Lydia tries to sidestep me, but I’m faster and reach the creature before she does.
It’s nothing but a pale blur as it moves through the thick ferns, but I raise my sword, ready to strike.
All of a sudden, there’s that scream again. It’s not coming from Lydia, I realize, but from the creature before me.
It sounds like a child weeping, high-pitched and unbearable.
I swing but my sword misses, striking the ground with a spray of dirt.
The creature stumbles out into the soft grass, fully visible now, and I fall to my knees, dizzy at the sight of it.
It’s a snow-white unicorn, its coat perfect and unblemished save for Bram’s royal seal, newly branded and sticky with blood, on one side of its back legs.
Its horn is pale gold, its eyes a large, luminous brown, jarringly similar to the eye color Lydia and I share. But that’s not the reason I fell.
It’s just a baby. No bigger than one of Bram’s hunting dogs, it’s still got the chubbiness of childhood in its face, and it’s unsteady on its spindly legs.
Lydia pushes past me.
“It’s just a baby!” I cry out. My sword clatters to the ground, and I reach out in an attempt to stop her even as she raises her sword. “Please!”
I stumble to my feet and get a grip around the hilt of her sword, my hands on top of hers.
“Ivy, stop!” she screams. “Let me do this.”
“We cannot!” I scream back. How marred will our souls be if we kill something as beautiful and innocent as this?
The unicorn has fallen now and is braying in an awful tone that reaches straight to the core of me.
I throw my full body weight to the ground, slamming my back hard against the dirt and dislodging Lydia’s grip on her sword, which tumbles to the ground with aclang. Its blade falls so close to my head, it shears off a few locks of my hair as it hits the ground.
I push myself up and toss her sword and mine into the stream. They both sink under the dark water, disappearing.
Lydia’s face is cold. She doesn’t even look at me.
“C’mon. Let’s just tell him we didn’t find it. He can’t keep us out here forever,” I whisper, but Lydia doesn’t respond.
I pick up my feet to run at her again, but a tree root writhes like a snake and reaches out to trip me.
I fall hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs.
In four long strides, Lydia is in front of the unicorn. I’m too far to stop her now.
She throws herself onto its back, and without hesitation, she snaps the golden horn off its head and stabs it into its soft neck.
The unicorn screams a death knell that will haunt me until the day I die. It hollows out something within me, and I have never wanted to be dead more than I want to be dead in this moment. I don’t know if it’s the unicorn’s magic affecting me or if the simple act of watching my sister do something so horrible has undone me.
The unicorn gasps and keens as it drowns in its own blood, its little pink mouth opening and closing again and again uselessly. Its tiny body shudders, and maybe I’m projecting, but it’s as if I can sense in it an emotion that all species understand; it wants its mother.
The unicorn dies alone in a field, its own horn the cause of the killing blow. I keep hoping it will disappear in a shower of sparks or dust, like the swan I once killed in a hedge maze. I’m desperate forsomeevidence that this is another magical faerie trick, but the unicorn lies limp and solid. Just another dead animal.
I retch, but there is nothing in my stomach but river water.
Lydia stands, panting and covered in silvery blood. Then she bends, scoops up the unicorn’s limp body, and slings it over her shoulder.
“Did you really want to win that badly?” I sob. “Nothing could have been worth that.”
She pushes past me wordlessly and begins the long walk back to Bram and Emmett.
