Huntress

by Malinda Lo

  The Queen’s fingers pressed against her cheeks. Her nails scraped against Kaede’s skin. “Listen to me,” the Queen whispered, her voice rough with pain. “You can save me. You can save all of us.”

  The words floated into Kaede’s mind as if from a great distance. She heard them, but she did not understand. She was engulfed in the enormity of the Queen’s grief.

  Taisin’s voice was thin and sharp behind them. “How?” she asked. She took three quick steps toward Kaede and put her hand on Kaede’s shoulder.

  Kaede twitched. She felt Taisin’s fingers, firm and warm; she drew another uneven breath. The Queen’s face wavered before her, coalesced into the image of an old woman, lines cracking from the corners of her eyes and spreading down her cheeks.

  “How?” Taisin asked again, her fingers digging into Kaede’s shoulder bone, prodding her back to the reality of the throne room. The Queen’s hands fell away from her face, and Kaede swayed. Taisin held her arm; helped her to her feet.

  “There is only one cure for me,” said the Queen.

  “What is it?” Taisin put her arm around Kaede, steadying her.

  The Queen ached with regret. She felt her energy leaking out of her. Her heart was punctured; she would become a hollow shell. “The water of life,” she answered. “I must drink it.”

  “Where is it found?” Taisin asked.

  “It is far from here. Through the darkest Wood and across the three rivers; beyond the red hills and within the trees of gold.”

  Con had been standing silent nearby, watching Kaede kneeling before the Fairy Queen as if entranced, and a sense of disquiet filled him. “What will happen if you don’t drink this water of life?” he asked.

  The Queen closed her eyes. “I will die,” she said, her voice light as a dry wind. “And my land will die with me.”

  “Your land,” Con said. “What do you mean?”

  Kaede understood, now, what the Queen had wanted her to see in her bright yellow eyes. “She means that Taninli will crumble,” Kaede said. “She means that the fay will die. And she means that the Wood itself will perish. The trees will fall; the rivers will dry up; the earth will become nothing but ash.” As she spoke, the words uncoiling through her, she felt her heartbeat quickening. What would the world come to? It would surely spread to the Kingdom. The border between their lands was porous; the Queen’s death would hover over their cities and villages, too. She had a terrifying vision of Cathair drenched in ash-gray rain, covering the red roofs of her parents’ home in a choking sludge.

  Taisin put a hand on Kaede’s cheek. “Kaede,” Taisin said. “Open your eyes.”

  Kaede blinked them open. She hadn’t realized they were closed. She saw Taisin’s worry-filled face.

  “Are you all right?” Taisin asked.

  Kaede rubbed at her forehead. She felt unbalanced, disoriented. “I don’t know. I saw—I saw Cathair. It was dying, too.”

  Taisin looked the Fairy Queen. “Are you putting these visions in her mind?”

  “She must see what will happen if I die,” the Queen said.

  “Why?” Kaede and Taisin asked together.

  “You, Kaede, are the only one who can save me,” the Queen said. “So you must know what will happen if you choose not to.”

  “Why only Kaede?” Taisin demanded.

  The Huntsman said, “The hand that took Elowen’s life is the only hand that can bring life to our queen.”

  Kaede was hot and cold at the same time. Visions, apparently, disagreed with her. “What do I have to do?” she asked. “How do I find the spring where this water comes from?”

  “It is not a spring,” the Queen said.

  Taisin stiffened. She remembered, suddenly, Mona and that little sharp knife drawn along her skin.

  “The water of life is the blood of the unicorn,” the Huntsman explained.

  Kaede stared at him. “The unicorn?”

  He nodded. “You must seek out the unicorn and submit to its judgment. If it finds you innocent, then it will sacrifice itself to you and give you its lifeblood. You will bring it back to the Queen.”

  Kaede remembered the stories, of course. Everyone told them. But this was akin to asking her to hunt down a dragon, and though she had seen enough wonders for an entire lifetime in the short period she had been in Elowen’s fortress, this was too much to take in. Besides, in those tales, no one ever survived the judgment of a unicorn. “What if it finds that I’m… not innocent?” she asked, and once again she felt the weight of guilt pulling her down. Her hand had been smeared with Elowen’s blood. She had done it, had taken the Fairy Queen’s daughter’s life. She had seen it pouring out of her onto the ice.

  The Huntsman said somberly, “If it judges you guilty, then it will kill you.”

  A thick silence blanketed the throne room. Kaede felt feverish. Everything seemed unreal. She wiped her hand across her brow, leaving a streak of dust over her skin.

  Con’s voice cut through everything. “This is mad,” he objected. “Kaede, you can’t go alone.”

  “We were there with her in the fortress,” Taisin insisted. “Your Majesty, I helped Kaede kill Elowen. I share the burden with her.”

  The Huntsman looked terribly sad. “Your friends do you much honor, but in the end, it is your choice alone.”

  Kaede looked at the Queen, frail and aged. She looked at Taisin and Con, whom she might never see again if she did as the Queen asked. But the Queen’s grief—and her own guilt—pulled her in the only direction she could go. She turned to the Huntsman and said, “I will do it.”

  He bowed deeply to her in thanks. “We will leave as soon as possible.”

  PART V

  Those who love are clouds floating side by side:

  Dewdrops bending blades of grass at sunrise.

  Yet love is the rhythm of nature;

  Love is oneness with beauty;

  Love is the joyful revelation of the way.

  —The Thirty Blessings

  Chapter XXXIX

  Kaede rode with the Huntsman out of Taninli later that day. He would not allow anyone else to accompany them. They traveled so quickly that the Wood became a blur of green and brown, moss and bark, but their horses did not tire. She ate the food that the Huntsman gave her, and she drank from the water skin he handed to her without question. The liquid burned down her throat, making her eyes open wide in momentary shock, and then they were riding again.

  When they stopped to sleep, she dreamed of ashes, drifts upon drifts of them, covering the Wood in a stale scent of burning. She heard the Queen’s voice: Please hurry. All around them, the trees were dying. She could feel it so clearly, though she did not understand how or why. Something had changed within her when she looked into the Queen’s eyes; now there was a bond between them, Fairy Queen and human girl. Sometimes she would reach out along the length of that bond, and at the very end, she could just sense the quiver of the Queen’s heartbeat. She still waited in her throne room.

  Kaede and the Huntsman passed through a forest of giant trees, their trunks black with age, the sun obscured by thick, tangled vines. They crossed a narrow wooden bridge over a rushing river, and a bridge that swayed over a gorge carved out of a granite mountainside. Kaede held her breath as her horse picked his way across, seemingly oblivious to the precipitous drop beneath them. Far below another river churned, and above them birds with vast wingspans shrieked, their calls echoing down the rocky canyon.

  On the other side, the trees were so densely packed together that their horses had to slow to a walk. From time to time sunlight shone in tall shafts through the foliage, and then there were stretches of shadow, or brief squalls of rain and mist. She saw deer in flight, white tails like flags. She saw crows with their darting black eyes, perched on branches above. Eventually they came to a river that ran sweetly over rounded boulders, and the Huntsman told her it flowed south to meet the Nir. There was no bridge here, and they waded across, for the water was barely higher than her knees. O
n the opposite bank, the trees began to thin out, and the next time they camped, the earth was the color of ocher and smelled of metal.

  They climbed one hill, and then another, and the red soil covered everything until even her hands were tinged a rusty brown. At last they came to a spring that bubbled out of a tiny little cleft in the rocky red hillside, and the Huntsman dismounted and knelt down to it, cupping up a handful of water. When he had tasted it, he said, “We are near. We’ll camp here tonight, and tomorrow you’ll continue on your own.”

  “You’re staying here?”

  He nodded. “The rest of the journey is for you alone.”

  “But… how will I know where to go?”

  He pointed up the hillside. In the distance she saw trees, their leaves as gold as the Queen’s eyes. “You’ll go that way. Through the trees.”

  She dismounted and watched as her horse drank from the spring. Her head felt fuzzy. The Queen’s presence was much more distant now, and she felt almost unmoored. She wondered how far they were from Taninli. “The unicorn—will it be waiting for me?”

  The Huntsman shook his head. “You must seek it out. It does not show itself to everyone.”

  “Is there only one?”

  “I don’t know. Once, there were many. But those days are gone.”

  “How do I seek it out?”

  He bent down to unbuckle the saddle from his horse. “That is for you to discover.”

  “What if I can’t?” she asked, and a bubble of panic rose in her stomach. “What if I fail?”

  He set the saddle down on the ground and looked at her with a grave expression. “I hope that you won’t.”

  That night she slept poorly. She fell in and out of the same dream she always had: ashes falling over the land, settling into the crevices between tree roots, dusting over every unfurled bud, smothering each hint of life. She allowed herself to get up as soon as dawn broke, and she knelt beside the spring and splashed the freezing cold water on her face, gasping at the chill.

  The Huntsman brewed a bitter, dark tea that morning that she had never tasted before. “It will give you strength,” he said, noticing her grimace. “You should drink it all.”

  As the sun rose, she sipped the tea, feeling her body slowly coming to life. The daze that had cloaked her during their journey was lifting, like cobwebs being brushed aside. She looked over the red hillside, at the rocks and the soil and the scrub grass, and then at the arch of the sky, pink and gold in the east. A question that had been forming in her ever since they left Taninli finally found its way to her tongue: “Why is the Queen so tied to these lands? Why does the land fall sick when she does?”

  The Huntsman considered her question for some time before he answered. “Our queen is the embodiment of our land. It has been this way since the dawn of time, and it will be so until our last queen dies.”

  “There have been many queens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then when one queen dies, why does the land not die with her?”

  “She is not like your king. She is not born into her station. Each queen chooses her successor, and each chosen successor must undergo many rituals to prepare for her duties. It may take decades. When the chosen one is ready, her predecessor goes willingly to her death.”

  “But this queen is not ready to die.”

  “No. She is not ready. She has not yet chosen a successor, and without one…” He could not finish the sentence. His heart constricted at the thought of his queen being taken before her time.

  Kaede dug her fingers into the ground, trapping the soil beneath her nails. It was already turning to dust.

  The Huntsman gave her a horn cup with a leather strap affixed to it. The cup had an ingenious cap, carved also of horn, and it latched into place with silver hinges. It was made from the horn of a unicorn.

  “After the judgment,” he told her, “you must fill this cup with blood, and bring it back.” He did not mention the possibility that the judgment might render her incapable of returning. “I will be waiting for you here.”

  She took the horn from him, feeling oddly calm. She thought she ought to be afraid—terrified, even, for she might be riding to her death. But instead she only felt ready. She had come so far, and in a way she felt as though she had been preparing for this her whole life. She buckled the iron dagger onto her belt and mounted her horse.

  She rode toward the golden trees as quickly as she could, but it was noon before she felt the shade of the first tree on her back, and she paused beneath its limbs to eat a dry biscuit and get her bearings. She had never seen trees like this before: white bark and branches so delicate she could not understand how they supported the weight of those leaves. They looked like gold coins, and when the wind blew through them, she heard a thousand tiny chimes. The trees sang.

  She continued on, and the trees began to grow more thickly, until all around her were slim white trunks. Sunlight dappled the ground; afternoon slid into dusk; and shadows spread purple and blue across the golden forest. The wind grew cooler. As far as she could see were these golden trees. There was no end to this forest, and she did not know which direction to go. She dismounted from her horse and decided to make camp for the night.

  Her horse was unusually skittish. She felt his muscles trembling as she unsaddled him, and he pranced as if he wanted to leave. “What is it?” she asked, her voice sounding strange in this wilderness. She tried to calm him down, but he continued to be nervous, and at last she had to tie him to a tree, afraid that he would bolt.

  She tried to sleep, but the horse’s anxiety and the keening of the trees kept her awake. She finally dozed off a little before dawn, only to wake up when she heard the horse whinny loudly. She scrambled to her feet, still half asleep, and saw the tail end of her horse disappearing through the trees.

  “Stop!” she yelled, but the horse did not halt. She looked at the tree where she had tied it, and the rope was still knotted around the trunk. The end that had been tied to her horse’s halter flapped loose in a slight breeze.

  Cold slid down her spine, and her heart pounded. She bent over, hands on her knees, trying to calm herself. She was suddenly aware of how alone she was in this queer place, and she had the uncanny sensation that the singing trees had been singing about her. It was a chilly morning, but she felt perspiration rise on her skin. The direction of the wind abruptly shifted, and the melody that had been running through the leaves changed.

  Something—or someone—was nearby.

  She could not sense people’s energies the way that a sage could, but this spirit or consciousness was so focused, so brilliant, that anyone would know it was there.

  She straightened, glancing around, but she saw only trees. She tried to swallow her fear; tried to ignore the prickles of panic that raced along her skin. She told herself she was there for a reason, and it was an honorable reason. She clenched her hands into fists and turned into the wind, letting it stream over her head, loosening her hair. The sun was rising, shedding gray light over the golden forest, and in the shadows she thought she saw something moving in the distance.

  “I am here for your judgment,” she whispered. The shadows moved again, but they did not come closer. She raised her voice, bracing herself. “I am here for your judgment!”

  She felt suspended in the wind. The music of the trees rang in her ears. She wondered how long she would have to stand there, waiting. The leaves shook like tambourines.

  The unicorn seemed to step out of nowhere. It was a male. His head was small and perfectly formed, shaped like that of a deer, but with a gray beard growing from his chin. The horn, a speckled, ivory spiral, protruded from between black eyes that were undeniably intelligent. He was about the size of a mature buck, with fur that contained all the colors of the rainbow. From one angle, he might look like lichen or moss; but from another, he was as stunning as a phoenix, his coat sliding from gold to silver to fire.

  She knelt down before him, her whole body tense, and asked for t
he judgment.

  Though she had felt Taisin enter her mind in Elowen’s fortress, this was entirely different. As his consciousness filled her, there was a sensation of perfect openness. All of her, heart and soul, was spread out before this creature, and he examined every last detail of her life.

  He saw her memories of childhood—roughhousing with her brothers, running around their courtyard home, begging their mother for rock sugar. There was her first trip to the Academy; the time she had upset Fin by leaving the workshop a mess; the warm saltiness of the sea on a summer day. The moment, that morning in the Council chambers, when she truly noticed Taisin for the first time.

  She felt the sway of the King’s ship as she left the Academy behind. Shock as she watched the King’s guards execute the bandit on the highway.

  In Ento: the black eyes of the monstrous child as she plunged the knife into its belly. The horror that gripped her as she watched its funeral pyre.

  The split second of sheer panic as the wolves came at her. The stretch of the bowstring as she shot arrow after arrow into their bodies, her stomach tight as a fist.

  Taisin: the warmth and the smell of her skin; the pleasure of her kisses. Love, new and fierce.

  And then there was Elowen, reaching for her throat. Blackness; everything snuffed out. She floated free, like a seed on the wind. Kaede wondered: Had she died? There had been a moment—she was sure now—when she had ceased to exist as a living human being.

  She remembered opening her eyes to see Elowen’s snarling face. Her knees skidding across the floor, her hand reaching for her weapon. The iron dagger, buried in Elowen’s heart. Blood on her hands.

  If she had killed someone who already killed her, did that still make her a murderer?

  Her eyes flew open. The unicorn lowered his head. She looked into his black eyes, and though he did not speak in words, she understood him.