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 ofmyhome 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 impossibilitiesand 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.
Anne wished briefly for Louis and his sword. But—no. She didn’t want a fight. She wanted these people with her.
She and the unicorn, both small, were concealed in the deepest shadow of a stone house, and Anne suspected that the uneasy unicorn had drawn a different place’s darkness around herself somehow, so they would go unseen.
“Come on,” she whispered to the frightened unicorn, and tried to give her a little of her own courage, her own certainty. A duchess was no duchess if she was alone. It was only many hands, clinging tight to the same rope and pulling, that made a court, that made a realm or a nation.
They went out, together, into the mob.
The nearest lady, with eyes glazed and blank, turned. Awareness came into her face, and she froze. Her stillness swept out like a vast wave into the craning crowd. Heads turned; the noise dropped. Anne whispered, “We need to be higher.”
The slant of the unicorn’s ears was distinctly irritable now, her skin shivering under all the human eyes. But she leaped, more like a cat than a horse, up to a sort of rolling platform in the middle of the nascent procession, strewn with dead flowers, which brightened under the unicorn’s hooves. Did they know how long they had been here, playing out their festival night?
Anne was sweating under her gown, despite the wind off the sea. Someone called in harsh, archaic Breton, “Who are you, lady?”
Anne answered clearly, “I am come to ask your help.”
They all moved uneasily. They could not take their eyes off the unicorn. Her sides were wire-taut; Anne sensed that if this went poorly, she would be thrown to the stone street, all her pretensions dashed to dust, and the unicorn would run clear back into the mortal world. But for now, the unicorn was still trusting her.
