Ascendant

by Diana Peterfreund

He sighed. “You think that’s all they did? Just deflowered your hunters? You think that they risked life and limb for a little sex? No, Astrid. That’s so naive. They were thieves.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Of virginity?”

  “Of the Remedy.”

  I dropped the sword to the floor.

  He went on. “There’s nothing magical about virginity. There’s nothing special about sleeping with a virgin. Usually. But people like you … you’re different. You know that. The virginity of a unicorn hunter is magical. And so is taking it.”

  I backed against the wall as the room swirled around me. I almost wished the fog would come back, but my mind was as clear as a bell.

  Phil, standing in the center of the Cloisters chapter house the night after she was raped, surrounded by bones that would never sing for her again. But that was enough. For whoever decides these things.

  Seth disappearing on the Gordian dime.

  And then, a few short weeks later, Marten Jaeger, cowering before the karkadann in the courtyard, pleading for his life. I know the secret of the Remedy.

  Last winter, Isabeau in the study, telling me the crazy story of the men who used to sleep with virgins to cure their illnesses.

  And then, worst of all, tonight: Isabeau, down in the lab, looking me in the eye and telling me how rare the ingredients for the Remedy were.

  Brandt was still watching me.

  “You get it from us,” I said. “The secret of the Remedy isn’t the unicorns.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s the unicorn hunters.”

  24

  WHEREIN ASTRID OBSERVES THE EFFECTS

  Unicorns were a dime a dozen, Brandt had explained. A thousand doses of the Remedy could be made from the materials gained from a single unicorn. Claudia, Isabeau’s mother, had figured out the basic formula by piecing together the medical memoirs of her hunter ancestors. Not that it mattered much to her, as there had been no unicorns around. But no one had been able to interpret the meaning of some elements of the formula, particularly the mystical viriditas.

  And perhaps it meant nothing. After all, many old medieval cures were utter nonsense, and sometimes so-called important steps in medieval alchemy were nothing but a waste of time.

  I remembered Cory and Isabeau’s conversation about Hildegard von Bingen and her obsession with viriditas, which literally meant “greenness.” And now—only now—I remembered how quickly Isabeau had changed the subject.

  For Hildegard, viriditas had meant the power of God, the power of life, freshness, vitality. For a long time after the Reemergence, Brandt explained, Gordian scientists had feared their inability to create the Remedy was a product of the freshness of the unicorn materials they used. Maybe the unicorn specimens had to be alive. Or maybe they could be gathered only in a particular season, or maybe they needed some special green herb to stir into the compounds.

  Nothing worked.

  And then, about nine months ago, Isabeau had a brain wave. One she shared with her husband. Once upon a time, there was a disease called “greensickness,” which was actually just a type of anemia that most often affected young women. Another name for this disease was “virgin’s sickness,” and the cure was believed to be—wait for it—deflowering. Because naturally, the cause of their illness was the burden of their greenness, of their virginity.

  Maybe, Isabeau had thought, the viriditas of Hildegard wasn’t the same thing listed in the formula of the Order of the Lioness. Maybe the creation of the Remedy required a mystical alchemy involving the virgin hunters themselves.

  Marten took that idea and ran with it. Enter Seth and Phil. Isabeau was horrified at his methods, but she couldn’t argue with the results. They’d discovered the secret to the Remedy.

  Even though it would never do them any good.

  Magic could not be synthesized. They’d never be able to make more than a few vials of the Remedy. There was only one dose per unicorn hunter.

  It was midnight in France, and I stood at the fence of the einhorns enclosure. I’d kicked Brandt out of my room and changed into more appropriate breaking-and-entering clothes. I needed to be with the unicorns tonight. I needed to get my head on straight.

  But the code for the lockbox had been changed. I was trapped outside the fence. I began wandering the perimeter, pressing my face up against the links and willing the unicorns to draw closer. They’d never be able to cross the boundary, of course—I’d never be able to touch them—but out here, with the magic, things already seemed clearer. I would never accept the Remedy.

  How could I? Brandt had been right. Actaeons were thieves. They stole the … essence of the hunter’s virginity and they kept the resulting Remedy all to themselves. That was why the hunters, as a group, hated actaeons. If a hunter chose to leave on her own, if she chose to marry and settle down—her Remedy was her own to keep, to sell or use as she saw fit. The Remedy we’d used on Brandt had been the one belonging to Clothilde Llewelyn.

  These girls, these hunters that Brandt approached—they knew nothing of the Remedy. All they knew was that Brandt was sweet, clean, and discreet. He’d unburden them of their powers and disappear into the night.

  Bearing with him something that might one day save their lives.

  Isabeau had lied to me. She hadn’t kept the secret of the Remedy from me due to a technicality of not being able to reproduce it. She’d kept it from me because she knew I wouldn’t approve of her actions.

  I could not use it. The Remedy didn’t belong to Isabeau to dispense to her friends. It belonged to each person who had helped make it possible to create.

  No, the only option was to try it myself. I could ask Isabeau to do it for me. I’d sleep with someone—Brandt maybe—then make the Remedy, then take it and … see what happened.

  But what if it didn’t work? Isabeau had already warned me she had no proof that the Remedy was potent against brain damage. And if I lost my virginity, I’d also lose the magic. If the Remedy didn’t work, I’d be stuck in my fog forever.

  Was that a chance I was willing to take? Even if it meant the only alternative was stealing someone else’s personal cure?

  Sacrificing Angel was bad enough. I couldn’t sacrifice a sister-at-arms.

  “Who’s there?” said a voice. I turned, and with the clarity of unicorn magic, I saw René standing about twenty yards down the fence line.

  “Astrid,” I said, and stopped.

  He came forward, a beam from his flashlight cutting through the night. Its glare hit my eyes. “Astrid, le chasseur des licornes. You look terrible.”

  “A wild unicorn,” I said. I circled my ravaged face with my finger. “See, this is why you shouldn’t be so eager to see these monsters released.”

  “That does not deter me,” he replied. “If you were to go inside and see them, you would know that they do not have much time left. They cannot survive any longer in captivity. You must help us.”

  “I must not do anything.”

  He came closer and examined me, my shorn head, my long scar. “I have looked you up, Astrid Llewelyn. I have seen your mother on the television.”

  “Well, that should be your answer right there.”

  “And I have spoken to your cousin. I am a friend of Philippa.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. With the help of the magic, I could see him clearly in the dark. He did not look like he was lying.

  “I am a conservationist, just like her. I have helped her with her battle to protect the unicorns. I have read her papers. I have listened to her cry when she thought her cousin—her best friend—would never wake up.”

  My eyes began to burn, and I couldn’t trust myself to speak.

  “I know you can make it over this fence with my help. I saw you do it the night the electricity went down. I want you to go inside and see the einhorns. You will help us,” he said. “I know you will.”

  The dust puffed up around my feet as I landed hard in the dirt on the other side of the fence.

  I turne
d to René. “How am I supposed to get out of here when I’m done?”

  His face fell. “I had not thought of that.”

  I rolled my eyes. Great. “Never mind. I’ll just tell Isabeau that I felt the need to spend the night with the unicorns.” She’d understand that. I’ll say it kept my head clear while I considered her offer.

  An offer that I wished above anything I was the type of person to accept. But I could never live with myself if I wasted a dose of the Remedy when there was someone else out there who really needed it. Someone else it actually belonged to.

  I crossed the electronic boundary and headed into the woods. Around me, the unicorns slept, not even stirring as I approached them. This was strange, like the sedation I’d felt in the labs with Angel. Had they somehow figured out a way to manage the unicorns’ rejuvenation-happy body chemistry?

  As I reached the outermost trees of the grove, I sensed a new smell, one even stronger than unicorn. Rotting meat. A few steps farther in, I practically tripped over a burlap food bag filled with moldy steaks. Another sack lay nearby, torn to shreds, with scraps of meat scattered about the ground and going bad.

  I stared at the food with a sense of growing unease. It was impossible that Gordian had taken to feeding them too much. So why was this here, going to waste?

  A few yards on, the smell grew even stronger, and I came upon the corpse of an einhorn. Several days old from the look of it. Its bowels had been ripped out, and its insides were hollow and mushy. Its fur was patchy and its skin raw in places, but I didn’t know if that happened pre- or postmortem. Its face was covered in gore. I couldn’t recognize it … or I didn’t want to.

  I sidestepped the mess and kept walking, trying not to gag on the stench. Did no one at Gordian know what was going on here? Food rotting while the unicorns turned on one another? I sensed a conscious presence off to the left and turned. The bushes rustled, and I saw a flash of white. More than that, I tasted familiar thoughts.

  Fats. I called to her in my head, but she cowered deeper in the bushes. I wondered what she’d been through in the past few months, if she missed her baby, if she’d fought when they took him from her the way the re’em had fought us when she thought we’d threatened her offspring.

  “Fats,” I cooed, and held out my arms.

  Nothing. Her mind radiated only suspicion. I came closer, and she sprang out, snarling and tossing her head, then raced off. I saw her white hindquarters vanishing into the forest, her long, lionlike tail now replaced with a bobbed stump.

  As my exploration of the woods continued, I found two more corpses in various states of decomposition and three more unicorns, each of which vanished as soon as I came close, each of which sported tails gnawed to nothing and open wounds as if they’d been fighting.

  At last I reached the center of the enclosure, the roots of the large tree that had once been the den for Fats and Angel. I closed my eyes and stretched out my senses. Ten little pinpricks of light, ten lives of hunger, terror, boredom, and desperation. And beneath all those emotions, something else, something that grated against my senses like the wrongness of rotting meat. Lunacy. These unicorns weren’t just withering away in here. They were going mad.

  This couldn’t continue. The Remedy was a fraud, and so was this experiment in einhorn captivity. Perhaps at some point, it had been worth it to sacrifice these animals for the good of mankind, but not anymore.

  But what should I do? I could kill them all, right this moment, put them out of their misery. They were all sick, weak, violent. They might not survive even if I did set them free. They’d certainly be a danger to the people of the surrounding countryside. I could hunt them down, slaughter every last one by morning.

  I tipped my face skyward, tasting the spring breeze and the traces of unicorn on the wind.

  Cognosce te ipsum. Know thyself.

  I could kill them all. But I wouldn’t.

  I returned to the fence line and waved to René. “You were right,” I said when he came over. “I’ll help you.”

  We made our plans through the fence. René brought over another man: short, with a scarred leather jacket and an equally pockmarked face. Not that I was one to talk.

  I remembered him from before. He was the one who’d warned René not to talk to me. He seemed no less suspicious now. Though he introduced himself as Thierry, his habit of not meeting my eyes made me doubt the claim. They explained their plans to me, passed them through the holes in the fence in little rolled-up bundles of paper. I read each plan with the benefit of unicorn magic and flashlight glow.

  And then I laughed.

  I rolled the pages up again and shoved them back into the links. “This one,” I said, punching it through, “will get you all killed by the unicorns.” I punched at the second. “Killed by the unicorns.” The third. “And, oh yes, killed by the unicorns.”

  They stared at the crumpled plans.

  “You say you’ve been watching them.” I crossed my arms. “Haven’t you seen how vicious they are? You can’t just let them roam freely around the countryside. The first thing they’ll do is eat everyone in your camp. This fence isn’t here for their protection.”

  “What do you recommend?” René asked.

  “Me, of course. That’s why you came to me, isn’t it?”

  “We came to you for help breaking into the fence.”

  They most certainly did not. A tractor could accomplish that. “You’ll need a lot more than that if you expect to survive this little endeavor.”

  “We have people who have dealt with wild animals before.” Thierry shook his head. “We’ve always managed in the past.”

  I stood in silence for several seconds, and then I said, “I will not assist you until I can be sure that doing so will in no way harm the people in your camp, on this property, or in the surrounding countryside. I’m a unicorn hunter, which means it’s my job to protect people from unicorns, in whatever way is necessary.”

  Thierry narrowed his eyes. René looked increasingly nervous. I stood my ground.

  “I believe,” René said at last, “that Astrid knows what she is talking about in this matter.”

  “We’re not going to have her release the unicorns only to shoot them dead.”

  “And I’ll shoot them dead in a flash if I have the slightest inkling they’ll cause trouble once they’re free.” My voice was even, my expression mild, but my very presence was scary enough to let Thierry know I was serious. One nice thing about having brain damage, people are inclined to believe you might fly off the handle at any moment. And I came armed.

  “We appreciate your concern for us,” René began.

  “It’s not just concern for you,” I said. “If you do this, you must promise that no harm will come to anyone in the château, either.”

  René blinked. Thierry twitched. And in the throes of unicorn magic, I noticed everything.

  “The unicorns are freed,” I said. “Gordian is untouched. And the second I think a unicorn might become a danger to us, I kill it. Those are the terms.”

  After a long hesitation, Thierry nodded curtly.

  “Now,” I said, “the difficult part. What can we do with the einhorns after we free them?”

  By morning, when the Gordian technicians came to retrieve me from the enclosure, we’d hammered out a strategy and my partners in crime had returned to their tents. Another nice thing about having brain damage is people don’t think much of you. So when I goofily batted at the hand of the technician working the lockbox and pretended not to understand a word of his French, he merely rolled his eyes at me and entered it again, muttering the code to himself.

  Step one.

  When Isabeau asked me if I’d made a decision, I said I was still torn. And then I told her the truth—or most of the truth. Another nice thing about brain damage is that no one expects you to lie. I told her that Brandt had come to me last night, but I didn’t tell her that he’d shared the secret of the Remedy. Instead, I’d focused on his romanti
c aspirations. I told her that I’d gone out to be with the unicorns, and had been horrified by the state I’d found them in. I asked her why, if they were no longer in need of the einhorns to make the Remedy, they needed to keep the animals, and if the change in their condition had anything to do with a shift in treatment now that they were no longer a priority.

  In other words, I gave her one last chance. Isn’t that what I owed her, after everything she’d done for me? She’d given me a home, an education, beautiful clothes, a real chance at a future. She’d given me more affection than my own mother, and taught me that there was an actual place for my magic.

  And, with that knowledge, I’d realized that my only choice was to save the einhorns. To betray her.

  Isabeau reacted about as I’d expected. She blew up at Brandt, then sent him away. (Step two.) Then she pretended to be shocked and appalled that the unicorns were doing so poorly. Then she apologized profusely for both situations, and started explaining to me what kind of new experiments they were using the unicorns for. Just because the Remedy was a bust didn’t mean the rejuvenation ability of the unicorns couldn’t supply the company with a major scientific breakthrough. Isabeau even took me down to the lab again to show me some of their most recent data.

  Step three.

  It was actually pretty interesting. Too bad it was over. I couldn’t countenance the suffering of the einhorns for anti-aging cream. Saving human lives was one thing, cosmetology another.

  Later, when Isabeau was occupied, I packed a change of clothes, my money, and my valuable documents in a backpack, and hid both backpack and sword case out near the enclosure. Yet another nice thing about having brain damage is that when your boss’s secretary sees you wandering through your house with your luggage and asks if you’re going somewhere, you can just act disoriented and say something nonsensical like, “I’m having a picnic, want to come?” and they write you off.

  I do want to get better, but at the same time, I don’t think I mind people assuming I’m dumb.

  After that, there was nothing to do but wait. I’d been a unicorn hunter for a year. I’d spent nights in tree stands, days staking out a field, weeks trapped in a monastery with only my bow, arrow, and target range for company. I’d spent hours upon hours alone in a forest, stretching out my senses for the slightest trace of a monster.