Ascendant Read online

  ASCENDANT

  Diana Peterfreund

  For my father, who taught me about science and strong women

  Contents

  THE HUNT FOR THE UNICORN

  1 WHEREIN ASTRID FOLLOWS HER DUTY

  2 WHEREIN ASTRID LOSES AN UNEXPECTED BATTLE

  3 WHEREIN ASTRID RECEIVES A MESSAGE

  4 WHEREIN ASTRID FALTERS

  5 WHEREIN ASTRID REACHES OUT

  6 WHEREIN ASTRID DISCOVERS A SECRET

  7 WHEREIN ASTRID SAVES A LIFE

  8 WHEREIN ASTRID GETS AN INVITATION

  9 WHEREIN ASTRID MAKES A CALL

  10 WHEREIN ASTRID BREAKS THE NEWS

  11 WHEREIN ASTRID WALKS A NEW PATH

  12 WHEREIN ASTRID MAKES A KILL

  13 WHEREIN ASTRID CONTEMPLATES THE MEANING OF LOVE

  14 WHEREIN ASTRID CROSSES THE LINE

  15 WHEREIN ASTRID TESTS THE LIMITS

  16 WHEREIN ASTRID SEES SOMETHING NEW

  17 WHEREIN ASTRID GOES NATIVE

  18 WHEREIN ASTRID TAKES A STAND

  19 WHEREIN ASTRID REACHES THE PEAK

  20 WHEREIN ASTRID LOSES HER MIND

  21 WHEREIN ASTRID LEARNS HER PLACE

  22 WHEREIN ASTRID MAKES HER DEBUT

  23 WHEREIN ASTRID CONSIDERS THE CURE

  24 WHEREIN ASTRID OBSERVES THE EFFECTS

  25 WHEREIN ASTRID COMMITS A CRIME

  26 WHEREIN ASTRID TOUCHES THE TRUTH

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE HUNT FOR THE UNICORN

  In ancient times, royalty hunted unicorns for sport. They’d sally forth from their castle, gaily dressed, armed with spears, bows, knives, dogs, and their secret weapon: a virginal maiden. Without this girl, the unicorn could never be captured. Noble of birth and pure of body and heart, the virgin would enter the depths of the forest and allow the men to tie her to a tree. There she would wait, chaste and silent and still, until the elusive unicorn, attracted to her as if by magic, would come forward and lay his head in her lap.

  Once the unicorn was subdued, the virgin would grasp its horn and trap the beast with her. The men would spring forth from their hiding place and stab the dangerous unicorn as it lay in the gentle virgin’s arms. And so it was that brave and glorious men would be able to kill a unicorn.

  Never mind that it was the virgin who had its blood on her hands.

  1

  WHEREIN ASTRID FOLLOWS HER DUTY

  The unicorn drew its last breath. Within its chest, its heart shuddered and stopped. Twenty yards away, I felt it die, and the world settled into normality. Fire and flood ebbed, the tunnel widened, and my thoughts became my own. I lowered my bow and ran to the corpse—a human run, at a human pace, sluggish compared to the recent rush of hunter-granted speed. I bent over the body and withdrew my arrow. It had pierced both lung and heart, and the alicorn arrowhead was soaked in the almost black arterial blood of the kirin. Steam escaped from the corpse at my feet, twisting around my legs and mingling with the early-morning mist in the field. I wiped the arrow off on the grass and returned it to my quiver. These arrows were not so common that we could afford to lose any. I withdrew my knife and knelt by the unicorn’s head. Its yellow eyes were flat now, snuffed of the bloodthirst that had so recently filled us both.

  I was carefully carving into its skull by the time Cory arrived. “Didn’t need backup after all, then?” she puffed.

  “For a single kirin? “ I replied without looking up. Over the past month, carving out an alicorn had become a perfunctory postmortem operation. In through the eyesocket to the orbital, a quick jab up to break the nasal cavity, and then use the alicorn itself as leverage to shatter the top part of the skull and peel back the ligaments and skin protecting the base of the horn. In the early days, we’d simply sawed off as much horn as we could grab, but now we were trying to dig as deeply into their heads as possible to retain the venom reserves.

  Cory watched me work. “How many kills does this make for you?

  “On this hunt?” I asked, and cracked the alicorn free.

  “Four?”

  “Four?”

  Cory said nothing. I swung my braid back over my shoulder with my less-bloody hand and looked up at her. “You?”

  “Zero.”

  I stood. “Really?”

  She gave me a tight smile. “Someone always marks them before I get a chance.”

  If the statement was intended to sting, I could hardly feel it over the burn of alicorn venom. Beneath my sweater, droplets of sweat prickled the tender skin of the scar at the base of my shoulder blades. “It’s not a competition,” I said.

  Her smile grew even more strained. “All evidence to the contrary.”

  Together we doused the ground around the unicorn with flame-retardant, then took out our vials of gasoline and lit the corpse on fire. It was the only way to deal with the bodies, we’d learned. No vultures, no bugs, would touch unicorn carrion. The bravest among us had even tried the meat, wondering if—as with so many other aspects of the animals—hunters possessed a higher tolerance to unicorns. But apparently the flesh was vile. Even Grace, who ate Roman-style tripe with glee, spat it out. So cremation was our only option.

  Cory and I returned to the rendezvous point without further conversation. In all honesty, I couldn’t see the source of her pique. When I took a unicorn, it was more out of reflex than anything else. The magic took over. It was just me, my prey, and my weapon. There was no discussion with the other hunters about whose “turn” it was. Hesitation might result in one of us ending up dead. A unicorn moved too fast for us to stop and think about how many kills we’d each gotten. If I had a shot, I’d take it. The alternative was a horn in the gut.

  I knew that all too well.

  Two of the other hunters who met us in the clearing were splattered with dark kirin blood, though only one of them clutched a horn. Grace was twirling hers like a gory baton, and Ilesha looked baffled. “Its horn was broken off,” she explained, wrapping a bandage around her leg. “Teeth still worked.” The rest of the hunters stood in readiness, their bodies drawn as tight as any bowstring, their chins lifted, their eyes shrewd and darting.

  “Give it a rest,” Cory grumbled. Alone among the unsuccessful, she slumped, the tip of her bow dragging in the dirt. “There aren’t any more.”

  She was right, of course. The sun was already rising over the distant hills, burning off the morning mist and sending any unicorns back into hiding until twilight. They were crepuscular creatures, active at dawn and dusk, when shadows and mist would be most likely to shield them from human eyes and memory. It was a rare kirin who would stay out in the full light of day. I stretched my senses to the limit but caught no lingering trace beneath the scent of burning fuel and wet earth.

  I looked at the other six girls in the clearing. Only a few short months ago, they would have been an unthinkable sight in their blood-spattered clothes, clutching pieces of the monsters they’d slain. A couple of months ago, few people believed there had ever been unicorns. And even if there were, they hadn’t been venomous, man-eating beasts—but gentle, sparkly, magical creatures. That was the story, anyway. And it was about as accurate as the one that held that medieval noblemen kept virginal maidens around simply as unicorn bait. Why complicate the issue? We virginal maidens could do more than simply attract and capture the animals. We could shoot them ourselves. The women of my family had been unicorn hunters since time immemorial—except for those hundred and fifty-odd years in which we’d erroneously thought that unicorns were extinct.

  Unicorn hunters may know more about the monsters than the average person, but even we make mistakes.

  Actually, if I started cataloguing the things we didn’t know about unicorns and our own unicorn magic I’d be he
re all day. And my morning had already been long enough.

  I finished my perusal of the circle. Had I really killed more than my fair share? Ilesha had three, Grace five, Melissende and Ursula two apiece, and Zelda one. I frowned and flicked a sliver of skull off the back of my hand. Perhaps I was on the high end of the scale, but it certainly wasn’t outlandish. And, as I’d told Cory, it wasn’t a competition, either. We hunted as a group, and helped one another with kills if the initial shot didn’t bring the animal down.

  Of course, as often as not, my “marking” a unicorn meant ending its life. Gone were the days I’d risk anything but a killing shot. Two weeks ago, I’d hit a unicorn in the leg, and before I could string a new arrow, it had reared up and kicked Valerija in the face. She was still drinking her meals through a straw.

  Seventeen was large for a kirin pack, though, and I was about to say so when Grace spoke up.

  “We cleared out two packs, I wager.” She’d stored the alicorn she’d obtained and was inspecting her sword for chips. “Or the remnants of two. I bet Ilesha’s broken one was a losing alpha.”

  “It was a female,” Ilesha said. “And I don’t think they have alphas like wolf packs.”

  “We don’t know what they have, do we, Cory?“ Grace pointed out. Cory slumped farther.

  “I don’t see you doing any research!” I snapped at Grace.

  “And I don’t see her killing any unicorns,” Grace snapped back. “And perhaps if you stayed home from a few of these trips, we’d be doing more with that laboratory of yours than just buying beakers.”

  “Since when do I have a doctorate in pharmacology?” My hands were on my hips now, or more accurately, resting on the hilt of the alicorn knife in my waist scabbard. “Yes, we’re rebuilding the scriptorium, but there’s no way we’re going to wake up one day and the Cloisters will be the Gordian labs—”

  “Thank heaven for that,” Ilesha murmured.

  “We don’t have the equipment or the know-how to …” I trailed off because I knew I sounded like a broken record. Grace was as accurate with her verbal barbs as she was with a bow and arrow. She knew exactly where to hit me to make it really sting.

  Rebuilding the ruined library-cum-lab in our crumbling monastery had been the joint brainchild of Cory and Phil—not me. They’d decided I needed a project to help me get my mind off what had happened in Cerveteri last month. How they figured putting together the equivalent of a high school chemistry lab would make up for the destruction of a state-of-the-art research facility was beyond me. And a high school dropout with aspirations to a career in medicine could never duplicate the skills of the man she’d allowed to be killed right in front of her.

  I shut my eyes for a moment, allowing the memory to fill my mind, drowning any remnants of hunter bloodlust in bitterness and regret. Marten Jaeger, his face twisted in pain as karkadann venom rocketed through his system. Perhaps I could have stopped it, could have saved him.

  By the time I tuned back in to the conversation, Cory had achieved full-on rant mode.

  “Furthermore,” she was practically yelling at Grace, “until you take a more active role in the administrative responsibilities of the Cloisters, you don’t have a right to complain about the choices we do make.”

  Something pricked my awareness and my hand tightened on the hilt of my knife.

  Cory shouted on, though I could hardly hear her over the rush of blood in my ears. “Value to this order is not determined by quantity, and I resent—”

  Grace drew her sword, whirled, and plunged it into the heart of the kirin colt bearing down upon us. The monster slumped over the blade, dead.

  Cory froze, but the rest of us were not surprised. The other four girls and I had all drawn our weapons; all stood crouched in readiness. Cory’s hands remained empty, her mouth open in shock.

  Hadn’t she felt it? To judge by their expressions, the other hunters were just as curious.

  Grace tugged her blade free. “That makes six for this hunt,” she said coolly. “Now, what were you saying about how useful you are?”

  “I just don’t understand it,” Cory said for what must have been the fiftieth time.

  We were replacing the alicorn weapons on the wall inside the Cloisters’s chapter house. No one was sure if it was advantageous to keep them stored down here, but we figured it couldn’t hurt. The ancient hunters had displayed them on the wall, so we would as well. There was very little argument that the chapter house was the most magical chamber in the building. So if it could make the hunter magic stronger in us, maybe it could spare a little for the weapons?

  “I’m a hunter. I know I am. I can feel it,” Cory said. “Bone-grinder still bows before me. So the powers aren’t gone. They’re just … depressed. Is that possible? I don’t understand it.”

  Rosamund paused over her beloved piano keys and blew a strand of red hair out of her face. “Is it possible for you to not understand it someplace else? Some of us are trying to practice in here.”

  Cory snarled. “What, am I throwing off your tune? A sour note inside your perfect hunterly echo chamber?” She hooked another bow onto the weapons wall with a lot more force than it deserved and flounced down the steps, brown curls bouncing indignantly.

  Rosamund looked stricken. “You know that’s not what I meant, Cory. Perhaps it is something far simpler. Perhaps you are like a piano and need to be tuned.”

  “Don’t pianos need to be tuned only if they aren’t in use?” I asked, then immediately regretted it. Cory had been trying to hunt, after all. It wasn’t her fault she was sucking at it. And if anyone should be suffering from lack of practice, it ought to be Rosamund. She’d managed to weasel her way out of participating in the last three hunts, preferring instead to remain in the chapter house and play her precious music.

  Lucky. I wished I knew her trick. I wasn’t keen on killing animals at dawn, either, but I had not yet found the strength to stay home.

  I wasn’t sure what that said about me.

  Not that I wanted to spend time in the bone-strewn chapter house. Though the room rarely gave me headaches anymore, it still had the power to drive me bonkers. I didn’t like being surrounded by so much death. Most of the other hunters were just as happy spending their off time in the dorm or the courtyard, and only Rosamund and Valerija seemed to like it down here.

  “No, I like this idea,” Cory was saying. “Maybe we just need regular checks, like a car.” Her face brightened for the first time in what seemed like ages. “And we know precisely how to do it, too.”

  Rosamund shuddered. Despite her avowed love for the Clois-ters’s chapter house, there was one unicorn artifact she went out of her way to avoid: the enormous alicorn throne, composed of dozens of unicorn horns intersecting and weaving around one another in a series of terrible patterns. The throne was a gift from the people of Denmark in honor of a corps of hunters who had once saved a city from unicorn-induced decimation. Each horn in the throne was taken from a unicorn that had killed a hunter. Last month, we’d discovered the throne’s purpose. Like every other unicorn artifact in the Cloisters, its presence attuned us to the monsters’ thoughts and movements, made us better hunters.

  Our inborn hunter abilities lay dormant unless we were in the presence of an actual unicorn. Having the artifacts around, being close to our pet zhi, Bonegrinder—it all functioned like antibodies in the bloodstream, boosting the body’s ability to fight. The Cloisters was a giant tuning instrument. However, if the building was like an immune system, the throne was like a shot in the arm.

  Of course, the quickest way to improve your hunting abilities was to let a unicorn tear a hole through your body. I was living proof of how well that worked. A mildly less agonizing, though no less violent, manner was to sit on the throne and let the magic of the murdering alicorns seep into your body.

  It felt like fire, and your mind would be filled with visions of the bloody battle in which the ancient hunters died, visions that would forge pathways in your brai
n to make way for the alien communion with the hunters’ quarry. I still didn’t understand how it worked. All I knew was that it did.

  For a hunter, anything made of unicorn was imbued with magic. For everyone else, it was nothing more than horn and bone.

  Cory approached the throne and cautiously sat down, bracing her body for the expected onslaught of pain and horror. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  Rosamund grimaced. “What’s happening?”

  “I see the field of battle,” Cory replied. I shuddered, remembering the blood-soaked earth, the wormy gray sky, and the moans of the dying beneath the battle cries of those who still fought. Cory went on, her voice toneless. “But I feel nothing.”

  Last month, fresh from a unicorn stabbing, I’d touched the throne and did not feel the usual flash of fire. It had occurred to me how similar the pain of the throne felt to the agony of alicorn venom, which is when I’d gotten the idea that you could use the throne to force a quick hunter attunement. The experiment worked, and that first time, we’d realized that a subsidence of pain had been a signal that the process was complete.

  If Cory felt no pain now, it should mean that she was ready to hunt. But she still wasn’t sensing the unicorns as the rest of us did, and I couldn’t understand why.

  Cory turned to me. “Well, Dr. Llewelyn? What’s your diagnosis?”

  I said nothing.

  “Forget it.” Cory slammed her hands down on the arms of the throne, pushed herself out of her seat, and bounded out of the room.

  Rosamund and I stared after her. “Should I go apologize? “ she asked.

  I shook my head. “Just let her cool off for a while.” After three months of sleeping in the same room, I knew that Cory’s moods were best handled by avoidance, not comfort.

  “I am sorry I made her feel worse,” Rosamund said. “She knows she doesn’t make the music go bad.”

  “Does it ever go bad? “ I asked, half joking. Before coming to the Cloisters, Rosamund had been headed toward a career as a concert pianist.