“And this,” he said, and gave her a ring. Gold set with an incised jewel. The device was that of a sea-drake. It was too big for any of her fingers, so he helped her string it round her neck with a hair from the unicorn’s tail.
The unicorn pawed the earth.
Softly, Anne said, “Please—you must explain to Orléans. He will not understand.”
The old man stood very straight. “I will do all that is wanted, lady,” he said. “For do I not know both love and duty? And I think he will understand. For he was born to it, the same as you or I.”
He kissed her hand. Then Anne turned to the unicorn, hesitated. It felt like sacrilege.
But the unicorn, in silent answer, knelt in the grass.
Anne thought of her kind Jonquil with her comfortable saddle. Butshe got on the unicorn’s back, and was small enough not to dwarf the beast’s slenderness. Not a maiden sacrifice now, she thought, but an aspiring queen, who would preserve the unicorn’s grace and with it the way into the land of twilight.
In a breathless instant she thought all these things.
In a breathless instant a legend was born.
And then the unicorn shot away like a loosed arrow, Anne clinging to her mane while the wind of their speed whipped the tears from her wide-open eyes.
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 pouringsilver 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.
