The Unicorn Hunters: A Novel(113)

Whatever I have changed, whatever I have kept the same, I hope you will come away from this book beguiled as I was by this time period, the vibrant cusp between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Courts, religion, art, and secular life were all in the midst of startling and far-reaching change, as the laws of chivalry gave way to modern court politics. And into this change, I could not resist throwing a beautiful and brilliant young woman, an ancient magic, and a lost city by the sea.

When I was a child, I had a book of lore called Magical Beasts. Among the manticores and the chimeras, the dragons of cave and water and fire, there was a chapter on unicorns. My favorite chapter of a favorite book, it contained tales of Eastern and Western unicorns, warlike or sacrificial, sometimes elusive in their forests, sometimes slaughtered wantonly by men. There was even, as an aside, a few paragraphs about the rhinoceros that Marco Polo met on his travels and mistook for a unicorn.

But though I read through every single tale in this book, many times, the unicorn story that lodged in my memory was the first of them, a tale told like history of some nameless seigneur and his retainers going unicorn-hunting in a forest called Brocéliande. This tale was not a happy one; the hunters start the unicorn like a stag, course it, exhaust it, and finally summon a beautiful maiden to draw it helplessly to a clearing and ensure its doom. In the story, the unicorn dies with its head in the girl’s lap. One of my first pieces of writing, when I was aged about ten, was a retelling of this story, except that the unicorn is not killed; it escapes with the maiden to another world.

I lived in France for a year at age sixteen, and went seven months of that year, with a teenager’s charming obliviousness, before I realized that I was living not an hour from that forest of Brocéliande. I hadn’t, up until that point, known it was real. It existed in my heart as a place of fantasy, unicorn-haunted and faerie-ruled.

Naturally, I made straight for it, as quickly as I could work out how to get there.

I met no unicorns on that day, or on any other day I spent beneath the boughs of Brocéliande. But at least it is a forest to make you believe in them. Brocéliande is a place of rills and secret water, boasting every shade of green and every sound of stillness, complete with a medieval castle and a mysterious abbey standing stark beside a great still lake, with rings of standing stones half-hid in the depths just to complete the air of enchantment.

I have held that place in my heart for two decades, held the tale of a failed unicorn-hunt for three, but my heart is full of strange places; these two might never have coalesced into a novel had I not also read the famous Breton faerie-tale of the drowned city of Ker-Ys and seen Anne of Brittany’s castle in Nantes, a Renaissance edifice on the bank of the Loire, as beautiful still as her taste could make it after she became queen of France.

As often happens, when a book is coalescing in the strange passages of my mind, these various notions merged and out of them was born, with that strange alchemy I love and can never fully understand, the book that you have in your hands.

I hope that you too find yourselves straying through places where it is possible to believe in unicorns.

Katherine Arden

Duxbury, Vermont

January 15, 2026





Acknowledgments


Writing any book is a journey through the most tangled of forests, with only the briefest glimpses of open meadow, of flowers and water and the straying unicorn, to encourage you on your way. Forging a path through the brambles is not merely the work of one writer; it takes a whole cavalcade of people to make art from these wild briars.

My publishing teams in the US and the UK have my undying gratitude for their hours of work, their infinite patience with my dithering and doubt, their unfailing kindness and encouragement. I am more grateful than I can say to my editor in the UK, Selina Walker, and my entire publishing team across the ocean: Lily Capewell, Mary Karayel, Issie Levin, Conor Hodges, Amy Musgrave, Helen Wynn-Smith, Lizzy Moyes, Alice Gomer, Emily Harvey, Kirsten Greenwood, Phoenix Curland, Rhian Steer, Caroline Newbury, Sophie Agnew, James Keyte, and Meredith Benson.

I am also so grateful to my team here in the States: Kate Gomer, Keith Clayton, David Moench, Katelynn Jasper, Emily Reilly, Julie Leung, Tori Henson, Tricia Narwani, Loren Noveck, Kevin Garcia, and Emily DeHuff. Above all, to my editor, Jennifer Hershey, who untangled the roughest of drafts and overcame all my self-imposed obstacles with superhuman patience and aplomb.

Thank you also to my agent, Paul Lucas, who liked something he saw ten years ago in the rough draft of a book called The Bear and the Nightingale and has been with me through all the ups and downs since.

To Peter V. Brett and Naomi Novik, friends for life, whose long conversations over dinner were instrumental in shaping this book. To Meghan Condon, because your horrid suggestions for book titles never fail to make me laugh. And above all to my husband, Evan Johnson, and Moose, my loves, my small family, who held me and loved me and put up with me as I carved a new path through this particular forest.





About the Author


Katherine Arden is the New York Times bestselling author of The Warm Hands of Ghosts, the Winternight Trilogy, and the Small Spaces Quartet. In addition to writing, she enjoys aimless travel, growing flowers, and running wild through the woods with her dog, Moose. She lives in Vermont.

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