Rampant (25 page)

“Help me!” Valerija was hanging from the back of a kirin as it ran for the woods, dragging her with it. “My arm! My arm!” Somehow she’d become tangled in the unicorn’s mane. I rushed forward, alicorn knife in hand, as it disappeared between two trees, with Valerija bumping behind.

We zigzagged through the undergrowth, Valerija screaming in pain and panic, the kirin grunting loudly. My legs flew over the ground, leaves and branches blurring as I charged forward; and then I was flying, landing on the beast and hacking away with my knife.

The kirin’s head snapped up as I sliced through its mane and Valerija slid to the ground. She scrambled up in a hurry, cradling her elbow in her other hand.

She was unarmed.

“Run,” I gasped, as the kirin bucked. “You’re dead with no weapon—” The unicorn threw me off, and I spun in midair, landing in a clumsy half crouch. The unicorn lowered its horn at me and, even in the darkness, I could see blood pouring from its many stab wounds.

No, I could
smell
it. How weird was that? Even weirder, they
weren’t closing. Just like with the re’em that night.

“Run!” I repeated to Valerija. I tugged at her shoulder, trying to pull her toward the clearing before the unicorn charged.

Her eyes grew huge and round and then fire exploded all along my back. I tried to breathe but could not, and my mouth filled with hot, bitter blood. I dragged my eyes from Valerija’s horrified face to my torso. What was that bump sticking through my shirt? It looked like an alicorn.

How strange.

Valerija ran, and the world went black.

The scent came first: fire and flood. The odor of apocalypse.

A moment later, there was nothing but pain. No air, no light, no sound but my own heartbeat, loud and slow.

There was grit between my fingers, sticky, wet. My vision blurred when I tried to open my eyes, and when I tried to speak, my mouth was caked and dry.

As for breathing, it hurt too much to try. Each shuddering gasp sent sharp, fiery arrows through my lungs.

I struggled to turn my head, my hands digging in the dirt to steel myself for the torment of moving an inch. Had Valerija left me to die in the woods like an animal? Was she here, too, dead or dying? Where were the others? Were we all…

A croak of despair escaped my throat, and it hurt so much that I almost passed out again. So this is how it ends. Alone, in the dark. No mother, no Phil, no chance. The darkness began to grow fuzzy again, and I tamped down the instinct to inhale.

Daughter of Alexander.

I froze, face down in the muck that I now realized was a puddle of my own blood.

Daughter of Alexander, breathe. You will be well. Your lung works once more.

I choked again, and the air felt like fire. It seemed as if an age passed in pitched battle, me against my lungs, with weapons of oxygen and agony. And then, I coughed, blood and sputum flying from my mouth, and I found that I could breathe. It hurt terribly, but I inhaled.

Do not move.

Yeah, no kidding. I blinked and breathed, content for a moment to have that tiny privilege restored. Air. Oh, air. I’d never before appreciated you!

Several minutes later, I turned my face to the side. A foot away lay the bodies of two kirin, one whose horn was drenched in blood. That must have been the one that had attacked me. This seemed familiar, somehow, like the pictures piling up in my head.

A Band-Aid, a crossbow, a bonfire. Giovanni and me in the woods; the eviscerated unicorns; the tableau in the rotunda; me, on the ground, with a giant hole in my back…

He’d saved me. He’d saved me again.

A microphone, a waiting audience
…

Daughter of Alexander, can you speak?

“Yes,” I said, in a voice like a toad.

The karkadann stepped from the trees.

You are getting better at this.

T
HE NIGHT PASSED
, and I drifted in and out of consciousness, while the karkadann watched over me in colossal silence. I could feel the waves of venom pouring off his horn, and yet they didn’t bother me as they once had. Perhaps I was growing used to it, building up a resistance after each exposure. It had almost killed me on the park bench, but here, next to a near-fatal wound, I hardly felt it. Or perhaps the venom was connected to the Remedy after all.

“Does it help?” I asked aloud.

A beaker in my chemistry lab back at school. My lab notebook covered in my scribbles.

You are the scientist. You say.

And then, much later:

“The others—they’re all dead, aren’t they?”

No hunter perished this night.

Then why was I alone here? They wouldn’t have left me for dead, would they? And even if they thought I’d been killed, they would have come looking for my body. I choked and coughed.

And then, in my mind’s eye, I saw a kirin running with a giant lump on its head. My body, impaled on its horn.

A trophy.

“They…took me?”

Fireworks. Dancing. The figure of Clothilde Llewelyn.

“To prove they killed me. The Llewelyn.” I shook my head. Perhaps I was better at translating the images when I was losing consciousness. “But I’m not so different from the other hunters. Why do they care?”

Vengeance.

“Against whom?”

Against the hunters. Against me.

“Why you?”

Laughter. Then a pop quiz. Then kirin.

I almost groaned, until I realized how much it would hurt. Why wasn’t it Cory here instead of me? She could give him an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge about kirin.

They were from Asia. That part I knew. And they had spread through Europe by the time of the first extinction. They hunted in packs, and the prevailing legend was that they appeared around the time of a great leader. Like Confucius. They were tough as hell to see at night, which may be why the ancient drawings of them were covered in clouds, and they fought like demons. In olden days, people worshipped them, sacrificed to them as if they were gods.

Yes. The kirin desire man’s worship.

A walled city, a barred gate…Exile
, I translated.

Exile does not please them.

Exile? The truth bubbled up inside. That century and a half when we thought they were extinct? To them, it had been exile.
These were more than simple beasts, quietly surviving in the wild pockets of the world. Unicorns had been
hiding
.

Had they gone into hiding after Clothilde killed that karkadann? Did they know their days were numbered then? Cory had always described Clothilde’s karkadann kill as the Last Hunt. I’d certainly never heard of anyone killing unicorns after that.

I was so thirsty.

Into my head came the vision of a schoolgirl, walking along a road with a brown lunch bag in her hand. Very close, and very vulnerable. A meal for him carrying a meal for me.

I could get you food and drink, but you would not like my methods
.

“No.” I tried to lift my head from the ground, but the flesh of my back boiled as I shifted. Was I healing? Unlike Ursula, I hadn’t gotten a transfusion of non-hunter blood. I had no idea how much I’d lost, but I was still here, still alive. Perhaps I still healed. As the gory images of the schoolgirl faded, I risked speaking again. How could he be treating me with such kindness and act bloodthirsty to another girl? “Why don’t you kill me?”

I need your help. Like last time.

“In the park?”

No. With Clothilde Llewelyn.

I closed my eyes. Right. The karkadann who thought he was Bucephalus. Talk about delusions of grandeur! “How have the last two thousand years been treating you?”

Not bad.

I tried to laugh then, and was rewarded with a flash of fresh pain. Well, what did I expect? For the talking unicorn to be
reasonable?

Pop quiz: Karkadann, I thought, since I didn’t have the strength to speak. Alexander’s warhorse, Bucephalus, according to all accounts except my mother’s, had died, mid-campaign, in what is now Pakistan. In his mourning, Alexander named a city after his greatest companion: The “horse city” Bucephala was now known as Jhelum.

True. But I did not die there.

That’s what my mother said. She said Bucephalus had escaped, and that Alexander had made up the death story to save face.

According to the legends the unicorn hunters passed around, Bucephalus lived for another two thousand years, until Clothilde Llewelyn came along and finally defeated him, the last surviving unicorn, in an epic battle that had cost them both their lives.

I did not die there, either.

No,
he
didn’t. It was different karkadanns, each time. A few animals could live a hundred years—I think we learned in bio class about birds of prey—and a few plants could reach into the thousands. But a two-thousand-year-old, battle-tested unicorn? He looked awfully spry for his age.

Besides, I’d seen the unicorn in the rotunda, the one Clothilde killed.

There is only me.

Then what’s the thing in the rotunda?

The karkadann began to growl, and the earth itself trembled beneath my palms, chest, and cheek.

Do you doubt me, Daughter of Alexander?

I was in real trouble now, if my thoughts were no longer my own. I was used to keeping my mouth shut in front of my
mother. With this karkadann, it wouldn’t help.

I wondered about the other hunters. Where were they? Where was I, for that matter? What did they think had happened to me? Did they think I’d been eaten? Did they think I was dead?

Do you want them to?

The thought was so clear in my mind that, for a second, I thought it belonged to me alone.

“No!” My mother, and Phil…they’d be so upset.

Are you sure? It is very nice, being dead. No more hunting. No more being hunted.

“You’d know,
Bucephalus
,” I said, “what with dying twice now.”

Laughter. You must be getting stronger.
I felt him shift above me, and the corresponding wave of venom-filled air.
It is almost closed now.

I got a flash of my back: my shirt, torn to shreds and stained brownish red with dried blood. Beneath it, a glimpse of a horrific, enormous wound.

I recoiled from the vision in my head. How had I survived? No one could live through a wound like that, not even a hunter. I’d have bled to death or stopped breathing or—was it possible that the horn had missed all major organs? No, I couldn’t breathe. My lung must have been pierced, at the very least. But it had healed, too.

The karkadann snorted. He was growing impatient, standing here. I could tell. You’d think that a few millennia would chill a guy out.

I will have all the time in the world when the rebel kirin are defeated
.

“You need my help?” I glanced at the body of the nearest kirin. “I think you’re better at killing them than a hunter is.”

For now. You get better. Besides, I do not want to kill them all. I want to free them.

“I don’t understand.”

A rush of images flooded my brain, each more confusing and muddled than the last.
The burnt scriptorium of the Cloisters; Marten watching Philippa at target practice; the head of the kirin that Valerija had killed;, the Wall of First Kills; the alicorn throne; the claymore of Clothilde Llewelyn, the golden, blown-glass vial that my mother had used the night she’d saved Brandt’s life
—

“Stop,” I gasped. “Please.”

A Band-Aid; a crown; an endless, barren wasteland; the scent of hot horse and dying men; the bronze bit in my mouth, tearing, tearing
—

I tried to rise, but I blacked out.

When I woke again, the pain in my back had subsided a lot, and I risked pushing myself to a sitting position. The corpses of the kirin were gone, and I shuddered to think what had happened to them. I didn’t see the karkadann, either.

“Karkadann?” I whispered into the woods. The quality of the light through the trees made me think it was late afternoon. “Um…Bucephalus?”

Daughter of Alexander, are you well?

Yes, I thought. Where was he?

Near. Your skills have increased.

My skills at reading his mind? He couldn’t be too close—I didn’t even sense the venom.

Yes, you grow better for me. Better to withstand me. Better to listen to me. Better to hunt.

“Hunt you?”

Laughter. Try it.

Gingerly, I reached behind me and touched my back. My skin felt rough and rippled beneath my fingertips, and I cringed, coughed again, and felt dizzy.

The ground trembled, and the karkadann emerged through the trees. He stood above me and dropped three small, slightly squashed oranges to the ground near my feet.

Good?

I picked one up, ignoring how sticky my hand felt, how it was spattered with blood and dirt. “Yes. Thank you.” It was wet and slimy to the touch, and the caked mud and dirt stuck to the rind. Gross. Unicorn spit.

I tore into it anyway, then sucked at the juice as best I could without eating the dirty parts. How far had I come from the hospital aide who would never dream of eating food without freshly washed hands?

I guess once you spent the night in a mud pit made with your own blood, you relaxed the rules a bit.

“Okay,” I said, between mouthfuls of orange. “You saved my life. Now tell me about the kirin.”

Not all kirin but some. They have been deceived. They think they will find a new glory among men. But all they shall find is slavery. They do not listen.

“Well, I can’t talk to them…can I?”

No. But your sword can.

I lifted my arm. It hurt. “I doubt I’ll be doing anything with a sword anytime soon. Besides, you saw what happened
last night. We hunters are no threat to more than one unicorn at a time.”

You will be now. You are better all the time.

I shook my head. “The ancient hunters had years to learn their craft. We’ve had a couple of months. They had experienced people to train them. We have no one. They understood their powers. We do not.”

The last is true.

“Do you…understand the powers?”

Daughter of Alexander, I am teaching you now. When the kirin gored you, he taught you. When you pet your—Bonegrinder?—she teaches you. When you stand in your prison, surrounded by bones that sing and horns that scream, it is all a lesson.

Being around unicorns made us better hunters. If our abilities manifested themselves only when we were around unicorns, it would make sense that prolonged exposure could enhance the powers. That I could understand. And it explained the bones in the wall just fine. But it didn’t tell us how to take on a pack of kirin.

Alexander and I were with each other all our lives. We were born at the same moment. He was best of all. But he was lost without me. Hunters are different. It took me thousands of years to understand. And then I met Clothilde.

“And killed her!”

No. Clothilde Llewelyn died in bed surrounded by her grandchildren.

“That’s impossible.”

Is it? You too are dead, Daughter of Alexander.

And all at once, I understood. I didn’t even need the images the karkadann placed in my mind.
A young woman stood in a
field, her hunting clothes torn to shreds, her wounds closing as she strode forward, past the bodies of dead einhorn and kirin, her claymore held high. Her fair hair wasn’t long, like in the tableau, but shorn short, the better to show off the scar that ran vertically across her scalp.

She stood before the karkadann, her face battle weary and drawn, pointed her sword tip into the earth, and said, “The world changes, unicorn. The fences rise, the forests fall. There is nowhere to hide and nowhere to hunt that does not rob from men. This world is not for you. And neither is it for me.”

“You made a deal,” I whispered. “Exile.”

Yes.

“Where?”

Secret.

There had been no extinction, no Last Hunt. There had been no great battle between Clothilde, the greatest of all unicorn hunters, and Bucephalus, the greatest of all unicorns. It was all a lie. And Clothilde “died” so that no one would know the secret. So she could stop hunting. And she got married, and she had children. And the hunters never knew! Talk about a line of lost Llewelyns! Cory would flip. That is, if she still thought there was anything special about Clothilde’s lost descendants once she knew the truth.

Her descendant has been found.

The golden vial appeared in my mind’s eye. The golden vial Lilith had procured from the man who’d been my father. The very last remnant of the Remedy.

“Shut up.”

Why do you think I come to you?

“I honestly couldn’t say.”

You are the only one I trust not to kill me on sight.

“None of us would,” I insisted, “because we can’t. We aren’t good enough at hunting.”

Did you think you could kill that re’em? You can do anything. It is your choice.

“I choose to remain dead, then. Like Clothilde.”

The karkadann growled again, and I could tell that he regretted his slip. But if he could talk to me, he could talk to the others, right? I’d been granted a reprieve. A single, perfect chance. I could have died last night. Could die the next time I was sent on a hunt. I can’t do it anymore. I won’t.

I rubbed my hands together, and the grime began to ball up and flake off. Before, Phil would have been all over this unicorn conservation plan the karkadann and Clothilde had dreamed up. I bet Ilesha and Rosamund would go for it as well. Cory, not so much, but—