Chapter 34 #2
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.
“Oh,” she said.
Spread before them was a white causeway, paved with oyster shells that glimmered in the last of the moonlight. The water lapped it on either side, and beyond was a walled city, with the sea moving lazy as a loving hand against the base of its walls.
It looked like a heap of stars rising massively toward a crown of gold-tipped towers, lit as though for a festival night.
Windows and streets shone, fires flickered in the tiers of the spiraling street, perfect as jewel-work.
Even in that fading light, she could make out colors, as though those firelit roofs contained hidden places: gardens, perhaps, or painted chapels.
For a breath she was sure she dreamed.
Then the smell of salt and bladder-wrack and something fishy came to her nose and faintly she saw the masts of ships, a black forest starred with lanterns, in the sea beyond the walls.
It was real. It was all piercingly real.
This was Keris, the drowned jewel of Brittany.
But it was not drowned. It stood shining in the Lost Lands, where no man had seen it for a thousand years.
It was larger than Nantes, and more beautiful.
It was the loveliest thing she had ever seen.
The lamps sent their light glimmering over the water, but the unicorn stood outside the reach of it, quiet now, her sides going in and out.
One ivory hoof stroked hissing against the sand; she tossed her head and shifted her weight like a horse about to rear.
Anne hastily slid off, and the unicorn let her cling to her mane as she steadied herself.
How could one bring all this—people and history and stone—back into the mortal world? She tried to see the city in a different light—moonlight, daylight—but nothing changed. It felt too big, too much itself, to shift at her will alone.
Softly to the unicorn, she said, “I have learnt what I could of sorceries. But I do not know what to do now.”
The unicorn watched her a moment more, silently. And then the white neck curved, shining like seafoam. Some creatures belonged in the stable, or the mews, some belonged in the forest, and this one surely belonged in those liminal spaces where sky met sea. Where the Lost Lands met the mortal world.
And then with her horn, the unicorn slashed her own flank.
“Oh!” cried Anne. “Oh, no.” She put out two instinctive hands to stop the bleeding, but stopped a hair away.
The cut was deep and the blood was silver as the sea-drake’s, and it ran down and smeared the white coat.
What would it do to her, to touch it? The sea-drake’s blood had given her power, had made it possible to escape Nantes. It had also nearly killed her.
Would the unicorn’s blood let her work her will on this lost city? At what cost?
The unicorn’s eye seemed to hold an answer.
The price was herself and it had always been.
If she meant to save the city, she could, but they’d find her lying dead on the shingle.
Her dreams of power were only dreams, and not even the Lost Lands could make them real.
She was born a sacrifice, and nothing more.
That was the truth of her soul, as mapped by the Lost Lands.
Her hands hovered over the blood. “You cannot heal me afterward?” Anne demanded of the unicorn, appalled, knife-edged, a sovereign demanding information.
The unicorn’s dark eye said no, that there would be no healing. That Anne would have torn the boundaries of her entire self, and there were things not even the unicorn could mend. You wanted this. What will you give for it?
Anne didn’t want to die. She wanted to see Louis again, and her brother and her sister, and sit at a feast or a council meeting. She wanted a realm to keep and to love and to defend. And yet here she was standing on this godforsaken beach with her own death in a unicorn’s eyes.
Anne was starting to grow indignant.
“No,” said Anne aloud. “This isn’t right.
Perhaps queens a thousand years ago were born to lay down their lives for their people.
” Uncomfortably, she remembered how near she’d come to yielding all she was for Brittany’s chance at freedom.
“But the world has changed.” She turned on the unicorn, which startled back a step, looking at her with what she could swear was surprise.
“What purpose is there to standing alone on a beach, breaking myself upon a task that is too big? Or—or”—her voice was quivering—“choosing to go far away, leaving the government of my home to others, yielding all that I am, because the only part of me that will ever matter is the heirs of my body?”
She advanced on the startled unicorn, who lowered her head in uncertain instinct.
Anne walked forward until the spear-sharp point touched her breastbone.
“A sovereign is not a martyr,” she whispered, her voice hissing-sharp, not beautiful at all.
“A sovereign forges many into one, forges people into a nation; a sovereign is an enchanter too, for she can make real what her people only dream of. I am not going to die for your border, or for my realm. I am going to live for them.”
The unicorn’s nostrils flared.
She said, “I think there is another way. If you will help me. If you will bear me into the city.”
The unicorn’s ears flattened. Anne narrowed her eyes and said, “I can’t walk all that way. And I think I might be more impressive if I am riding.”
The unicorn stared at her.
Anne said, “Yes, yes—it is all deeply unpleasant, my beautiful creature, but I am more than just my death, and you are more than just your blood. Let the Lost Lands bear witness.” Her fingers hovered over the gashed flank. “Will you help me?”
She waited.
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.