Ascendant

by Diana Peterfreund

  I stared at Mrs. Jaeger and wondered how quickly I could run without a unicorn chasing me.

  “Yes,” I stammered. I knew him. I hated him. I watched him die.

  Her hand, slim and fine and cool as spring, slipped into mine. Her eyes were silver blue, just like the walls of the room and the moonstone necklace she wore, and shiny black hair fell in waves to just above her shoulders. “I’m sorry, ma chère, does this trouble you? I know the way he died was most horrible.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss.” The words shook from my lips, and I prayed they did not sound quite as hollow to her.

  “Merci beaucoup,” said Isabeau Jaeger. “We were quite shocked to hear of it. You see, it had been many, many months since I’d last spoken to him.” She turned her back to me and moved toward the desk, her giant dogs trailing in her wake, their noses practically reaching her shoulders, when she stopped. “We were estranged, Astrid. I could not support his policies. Not the ones about our company, not the ones about the kirin, and most certainly not his thoughts regarding the young ladies in your monastery.”

  I stood dumbfounded. No one had ever mentioned Marten’s wife. Was their “estrangement” why?

  Isabeau gestured to the armchairs near her desk. “Please have a seat. I am very glad to have the opportunity to speak to you. I am ashamed to admit I’ve felt far too uncomfortable to approach the Order of the Lioness these past few months. I should have contacted you at once, but I had no idea what reception to expect. You’d be justified in slamming the door in my face.”

  I sat down on the chair—plopped, really.

  “Can I get you something to drink? Perrier, perhaps? Or chamomile tea?”

  I shook my head, and watched as she scratched one of her dogs behind an ear. Its lips parted and I saw a flash of white fangs even longer than Bonegrinder’s.

  “Do you like dogs, Astrid?” Isabeau asked. “These are Great Pyrénées. They are sheepherding dogs from our French Alps. As beautiful as einhorns, no?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve never seen an einhorn.”

  She beamed. “We must do our best to correct that. They are the loveliest of all unicorns.” Her smile faded as she continued to caress the dog’s neck. “At one time, I had hoped a sheepherding dog could do the same for unicorns. I was mistaken.”

  How many dogs had they lost before that became clear? I folded my idle hands in my lap. “What are their names?”

  “The male is Gog,” she said, pointing. “And the female Magog. It was a joke of my husband’s. Some Alexander story about giants who guard the gates of hell.” She pursed her lips. “He had it wrong, of course. The giants were the monsters trapped beyond the gates.”

  Brandt slumped into a seat beside me and started scarfing brightly colored candies from a nearby crystal dish.

  I sat forward in my seat. “Madame, I have to tell you, I tried so hard to stop the unicorn that killed your husband. I couldn’t—”

  “I believe you, Astrid,” Isabeau said, and sat behind her desk again. She kept her face down for a moment and when she did speak, there was a catch in her voice. “Marten reaped what he sowed. He was very hard and very greedy, and I could not bear to live with him like that. We went our separate ways, but I did not supervise him. And so, I feel like I must apologize to you. I did not know how twisted his ideas had become. Had I any notion of his behavior to the women in your Order, or the way he would withdraw and give support at a whim, or his evil dealings with the kirin unicorns or those boys, I would have stopped him. It was shameful. It was criminal. Had he not died, I would be working now to see him justly punished for his actions.”

  Her expression was somber, but not devastated. Certainly not as wrecked as I’d be if I found out my husband was a scumbag like Marten, though I supposed she’d had several months to adjust to the idea, and several more to come to terms with the fact that he’d been killed by a unicorn.

  I cleared my throat. “That’s actually why I’m here. I’ve been looking for Seth Gavriel—”

  “You and the authorities, no?”

  I looked at Brandt, who was still involved in his candies. “Brandt said you might know where he is?”

  Isabeau gazed at me sadly. “If I did, I would certainly inform the police, just as they have asked. All I know is that Seth was under the protection of my husband. Marten gave him money, set him on the run. If he should use his company credit card, we’d be able to trace him. He’s either too clever to use it or so stupid he’s lost it. But trust me, Astrid, should we ever have an inkling of what has happened to that young man, we shall contact the authorities.”

  And yet, all this time, the Bartolis’ investigator had been chasing the wrong card! “If you know what credit card Seth has, why didn’t you tell us at the Cloisters?”

  Isabeau looked confused. “The Cloisters? I have given the information to the police,” she said. “Who are most likely to track such things. I didn’t think it would be useful to you, and we are tracking it as well, but I can give it to you if you wish. I will do whatever I can to help. It’s such a terrible thing.”

  My shoulders relaxed like the limbs of a bow at rest as Isabeau spoke.

  “We all want to find the secret to the Remedy,” she went on. “It could be the most important medical breakthrough of this century. Yet it will not be had at the price Marten sought to pay.”

  The phone on the desk rang twice, then Jean-Jacques poked his head into the room and aimed a stream of rapid French at Isabeau.

  “Forgive me, Astrid,” she said. “I must accept this call. We can talk more in a few minutes, yes? And in the meantime, maybe Brandt can show you our herd. I understand you were friends in the States.”

  Their herd? I looked at Brandt, who rolled to his feet, then pulled me to mine.

  He kept his hand on mine all the way out of the room and down the hall, and I was pretty much grateful for it, as my mind was busy spinning the information it had just received.

  All this time I’d been terrified by the idea of resumed contact between Gordian and the Cloisters. Would they be furious over what we’d done to the kirin? Over what we’d let happen to Marten? I’d never expected a reception like the one I’d just received. I’d never thought that Gordian was anything other than utterly under Marten Jaeger’s thumb. I never thought that anyone there would consider what we’d done to be justified.

  Especially since I hadn’t reached a conclusion on that myself.

  Brandt seemed oblivious to my inner turmoil, chatting about our hometown as we walked through the corridor.

  “Hold on,” he said as we reached the back of the house. He ducked into a side room and emerged with a small paper sack. “You okay, Astrid? You look like you did that time you got a B on your chemistry test.”

  I swallowed. “It was a C. A C-minus.” I’d completely screwed up my orbital calculations and spent the next week on makeup extra credit.

  “How traumatizing,” he joked.

  I turned my face toward my feet, trying to remember a time when a C-minus on a test was the most traumatizing event in my life.

  “You still want to be a doctor?” he asked as we exited the house.

  “Yeah. But it’s hard lately. I haven’t been in school, even.”

  “The hunter people didn’t put you in school in Rome?”

  “They tried,” I said with a shrug. “But we’d missed the application cutoff. It was disappointing.”

  “For you, I’m sure!”

  The back of the château featured a large stone patio that ran the entire length of the building and spilled down toward the lawn in a series of shallow terraces. Beyond that, the dome of the greenhouse rose above our heads, glinting in the intermittent sunlight breaking through the persistent clouds.

  “What have you been doing for school?” I asked him.

  “A better question is what haven’t I been doing?” Brandt spread his arms wide. “I’m living in France! Our dinky little high school can eat its heart o
ut.”

  How was France supposed to help him on his SATs?

  Brandt led me down the terraces, and the moment my feet hit the grass I felt them, the way the taste of salt in the air signals you’ve reached the sea. Unicorns. The sense of them bubbled within me, crowding out my thoughts of home and chemistry and even Marten Jaeger’s death gasps. The world warped as we moved forward, and the alicorn knife in my purse seemed to hum against my hip.

  Brandt was studying me, not even bothering to conceal his wry grin.

  “You’ve got a lot of them in the woods,” I said, surprised by how breathless I sounded. “Can you count them?”

  “No. There are too many.” Their thoughts overwhelmed me. Hunger, fear, rage, weariness, despondency, despair. “These are einhorns?”

  “‘These.’“ Brandt laughed. “Amazing.”

  Not as amazing as what I’d started to touch back when I’d been doing yoga at the Cloisters.

  We neared the greenhouse. “What’s in there?” I said, trying to subdue my instincts to sprint toward the forest. It was still possible to have a civilized conversation, unicorn magic and all.

  Brandt shrugged. “More of Isabeau’s experiments. Medicinal herbs and stuff. She’s all about finding cures in the natural world.”

  As we rounded the back of the glass dome, I saw that the forest itself was ringed with high chainlink fences topped by massive loops of barbed wire. More barbed wire was woven through the links.

  “Is this supposed to keep the unicorns in?” I asked skeptically. Steel barbs probably wouldn’t even slow them down.

  “No, it keeps the crazy people out.” Brandt pressed a code into the lockbox on a double-row security gate, and a buzzer sounded as we went through to a slim open area beyond the actual start of the trees. Inside the woods, I felt the unicorns stir and come forward. The air was dappled with sunlight as the clouds moved in the sky. Beneath the fire and flood that marked the presence of the animals, I caught the odor of a coming rain. It was the perfect weather for a unicorn attack.

  I stepped between Brandt and the approaching monsters. “Um, this is a little unsafe. I’m getting some scary flashbacks to the last time we were in the woods.”

  “Really?” Brandt raised his eyebrows suggestively. “Remember what we were doing then?”

  Making out on a blanket. I blushed as he stepped around me.

  “Here they come!” He pointed. A half dozen einhorns stepped out of the grove.

  Just as Isabeau had promised, they were magnificent. Tall and elegant as deer, with slender white limbs and long, curving necks. Their large eyes were black and shiny as obsidian, surrounded by eyelashes as snowy as their fine coats. A graceful spiral horn the length of my arm stood at attention in the center of each of their foreheads. Long white tails like lions’ tails flicked with curiosity behind them.

  Around each of their necks lay thick collars supporting chunky black boxes that blinked with green and red lights. My steps faltered.

  “Electric collars, see?” Brandt pointed out a line in the dirt in front of us marked with little red flags. “They can’t cross this point.” He moved up almost to the line while I watched the silent unicorns, transfixed.

  “How did you do this?” I asked, astounded. Unicorns could not be kept in captivity. At least, that’s what I’d always been told.

  “How do you think?” said Brandt. “A hunter caught them for us.”

  A hunter? Who? “Where is she now?”

  Brandt lifted his shoulders and reached into his paper sack. “Uh, she … got out of the business.”

  The unicorns watched him warily, though a few cast their eyes toward me and back to Brandt. Their thoughts seemed alien to me, like a favorite dish cooked by a different chef. It wasn’t the pure, untempered rush of emotion like Bone-grinder’s, nor the flickers of concrete images like the kirin’s. It certainly wasn’t the karkadann’s complicated imagery that could, after a fashion, pass for speech in my head. I struggled to separate the sense of each unicorn into their individual thoughts, a process made all the more difficult as they suddenly united under a single desire.

  Food.

  Brandt was holding out a giant steak. He waved it at the unicorns, clucking his tongue. “Brandt!” I said in surprise.

  “Relax.” He chuckled. “They know they can’t go past the line.”

  He must be right, for though I could feel their hunger, shimmering like the mottled sunlight through my head, none of the unicorns stepped forward, despite Brandt’s persistent teasing.

  “What?” he cooed to them. “No one wants a nice raw steak? Yummy.”

  And then, from behind the others, I saw a unicorn move forward. A juvenile male. Mangy, with raw patches and scabs showing through his white coat, and so skinny I could count his ribs. I’d never seen a unicorn with wounds like that. Had he been gnawing on his own skin, then? Or were his regenerative powers failing? The unicorn’s black eyes trained on the steak as he hobbled forward.

  For a moment, his thoughts bubbled up above the others. Starving. Hadn’t eaten in days. Smaller than the others. They got to food first. They stole it from him.

  “Brandt,” I warned.

  “Yummy bloody meat,” said Brandt, and drew his arm back as if to toss it to the unicorn.

  The unicorn lunged at the barrier and Brandt jumped backward.

  I heard a pop and a sizzle, and the unicorn stumbled.

  “Crap!” Brandt cried, turning my way. “Did you see him go? He almost got me!”

  Behind the barrier, the unicorn was shaking his head, dazed, and getting back to his feet. He began to growl, lips pulling back to reveal sharp white fangs.

  I reached for my purse as the unicorn started forward again. This time it broke right past the barrier and galloped toward the steak still in Brandt’s hand.

  My ex-boyfriend turned around just as the unicorn reached him. It lunged at the steak, spearing right into Brandt’s hand. Brandt cried out.

  The unicorn collapsed, the vibrating hilt of my alicorn knife buried deep in its throat. Blood pooled around the steak still clenched between its jaws. The other unicorns scattered, terrified. I rushed forward, watching Brandt’s expression dissolve into pain as he struggled to pull the horn out of his hand.

  Too late, too late! And this time, there’d be no ancient vial of the Remedy to save him. What an idiot, to wave a piece of meat at a starving unicorn! If only I’d pulled out my knife the second I saw them come out of the woods. If only I hadn’t wanted to see the einhorns up close.

  “Man, that stings,” said Brandt. He shook his hand free and looked up at my stricken face. Then he smiled. “You okay, Astrid? Aww, that wasn’t your first time, was it?”

  I froze as he calmly held out his punctured hand. The wound knit together before my eyes, leaving behind nothing but a small, helix-shaped scar.

  8

  WHEREIN ASTRID GETS AN INVITATION

  “You’re—” I stammered. “You’re immune.”

  “Yeah,” Brandt said. “You gave me the Remedy.”

  “I mean … you’re immune like a unicorn hunter. You heal instantly from alicorn wounds.”

  “Yeah,” Brandt repeated like I’d lost my mind. “You gave me the Remedy” He pulled the alicorn knife out of the dead unicorn’s neck and examined it. “This is really nice. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

  And I’d never seen a boy heal like a hunter. What was some alicorn carving compared to that?

  He handed me the knife. The surviving unicorns cowered deeper in the woods. The acrid smell of fresh blood mixed with the scent of fire and flood. “You’ve got killer aim, Astrid. For a second I thought that knife was going to go right through my arm.”

  “But you’d have healed from that, too?” I asked. “It’s alicorn.”

  “Yeah. All alicorn, just like you.” Brandt nudged the corpse of the unicorn with his toe. The steak slid from between the creature’s death-slacked jaws. “We’re going to have to get someone to
come by and clean this up. What a mess. Poor guy.” He looked up at me. “Hey, you all right? How many have you killed?”

  “Dozens.” I turned away from the corpse on the ground.

  “Well, don’t worry about it,” said Brandt. “We’ve got plenty here, and that one was attacking me. You were well within bounds to put it down.”

  I studied the blood staining the knife in my hands. Not dark like kirin blood, but a bright crimson. Lighter than human blood, thicker than zhi’s. “I knew the Remedy healed the poison. I didn’t know it made you immune. I didn’t know it made you like me.”

  “Just in terms of alicorn wounds,” Brandt said, walking toward the exit. I caught up to him by the doors, still holding the knife awkwardly in my hands. “Which we basically discovered by accident. This isn’t the first—or rather the second—time I’ve been gored.” He held the chainlink gate open for me. “Remember how scared I was the first time? I totally flipped out.”

  “What else has it given you?” I asked as we passed back onto the château’s lawns. “I mean, I know the whole idea of the Remedy is that it can cure poisons or diseases or wounds other than the kind made by unicorns—but so far, that’s all I’ve seen.”

  “Well, I haven’t been sick once since your mom doused me,” Brandt said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Gotten a couple cuts and scrapes falling off my bike, though, and those heal normally. The truth is we don’t know. Isabeau doesn’t believe it’s a panacea, by the way. Not like her husband did. She doesn’t think it can cure everything there ever was. But if it can neutralize poisons—any poisons, which is what the legends say—it would revolutionize a lot of medical treatments. The way they talk … it sounds pretty cool, actually. Like a cancer therapy where you could flood the patient’s entire body with really powerful chemo then shoot them up with the Remedy before the drugs could attack healthy cells.”

  And that was only the beginning. “So that’s why you have these einhorns? For testing?”