Then he would lie to his parents and say he’d managed to get an apprenticeship under some accountant somewhere, preferably a long way away from Stellaria, and leave. Perhaps he could go and work in a stable over in Clementia or something.
“Never mind, Daisy,” he said. “None of it will affect you.”
He glanced around to check they were going the right way. It wasn’t very good light now, the sky had gone a muddy lilac colour and the silver birches were the only ghostly glimmers of brightness amongst the trees. Still, he recognized the place because he remembered going through here before, and some place around here was a path that led back, eventually, to the main forest trail.
“No, it won’t affect you,” he said again. “Just me. It always depends on me and my decisions. Whenever I do what I’m told to do, there’s always somebody telling me not to. Then I do what I think is best and they all hate me… Marvellous. Just - marvellous.”
Daisy plodded on.
“And worse,” pondered Quinn, “is I never get the credit for any of it. Nobody gives a feck about Quinn. I could probably die and they’d just say, ‘oh, bother. Well he never did make the right choices anyway’. Gah. They’re all mad.”
Lilian’s stricken face cropped up in his thoughts. He felt like a hypocrite for a second. Then he brushed it aside. She had her freaking unicorn after all. She could cope.
The narrow track appeared and Quinn directed Daisy along it.
He peered into the trees either side, unable to help being slightly uneasy about the darkness, especially after all the strange strange things he had seen in the deep forest…
A flash of white burst in front of Daisy’s nose.
For a second, Quinn saw the pigeon and a handful of criss-crossing white feathers; then Daisy bolted. This time he hung on with all his might and managed to stay sort of seated – if clinging to the mane with one foot in the stirrup and swinging off the reins like a deranged monkey counted as seated.
At some point Quinn’s weight on the bridle squeezed so hard on the bit that Daisy took it as a signal to stop. She pulled up short and Quinn slid off – it was only another two feet – to the ground.
“Urgh,” he said. The shock, the suddenness, and the aching were well matched to such an all-encompassing description. He stood up, wiped foamy green horse spit off his face and tried to calm Daisy down while attempting to figure out how far they had strayed from the path.
Before he could put any more thought to it however, he noticed Daisy was holding a foot up. He cupped the hoof in his hand to check it, to find the horseshoe missing and blood pouring.
“Oh no, Daisy…” Quinn was appalled. He rummaged in the saddlebags and brought out some cloth. He tore a piece off, wiped away the blood and held it fast to the injury. It wasn’t too deep, he could see now, but the whole hock had taken a bending and he watched it swelling before his eyes.
There was no way a horse could be ridden like that, and even walking her in such a state would be unthinkably slow…
He looked around properly then; a thickly wooded slope heading down to a silver glistening curve of the river. Right back the way they’d just been.
Something tickled in the cuff of his sleeve. He pulled it out and held it up – a soft white feather, ruffled in the breeze.
***
Lilian just sat there for a while after Quinn had gone. Then she put her head in her hands. She was dizzy and headachey from lack of food. Quinn had run off with all the supplies, of course.
She’d almost expected it – in fact, it had been most surprising that Quinn had been civil to her at all in the first place. She was after all an entirely unknown quantity, appearing out of Lucerna’s employ and turning up at apparently every inopportune moment under bizarre circumstances. Trust was an unlikely reaction.
All the same. It was at least a little hurtful, what Quinn had said.
For a while she didn’t care. Then she did a little. Then she decided that if Quinn was so damn unreasonable, he could get himself killed for all she cared – it wasn’t like she hadn’t tried. Then she wondered if Quinn would tell Lucerna about her. Where she was. What she’d said. The unicorn…Lilian sat up in horror. She couldn’t just leave it, it had to be sorted out. It had to. She felt hatefully responsible and hopelessly overwhelmed. Since when did the outcome of one of these epic events that never happen rely on her? Maybe it sounded cool in stories, but the truth was far from glamorous. There was nothing cool about it. It was hot, itchy, inescapable, exhausting, undermining and hideously stressful.
Not to mention, nobody cared about you or thought you were amazing or heroic; they thought you were a nuisance and sabotaged your every effort.
“They’re all mad. I hope something really annoying happens to all of them,” said Lilian.
Then a mouse crawled on to her knee.
“EEEK!” it yelled at her self-righteously.
Lilian started, then frowned at it and sighed.
“What?” she asked loudly and impatiently.
“You can always ask for help,” the mouse said squeakily. “Petty complaints do nothing.”
Lilian scowled. “They make me feel better. And it was not a petty complaint. It was a deeply genuine sentiment that I hope is manifested as soon as possible.”
The mouse sniffed. “You will not listen while you are in that state. You will refuse to do anything I say and blame it on me later. Do as you wish; I was only giving advice.”
Lilian close her eyes in irritation, then begrudgingly replied “I’m sorry. Thank you. Perhaps you’re right.”
The mouse smiled a satisfied rodent grin and trickled away into the bracken.
Lilian considered.
“Unicorn?” she said out loud, experimentally. “Unicorn, please help. Sorry to bother you but, please, help me now.”
Nothing happened.
She said it again, louder. Still nothing happened.
“I knew it,” she added. “It was all – another – lie. And mice talking is now normal? They’re all mad.”
She sprang to her feet and crunched away over the beech mast.
“I bet it’s Monday,” she muttered bitterly. “I detest Mondays.”
Not really looking where she was going, she stumbled along the river a ways, until it took a bend around the edge of a gradual slope. She paused, not sure how long she’d been walking. She turned away from the river, which seemed to branch off back in the wrong direction, and headed up the slope. Then she paused again.
The forest was…huge. How would she ever do this in time?
She would have to…go back. To the town and somehow convince everyone that Lucerna was barking. She remembered the unicorn’s words: “but you don’t have to convince them all…you only have to pretend to believe in it yourself, temporarily…” She pushed it aside. How on earth would that ever work? Nobody would listen to her…
With real desperation, she thought “if only something would happen, to sort it all out. I just need some help…”
She stepped forward again, not wanting to waste time thinking and standing.
Above her, a pigeon sat on a branch took off and soared away, leaving a very tiny white feather at her feet. For some reason Lilian decided to pick it up. It was a remarkably beautiful pigeon feather, very soft and brilliant in the darkening forest.
She tucked it into her sleeve.
And here were the mosquitoes again. Hateful whingers.
It only got better; stinging nettles invaded her privacy, a particularly brutal bramble tore a gash in her shin that could have been mistaken for a knife attack, and finally she tripped over something disconcertingly metallic.
She figured there would have been a nice loud click noise if it were something that bad. Shifting cautiously, she looked down to find a – a horseshoe, wrapped around her ankle. Thank goodness for that. It was very shiny, surely reasonably new? It occurred to her that maybe it had come off of Quinn’s horse. She loved horses but didn’t know a whole lo
t about them, and wondered if they had to have their shoes. Had something happened, maybe they weren’t far away? Then she looked at her own bare feet and thought of the unicorn, and realized how silly the idea was. Of course horses didn’t need shoes. They had managed for thousands of years in the wild hadn’t they?
Still…did she even want to see Quinn again. He obviously hated her, there was no point trying to reason with someone like that. Best to get back as quickly as she could and sort it all out by herself. She wanted to stop Lucerna. It seemed only right. How much misery would the woman inflict if she wasn’t interrupted? And what else was Lilian going to do? Now the forest seemed to have turned hostile again and she had no help and nowhere to go. For a moment the sense of fear and impossibility overwhelmed her and she tried to take deep breaths to quell the panic.
The trouble with that was that taking deep breaths never actually changed anything. She decided that the only thing that would make her feel better would be taking action; she set off away from the setting sun and into the trees. She would walk all night, if she had to, just to stop being taken over by the illogical terror of being in a forest in the dark. To be sure the mosquitoes were a pain, but somehow it wasn’t so much them as something completely nameless and vague that scared her so much. She tried to define it, but there was no way of having a rational conversation with something completely irrational.
It’s fine, she told herself. It’s fine, I walk, I get back. Focus. Worry about everything else later. The sun will reappear in a few hours. It’s as simple as that.
And then she noticed the glowing.
At first it happened when she moved her hand. A streak of blue darted through the air. She blinked. It was just her eyes playing tricks on her. Great, my eyes now too! She thought sarcastically.
Only then she noticed it over her shoulder. And then it seemed to appear between the trees. Trying to contain her unease, she glanced around, stopped still, peered at the elusive lights in the hope of understanding their source.
Instead, they vanished.
Now thoroughly disconcerted, she stepped forward briskly thinking that maybe it had just been some strange…
Out of the corner of her eye, the light flickered along the branches of a tree. This time she really stared at it. She stared and she stared and as she did, she became aware that the glow was all around her, as though she was sweating light somehow. It wasn’t there when you focused on it, she realized.
It was getting more difficult to see by the minute, and yet the mysterious glowing was becoming clearer and clearer. She began to walk quickly with the idea that everything would somehow be explained in the process of moving around.
Close your eyes.
Lilian told herself she couldn’t hear it. I’m going crazy, she thought.
Close your eyes…
No, Lilian said inwardly. I won’t.
If you don’t, you will fall.
Lilian closed her eyes.
Then she opened them, two seconds later.
Close them and focus…on yourself.
It was getting to the point where it didn’t make much odds whether your eyes were open or not, as it was now very much night time and there wasn’t even a moon because it was cloudy. So she took the chance. I really honestly am insane, she told herself. What do you mean, focus on myself?
Focus! The indefinable thing said.
Somehow the urgency of it scared all the thoughts out of her mind, and she realized it was quiet. It was silent. And the glowing light all around her could now be seen. She didn’t dare move, didn’t dare think, because she wanted to look at it properly and anything she did might make it disappear…
Continually shifting and adjusting colour, green, red, turquoise, blue…
Then a patch of the light seemed to appear around a pile of twigs on the forest floor. Lilian stepped closer to see them, and the light flickered and moved to a shrub a few feet beyond. She walked toward it, fascinated by this strange phenomenon. The light leapt to some brambles, then crept over tree roots, gleamed over a puddle, hopped over a stone.
At this point Lilian faltered. It’s a trap, she thought, or I’m seriously dehydrated again.
As if in response, the words echoed in her mind like an after image of sound.
Trust. Trust…
With a sudden surge of realization, Lilian wanted to laugh hopelessly at herself. Whatever game she was in right now was much bigger and scarier than she’d ever understand. The forest had a mind of it’s own, and did she really think it wouldn’t find some other way of pushing her over the edge if it couldn’t convince her this way? You couldn’t fight nature; whatever happened would happen anyway…
She gave up on everything and followed the light.
Chapter 7
“I’m just so damn stupid,” Quinn said to himself again.
He felt like the most daft idiot ever in existence. He had allowed a pigeon, a pigeon, to let him lose control of his horse so much that she was now badly injured. He felt guilty. He felt scared. He felt responsible and anxious. But mostly he just felt stupid.
He also felt hungry.
Having taken the tack and baggage off Daisy, he carefully cleaned the blood from the scrape on her foot with water from his water bottle, then bound it up with bandages and cloth. He managed to get Daisy to lie down, and she munched morosely at some nettles.
Then he delved in to the discarded saddlebags and found a parcel that he hadn’t brought with him before. Curiously he opened it out, noticing it was made of large leaves rather like banana leaves. Inside was a collection of beautiful fruits and strange crisp-like things that looked suspiciously like tree bark chippings. There was also a small bottle that appeared to be carved out of a seashell. It was corked with real cork and when Quinn opened it he saw a silvery purple liquid. It had a mysterious scent of cinnamon and liquorice and mint all together.
He didn’t trust any of it, not after the butterflies.
Back to the pumpkin seed cakes.
***
Lilian stumbled into the fresh chill light of dawn, her legs aching, her eyes strained, and jittery from hypoglycaemia.
And here was the main forest trail.
Surely it wasn’t far from here?
She couldn’t go on any longer though. This had to stop. She looked around for a handy log to sit on, but there was inconveniently a dearth of logs in this part of the forest. She lurched to sit on the verge of the trail road, sank down on to a pile of weeds and curled up, sickened.
Evidently, the unicorn hadn’t expected Quinn to be so dang unreasonable.
To hell with that, Lilian thought disinterestedly. She was fixated on one thing now, one thing alone: get rid of Lucerna. Somehow every little anger and injustice and manipulative action by her former employer, to Lilian herself or to anybody, had coagulated into a burning desire to see the woman taken down.
And she would stop at nothing. Because she couldn’t stop now. This was war.
If only she had some way of knowing what was happening back in the town…
If only she had the unicorn horn…
If only there was somebody in Clementia with an ounce of sense…
Nope.
Now the logistics. Water, she would need water, she was parched. And some sleep wouldn’t go amiss, but how to sleep here? And there wasn’t water, wasn’t water anywhere. Why must this be her perennial problem?
And then it began to rain. Lilian thought she was imagining it at first. Then large cold drops began to splot on to the dry earth of the trail road. She cast around frantically. What could she collect it in? In a moment of inspiration she took off her jacket, scraped a hollow in the grassy bank and placed the material flat in the indented ground. She watched in trepidation, then noticed the bare skin on her arms was catching water. She was so thirsty she licked it off without a thought.
After a minute, the rain began to gather in her jacket. She scooped it up to drink and realized she had not had
any water since the unicorn showed her the stream near where they had found Quinn. That water had been much cleaner and better than this, but she couldn’t think about that now. She was lucky to get this water at all.
The band of rain drifted away quickly, and Lilian retreated to the pine trees nearby and shuffled the bracken around until it resembled something softish. She put her damp jacket back on and rolled up like a hedgehog on the leaves. It was remarkably uncomfortable. She was so tired however that she fell asleep even like that; cold, scratched, bruised, nauseous with hunger and dizzy with focused rage.
***
“Why did I agree to something a mad woman who lost the plot decided? What kind of bat tells you to kill unicorns?”
Quinn took out his knife and stabbed the ground a few times, just to vent the anger. It didn’t satisfy.
“Where’s that pigeon. I think I might kill it,” he thought out loud.
Then he went very still. His shoulder felt cold. Icy cold. Just the one. A whisper of cold air passed his ear, and it sounded unmistakeably like “no.”
Quinn shivered. “I’m using my imagination without realizing,” he told himself. “This is as daft as anything.”
Only the whisper happened again, louder this time.
“NO…”
“What d’you mean, no?” Quinn asked threateningly. He could swear he heard a whispered laugh. The light was very dim at best now, and he was getting creeped out by this new batch of weirdness. It was far from anywhere, his horse was lame, and as well as possibly being mad, concussed, and trapped, he had lived off nothing but a few pumpkin seed cakes for two days now.
Then the coldness shifted, as though someone was breathing ice into his ear.
“Killing…” it said, then moved to the other ear, “…is killing.”
“Well, duh,” replied Quinn automatically.
“I am…a dryad,” said the whisper.
“You what?” Quinn shook his head.
“To kill is to live in fear forever…”
“It’s just a pigeon,” said Quinn. “I was only joking.”
“And you are just human…and when will you stop?”
“Stop being human you mean? Hopefully never.”
“If you kill a bird today, you will kill a thousand birds tomorrow. It doesn’t affect me…do as you will…I only warn you of the inevitable…if you kill, you will lose the game…”