The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(101)

Gralon stood awhile in silence. “Long ago, we said the test of the rightful sovereign was the hunting of a unicorn. A unicorn never came to my daughter, yet I had her crowned in my place, and only evil came of it. The unicorn has come to you, and your road leads to the sea, but I will tell you now that if you wish to vie for the rule of Keris, you must go alone, with no chevalier to help you. Not if you wish to be accepted as the rightful sovereign.”

Anne stood still. Ride away? But what would Orléans think, when he woke to find her gone?

Would she give up the chance of a realm for this newborn love?

The answer, deep in her bones, was clear. No, she thought. Never.

She whispered, “When he wakes—within—will you tell him—”

“I will send him to you,” said Gralon Meur. “If you have been successful, the way will open for him. And if you are not, then he may go questing, as many have done before him in this land of faerie, and take his fortune as it comes. But this is your hour now, and the unicorn waiting. Go, lady. No—wait. I have something that will help you.”

He disappeared swiftly into the house, and Anne, after a hesitation, walked over to the unicorn, until their shadows merged beneath the trees. The unicorn put down her nose and blew warm breath into Anne’s palm. The dark eyes lay steadily on her. One cloven hoof, white as the purest ivory, scraped the green ground.

“I still don’t know exactly what you wish of me,” said Anne. “Will you take me to Keris?”

The unicorn shook her mane, like a fall of moonlit water. Anne put a hand on the warm neck. The unicorn was no taller than a pony. Her head curved round, filling the air with the smell of flowers and the salt sea.

Gralon Meur came back, and he had a white garment in his hand. He said, “My Malgven wore this when we wed. It is yours now. I think the city will recognize it.”

The unicorn stretched her neck out to the old man and laid her horn lightly on his shoulder.

Anne stripped off her torn gown where she stood and put on the dress that Gralon Meur held out for her. She could put it on without help, for it was like nothing she’d ever worn, light and simple and fine, sewn all over with pearls. She remembered that she’d worn white for the unicorn-hunt. Well, perhaps this was proper. She could hardly draw breath, so fast was her heart beating.

“And this,” he said, and gave her a ring. Gold set with an incised jewel. The device was that of a sea-drake. It was too big for any of her fingers, so he helped her string it round her neck with a hair from the unicorn’s tail.

The unicorn pawed the earth.

Softly, Anne said, “Please—you must explain to Orléans. He will not understand.”

The old man stood very straight. “I will do all that is wanted, lady,” he said. “For do I not know both love and duty? And I think he will understand. For he was born to it, the same as you or I.”

He kissed her hand. Then Anne turned to the unicorn, hesitated. It felt like sacrilege.

But the unicorn, in silent answer, knelt in the grass.

Anne thought of her kind Jonquil with her comfortable saddle. But she got on the unicorn’s back, and was small enough not to dwarf the beast’s slenderness. Not a maiden sacrifice now, she thought, but an aspiring queen, who would preserve the unicorn’s grace and with it the way into the land of twilight.

In a breathless instant she thought all these things.

In a breathless instant a legend was born.

And then the unicorn shot away like a loosed arrow, Anne clinging to her mane while the wind of their speed whipped the tears from her wide-open eyes.



* * *





There was no comparison to riding a mortal horse. For one thing, the unicorn’s hooves touched the earth with scarcely a jolt; it was like flying. And it was the unicorn’s intent that drove them, an intelligence alien to hers. Madness perhaps to trust it. Perhaps ungodly, irreligious. But it was the most exhilarating—the wildest—experience of her life.

Anne clung with all her strength, blinking away tears in the whipping wind and peering through the strands of falling mane. There was no end to the Lost Lands, and no beginning. What border could there be in a land made of lost things? But fair sights met her eyes. A palace of gray-blue spires; a man like a mountain, whose head turned slow; a black tower mortared red, like the product of some dire forge. A figure with eyes silver as the scales of sea-serpents, his hands in the dark hair of a woman. A child weeping by a pool, leaning over the water.

Then they came bursting out at the top of a cliff, and Anne was too startled to do anything but hold on, biting back a scream as the unicorn bounded down the rocks. Then there was only the pure sea before them, sand firm as a roadway; they were galloping beside the endless water, and it was dawn no longer, but dusk.

Then night fell like a blade bearing down, and the moon was setting into the sea. Anne looked out at the water in the last of the light and her heart lurched within her, for something moved in the deep, as great as a ship but alive and sinuous, with a fringed head and water pouring silver off its scales. But next moment, they’d raced past, and when Anne looked again, there was only the sea, plashing lightly on its shore.

She was beginning to falter in her seat, despite all her determination, when the unicorn dropped abruptly to a walk and raised her ivory-crowned head. Anne wiped the tears and salt from her face and squinted down the beach.