Chapter Twenty Kian
The moment the unicorn passes, Adela’s phoenix mask finally releases. It falls off her face, onto the earth, right beside a pile of red stones.
My red stones.
The ones I used to mark the path into the valley.
But I can’t think of the implications of Adela finding these right now.
I’m too busy staring at her face. Her beauty, and her pain.
She has gashes across her perfectly rounded cheekbones.
The slightly upturned curve of her delicate nose is red and raw.
The pale arches of her eyebrows are tinged slightly pink from where they’ve caught seeping blood from her scrapped forehead.
Lathai rages, the storm growing more violent as he stomps and snorts and flashes his wings. I expect him to attack us, to get us away from his love, but he must understand. There is nothing more we can do to hurt Etana now. She is gone.
I wrap Adela up in my arms, to protect her from the wind and rain. I use my sleeve to dab away what I can, and she buries her face in my chest.
I’m surprised her father isn’t there beside me, instantly examining her cuts and scrapes, but he’s hovering over the unicorn. He removes a small blade from his bag of tools and kneels beside Etana’s corpse. After whispering some words to the dark forest, he slices down her belly.
There is a sickly sweet, coppery scent, and I involuntarily shift away from the violence of it. Blood, guts, and a small, unmoving foal still in its embryonic sack pour out on the forest floor.
This is the work of a healer. It is not all tender hands and tidy bandages. Her father gently releases the foal from its sack. “She would have been magnificent.”
“Dad?” Adela’s raw, terrified voice cuts through me, and I want to pull her back into my chest, shield her from it all until she no longer sounds as if she must either sob or perish. Or potentially both. Her sorrow is palpable.
Her dad shakes his head, a universal sign. There is no luck or blessing from the goddesses that would make this foal live. Adela’s magic has killed it along with its mother. Or perhaps it died before Etana. I don’t know enough about the process of unicorn births to tell.
Adela pulls farther away, putting a hand on the unicorn’s back. I glance quickly at Lathai, concerned he’ll object, but he is too busy nosing at Etana’s face, as if trying to revive her. He isn’t paying attention to Adela, or even his lost foal.
Adela strokes Etana, as if her touch will calm the dead creature. She needs calm herself, but I know that her night is just going to get worse. She is free of the phoenix at last, but by destroying the matching hut, I have stolen any hope of her returning to her old life.
Shortly, Etana will become a skull. The first and only skull in the valley for a time, but keepers do not need a matcher for a single skull. And High Priestess Sarai will never allow someone with Adela’s newly revealed power to escape her machinations.
Adela’s fate was fully sealed the moment I tossed the dragon-lit candle. I’ve burned any hope of her staying to the ground. And she doesn’t even know it yet.
“Kian.” Her voice trembles with hope and trepidation. It cuts through the oppressive silence, and my guilt.
“Save them.”
Save them? The words, so simple and yet fully unfathomable, splash against me like the softening rain.
They fly up into the forest canopy and then crash against me.
I stare at Etana, then the small hybrid creature torn from her mother’s womb.
Save them. As if I am capable of such a thing. I am no keeper, no healer.
Adela takes my hands. She places them on Etana. Still red with despair, her eyes brighten with frantic possibility. “Use your magic. Save her. Save them.”
My magic. Of course. The phoenixes work in tandem. Two parts of a whole. If Adela is destruction, I must become rebirth.
But how? To destroy is simple, straightforward. Break it. Smash it. Kill it. But to recreate life? I close my eyes and see the matching hut burning before me. I am made for destruction.
She whimpers. “Please.”
For Adela, I have to try. I focus on Etana, but the moment I even begin to think about pouring magic into her, the phoenix sends a refusal through me so strongly that it hurts.
Adela must feel it, too, because she cries out as if I have stabbed her.
He either cannot or will not attempt to revive a creature killed by magic.
Images of the foal pan through instead. Running through a flower-filled meadow, bedding down beneath a bush, flying amongst the pegasi.
Adela scrabbles for my hands, placing them back on the small creature, pressing them tightly into her unmoving ribs. “Try to revive the foal. Please. Try the foal.”
Adela’s father is beside her, trying to pull her away. He tucks her head into his chest, protecting her from whatever comes next. But she doesn’t want protection. She wants resurrection.
The foal’s coat is white, like her mama’s, and still sticky with amniotic fluids.
She is so thin, spindlier than even a typical horse foal with long legs and a narrow, delicate face.
On her forehead is a small bump, the beginnings of a horn.
A gift from her mother. Lathai’s gift, wings, protrude from her back, massive compared to the rest of her and majestic, even covered in goop.
As if my thoughts somehow broke through his grief, Lathai attends to us. He stomps a heavy hoof.
Now is my chance, if I’m going to do this.
I close my eyes. I imagine a building of pressure like Ulric discussed and let my will flow through me. What does it matter if I don’t believe in myself? This beautiful, hurting woman who means more to me than I’m ready to admit believes in me.
I bend down over the foal, whispering in her overly large, wet ear, “If you do not revive, some smelly novitiate is going to wear your face for the rest of their days and you will have never known the taste of fresh summer grass or the warmth of a midday sun.”
The pressure is building, but I cannot access it.
The phoenix feels as if it is beating frantic wings inside me, chipping away at the wall I’ve put between us.
I drop my defenses and release the impossible pressure.
I imagine shoving the magic into the small body of the foal.
She will breathe. She will stand. She will pop up and canter into the night, or whatever shit newborn unicorn-pegasus hybrids do in this valley.
The foal shudders.
“Spinner’s tits,” Adela’s dad whispers, something like reverence lacing his words.
I scramble backward.
The foal’s eyes open. They are solid black, lined with thick lashes. She springs up on wobbly, twig-like legs. We stare at the creature who looks more like some ancient illustration of a creature than the flesh and blood of her parents.
“Is-is that how it’s supposed to look?” I ask.
Adela is too busy sobbing and trying to crawl across the forest floor to the foal to respond.
Her tears mix with the rain, and her whole body lurches forward, undone by loss.
Mud cakes her hands, her clothes are soaked through with rain and grief.
The storm lashes through the forest, wind tearing at branches, scattering new leaf buds and pine needles.
Her father answers.
“There’s no ‘supposed to’ here. But also…
no. Not what I’d expect.” He steps forward, reaching out with hands still covered by blood.
His voice is steady, but his eyes flicker to Lathai, then to Adela, and back to Etana.
He clearly wants to examine the foal, but he’s wary of the grieving pegasus and no doubt aches to comfort his daughter.
He takes a step forward, but Lathai is there between them. He stomps hard enough to make divots in the forest floor, which instantly fill with rainwater. He bares his teeth in warning. No one will approach his little one. Not now. Not while his grief is still so raw.
The foal headbutts Etana’s belly to release her milk, but all that happens is more of her insides seep out through the cut Adela’s dad made.
Adela stands, soaked and shivering, and approaches Lathai.
The trees stop whipping in the lessening wind.
Rain still falls, but slower. Lathai drops his head, waiting for her.
She has just killed his mate, and still he allows her near.
She kneels by the foal, and reaches out a shaky hand.
“Come here, little one. I’ll tell you of your mama as we get you some milk. ”
The creatures of the valley trust her, but this one doesn’t know her yet. The foal flinches, ears pinning back, and twists away from Adela, skittish as a barn cat. And then, without a look back, she runs into the forest.
“No!”
Lathai goes after the little creature.
Adela moves to follow, too, but I quickly put an arm around her waist. She struggles against me, but has no strength left to truly fight.
“You’re not catching her tonight,” her dad says. “Let her go. And hopefully she’ll come back when she’s hungry or tired. Or Lathai will bring her.”
“Hopefully?”
Her father shrugs, but it’s not dismissive.
He simply doesn’t know for certain what will happen.
He’s a healer. He knows the ways of creatures—their habits, yes, but also their unpredictability.
He turns back toward the faint, flickering lights of the village.
“Let’s go home. We’ll come back in the morning with a cart and take care of our Etana then. Nothing we can do for her now.”
The storm sighs above us, not yet done, but easing. We turn and walk back to the village and to whatever fate awaits me and Adela.