, they at least need to know how to protect themselves.”

  Cory straightened. “You’re right. Astrid, that’s brilliant.”

  Phil probably wouldn’t thank me for that particular stroke of brilliance.

  “They can’t let me go or then I really might die. The woods on our land are simply infested with zhis.” She narrowed her eyes. “Zhis just like the one today. Zhis just like the ones that killed my mum.”

  “Zhis just like the one living in our nunnery?” I replied.

  But Cory was not to be gainsaid. “Grab my boots, will you?” she said, swinging her crutches toward the door. I followed halfheartedly, boots in hand. This couldn’t end well.

  One screaming match in a small country clinic and half an exceedingly awkward and unbearably silent car ride back to Rome later, I remembered that I’d never gone back to burn the scraps of paper that were all that was left of my letter to Giovanni.

  No matter. I stared out the window at the rolling Italian countryside and began to compose another e-mail in my head.

  Dear Giovanni,

  Today we found out that Cory’s hunting abilities are mysteriously diminished, and Neil and Phil have concluded that it is too dangerous for her to remain active in the Order of the Lioness. Cory is furious, but all I can think is “I wish it were me … .”

  5

  WHEREIN ASTRID REACHES OUT

  The sun beat down on the cobblestones in the Cloisters courtyard, shimmering off Phil’s blond ponytail as she stood before us on her yoga mat.

  “Now,” she said, “exhale and bend your left leg until the left knee is perpendicular over the left ankle. You want a straight, ninety-degree angle between your shin and the ground.” We all moved on our mats.

  “Keep breathing,” Phil said. “Lengthen your torso. Put power into your right leg. Feel the energy in your right leg all the way through your toes and into the earth.”

  And under the ground to the chapter house of the Cloisters, where the bones hummed in tune to the beating of our hearts. What Phil didn’t know is that the rhythm of our inhalations was not dependent on her instructions. All hunters breathed together in the Cloisters—the entire nunnery respired like a massive iron lung.

  “Now, on the next breath in, sweep your hands up and out at the level of your shoulders. Think of your arms as arrows pointing straight and true.”

  I loved warrior pose. I increased power to my core and looked left over the tips of my fingers, imagining them as arrowheads aimed directly at the heart of a kirin.

  But in my sights I saw instead Cory, bandaged foot elevated against a column, reading a magazine and drinking lemonade. Her side of our room was packed, and she was headed back home to England this week. No amount of arguing with Neil had resulted in a change of heart. As far as he was concerned, the Cloisters was a gravity well of hunter attraction. Neil’s flat in London, however, would be safer.

  “Warrior Two,” Phil was saying as we deepened into the pose with every breath, “is a position of power but also of focus. A Zen archer aims his bow for years before ever releasing an arrow.”

  “Doesn’t kill many unicorns that way, huh?” Melissende said with a snicker. Some of the younger girls laughed.

  Phil lifted her chin and went on. “You are arrows, straight and true. You are spears, strong and focused. You are warriors.”

  Grace ignored her friend, for once, and closed her eyes.

  I, too, turned inward.

  The bones in the masonry sang around me. In the shade of the Cloisters, Bonegrinder sat in watchful stillness, her chain anchoring her to the wall. I felt her presence like a livid pinprick in my mind within the net of buzzing artifacts.

  And beneath that, I felt my fellow hunters. Grace, solid as a rock, her energy radiating outward from her arms like the points on a compass. The other girls, bright or dim depending on the strength of their concentration. Beyond my fingertips, I felt Cory sizzling like a frayed power cord. Farther out were the others: Valerija resting in her room; Dorcas on the computer; Rosamund coming up the stairs from the chapter house into the rotunda.

  I breathed and sank deeper into this new awareness. Inside my head a chord began to ring. I’d he
ard it before, the music of the Wall of First Kills. I’d only heard it from the other hunters once, just before our battle against the kirin in the necropolis of Cerveteri last month.

  I’m an arrow, I thought to myself.

  You are an arrow, said Phil’s voice inside my head. But no, it wasn’t Phil. It was Clothilde Llewelyn. The Clothilde who lived inside the memory of the karkadann Bucephalus.

  You are the arrow of God, said Clothilde, on a mission to vanquish the savage unicorn.

  I lost my balance and went careening into Ursula, who knocked into Ilesha, who elbowed Melissende hard in the stomach. We all collapsed to the floor.

  This time, Grace did laugh as she swept up from her pose and smiled smugly at the tangle of hunters at her feet. “Too challenging?”

  “Get off me!” Melissende shoved her younger sister, Ursula, out of the way and blew her black hair out of her eyes. “Yoga is dumb.”

  I put my hands over my eyes trying to clear the dizziness.

  “Asteroid?” Phil said, narrowing her eyes in the glare of the afternoon light. “You okay?”

  “One too many sun salutations today, I think,” I said. I pushed myself to my feet and dusted off my knees. “I’m going to get some water.”

  The last time I’d heard Clothilde’s voice in my head, it was because Bucephalus had put it there. The last time I could feel hunters the way I could feel unicorns—the way I imagined that unicorns could feel us—Bucephalus had been there.

  Inside my head, I called out to the karkadann. But there was no reply.

  Figured. I had no idea what Bucephalus would be doing in Rome, anyway. Despite the city’s network of parks, abandoned, stray-dog-infested ruins, and endless underground catacombs, it was hard for a unicorn the size of a rhinoceros to find a good hiding spot. I hadn’t seen him for months, hadn’t even dreamed about him for weeks. He’d told me he was going away, and yet I still searched.

  Because he was the only one I knew who had any answers.

  As I passed through the door into the rotunda, I saw Rosamund standing with Father Guillermo, their heads both bowed in whispered prayer. I stopped, afraid of interrupting them, and after a moment, he made the sign of the cross over the girl’s auburn head, then smiled at her.

  “Vaya con Dios, Hermanita,” said Father Guillermo.

  “Vielen Dank,” Rosamund said. “I am feeling much better now.” She turned and caught sight of me. “Astrid!”

  I shied behind the edge of the stuffed Bucephalus. “I didn’t mean to interrupt—”

  “No,” Rosamund said, and beckoned to me. She gathered up her music, which was arranged in a pile at her feet. “Ever since I heard of Cory’s … problem, I have not been able to sleep. I am so afraid it will happen to us all. I asked Herr Pfarrer to bless me. For protection from … whatever this may be.”

  “I will be happy to bless you as well,” said Father Guillermo.

  I looked down. “No, thank you.”

  “Or any of the other hunters.” He took in my clingy yoga clothes. “I take it you have been exercising?”

  I swallowed. “Yes. Yoga. In the privacy of the Cloisters courtyard. We are all alone here.” Couldn’t embarrass him or the Church or the Order.

  He shook his head and smiled. “Señorita, please do not be alarmed. This is not a police state, and I am not your enemy.”

  I brushed past them both and took the stairs to the dorm floor. Yeah, well, the last time some strange man holding the purse strings told us that, he was Marten Jaeger.

  And when he’d tried to destroy us, I’d turned the tables and let him be killed.

  In the shower, I washed off the sweat of the Italian afternoon and tried to rinse the memory of Clothilde’s voice from my brain. As a nun—even a lapsed one—Clothilde would have been Catholic. She would have been raised in the original Order of the Lioness, the kind that carved prayers into their swords and truly believed that they were vessels of God, charged to kill unicorns and dispense doses of the Remedy as the Church saw fit.

  That was the Order that Clothilde had rebelled against. That had been the life she’d faked her own death to escape.

  I wish I’d known more about her, this mysterious, revered, misunderstood ancestor of mine. It was well documented in Cloisters’s records that most hunters who sought to escape their duties turned to the services of what the Order had long called “actaeons,” after the mythological man who’d spied on the hunter goddess, Diana, in her bath. An actaeon was a fancy name for a lover—a guy specifically employed to divest a unicorn hunter of her virginity and thus her magic. The mythological Actaeon had been punished for his boldness when Diana had turned him into a stag to be torn to pieces by his own dogs. When the ancient Order of the Lioness caught an actaeon in the act, they fed him to their house zhi.

  Yes, I was part of a long line of extremely hard-core nuns.

  But Clothilde had not gone the actaeon route. She was still a hunter—had to have been to be able to communicate—when she made the deal with Bucephalus that had sent every unicorn in the world into hiding and had convinced the world they’d become extinct.

  Naturally, all records of Clothilde had disappeared from the history. I did know, however, that she’d married and had children. I was a direct descendant, on my father’s side. A father that my unicorn-obsessed mother had long ago tracked down and seduced. Possibly—I had recently realized with disgust—for the sheer purpose of getting a hunter daughter with a more prestigious lineage.

  Lucky Lilith, not to have borne a son.

  The Order of the Lioness may not know what happened to Clothilde, but my mother somehow did. She’d found my father once, though she’d told me he knew nothing of our lineage. And yet, the only thing she’d kept from their tryst (aside from me) was a single golden, blown-glass vial of the Remedy—the only one in existence. A vial she’d kept my whole life, until the day my boyfriend Brandt got gored by a unicorn in the woods and she’d cured him with it.

  Naturally, my father, whoever he was, would have no knowledge of its value. To him, it may have been nothing more than a family antique. Maybe he didn’t even know my mother had it.

  I wondered where my father was. I wondered if he had a family—daughters who may not know what kind of danger they were in. Untrained hunters were in the same position as Cory—unable to help themselves or their loved ones when the unicorns would inevitably be drawn to them.

  I left the bathroom, got dressed, and tied my hair into a damp braid whose hard elastic end slapped against the alicorn scars on my back as I took the stairs to the don’s office.

  The desk was covered with the usual piles of paperwork: reports of unicorn attacks, family trees and other genealogical records to trace the location of possible unicorn hunters, and the newest, disturbing addition—letters from people across the globe begging for help from the Cloisters. Please, come get the unicorn in our town. These monsters have already killed three people. We can’t figure out how to stop it. They’ve had to close the park/the school/the logging operation …

  Well, maybe I didn’t so much mind that last one.

  The letters came from all over the world, especially remote locations that would be nearly impossible (and cost-prohibitive) for us to visit. Tiny villages in the Canadian tundra, mountaintop monasteries in Tibet, cattle ranches in South America. There weren’t many, but it was clear that as people began to learn who we were, the requests would increase. We needed more resources, even than the Church could provide. And we needed more hunters.

  My mother answered the phone on the second ring.

  “Astrid?”

  “Hi, Mom.” Probably best not to lead with a request. Our relationship had been strained enough since Phil and I had kicked her out of the Cloisters. “How are things?”

  “Great,” she said. “My agent is in talks with the networks for a major exposé.”

  Not that she appeared to have suffered too greatly.

  “We might come back to Rome and tour the Clois
ters if this goes through.”

  “Have you spoken to Phil and Neil about it? “ Not to mention Father Guillermo.

  Lilith was quiet for a moment. “Well, Sweetie, there’s quite a bit of money involved. Given how tight things have been around there recently, I figured they’d welcome an influx of cash.”

  Translation: she hadn’t planned on asking for permission.

  “Actually,” I said, “we’ve been getting some support from the Vatican.”

  Lilith snorted. “Right. The habits. Well, they’ll look better on TV, at any rate. Do they hinder your hunting at all?”

  Typical. First my mother worries about the aesthetics and only then concerns herself with little practicalities like whether or not her daughter’s life is in danger. “They were designed as hunting costumes.”

  “Really?” I picture Lilith, her eyes glowing with interest. “Now that’s an angle.”

  “Mom, would you like me to actually take some religious vows? You know, to help with the ratings?”

  “Ooh, would you? We’d make prime time!”

  I almost swallowed the receiver.

  “That was a joke, Astrid.” Lilith clucked her tongue at me.

  Funny how lightly she could take this all now. She’d barged into the Cloisters, determined to whip us into shape, judgmental and dismissive of the Bartolis’ policies and their more inclusive, democratic attitudes. She’d run the place like a boot camp reminiscent of the ancient Order, and dreamed of hunters victorious in every battle.

  The truth, unfortunately, was not quite as glamorous, and when I’d been severely injured the first time she’d sent us out against a group of kirin, she’d flipped out and tried to close the place down. Phil and I had risen up against her and sent her packing back to the States.

  From a few thousand miles away, though, I guess the gory reality of unicorn hunting seemed a tad more rosy. I guess she forgot what it was like when I almost died. Maybe her concern was related to proximity, and now that she lived across an ocean, she’d gone back to buying the hype she spewed on television about our “glorious destiny.”