by Sean Platt
“You were an unknown,” said Fiona.
“Well,” said Cyrus, sitting on a rock in the corner of the haven, looking up at her with wide, studious eyes, “now we are known.” He waited for an explanation — for Fiona to move him from her pile of inert game pieces into the pile of players.
She nodded then began to explain. Only the Unicorn Blessing and Cerberus had known what she said next, so she spoke to everyone: to Cyrus, to his less-worthy brother and the other humans, to the representatives of the Seven Nations, and to Edward, progeny of the shameful creators.
“We’ve been watching as worlds heal since the Grand Cataclysm,” she said. “What isn’t widely known is that they never fully healed. They were like shattered ceramic. All of the pieces that could be found were found — by the worlds themselves, I mean; the worlds are their own organism with their own systems of defense and repair — but some of the pieces never quite fit, like a chipped edge in spite of patching. Those original holes were necessary because as I said, the floodwaters needed a way to retreat. But that happened quickly, and it took many more years for the biggest fissures to heal, and by then we’d already started to see that the needle was still more or less through the cloth — that the fissure was still there, now because pieces hadn’t quite meshed. We were able to find the largest areas and patch them as you would with clay, but the Cataclysm was huge, and hit the worlds everywhere, all at once, when the water sundered them. We couldn’t find them all. The water drained then kept draining. Fissures were originally easy to find because the areas around them were marked by dry rivers and drought. We found and repaired the tears, and the land’s lushness returned. But every time we think we’ve found them all, we discover more. The world has become like an alloy sieve humans use to drain water when cooking. When Edward returned with news of The Realm’s greed — which, unfortunately, is making things worse by tapping veins and pillaging the Dark Forest … ”
“You could have told us it was damaging the worlds,” said Cyrus.
“We did tell you,” said Edward, finding his voice. He tried to sound angry because it was a drum he’d banged for decades, but he’d been banging to the wrong people. He turned to King William. “But you never listened.”
“Magic makes our city run,” said William. “We need time to adjust.”
“You’ve had all the time in the worlds!”
William started to retort but realized he was outmatched; his only support came from the five sycophants behind him. The shelter’s seventeen other occupants would pounce if he said more, so he curled back and pouted.
“Anyway,” Fiona continued, “we had the existing tiny rips and tears left over from the Cataclysm, and we had The Realm — keeping that needle firmly wedged in place, piercing all of that cloth. The veins got weaker, and the magic leaked, meaning it wasn’t available to allow the worlds to heal themselves. When we listened to Edward, our ambassador to the humans, and watched The Realm’s greed” — she gave William a look, daring him to contradict her — “we started seeing a way to control the humans, along with the damage. The worlds were going to leak. We thought if we could connect them in a deliberate way, we could ensure their slow drip was balanced. We told the humans we would patrol the corridors and provide them with the inspiration required, but there were areas that only we knew about. We established magic conveyances running between stations that could carry materials as needed, that could be converted to underground rivers or magic veins if necessary. Where the worlds ran dry, we could shuttle waters. Where there were leaks, we could provide a path of lesser resistance, encouraging the magic to leak where we wanted it to leak rather than somewhere else that we could neither find nor control.”
“Why didn’t you tell us, then?” said Rowen. “Why didn’t you enlist our help?”
Fiona shook her head. She hesitated, and Edward understood. He knew her answer, and Rowen wasn’t going to like it.
“We are the guardians of the magic,” she said. Her voice was deliberately low, and it was obvious that she was conveying what must sound like an arrogant truth in the most timid way possible so as to minimize airs and leave only truth. “We couldn’t trust anyone else to know the tunnel system’s entirety. The Seven Nations all have their own magic, and there are kinds we don’t fully understand. You could only see the system when it was finished, when we could be sure that you wouldn’t be able to plumb past our protections. Only the unicorns could be able to know it all.”
Rowen shook his head. He seemed irritated, but at least he also seemed to understand.
“If it worked, it would solve all of the problems at once. It would pacify The Realm and give it an outlet for its greed. It would perfectly balance the outflows from one leak into inflows from the others. At best, it would merely duplicate the natural pores. We had hopes that the system would actually improve the worlds — that it would allow for more circulation of magic in controlled ways.”
The royal from the Seven Nation Army — apparently a queen or a princess or perhaps a duchess — spoke next.
“Is it working?”
She was looking at Fiona, but Fiona turned to Cerberus.
“We don’t know,” said Cerberus. “It’s not finished.”
“What about the raconteur trade?” she asked. “Not the renegades or criminals but the officially sanctioned couriers of story magic?”
“The tunnels will be the safest way for them to travel,” he said. “Now that you know, we should stop using surface tears. Let us close them.”
Edward shook his head. His line might be heaped with shame, but he spoke up anyway.
“Raconteurs,” he said. “Story couriers. So you’ve allowed this to happen.” He looked around the gathering. Everyone here except for himself (and mayhap Cerberus) apparently already knew that The Realm and the other worlds had been trading the very magic that they’d been prepared to war over today all along, and that the unicorns had known and allowed it.
“There had to be circulation,” said Cerberus. So they’d told him after all. Edward found himself growing angry again. He’d always been more or less upbeat, always optimistic. But he’d been shut out of the tunnel project by his oldest friend, and he’d been made to feel a fool about the sanctioned, black market story trade. For unknown millennia, the unicorn nation had known Edward to be the grandfoal of world-breakers but had held their tongues, letting him believe a lie. He’d had enough. He felt himself harden, felt a wall wanting to go up. There could be no more starry eyes. No more vulnerability. No more naiveté.
“The circulation was supposed to happen through the pores,” said Edward. “Through the Wellspring.” He turned to the other unicorns and the creatures and the humans, using the only weapon he had left to protect himself: righteous indignation. “You pretend to help the worlds on one hand while ripping them on the other. And you wonder why the needle never pulled from the cloth? How dare you blame The Realm. They couldn’t have done it alone.” Something dawned on him. He looked at Fiona and said, “That’s why you didn’t want to cut them off, isn’t it? Because you wanted to have your grass and eat it too.”
“The shattering of the worlds put us in touch with others that we needed to get along with,” said Fiona. “Everyone had to be kept happy. There are things at play you can’t understand, Edward.” She stared at him, daring his retort. The way she’d spoken about the shattering worlds had put enough of an onus on the idea, though, and her message was clear: Whatever we had to do was caused by the damage your grammy and grappy created. Edward caught it fine and decided not to jab.
Into the sudden quiet, Rowen said, “Fine. Now we all know it all — other than what the unicorns refuse to divulge and will never reveal. So what do we do? The Realm has been siphoning our stories, and we are growing thinner and less substantial. We will not allow it to continue. So what comes next?”
“We take a step,” said Fiona. “And tomorrow, another.”
CHAPTER 32
CAUSE AND EFFECT
Control came next.
Each of the three sides in the Genesis Treaty — The Realm, the unicorns, and the other worlds as represented by the Seven Nation Army — wanted something from the others, but the protection of the worlds was paramount above them all. A number of the Seven Nation Army had lived through the Grand Cataclysm, and so had all of the unicorns. The younger members of the Seven Nations, being from worlds that Mead considered to be filled with fiction, understood the power of storytelling and had as firm a recall of the Cataclysm as the older members. And The Realm, which had borrowed most of its own legends from the Dark Forest and the other worlds, felt the same. Everyone was in agreement: nobody wanted to live through another Cataclysm, and further sundering of the worlds must be avoided at all costs.
The Realm refused to surrender its magic entirely, but it did shut down two of its three pipes from the vein and allowed the unicorns to improve and leak-proof the remaining connection. They also allowed unicorns to enter the city in order to repair the vein in three places: at the sites of the two shut-down taps and at the original site below the castle, where magic had been leaking unabated.
The Realm didn’t want to surrender its access to stories and inspiration either, but that was fine because the tunnels needed to be finished anyway. The tunnel system would leave access points open between the worlds to allow pressure to dissipate in controlled ways. But the Seven Nations wanted incursions by illegal couriers to stop, so all sides agreed to restrict trade to official channels, with all stories being delivered only by raconteurs.
The idea of raconteurs was new to Edward, so the Unicorn Blessing caught him up before proceeding. The raconteurs were magical beings, sometimes from other worlds and usually quasi-human, who had been imbued with unicorn magic that had allowed them to cross between worlds — as messengers — since before the Cataclysm. They were magic enough to enter the Seven Nations, were human enough to fit in inside The Realm, and had been born from unicorn magic. Thus, everyone accepted them. And what was more, the magic the unicorns had given the raconteurs to allow them to serve as couriers made it impossible for them to lie. Raconteurs could spin yarns and stretch truths, but they could never tell outright falsities. This was done because raconteurs were keepers of stories, and their inability to lie ensured that the stories would never be distorted over time. But during negotiations, their default truth telling had the side effect of keeping everyone honest. If any of the three groups doubted either of the other two, all they would ever have to do would be to ask a raconteur if anyone was thieving, knowing the answer they’d receive would be the truth.
Control. It was all about control.
The leaks couldn’t all be repaired, so the tunnel system’s purpose was to control those leaks. Human greed couldn’t be stopped entirely, so access to stories was permitted but only through controlled channels. The humans would never stop trying to find new ways to tap the magic, so the unicorns controlled their access to it and reinforced their taps to minimize loss.
Control.
The unicorns would preside over the tunnels. Humans would never move alone inside of them. Humans couldn’t open the doors alone; the unicorns knew the entire system, and nobody else did; secret passageways diverted the magic and the waters that hadn’t stopped draining since the great flood. The tunnels could be destroyed and collapsed if needed, and only the unicorns knew how to do it. Only the unicorns knew where all of the back doors were located, and where they led.
But because the unicorns had unfettered knowledge of the tunnels, both The Realm and the Seven Nations insisted on a check — another system of control — to counter that knowledge. The humans demanded secrets of their own. And the Seven Nations, in turn, wanted their own controls — in their case, protection for the cores of their stories, which were essentially their very souls.
There were plenty of bits of knowledge to go around, but the groups had to agree on a way to split those secrets so that together they’d have the truth — but that no one group would have access to all of it. Each party wanted a club to wield over the others’ heads, to hold back as their ace in the hole. And there was a lot that needed to be remembered for posterity: the truth about the Cataclysm, the nature of the rips and leaks, the unicorns’ shameful secret, the arrangement of the worlds. In the case of the Genesis Treaty, that meant that all of the vital knowledge had to be remembered in three non-overlapping pieces, hidden from public eyes so the truth about the worlds’ fragility would never be publicly known — until such a time as the seal needed to be cracked, and the archived knowledge revealed.
The solution was to create living vessels to hold the secrets then to conceal the identities of the vessels. Human minds were weaker than magic minds and were the most malleable, so six humans were chosen. Those six original humans, together with the raconteurs, would hold the whole of the information. Even they wouldn’t know about the information they held, or the nature of the magic that sealed it within them. They would filter into the population, having children, fathering and mothering lines, eternally passing their unbroken archives to their offspring without ever knowing it was there. After a few human generations, there would be no way for anyone to lie in the face of an archivist. The truth of all that had happened would be too spread out, too unknown. Humans would take in new information, adding history to the archives within them without even realizing — then pass it on, and on, and on, and on.
Three elder unicorns would create two human lines each — one of which would be a pure archive, the other of which would be some sort of an intuitive line, meant to subconsciously interpret the knowledge rather than simply reporting it.
Each elder unicorn — the creator — would be supervised by two representatives from each species: two members of the Seven Nation Army, two humans, and two additional unicorns.
Edward and Cerberus, as unicorn witnesses, were paired with two humans, a warrior, a gargoyle, and an elder named Niles. Niles was given two human women as the group’s vessels. One, named Rosetta, he turned into a mnemonic archive that he simply called a “savant.”
The other was a beautiful young girl with dark hair named Sarah. Niles gave Sarah the ability to birth an empathetic breed of magic when her line’s will deemed the time to be right. She would become supernaturally empathetic, able to sense worthy beings in a way that sounded like Edward’s sensing of worthiness in David. It would give her an advantage in finding allies and avoiding those with ill intent, which would protect the information and magic seed she held. Niles called Sarah’s line “benevolents.”
To tie the three groups together at the top level, there was only one person who knew the identity of all six human lines. He was a raconteur tasked with holding the story and telling it only when permitted by all parties. When the assembly asked the raconteur if he would keep the secret until the end of time, he promised that he would — and because raconteurs could not lie, they could all be sure that he was telling them the truth.
The raconteur arrived, and Edward gasped. It was Rumpelstiltskin.
“Don’t act so surprised, unicorn,” said the small man. “I’m a trickster, but I never lied. And you were right — a smidge of darkness has always been what this perfect world needed.” He smiled then winked. “Besides, who better than me to take the stories and make them better as I carry them? I am used to spinning gold from straw.”
The last element of inter-species control set forth in the Genesis Treaty was the most controversial, but Edward felt himself warm when he heard it. It was something Adam had proposed an unknowable amount of time before, back when he’d simply been young Edward’s Grappy, the yarn spinner, the progenitor, the hero.
It was a mentorship program, pairing unicorns with humans.
Human riders.
The other unicorns balked, but Edward could only smile. He alone had spent enough time with a human to see the goodness that could exist within the untidy human soul, and he alone had come and gone freely in The Realm. As he had, he’d notice
d the peculiar feeling of going home that came with it. For David’s entire life, the boy-then-man’s soul had called out to Edward’s. Those two souls had spoken the same language. The feeling was intimate, like that between two unicorn brothers.
The notion of pairing was not reprehensible to Edward at all. Edward had mentored David and brought out what was within him. David had taught Edward empathy, and that spirit was the same beneath the surface of any two enlightened beings. They had fit like two pieces of a puzzle. And if it was possible for humans and unicorns to pair — ostensibly for the unicorn to control the human but really for each to complement the other — then why would they walk side by side? Unicorns had broad backs, and humans could not run where magic allowed unicorns to travel. The unions — which were to be protectors of The Realm — would be hampered if the two couldn’t work together, as rider and ridden.
Unicorns would choose their riders, and only permit those truly worthy to share their souls.
There would be no rush. No deadline to pair.
And the pairing — which would result in an actual exchange of spirit from one to the other — would be permanent. It was fusion, not just bonding. What better way was there to ensure harmony between the species than braiding them together? Humans understood the concept, having already been accustomed to intermarrying royals to create peace between nations.
Cerberus found the notion reprehensible and swore never to pair. He supported the Genesis Treaty when attention was on him but felt that the idea of pairing was insulting. Why could unicorns not simply patrol The Realm? But the answer was obvious: Doing that would be like an army occupying a hostile land. The secret to changing human minds (from greed to moderation, from selfishness to cooperation) was to show them the way, not to enforce it. The unicorns needed to extend themselves, to put their hooves where their hearts were. But Cerberus wouldn’t listen, and complained without stopping.