It was Robert. It was ordinary, human Robert. The look on Robert’s face wouldn’t have been there on the other.
Devon wondered what Robert saw. The bones in his face were intact. His lips felt bloated and shapeless; his eye was swelling closed. He still wore the cap. His clothes were wrecked, even those that were still on his body and not on the floor. He would have liked to have said, It was six men.
‘Who?’ said Robert.
‘It doesn’t matter. I am going to take care of it.’ Speaking required care with fluffed lips.
‘I know you’re involved in something. Whatever it is—’
‘It’s not your concern.’
Robert sat down on the bed beside him.
After a moment: ‘You don’t need to tell me. I don’t ask that of you.’
Robert’s presence made him feel stupidly grateful, which in turn provoked a violent surge of anger. A human to hurt you, a human to help you. It was stifling, the world clogged by them. If Robert tried to comfort him, he would push himself up and over to the other side of the room. If Robert tried to touch him, he would bolt.
Robert just sat beside him, long enough that the anger faded, until he was aware of Robert simply as a confusing presence. It upset the unspoken terms of their association, which for ten years had run along the professional lines, an ivory merchant and his clerk. Yet he was aware – confusingly – that if he had come upon Robert alone and in a similar state, he would have done the same. He pushed the words out.
‘I’m fine. I heal quickly.’
‘I know that.’ And then: ‘I have something for you.’
Robert had been carrying something. Cloth-wrapped, it was the length of a man’s arm. An umbrella in a box. It would have been useful earlier, when it was raining.
Robert undid the string and drew the cloth aside. Devon felt the room tilting under him as he saw the shine of black lacquer, a polished box, with two filigree clasps, like the case for a musician’s instrument.
His eyes flew to Robert’s face, only to find Robert was looking back at him, a calm look that demanded nothing. There was no surprise in Robert’s eyes, nor any anticipation of surprise. The truth was expanding between them, and Devon felt, for the second time that evening, the feeling of being looked at and seen. Violet’s horrified scramble backward was nothing to the calm knowledge in Robert’s eyes.
‘‘I have hunted the unicorn mostly in libraries,’’ Robert quoted softly.
He thought, ten years of working together, ten years in which Robert had aged and he had stayed as he was, a fifteen-year-old boy with a cap pushed down low over his forehead. He couldn’t make his hands move over the lacquered box.
‘How did you get this?’
‘Simon Creen is not the only one who can steal objects from other men.’
He forced himself to look down. His fingers moved as though they belonged to someone else. He watched them unfix the clasps and push open the box.
It was strange, considering how everything else had changed, that it was so perfectly as it had been, white and looped and long and straight and beautiful. There was nothing like it left. There was nothing of the toss of his head and the way it had felt to run, hooves on snow.
‘I’m sorry this was done to you.’
He looked down at the horn, and he heard himself say, ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I wondered,’ said Robert, ‘if it could be restored.’
‘You mean reattached?’ he said. ‘No.’
Devon looked up at Robert.
‘No,’ he said again, and he felt that bewildered sensation. ‘But I am glad to have it all the same.’
The lamps in the room weren’t overbright, but it was enough to see everything. It felt intimate, with Robert’s serious eyes on him. Like being helpless to the truth. Devon found himself lifting his hand and pulling the cap from his head. It dropped from his fingers onto the carpeted floor, so that there was nothing hidden between them. His heartbeat was intrusive in his chest. Being exposed felt like being found out and waiting for the blow to fall.
Robert said, ‘Are there others?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I am the last.’
‘So you’re alone.’
Devon stared at him. The fingers of one hand had curled around the horn, and he was holding it so tightly in that hand that his knuckles were white.
Robert said, ‘Whatever you’re caught up in, if there’s something you need, I can help you.’
Devon closed his eyes, then opened them. He said, ‘You don’t want to do that.’