Two cigarettes later, and the scent of tobacco smoke wanes in my nostrils in favor of true fire. For a moment I’m elated, and then I realize the origin, as rot joins the mix.
In storybooks and movies, magic lets you see the secret path, the hidden sprite. It lets you hear the sound of fairy music, or the voices of the dead.
My magic stinks. Unicorns stink. They smell of soot and stagnant water. Of death that comes by suffocation or incineration. I wonder if those are preferable to the one I always figured awaited me, somewhere on the end of a unicorn’s horn.
The magic makes it impossible for a unicorn to sneak up on you. Your mind smells them from miles away. Today, however, I’m grateful. If it weren’t for the stench heralding his arrival, I’d have jumped from my skin when he spoke.
Daughter of Alexander.
I flick some ash and keep smoking, steeling myself for the sight of him. I have my crossbow, but it didn’t even pierce his skin last time. Some part of me, some tiny traitorous part, must have been waiting for him.
Seconds later, there he is, bigger—always bigger than I expect. Bigger than the pictures in the books, or the statue in the rotunda, or the nightmares Ursula’s been having for the better part of a year. Big, bigger biggest.
“The name’s Melissende, Bucephalus.” I nod at the unicorn. His voice in my head reminds me of my father’s. I’m sure that’s what he intends.
In storybooks, unicorns are lithe, graceful things, with slender, deer bodies and mischievous goat faces and gorgeous, spiraling white horns. Bucephalus looks more like a wooly mammoth, with hooves the size of hubcaps and eyes like temple fires. His horn is a massive spike from his head, a tusk of stone stained with the murders of millennia. I climbed up this boulder, but he still stands at eye-level.
“What are you doing here?”
What are you doing here? He reflects back at me. And why does the soil smell of peat?
I gather the images in my mind for him. Automobiles and oil fields, petrol stations and red warning labels.
His front hooves paw the ground. The boulder beneath me vibrates at his every move. If he kills me where I sit, will I have succeeded or failed in my goal?
Do not wish for death, young hunter.
“Why? Don’t you, after all these years? You have nothing. Nobody. Everything you ever knew or loved is gone.” I flick away my cigarette. Nothing. No sparks, no flames, no tiny plumes of smoke. I know my aim is better than that.
But it is not that way for you. You have your sister. The little bear.
“Don’t speak of her.” My fingers itch for my crossbow. Instead I light a match. Such a frail little stick, compared to my horn-tipped bolts. But it’ll do more damage, magic or not.
Bucephalus says nothing. He snorts and shifts on his massive legs. Nothing was meant to live as long as he does. I have heard that there are trees that do, though, in Norway or New Zealand or America or something. That makes even less sense. How much worse would thousands of years be if you were rooted to the same place that whole time? If your children fell from your branches and lived in your shadow and died so close you could touch them, if only the breeze was strong enough that day.
If I’d been a few meters closer, I might have killed that re’em before it got to Astrid and Rosamund. If I hadn’t tripped, if my first two shots had been deeper or in a more vital artery. If Dorcas hadn’t decided to stay back and let her arm heal. If there had been more hunters on the mountain that day. If Clothilde Llewelyn had killed every last one of these monsters when she’d had the chance a hundred and fifty years ago. If she’d never made a deal with the monster who stands before me.
When Bucephalus growls, you feel it more than hear it. Your bones shake beneath your skin.
The match extinguishes in the mountain breeze. Oh well. Plenty more where that came from.
“I’ve killed a hundred unicorns," I say.
I’ve killed ten thousand men.
“Please, tell me more about all the people you’ve murdered.” Of course, your bones can shudder from other causes, too.
We are both killers, Daughter of Alexander. There is no need to apologize for it.
“Do you see me apologizing?”
What is your wish?
To avenge the death of Rosamund is the only one I’ll allow in my mind for Bucephalus to see.
Her killer is dead.
The image floats before me—I slew the re’em while Rosamund and Astrid lay in pools of blood on the mountainside. It didn’t take the half-dozen bolts I fired into the unicorn’s body, nor the dagger I used when it dropped to the ground. Even as it gurgled its last breaths, it cried out for its offspring. I heard their answering pleas in my mind for the first time as their mother’s lifeblood soaked my hands and stained my clothes.
I would have killed them, too, but I had to get Astrid off the mountain.
Do you know what happened to them?
I shrug and light another match. I feel faintly sick, but I don’t know if it’s from too many cigarettes or a unicorn far too close.
Search for them now.
I flick the match from my fingers. “Not necessary.” The match bounces on the ground and the flame dwindles. Nothing. Again.
Who knew it could be so hard to start a fire?
Search for them. Do you feel any unicorn other than me on this mountaintop?
Against my will, my instincts reach out, but I hear no chord, scent no fire, feel no unicorn thoughts. But what does that mean? I couldn’t feel them last time, either. Their existence was shielded by their mother.
Who is now dead. Do you think they survived here all winter without her?
I grimace and fumble for the box of matches, knocking the canister so it falls over, clattering against the stone, splattering oil in its wake. My fingers are shaking. Yes, too much nicotine. Too much magic. The scene blurs before my eyes — the massive, red-brown hide of Bucephalus, the tiny pinpricks of wildflower color against the carpet of mountain green.
“If the unicorns aren’t here, then tell me what I’m doing.”
You know what you are doing, Melissende Holtz. But do you know why you have not yet done it?
I have to strike the match three times before it lights. “Oh, I get a name now? I heard you were stingy with things like that.” The flame licks at my fingertips, but I can’t feel its heat. I need more. So much more. I toss the match away from me, and watch its arc down into the grass.
Bucephalus watches too. I can’t see that well anymore, but he helps. This match, too, fails to do its duty. It lands facedown in the heart of a wildflower, melting the petals and singeing the stamen before it extinguishes.
Come now. Your aim is not that bad. When you kill a unicorn, you shoot for the heart. Why such a coward when you wish to kill yourself?
My head flies up, my eyes meet his. There’s a pool of gas on the rock at my side. And I shove my sleeve into it. “I’m no coward.” Where are my matches?
Bucephalus charges forward, swiping his giant head at me. I’m swept from the rock by the flat of his horn, tossed in the air like a petal torn from a flower.
If I landed on a rock, I might be dead, or maimed, like Astrid. But Bucephalus’s aim is as good as mine. I hit the thick grass hard, but not hard enough to break. There’s gas in my nose and damp wildflowers in my hair. My body burns with pain. I cough, trying to catch my breath as his shadow blocks the sun.
My crossbow is gone, up on the boulder. My matches have been flung in every direction.
“So why don’t you kill me?” I scream at his ancient, terrible face. His nostrils flare wider than my open mouth. If he wanted, he could bite off my head. He could crush my skull to dust beneath his hooves.
He’s killed ten thousand people. How many were hunters, just like me?
I grab the nearest rock, and bash him on the snout. He winces — if monsters can wince, and I scramble out from beneath him.
I race back to the boulder, but his legs are as long as my whole bod
y. Again, he brushes me aside, and I go tumbling, over and over, my body jostled by half buried rocks in the pillowy grass. Bruises and blood bloom on my skin like so many spring flowers.
I push myself to my feet against, bracing my body against the rock and face him. The unicorn is eyeing me, horn lowered, mouth open so saliva drips over his fangs and off a tongue as large as my arm.
“Speak!”
But there are no words from the unicorn in my mind. It’s closed off to me, the way the re’em or the kirin can sometimes shield their thoughts, the way the little ones like Bonegrinder never can. “Is that what makes you special?” I spit at him. “That you have the choice whether or not to speak, but you can always, always read our minds, as we can always read the minds of the lesser unicorns?”
The unicorn is silent. The whole mountain is silent. The birds and insects have fled the stench of gasoline, and even the breeze has stopped. I hear the blood in my ears.
“You should kill me,” I say. “I’m not soft, like the Llewelyns.” Like all the Llewelyns. “I have no love for fluffy animals that only want to eat me.”
Nothing.
“Speak!” I shriek. I rush at him, unarmed. He doesn’t let me get a blow in this time, lifting his head and shoving me back against the boulder. His horn screeches against the granite above my head.
This is how it ended for Astrid. My skull smacks against the stone, but not hard enough to crack. Not nearly hard enough.
I slump to the ground as he backs away, and I cover my face with my hands. My skin is wet with blood or gas or tears. My flesh stings and burns, but not with fire. Not with fire.
I don’t want to die by fire.
“If I live,” I say at last, “I will kill you all. Unicorns are a threat to my family. To everyone I love. I won’t rest until every last one of you is dead.” I drop my hands to the grass at the base of the boulder and rake my fingers through the blades. Bucephalus watches me with eyes as old as the ages. In his endless life, he’s watched millions die. He’s seen empires fall and stars fade and species wink out of existence.
And still he fights. He could have walked off a cliff a century ago, and he didn’t.
“I would dedicate my life to eradicating unicorns. Is that not reason enough to kill me?”
It is.
I almost cry out with relief at the voice in my head. He’s going to do it. He’s going to do it.
He lowers his horn and his hooves slash the earth, smearing wet wildflower against a scar of green and black. In this moment, my last moment, I am transfixed by the colors.
It’s so pretty up here. Ursula would have loved it. Little, bratty, precious Ursula, who should never have seen the blood and the death and the violence she’s seen. Who shouldn’t even know how to hold a bow, let alone use one to kill something. Who has a massive scar in her tummy from the time she was impaled by a unicorn.
You know what? I don’t want to die by unicorn, either.
My hand closes around a tiny, round-tipped twig in the grass. Bucephalus has seen far worse than me, and he’s ready to murder rather than allow his kind to be cut down.
You can learn quite a lot from your elders.
The unicorn charges and I leap. I scrape the end of the match against the stone as I jump and it bursts into flame against my fingertips. Bucephalus collides with the rock as I land, shaking the foundation beneath my feet. The boulder cracks beneath me and I reach out for a handhold.
The match tumbles from my fingertips. In the slowness of time that comes courtesy of my unicorn magic, I can see it falling, end over end, the fire traveling down its length until it lands in the grass.
The explosion knocks me off my perch.
Somewhere, beyond the rock, beyond the roar of the flames, the unicorn bellows in agony. My eyes are seared with the afterimage of a ring, a mushroom cloud of fire. My coat’s aflame — I drag it off, rubbing my arm against the grass until all trace of fire is gone.
And then I run. I don’t know if he made it out, but if he did, he’s coming for me.
Halfway down the trail, I stop to look back at the charred rock field above. The fire’s still burning, but the rocks will contain it. It won’t spread to the rest of the mountain.
All those lovely wildflowers: gone. My crossbow: gone. And Bucephalus — the unicorn that lived for a thousand years, the unicorn that saved my life by promising to end it, the unicorn that made sure that his kind survived the last time we hunters threatened to extinguish their entire species…
He won’t be a problem this time around.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The world of the killer unicorniverse, as seen in this story, is based on real myths and legends of unicorns from around the world. For instance, contemporary biographies of the great military leader, Alexander the Great, claimed that his famous warhorse, Bucephalus, was not a horse at all, but rather a giant type of man-eating unicorn from Turkey called a karkadann. To read more about Bucephalus, other killer unicorns, Melissende, and her fellow unicorn hunters, check out the novels Rampant and Ascendant.
***
Diana Peterfreund is the author of eight novels for adults and teens, including the Secret Society Girl series, the killer unicorn novels, and For Darkness Shows the Stars, a post-apocalyptic retelling of Jane Austen's Persuasion. Her critically acclaimed short stories have been on the Locus Recommended Reading List and anthologized in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, vol. 5. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her family. Read more about Diana at https://www.dianapeterfreund.com.
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The Language of Flowers
By
Rhonda Stapleton
“I want something romantic. A bouquet that shows her how much I love her.” The lanky older man casts his glance around the shop, gaze skipping over our vibrant offerings. “Something…special.”
I slip from behind the counter and head toward our bold selection of wildflowers, him right on my heels. “How about a mixed bouquet? We can add romantic flowers in, along with sprigs of baby’s breath and other greenery.” A small wave of excitement washes over me. Finally, a chance to do something other than—
“What about roses? Not red, of course,” he adds quickly. “Everyone does red. Do you have any fun colors?”
I stop and slowly turn around, trying to keep my face from showing my disappointment. “We have a fantastic selection of roses. But if you really want unique, maybe you can try lilacs. They’re a symbol of falling in love.”
He purses his lips, thinking. Then he shakes his head. “Nah, I think I’ll get…two dozen roses. Let’s try yellow.”
“Yellow isn’t very…romantic,” I say as gently as possible.
His brow furrows. “But Mary looks great in yellow.”
Okay, my cue to back off. I head to our roses and get twenty-four bright yellow ones, swallowing my sighs of frustration. Aunt Becky tried to tell me when I started working at her shop a couple of months ago that most people go for tried-and-true bouquets, but I was convinced I could sway people into buying more exotic offerings. Everyone knows that roses mean love, especially red ones. But different colors actually have different meanings, which can also vary depending on context. Yellow is more of a declaration of friendship than romantic sentiments. So giving a girl two dozen yellow roses is like beating her over the head with a let’s-just-be-buddies bat.
Oh, well. Maybe Mary will love them. In the end, that’s what matters. I carefully prepare the flowers, wrapping them in tissue paper and tucking a packet of flower feed between the stems. The man smiles widely, almost patting himself on the back. He’s probably imagining the woman fawning over him in gratitude.
After ringing him up and handing him the change, I say, “And thank you for shopping at Eternal Spring Florist. Have a wonderful day.”
The door dings as he leaves, letting in a waft of fresh air. Most spring days in Cleveland are rainy, too hot or too cold, so it’s a pleasant surprise to have nice April we
ather.
My pocket buzzes. I snag my phone—a text from Anna. Hey, girl! Still coming over 2nite?
Yup! Bringing ice cream, I write back. Hanging out with Anna on Saturday nights is about the only highlight of my very, very lame social life. And while I love her to death, one of the secret thrills of our hangouts is spending time with Anna’s twin brother, Curtis. I’ve had a thing for him since second grade, when I moved to Cleveland and Anna and I became instant besties in class. The moment I saw his wavy blond hair and deep brown eyes, combined with that crooked smile and deep dimple, I was head over heels. And my feelings have only grown as I’ve gotten to know him better.
I’ve never breathed a word about it to anyone, though. Anna would either harass me for life about my crush or be irritated about it. I don’t want it to come between us. Not that Curtis notices me anyway. At least, not as anything beyond his sister’s dorky, flower-obsessed friend.
So I spend my Saturday nights on her couch, one eye on the movie and the other looking for any signs of Curtis entering the room. You wouldn’t think that’s physically possible, but I’ve perfected the art of looking-but-not-looking.
Awesome. I want cookie dough! Anna texts me.
With a grin, I shove my phone back in my pocket and focus on finishing up at work. Aunt Becky will be by shortly to close out the register and help me shut down for the day. It’s been surprisingly slow for a weekend, so I’ve been bored and mentally creating bouquets with different themed messages:
—I’m bitter and hate you—hydrangea to show heartlessness, with a splash of yellow chrysanthemum for slighted feelings.
—I just want to be friends—featuring pear blossoms, striped carnations and, of course, a crapload of…yellow roses.
—I want to touch your naughty bits—balsam, sprigs of coriander, and coral roses, reflecting lustful passion.
And the list goes on and on.
Ever since my aunt told me about the meanings of flowers on my first day, I’ve been passionate about uncovering their hidden truths. I’m still wading my way through—who knew there were so many plants in the world? Well, other than florists and botanists.