The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(103)

Tentatively, the beast knelt in the sand. As Anne remounted, she saw that the wound in the unicorn’s side had closed. The impossibility of it shook her, but it was her whole life’s work to take impossibilities and act to make them real. To decide. To rule. She put a hand again on the unicorn’s neck, beneath the heavy, silken weight of her mane.

“Shall we not write our own story?” she whispered. “Come.”

The unicorn slanted her ear and snorted, but she began to walk.

The moon sank at last into the sea, and there was only the city itself, flamelike, in festival, wrapped in the scent of flowers and sea-wrack, a city that had vanished from the mortal world a thousand years ago.

They crossed the sand toward the white road, the causeway, and the gates, shining like mother-of-pearl, fire-reddened, in the brilliant night. The unicorn’s ears moved uneasily.

The gates stood open, and they were decorated with flowers and with pennants bearing the sign of the sea-drake. The flowers were drooping, as though they’d spent the day in the heat, but that was all. They might have been twined into garlands that morning. Flickers of torchlight showed beyond the first houses, the shouts and footfalls of festival.

As the unicorn passed the flowers, they brightened, and fresh color came into their drooping petals.

The ground sloped up, not steeply but steadily, and Anne was glad that she was not walking.

Deeper in, the city had a harsh smell—stale—as though old sweat had sunk into the stones.

It took them no more than two turns or perhaps three before Anne saw lights bounding ahead, and to her surprise, a thoroughfare alive with people. They were gathering for a procession. She smelled perfumed torches, saw a great many wild-eyed horses with haggard riders. Kites of sea-drakes floating overhead, costumes of fantastic fabrics. Laughter. But it was a hysterical laughter, and the procession had the air of incipient riot, people running and laughing with faces wild with aching confusion. All their clothes were beautiful, but they were creased and dirty.

Anne wished briefly for Louis and his sword. But—no. She didn’t want a fight. She wanted these people with her.

She and the unicorn, both small, were concealed in the deepest shadow of a stone house, and Anne suspected that the uneasy unicorn had drawn a different place’s darkness around herself somehow, so they would go unseen.

“Come on,” she whispered to the frightened unicorn, and tried to give her a little of her own courage, her own certainty. A duchess was no duchess if she was alone. It was only many hands, clinging tight to the same rope and pulling, that made a court, that made a realm or a nation.

They went out, together, into the mob.

The nearest lady, with eyes glazed and blank, turned. Awareness came into her face, and she froze. Her stillness swept out like a vast wave into the craning crowd. Heads turned; the noise dropped. Anne whispered, “We need to be higher.”

The slant of the unicorn’s ears was distinctly irritable now, her skin shivering under all the human eyes. But she leaped, more like a cat than a horse, up to a sort of rolling platform in the middle of the nascent procession, strewn with dead flowers, which brightened under the unicorn’s hooves. Did they know how long they had been here, playing out their festival night?

Anne was sweating under her gown, despite the wind off the sea. Someone called in harsh, archaic Breton, “Who are you, lady?”

Anne answered clearly, “I am come to ask your help.”

They all moved uneasily. They could not take their eyes off the unicorn. Her sides were wire-taut; Anne sensed that if this went poorly, she would be thrown to the stone street, all her pretensions dashed to dust, and the unicorn would run clear back into the mortal world. But for now, the unicorn was still trusting her.

“What help?” demanded another.

“This is not real,” said a voice. “She is anaon, some stray from the Lost Lands.”

“You are in the Lost Lands,” said Anne, and they muttered. “I have come to bring you back into the world, if you will help me.” Abruptly, she slid off the platform and walked straight into the crowd. “Am I a ghost?” she demanded, and put out her hand.

The speaker looked stubborn, half-drunk, exhausted, and afraid. But a lady put out her hand and clasped Anne’s, still warm from the unicorn’s long mane. Anne saw the unicorn’s light reflected in all their staring eyes.

“God in Heaven,” whispered the speaker.

Anne said, raising her voice, “I must go to the citadel.”

Uneasy faces, terror. “Nay, do not go there,” called another voice. “Queen Ahèz’s guards will stop you. They have a short way with any discontent. Criminals’ heads are set upon spears and fastened to the seawall.”

Anne did not at once reply. To her surprise she felt the unicorn’s nose lightly on her shoulder. The unicorn had braved the crowd to come to her. The torchlight reddened her coat, shimmered along the pearls of Anne’s dress. She used the edge of the platform to mount up again, with what grace she could muster. The crowd’s murmurs grew louder. From her new vantage, Anne called to them, “What is impudent in a mere visit?”

“None are allowed. There is only the lady with her intimates. Some whisper that a korrigan came once, a royal korrigan of great beauty, and the queen fell in love with him. But he only cursed her and now none enter or leave.”