Ascendant (8 page)

“How’s Cory?”

“Physically?” Phil shrugged. “She’ll be fine. No organs were affected, and the doctors stitched her up. Luckily zhi teeth aren’t quite as long as their horns.”

“How did it know? How did it know it could do more damage with its mouth?”

Phil shook her head. “I don’t know. And maybe it didn’t. It could have been an accident that it bit instead of gored. Maybe the angle at which it attacked made using its horn impossible, or maybe Cory was able to fend it off. I don’t know. She’s got some pretty nasty bruises all over her chest and legs from its hooves, too, not to mention a sprained ankle. She’s going to have to take it easy for a few weeks, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.”

I took a deep breath. There
was
something new about this attack, though, and it wasn’t anything a doctor could stitch up. Cory’s hunter abilities had somehow been compromised and were deteriorating fast. A few weeks ago, she hadn’t sensed the kirin approaching our group in the forest, and today, she’d had a clean shot at the male zhi and missed. Afterward, she’d admitted what I’d already suspected: Cory was hunting blind.

“Can I see her?”

“Better wait until Neil’s done talking to her.” Phil cast a concerned glance at the door to the ward. “She’s not taking this too well.”

“Since when has she ever taken things well?” I blurted, then followed up immediately with, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” said Phil. “We both know what she’s like, but we also know why. This means more to her than it does to any other hunter in the Cloisters.”

Phil was about to say more when the conversation inside the ward suddenly got very loud. The door flew open, revealing Neil in the threshold, still looking back at the bandaged figure on the bed. “I
shall
tell you what to do, Cornelia Bartoli. Like it or not, I am your guardian, and I’ll be hanged before I let you die like your mother.”

He came out and slammed the door shut behind him, breathing heavily. He ran his fingers through his dark, wavy hair then noticed us. “All right, Astrid?”

“Hi,” I said. I looked from Neil to Phil. “Should I … ?”

“I can’t deal with her defiance,” Neil said to Phil. “She refuses to see me as an adult.” He sighed. “In her eyes, I’m not her uncle and guardian telling her these things; I’m her bossy older brother.”

“You’re her only family,” Phil replied, coming close. “She’ll come around. She always does.”

Neil didn’t look convinced. “I need a coffee.” He spun and headed off down the corridor to the break room, and Phil followed, leaving me alone. I watched them move down the hall, saw Phil place her hand on the small of his back in comfort.

I entered the ward. Cory was making a valiant attempt to get out of the hospital bed, flailing around with crutches and wincing every time she had to bend.

“Careful,” I said. “You’re not going to heal so quick this time.” Her shirt was folded up, and thick bandages wrapped all the way around her waist. There were other bandages on her arms and legs, and several bruises sprouted on the fair skin of her face. Her mop of brown curls lay flat and listless against her head.

She glared at me, her eyes overflowing with tears. “Did you hear what he said to me?”

“I think the entire village heard.”

“How dare he!” she said. “How dare he—” She cut off then turned away, burying her chin into her chest. “I’ve been hunting unicorns for months. I’ve killed kirin, I’ve killed re’em—it would be rather foolish if I were killed by a zhi.
Just like my mother.”

I nodded, and kept my voice soft. “It was wrong of Neil to say that. He didn’t mean it. He was just so frightened to see you like this. We’re all scared about what this might mean—”

“Oh, I know what it means!” she said. “It means I have to leave. It’s too dangerous for me to stay at the Cloisters if I can’t be a proper hunter, if Bonegrinder will leap on me as soon as look at me. And Neil says he’ll go with me, since we’re already a ring short. I’m too young to be a proper don, so I’m the one who has to go. Not Phil. Me.” She sniffled.

My mouth opened. “But you can’t leave!”

“I know. I practically rebuilt the Cloisters, stone by bloody stone. And this is how it ends! I didn’t
do
anything wrong! I don’t know why this is happening to me. I don’t know why I can’t …” She seemed to collapse over her crutches, defeated. “This isn’t fair. There’s no reason I should be losing the magic.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. It wasn’t fair. Not in the least. “I don’t know.”

“You’re quite the doctor, Astrid,” she snapped.

“Well, maybe you should go see a real doctor!” I cried. “Maybe you’re sick—something completely normal and non-magical, but your hunter powers are suppressed the same way that, I don’t know, your immune system might be depressed from some other illness.”

“Like what?” she asked. “Like a cold? I don’t have a cold.”

I remained quiet because “like cancer or something” wasn’t going to go far in calming her down.

“And look at this!” she cried, and thrust out her arm. A brand-new, glistening red alicorn scar peeked out from beneath the edge of her sleeve. “I’m still immune to the poison. It’s just the hunting that I can’t muster—why?”

“That’s what I mean,” I said. “It’s too dangerous for you to go. We don’t know what powers are still working for you. I mean, look at it this way: if you were in a coma, you’d be unable to hunt, but you’d still be a
hunter
. You’re still going to draw unicorns to you. That’s why we need to train all the girls with hunter abilities. Even if they don’t stay here, don’t work for the Order, they at least need to know how to protect themselves.”

Cory straightened. “You’re right. Astrid, that’s brilliant.”

Phil probably wouldn’t thank me for that particular stroke of brilliance.

“They can’t let me go or then I really might die. The woods on our land are simply infested with zhis.” She narrowed her eyes. “Zhis just like the one today. Zhis just like the ones that killed my mum.”

“Zhis just like the one living in our nunnery?” I replied.

But Cory was not to be gainsaid. “Grab my boots, will you?” she said, swinging her crutches toward the door. I followed halfheartedly, boots in hand. This couldn’t end well.

One screaming match in a small country clinic and half an exceedingly awkward and unbearably silent car ride back to Rome later, I remembered that I’d never gone back to burn the scraps of paper that were all that was left of my letter to Giovanni.

No matter. I stared out the window at the rolling Italian countryside and began to compose another e-mail in my head.

Dear Giovanni
,

Today we found out that Cory’s hunting abilities are mysteriously diminished, and Neil and Phil have concluded that it is too dangerous for her to remain active in the Order of the Lioness. Cory is furious, but all I can think is “I wish it were me … .”

T
he sun beat down on the cobblestones in the Cloisters courtyard, shimmering off Phil’s blond ponytail as she stood before us on her yoga mat.

“Now,” she said, “exhale and bend your left leg until the left knee is perpendicular over the left ankle. You want a straight, ninety-degree angle between your shin and the ground.” We all moved on our mats.

“Keep breathing,” Phil said. “Lengthen your torso. Put power into your right leg. Feel the energy in your right leg all the way through your toes and into the earth.”

And under the ground to the chapter house of the Cloisters, where the bones hummed in tune to the beating of our hearts. What Phil didn’t know is that the rhythm of our inhalations was not dependent on her instructions. All hunters breathed together in the Cloisters—the entire nunnery respired like a massive iron lung.

“Now, on the next breath in, sweep your hands up and out at the level of your shoulders. Think of your arms as arrows pointing straight and true.”

I loved warrior pose. I increased power to my core and looked left over the tips of my fingers, imagining them as arrowheads aimed directly at the heart of a kirin.

But in my sights I saw instead Cory, bandaged foot elevated against a column, reading a magazine and drinking lemonade. Her side of our room was packed, and she was headed back home to England this week. No amount of arguing with Neil had resulted in a change of heart. As far as he was concerned, the Cloisters was a gravity well of hunter attraction. Neil’s flat in London, however, would be safer.

“Warrior Two,” Phil was saying as we deepened into the pose with every breath, “is a position of power but also of focus. A Zen archer aims his bow for years before ever releasing an arrow.”

“Doesn’t kill many unicorns that way, huh?” Melissende said with a snicker. Some of the younger girls laughed.

Phil lifted her chin and went on. “You are arrows, straight and true. You are spears, strong and focused. You are warriors.”

Grace ignored her friend, for once, and closed her eyes.

I, too, turned inward.

The bones in the masonry sang around me. In the shade of the Cloisters, Bonegrinder sat in watchful stillness, her chain anchoring her to the wall. I felt her presence like a livid pinprick in my mind within the net of buzzing artifacts.

And beneath that, I felt my fellow hunters. Grace, solid as a rock, her energy radiating outward from her arms like the points on a compass. The other girls, bright or dim depending on the strength of their concentration. Beyond my fingertips, I felt Cory sizzling like a frayed power cord. Farther out were the others: Valerija resting in her room; Dorcas on the computer; Rosamund coming up the stairs from the chapter house into the rotunda.

I breathed and sank deeper into this new awareness. Inside my head a chord began to ring. I’d heard it before, the music of the Wall of First Kills. I’d only heard it from the other hunters once, just before our battle against the kirin in the necropolis of Cerveteri last month.

I’m an arrow, I thought to myself.

You are an arrow
, said Phil’s voice inside my head. But no, it wasn’t Phil. It was Clothilde Llewelyn. The Clothilde who lived inside the memory of the karkadann Bucephalus.

You are the arrow of God
, said Clothilde,
on a mission to vanquish the savage unicorn
.

I lost my balance and went careening into Ursula, who knocked into Ilesha, who elbowed Melissende hard in the stomach. We all collapsed to the floor.

This time, Grace did laugh as she swept up from her pose and smiled smugly at the tangle of hunters at her feet. “Too challenging?”

“Get off me!” Melissende shoved her younger sister, Ursula, out of the way and blew her black hair out of her eyes. “Yoga is dumb.”

I put my hands over my eyes trying to clear the dizziness.

“Asteroid?” Phil said, narrowing her eyes in the glare of the afternoon light. “You okay?”

“One too many sun salutations today, I think,” I said. I pushed myself to my feet and dusted off my knees. “I’m going to get some water.”

The last time I’d heard Clothilde’s voice in my head, it was because Bucephalus had put it there. The last time I could feel hunters the way I could feel unicorns—the way I imagined that unicorns could feel us—Bucephalus had been there.

Inside my head, I called out to the karkadann. But there was no reply.

Figured. I had no idea what Bucephalus would be doing in Rome, anyway. Despite the city’s network of parks, abandoned, stray-dog-infested ruins, and endless underground catacombs, it was hard for a unicorn the size of a rhinoceros to find a good hiding spot. I hadn’t seen him for months, hadn’t even dreamed about him for weeks. He’d told me he was going away, and yet I still searched.

Because he was the only one I knew who had any answers.

As I passed through the door into the rotunda, I saw Rosamund standing with Father Guillermo, their heads both bowed in whispered prayer. I stopped, afraid of interrupting them, and after a moment, he made the sign of the cross over the girl’s auburn head, then smiled at her.

“Vaya con Dios, Hermanita,”
said Father Guillermo.

“Vielen Dank,”
Rosamund said. “I am feeling much better now.” She turned and caught sight of me. “Astrid!”

I shied behind the edge of the stuffed Bucephalus. “I didn’t mean to interrupt—”

“No,” Rosamund said, and beckoned to me. She gathered up her music, which was arranged in a pile at her feet. “Ever since I heard of Cory’s … problem, I have not been able to sleep. I am so afraid it will happen to us all. I asked
Herr Pfarrer
to bless me. For protection from … whatever this may be.”

“I will be happy to bless you as well,” said Father Guillermo.

I looked down. “No, thank you.”

“Or any of the other hunters.” He took in my clingy yoga clothes. “I take it you have been exercising?”

I swallowed. “Yes. Yoga. In the privacy of the Cloisters courtyard. We are all alone here.” Couldn’t embarrass him or the Church or the Order.