Ascendant

by Diana Peterfreund

  Once I’d crossed the electronic barrier, I could sense the einhorns more clearly. Many were awake, their thoughts focused on the suffering one: Fats.

  Had she fallen? Had she been attacked by one of the others? Had her illness suddenly turned acute?

  Another scream rent the night air, one that existed in the physical world. It was followed by bellows and grunts, and I banked right and ran into the center of the woods, toward the origin of the noises.

  By the time I arrived, it was all over. Fats lay huddled and panting beneath the wilting leaves of a scraggly bush, and nestled between her twining hooves was a tiny, hornless einhorn, its downy, paper-soft hide still slick and shiny.

  I stopped dead, and the knife fell from my hands.

  The baby’s eyes were shut, tissue-thin lids closed over impossibly large black orbs that jutted from either side of its face. It mewled, snuffling at its mother’s belly until it found her teats. Fats licked the baby all over, nosing it softly until it was pushed fully against the warmth of her body.

  I dropped to my knees in the leaves, tears springing to my eyes.

  Fats lifted her head and faced me, blinking slowly and holding my gaze as I struggled to speak. Some magic greater than unicorns choked my senses, burned everything but the vision of this infant, drowned all but the swell of protectiveness emanating from Fats and flowing straight into me.

  I crawled toward mother and baby on shaking limbs, feeling as faint as the first time I was poisoned by a karkadann. There was nothing else in the world beyond these woods and these einhorns. The moment in the pool dissolved; my awkward, aggravating conversation with Giovanni melted away; the thwack of the arrows into the heart of the target faded; Cory’s bombshells vanished into the air. I had never existed before this moment; there was nothing more important than this unicorn.

  It was only in some dim, distant, human part of my brain that I realized these thoughts were not my own. They belonged to Fats. She was making me feel them. Her child, her love, her fundamental instinct to protect this infant at all costs.

  I drew in a breath and reached out my hand to touch the baby.

  Yes. It was as soft as I’d thought, and as warm, and as sacred. Fats curved her neck over the child, the blinking lights on her collar a crude barrier when she nuzzled against its skin. She turned to face me again, only a few inches away this time.

  “Yes,” I said aloud, though this was nothing like talking to the karkadann. There were no words in my brain to translate, just a vital need. “I’ll help you. I’ll protect her.”

  Fats sighed and lowered her head, exhausted by her ordeal. And I stood guard over mother and child all night, watching the baby twitch and nuzzle against its mother, watching until the first rays of dawn broke through the trees and made the baby’s bare white skin glow as if lit from within. It was then that I named it.

  Angel.

  17

  WHEREIN ASTRID GOES NATIVE

  Of course, Angel was a terrible name for a man-eating monster, but somehow that didn’t matter as the days passed and I kept up with my secret vigils. I saw the baby through Fats’s eyes—it was tiny, not terrible; sweet, not savage. The short days and long nights of winter made it easy for me to keep an eye on mother and baby, and I took to regularly spending my evenings in the enclosure. With Brandt still out of town and Isabeau increasingly wrapped up in her research, there was no one to talk to after my classes were over and no one keeping a close eye on whether or not I slept in my own bed.

  The dangers to Angel and Fats were twofold. With the constant food shortage among the einhorns, it was difficult for any individual unicorn to get enough to nourish itself, let alone enough to sustain a nursing mother. Though Isabeau had increased the unicorns’ food allotment twice on my request, it seemed that no amount would keep these animals satisfied. They’d already consumed all the creatures—rabbits, badgers, stoats—that had once lived in the forest. They needed a larger territory to hunt and survive.

  This difficulty was a product of their species—traditionally, it was known that unicorns could not be captured, only killed. Bucephalus had even told me of his suffering when he rode with Alexander. The truth was, they would wither in captivity, even if they were given all the fresh meat in the world.

  And what of Angel, born into a cage?

  Above all, it was vital that no one in the château discover there was a new unicorn in the enclosure. I didn’t know if I could bear to place an electronic collar around the baby’s neck, but I was positive I would never be able to inject Angel with any of the new serums I knew the Gordian scientists would soon be ready to try again. Angel may live on their lands, but I balked at the idea that the tiny unicorn was their property.

  Then there was the danger it faced from the other einhorns. More than once I’d noticed some of the other unicorns skulking nearby as I stood guard over mother and child. Some seemed only curious—like Breaker, Stretch, and Tongue—but there were others, like that angry one, whose thoughts tended toward the violent. I worried what might happen if the angry one came upon them when I wasn’t there. Fats was weak all the time, losing weight rapidly and constantly exhausted from feeding her baby; and Angel was utterly defenseless with no horn. Defenseless, fat, and probably very tender.

  I asked Isabeau to give the animals even more food.

  “With the colder weather now, they need to bulk up and protect themselves from the elements,” I argued. “Also, I’d be happy to take it to them myself.” Perhaps a peace offering of massive amounts of meat would keep the more threatening einhorns at bay.

  Isabeau agreed, and the strategy seemed to work—for a while at least. The einhorns ignored Angel in favor of the chunks of meat I threw at them, and I was able to give Fats a larger portion of food that was strictly her own and didn’t require scrambling to snatch out of the jaws of the other unicorns. She began to lose that famished look that had turned her name into such an irony, and I rested better during the few hours of sleep I caught each morning between the dawn and my first classes with Lauren.

  Angel grew like a weed, with silky white hair and spindly legs so long I began to entertain myself with notions of the unicorn’s paternity. Stretch, you rascal. After a few weeks of nursing, the baby began eating regurgitated meat from its mother’s mouth, which was a lot more difficult to witness, but still fascinating from a scientific standpoint.

  I suppose after you’ve seen unicorn guts, unicorn vomit isn’t so disturbing.

  And meanwhile, there were those stretches of dreamtime, alone in the woods with nothing but Fats’s soft thoughts and the near-silent flicker of the baby’s impressions in my brain. I immersed myself in both, marveling at the way they swirled together, their connections to each other far stronger than my magic-induced link. My gift had nothing on Fats’s natural ability. The tiniest twitch of Angel’s consciousness registered to Fats, even if they weren’t together, even if she was out foraging for food she’d never find, leaving Angel alone in the brush with nothing but a besotted unicorn hunter for protection.

  Though I recognized the influence Fats’s own maternal instincts had on my emotions, I allowed it to continue. After all, this was my job. I was supposed to be attuned to the state of the unicorns. When they were scared or anxious, I remained alert.

  When they were calm and passive, I could relax and devote my mind to other things. I was employed as a unicorn keeper, and in protecting the baby, I was keeping the unicorns as best I could.

  The fact that I was keeping this one a secret from my employer? Well, let’s leave that aside for now.

  “You seem tired,” Isabeau said to me one morning in mid-December as she found me staring bleary-eyed into the coffee press.

  I yawned. “It’s just winter. Gray weather will make anyone tired. Trust me, I grew up in Washington.”

  “How are your classes?” she asked.

  “Fine.” I gulped down a cup of too-strong, too-bitter coffee and made for the door. She stepped in front of me. />
  “I’m sure the unicorns are fine. Talk to me for a moment.”

  I slumped. It had been four hours since I’d seen Angel, and the scent of chamomile and coffee lingered thick in the air, masking my magic. Was the baby okay? Did it need me?

  “You’ve been so withdrawn lately. Ever since your friends visited. I am worried you are homesick for them?”

  “No, I—” I tried to sidle around her, but for such a petite woman, Isabeau could certainly fill a space. Okay, then. “Well, maybe a little, with the holidays coming up.” Perhaps now she’d let me be.

  Apparently not. “And you spend so much time with the unicorns. All night, every night? Astrid, I told you there was no reason to sleep out there.”

  “How do you know—”

  She looked amused. “The lockbox on the gate, Astrid. It keeps a log of every time the code is pressed. How else could we handle the enclosure’s security?”

  I pursed my lips. “And what other movements of mine are you monitoring?”

  Isabeau took a little half step back, looking surprised. “None at all. Why? Should I be spying on you, ma chère? Is there anything you are doing of which I would not approve?” When I didn’t answer, she went on, “Of course we keep an eye on the lockbox, Astrid. After the sabotage … Isn’t that why you’ve been going out there at night? Same as you did the night the boundary was shut down?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “I don’t trust the protesters.” But I didn’t fear them or for them, either. Things had grown scattered and sparse at their camp ever since the night of the break-in, partially given the police interrogation that had followed the situation and partially because the weather had become too unpleasant for any but the most die-hard animal lovers to stay outside all night.

  I suppose I now fell into that group myself.

  “There are other ways to deal with them than risking your health,” Isabeau said. “I appreciate your dedication, but not at such a great personal risk.”

  “Everything I do is at a great personal risk,” I grumbled as I walked by her. Even if I wasn’t taking my life in my hands every time I tried to hold off a hungry unicorn, I was risking my future by concealing Angel’s presence from Isabeau and Gordian. If I got fired and sent back to the Cloisters, what would happen to my education?

  And she thought I was afraid of catching cold?

  I zipped through my rounds that morning, taking quick stock of the perimeter while reaching my mental feelers into the woods to sense Fats and Angel, together and asleep. As I neared the side of the enclosure closest to the protesters’ camp, I paused. Standing by the fence was the same tall black man, and as usual, he was watching me. I kept moving.

  “Hello,” he said, and put his hands on the link. “Hello there. You are American?” “Oui.” I kept going.

  “I know what you are,” he said. “Vous êtes un chasseur de licornes.” You are a unicorn hunter. Give the man a prize.

  “You walk among them. You command them.”

  And this guy stood there and watched.

  “So I ask you,” he called, raising his voice as my circuit began to take me away from him, “why it is that you can bear to see them like this? They are wild creatures! You must know this is torture for them. A torture much greater than they can suffer, even within the terrible laboratories! Please! Listen to me!”

  I stopped now and turned back to face him, but I said nothing. How could I? Yes, the einhorns were suffering here in the enclosure; I knew that better than anyone, just as he’d surmised. And yet, if we could find the secret to the Remedy through their pain and captivity, well, then, wouldn’t it be worth it? We weren’t making cosmetics here. We were trying to save the world.

  Besides, what was the alternative? Let them out? Hardly.

  “What is your name?” he asked softly.

  “Astrid,” I said. “Comment vous appellez-vous?”

  “René. It is very nice to know you, Astrid.”

  “You don’t know me,” I said.

  “But I do. I watched you for many days and nights. I watched you heal the unicorn you cut—in the leg, no less. You are a very poor hunter, I think.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Oh, is that what you think? Should I start listing my more impressive kills?”

  “No, I also watched your skill with a bow. I know how talented you are. You are a very poor hunter,” he repeated, “because your heart is not in the kill.”

  “Shooting fish in a barrel,” I snapped, approaching him. Who was he to observe something like that? That was my own private business. “I wasn’t put here to kill any of these animals. Believe me, when I should kill, I kill.” I crossed the electric boundary and came near the fence.

  “And what if what you should do is something else?” Up close, he was younger than I’d thought, maybe only a few years older than Neil. Figured. It’s not like anyone old enough to have real responsibilities could take off months from work to go camp out in a pasture and watch a bunch of captive unicorns. Of that I was sure.

  René was very handsome, with strong, chiseled features, dark skin, darker eyes, and a clean-shaven head. He was dressed in a pair of black slacks, hiking boots, and a forest green sweater under a black slicker. He didn’t look like the militant environmentalist type, the ones who didn’t wash or bathe, who tied themselves to trees or disabled lockboxes or committed acts of ecoterrorism. More like a graduate student on holiday.

  “I’d get away from the fence, if I were you,” I said. “The monsters can smell your blood from all the way in the forest.”

  His eyes widened, but his hands dropped from the links and he stepped back.

  “Your presence here puts them in a constant state of agitation, do you know that?” I said.

  “But you are here to soothe them.”

  “They belong to Gordian.”

  “They belong to themselves and to the Earth,” he replied. “You know that, else you would not sleep out here as they do.”

  Did everyone in the world know where I was spending my nights? I gritted my teeth. “Can’t you see how important this work is? Do you know how many people we can cure if we continue to experiment on these animals?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But even if it were a million, or ten million, is it worth the destruction of this species? Are there even a million unicorns? Are there a thousand? Do you know?”

  “No,” I said without thinking.

  René stared at me. “Do you know how many you’ve killed?” I whispered, “No.”

  He nodded slowly and shrugged. “Perhaps you should.”

  “Perhaps I should have counted how many lives I’ve saved with the unicorns I’ve killed,” I said. I could start with every hunter in the Cloisters. “Perhaps I should count the lives of every person in your camp.”

  “René!” He turned to look at a man in the camp. The second man scowled. He was white, older, larger, and wore a scuffed leather jacket. Some animal-rights activist. “What are you doing talking to her?” the man shouted in French. “She’s one of them.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  René turned back to me, a smile playing about his lips. “You are not one of them,” he said to me in French. “Are you? I think, Astrid, that you are one of us.”

  The bellow of a unicorn broke the morning stillness. Instantly, every other animal in the enclosure was awake and on alert. I spun on my heel and sprinted into the woods, my conversation with René utterly forgotten. Disorder reigned in the minds of the monsters, with a ribbon of violence spreading through like a sickness. I quickened my pace, beelining for the epicenter of the excitement.

  By the time I arrived, it was to find Stretch and the angry unicorn facing off against each other, legs spread, heads lowered, horns glancing blows as each einhorn tested its limits against the other. Nearby lay the body of a third unicorn—dead.

  Neither einhorn noticed me as I came closer, struggling to project calming thoughts. They clashed, then withdrew, but any time either attempted to approach the corpse
, the other attacked again. I wished I’d thought to bring my bow—there was no way I could hold off two unicorns with only my little alicorn knife.

  The angry one charged at Stretch, causing him to gallop off into the brush. Then, before I could stop him, he rushed back to the corpse and fastened his fangs around a spindly leg, dragging the body away. Upon closer inspection, I could see that the dead unicorn was Tongue. I ran forward, knife drawn.

  “Drop it!” I cried. The unicorn looked at me and growled, teeth still firmly clamped around the corpse.

  I could feel Stretch returning, and suddenly, he was upon us, and had grabbed up another of Tongue’s limp legs. A tug-of-war ensued in which the minds of both unicorns were so firmly fixed on their prize that all the calming thoughts in the world were having no effect at all. I felt like a child stamping my foot in frustration. And yet, I kept my knife at my side. They weren’t threatening people, nor Angel, merely each other. They were acting like animals in the wild, fighting over food. Horrible, macabre food, yes, but food nonetheless. There were many animals that turned to cannibalism in starvation situations. I’d read stories of polar bears attacking cubs.

  I detected no injuries on the dead Tongue, which both soothed and worried me. It was good to know that the unicorns weren’t killing one another, but if Tongue had died of some sort of illness, I probably shouldn’t let them eat the body, lest they fall ill as well. I’d always wondered if Tongue might be sick, but hadn’t given it much thought after Fats gave birth. After all, I thought she’d been sick as well, and I’d been utterly wrong about that one.

  The growling grew in both volume and intensity.

  “Drop it!” I cried. “Drop it, drop it, drop it!”

  They paid me no mind. And what could I do? Kill them both? I wouldn’t be able to get Tongue’s corpse out of the woods on my own anyway, even if I wasn’t forced to hold off hungry unicorns—hungry unicorns used to me feeding them meat—while doing so. And with the einhorns in such an agitated state, I couldn’t risk bringing a nonhunter into the enclosure to retrieve the body.