Pip Bartlett's Guide to Unicorn Training

by Jackson Pearce

  “No,” Tomas said. “But I hope it wears off before I get home.”

  He had begun to attract the attention of other spectators. A man wandered closer from the Pixtail pen. “Hey! You’re glowing! Susan, come look! This boy is glowing!”

  “Just allergic to Dillopods!” Tomas explained.

  “Look at the boy over there! He’s glowing!” someone else said.

  “Can we get our picture with you? Do you always glow, or only for special occasions?” a woman asked.

  “Just allergic—” Tomas tried again, but people were excited now.

  “Have you considered caving? You wouldn’t need to carry a lantern.”

  “My friend would love to get a photo with you!”

  “Have you always glowed, or did you choose this recently?”

  Tomas’s eyes were getting enormous. And they were glowing too so he looked like some kind of magical creature himself. It was definitely time to get out of here. I grabbed Tomas’s backpack strap. “Sorry, everyone,” I said, “we have to go!”

  We ran.

  * * *

  Fourth stop: … somewhere.

  I couldn’t really tell where we’d ended up. There were no animals in this area, just bales and bales of lavender and hay and lilacs stacked beside giant bags of feed—honey and oat feed for Pegasi, rock salt and coal for Manticores, and the less appealing sardines and carrots for the Standard Griffins. Farther down, there were sealed bins as tall as me labeled HONEYCOMB, LIVER, and ORANGES.

  Both Tomas and I jumped when we heard a voice behind us.

  “Sorry, but this area is off-limits to spectat—oh! Pip Bartlett, right?” It was Mr. Barrera. He stood near the feed hall entrance, looking quite tidy in a suit and tie. Unicorn handlers often dress up to be as fancy as their charges, but most people don’t wear their fancy clothing while moving hay, which was what Mr. Barrera seemed to be doing. Like Marisol, though, he somehow managed to stay clean while doing dirty work.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And this is Tomas.”

  Tomas had stopped glowing and was now carefully cleaning between his fingers with a sanitary wipe.

  “What’re you doing in here? Marisol tells me you love magical creatures—but there aren’t any back here. Just food!”

  “Oh! I do love them. But there was just … well … Tomas here was … we’re just taking a break,” I said.

  “It can be a touch overwhelming sometimes, even for those of us who do a lot of shows,” Mr. Barrera agreed. He grabbed one of the red food buckets off a hook near the door. As he passed us, he scooped up a big bucket of honeysuckle. “Well, I hope you enjoy the show! See you around, Pip!”

  Well! I had to admit that even though Marisol wasn’t mad at me about the Unicorn Incident last year, I’d sort of thought Mr. Barrera might still be. But he didn’t seem mad at all.

  “His shoes sure were shiny,” Tomas said, in a meaningful voice.

  I made a face. But he was right—Mr. Barerra’s shoes were very shiny, just how the Dillopods described the tail thief’s shoes. And Mr. Barrera had easily grabbed the red feed bucket off the hook … because he was very tall. And Marisol had said that her father was out late the night before.

  No. No. He couldn’t have been the one to cut Forever Sunshine’s tail. I said, “No way.”

  “He would have a good reason to do it, though. Doesn’t this mean one of his Unicorns is more likely to win?”

  “Yes, but … it can’t be him! Besides, it’s not as if he’s the only tall man in shiny shoes around here!” Though there were not many people who wore fancy shoes to a dusty Unicorn show.

  “True. There’s also Mr. Henshaw,” Tomas said sadly.

  “There could be someone else,” I replied. “There are lots of people here.”

  Tomas didn’t look particularly convinced. And the truth was, I wasn’t particularly convinced either.

  Even though the Unicorn-tail investigation had been more discouraging than anything else, things were looking up on the Regent Maximus front.

  He spent most of the day in the Unicorn nursery, and it made him into a completely different Unicorn! Well. Almost. He was still overdramatic. But the baby Unicorns thought he was incredibly brave, because Regent Maximus’s stories made it sound like he was moments from disaster at every turn. And he seemed to be gathering confidence by teaching them what he knew … even if I thought that the skills he offered were not the most useful skills possible for baby Unicorns. For instance, when we arrived at the Unicorn nursery to work with him on round-two training, I found him saying to them, “Today, we will be discussing explosions.”

  “Regent Maximus, what are you doing?” I asked, as Marisol and Tomas discussed how to transform the nursery into a practice ring.

  “I’ve been teaching them survival skills, Pip,” Regent Maximus said. He turned back to the babies. “Having made it through many, many explosions or near-explosions myself, I am something of an expert. Here is the secret: When you think something might explode, or if something does explode, or if you have a dream about something exploding, you want to GET DOWN! COVER YOUR HORN!”

  Regent Maximus shouted the last bit so loud the baby Unicorns reared back in surprise. Swiftly, he dropped to the ground and curled into a ball with his horn hidden among his legs. The baby Unicorns shrieked and copied him. They stayed that way for a moment, and then I heard Regent Maximus whisper from between his hooves.

  “And make sure you stay here, since some kinds of explosions take a long time—like Manticores, right, Pip?”

  Manticores did tend to release explosive balls of fire in intervals, according to the Guide. I thought that perhaps I shouldn’t read the Guide when Regent Maximus could look over my shoulder anymore.

  “Uh, that’s right,” I said. Regent Maximus gave a satisfied snort.

  “Pip knows everything about dangerous magical creatures, class. Pay attention to her warnings,” Regent Maximus said. The baby Unicorns muttered in agreement. “Now we’re going to talk about avoiding asteroids falling from the sky.”

  I thought about stopping him, but really, it wouldn’t hurt to have him distracted as we set up the course. I left him demonstrating how to roll away from space debris and joined Marisol and Tomas in transforming the nursery. The idea was to make a course like the one Regent Maximus might face in round two. We took two of the signs off the wall and planted them in the ground as jumps, and Tomas and I used empty feed buckets to create the barrel-weave section. Marisol, Tomas, and I all strained our muscles to pull a water trough into the middle of the nursery to be like the possible water jump.

  “All right,” Marisol said, hands on her hips. “Let’s saddle him up!”

  Regent Maximus’s brave face slipped when he saw Marisol hauling his saddle off the fence. He turned his head so the baby Unicorns couldn’t hear and whispered, “Oh oh oh, is she going to put that on my back?”

  “Yes, but it’s very light. More like a blanket,” I assured him. “Tomas, do you have a saddle safety fact?”

  “They’re designed for Unicorn bone structure,” Tomas said. “I read the federal guideline sticker on the bottom of the saddle just now. It meets all safety regulations for your back muscles.”

  I translated. Regent Maximus sucked in his lips, then looked over his shoulder. The baby Unicorns were all gathered in their blanket nests, sitting on their haunches and watching eagerly, looking away only to nip a snack of honeycomb from the little pile we’d left each of them.

  This steeled Regent Maximus. He released his lips with a phhbbbbblllllllltttttt sound. “Okay. Okay okay okay, I’ll try. Can you check the saddle for lake fleas, though?”

  “We’re nowhere near a lake, though, so there can’t be any lake fleas—”

  “I checked it when I was reading the label. No lake fleas,” Tomas interrupted. When I stared at him, he said, “What? Lake fleas can carry seventeen diseases transmittable to humans. And also they spread quickly among Rockshines. I didn’t want to accidentally infes
t Ms. Gould’s herd.”

  While we were talking, Marisol had effortlessly saddled Regent Maximus without him even noticing. It was really quite clever—she just patted his side again and again and again, until he got used to the feeling of being touched, and then she slid the saddle onto his back in the direction that his hair grew. I made a note to write that into the Guide’s section on Unicorn training. Marisol’s experience with Unicorns meant I’d made a lot of notes since she started helping us.

  The crystal bit and bridle were trickier—Regent Maximus shied away, worried he’d choke on the bit or trip on the reins or that the clasps of the bridle would knot in his mane. The baby Unicorns cheered when the bridle was finally in place.

  “Can you give me a leg up?” Marisol asked. She was the obvious choice to ride him during the practice, since she had actual experience riding Unicorns (my time riding a Unicorn in a stampede didn’t count). Once she was on, Tomas and I went to sit near the baby Unicorns.

  “Here he goes! Here he goes!” the watermelon-pink one said, burrowing even tighter in her blanket, like she couldn’t handle all the excitement.

  “Has he ever told you about the time a HobGrackle tried to eat him?” an orange one asked earnestly. “All the things he’s seen! It’s amazing!”

  Speaking of amazing, I was amazed at the transformation in Regent Maximus. He was still very far from being Jeffrey Higgleston’s Ideal Unicorn. But when he’d arrived here, he had been too afraid to really move around without a blindfold, and every time he’d heard the loudspeaker, he’d begun to shake. Now he allowed Marisol to guide him slowly around the obstacle course so that he could get a good look at everything. He was crawling low enough that her feet dragged on the ground sometimes, but he still let her convince him to examine every obstacle without closing his eyes. And when a loudspeaker crackle made him startle and accidentally jump one of the jumps, he didn’t immediately run for cover. Instead, he shot a glance at the baby Unicorns, who looked at him in awe. He did his best to look like he’d meant to do it. Of course, he still wouldn’t purposefully jump over them when Marisol rode him toward one, opting instead to do a sort of climb-scramble-hop. It wasn’t graceful, but it was pretty good—for Regent Maximus.

  The baby Unicorns were thrilled.

  “I didn’t know you could climb the jumps!” one squealed.

  “He just looks at the world so differently!” another said, sighing admiringly.

  Even with all the climbing and slithering, I was pretty proud of Regent Maximus, and told him so, as Marisol dismounted.

  “I did good? Really?” he said, like he thought I might be lying.

  “You did great. Just make sure you’re as nice to Mr. Henshaw as you were to Marisol. Remember that Mr. Henshaw isn’t such an experienced rider, okay?”

  Marisol had been rubbing down his coat where the saddle had been, but when she heard her name, she grinned at me. She had never asked why I talked to animals, because she talked to them all the time too. The big difference was that she didn’t seem to expect them to answer her. She went back to rubbing his coat and said, “Sometimes I wish they could understand us. Imagine how much easier that would make this!”

  “Er,” I said.

  “Person,” Regent Maximus warned me. “Person person person.”

  I followed his gaze to the nursery door and felt a little nervous jolt in my stomach. Prince Temujin stood there, looking at Regent Maximus with a thoughtful expression. “Excuse me, I don’t mean to disturb your training. I just find his rainbow mane and tail so very striking. And I see that he is really coming along, isn’t he? With Forever Sunshine and Porcelain Promise out of the running, your Unicorn here might not do so badly after all!”

  “Porcelain Promise is out of the running?” Marisol asked.

  “His owners decided to withdraw him from the competition. Too risky, they said, to have their champion here with such poor security.” Prince Temujin sounded disappointed. “I see from your shirt that you’re with EverSun—one of the Barrera daughters? I suppose this means your girl Duchess could win the Trident!”

  “I suppose so,” Marisol said, but she didn’t look very happy about it. I looked at Prince Temujin. Did he think Marisol’s family was involved with the tail cutting, to better Duchess’s chances? It was hard to tell. I wanted to ask—I bet a grown-up’s opinion on the whole thing would help—but knew I couldn’t with Marisol standing right there.

  “I just can’t believe anyone would want to win that badly!” she said.

  Prince Temujin looked as if he had just tasted something unpleasant. “Desperate people sometimes have to do desperate things, I suppose. And the tails do grow back, after all, if a bit slowly. There’s really no need to panic.”

  I wasn’t as sure, and from the looks of it, neither was Marisol.

  Prince Temjuin drummed his fingers against the fence. “This Unicorn certainly is magnificent. He would be quite a lovely specimen for Galatolia’s depleted herds.”

  In all of the other fuss, I had nearly forgotten that we had to worry about Mr. Henshaw selling Regent Maximus. From the look on Tomas’s face, he had too.

  Surely Mr. Henshaw wouldn’t sell him now, though. Regent Maximus was going to make it through round two. He had to.

  I felt like I’d only been asleep for a few minutes that night when Callie woke me by kicking the side of my bed.

  “Get up,” she said. She sounded too sleepy to be cranky. “We have to go on a call with Mom.”

  I opened my eyes. It looked as dark with them open as with them closed. “Am I awake?”

  Callie pulled off my blanket, still with the same slow sleepiness. She muttered, “Now you are,” before stumbling back out of my room like a zombie.

  Downstairs, I found Aunt Emma already all packed up with her vet bag. Callie leaned against her with a level of snuggliness that she would have never shown while awake. Aunt Emma patted her hair and then said, “Sorry, guys. But I don’t feel comfortable leaving you here alone.”

  I sat in the front seat because Callie wanted to lie down in the back. I was wide-awake; the strangeness of being woken had driven sleep from me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Mariah called me,” Aunt Emma replied. “One of the Rockshines is sick.”

  Tomas wouldn’t be happy to hear that.

  At the showgrounds, we found the parking lot empty, and when we got out of the car, night bugs buzzed and frogs sang gleefully. Overhead, a GrowlOwl swept low, growling like a wildcat as it did. I jumped, but Callie didn’t—her eyes were closed as she gave an enormous yawn. Inside the building was actually quieter than the outside, with no sounds except for the snuffling and snoring and drowsy chattering of animals in their stalls.

  “What’s that?” I whispered. Up ahead, lights were flashing from behind one of the removable curtain walls between animal sections. Sound went along with it too. It sounded a little like … drums.

  Aunt Emma looked mystified. Together we crept forward. The sound grew louder, and now we could see that the lights were different colors. They seemed to be flashing in time with the drumming. When we got to the edge of the curtain, we saw the source of the sound: The Blankbirds were having a dance party! A few male Blankbirds were projecting a variety of colored lights on a few females, who were drumming a festive beat against the rafters and pipes hanging from the ceiling. The rest of the Blankbirds strutted across the concrete floor.

  They all saw us at the same time. Several dozen Blankbirds froze, staring at us, and then the entire area went dark.

  “Nothing to see here!” one Blankbird said in the black.

  “Just us Blankbirds, looking for … uh … spilled popcorn!” another said.

  “Yep, yep, spilled popcorn!”

  Of course, everyone else heard only chirping. Callie muttered, “That was weird. Am I awake?”

  “Sort of,” said Aunt Emma, placing a hand on her shoulder to guide her to the Glimmerbeast area.

  “Heyyyy,
” said one of the Rockshines, in a tired way.

  “Heeyy,” said another agreeably. I thought it might be Bucky, the Rockshine I’d first met at the clinic, but to be honest they all sort of looked the same, especially in this dim light.

  Ms. Gould said, “Thank you for coming so late, Emma.”

  Callie made a snuffling noise, pulled her hood up, and curled up on a pile of quilted blankets that were normally for the Rockshines.

  “You can sit over there too, if you like,” Aunt Emma told me.

  “No, I’m okay,” I replied. “Can I help?”

  Ms. Gould laughed quietly, so as not to disturb the sleeping animals. “This one’s a live one!”

  “She sure is,” Aunt Emma replied. “Okay, let’s see this gal.”

  We moved around to where Ms. Gould had trapped a Rockshine in a metal, roofless cage. The animal didn’t look happy to me, but Rockshines never really did.

  “Oh, I see,” Aunt Emma said immediately. “Do you have any honeysuckle here, Mariah?”

  “Oh, no, I’m just out. Do you need me to get some?”

  “Hm,” Aunt Emma said. “I actually need you to hold her for me, I think. Pip, do you mind terribly getting some honeysuckle from the Unicorn area? We can replace it in the morning.”

  It was dark, but the animals would be making comforting noises all around me.

  “Okay,” I said. “How much?”

  “A little bale. Maybe this big?” Aunt Emma made a gesture with her hands.

  I set off through the dark arena, pattering as quietly as I could. As I got to the Unicorn area, I could hear that the Unicorns were already awake. They were making scuffling, alarmed noises.

  At first I thought that maybe I had been the one to startle them, so I opened my mouth to say something comforting, but then I heard the words of the loudest Unicorn.

  “Back! Back, you fiend! Back!” a Unicorn shouted. It was Fortnight, one of the Barreras’ Unicorns I’d met before, during the Unicorn Incident.

  I closed my mouth and crept closer to his stall. I couldn’t see much, because it was dark, but I saw enough to see that Fortnight was spinning in his stall.