Ascendant (36 page)

My eyes became scary little slits in my scary, scary face. “Where’s Rosamund?” I asked. The ache grew stronger. “Rosamund should meet Wen, too. I’m sure they have a lot in common.” I reached around Phil and poked Wen on her cross.

Wen stepped back, grabbing at her throat. The silver zhi growled.

That’s right, little unicorn. Fear me. See how scary I am, with my freaky hair and my freaky eyes and my ugly, ugly scars?

Phil’s mouth had become a thin line. “Now you’re doing this on purpose, Astrid,” she said, her tone angry. “Stop and think for a second.”

I stopped. I thought. The ache reached down into my heart and squeezed hard, its claws raking every inch along the way—my eyes, my throat, my lungs. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, and tears welled up to drown the pale crescents floating in my skull. Now I remembered.

Rosamund was dead.

She’d died trying to save me. The re’em had gotten her right through the heart. She’d never have a wedding night.

I sat down on the floor and covered my face with my hands.

“I’m sorry.” I sobbed through my fingers. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Even through my moans, I could hear Phil sigh. I was disappointing her. I looked up at Wen, who hadn’t deserved this. “I apologize. I forget things sometimes. I’m brain damaged, you know.”

“Not now, you’re not,” said the girl Wen.

“What?” I said, taken aback.

“Not now,” she repeated. “That’s what they told me, anyway. If you’re around a unicorn, everything works just fine.”

I blinked at her. They’d told me that, too. Sheesh, were they telling everyone?

“And she’s getting better all by herself, too,” Phil said. “She just sometimes likes to pretend otherwise.”

“Why would I do that?” I asked from the floor.

Phil sighed. “I don’t know, Asteroid, because you’re a brat?”

I frowned. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about Rosamund. I’m so sorry… .” I started crying again. Phil knelt beside me. Wen knelt on the other side. They both held me.

“Is it always like this?” Wen asked Phil.

“This is the third time she’s remembered on her own,” Phil replied. “It gets better every time.”

“Well, that’s good news,” I said, hiccupping. I wiped my eyes. “I like your zhi, Wen. He’s kind of big for his age, huh?”

“How do you know that? “ she asked.

I shrugged and held out my hand for Flayer to lick. I knew a lot of things when the unicorns were around.

It was the only time I did.

Cory looked better than I did, though that wasn’t saying much. Though she still insisted that her illness was related only to her ability to access her hunting magic, everyone else knew that she was growing weaker by the day. She suffered from stomach pains no one could diagnose. Allergies whose source no one could pinpoint.

“Ironic,” I said one day as I was brushing out Bonegrinder. “All I have left right now is my unicorn magic.”

“Together,” Cory rasped, “we’d be the perfect person.”

Valerija excused herself from the room. Later, I discovered she’d scrubbed down half the statues in the rotunda before she burned off her frustrated rage.

Wen forgave me our inauspicious meeting. I started giving her archery lessons. As long as Bonegrinder was around, I was still great at archery. She also let me watch Flayer while she was in classes. Phil didn’t think I was ready for classes again, and she wanted me to spend as much time with the unicorns as possible.

Dr. Sachetti said that though there was no scientific basis, the changes in my cognitive functions were probably due to the enhanced focus that we claimed our unicorn hunting magic gave us. When our magic was active, our focus increased. He hypothesized that this increase, which he wasn’t able to explain, triggered my neural pathways and repaired the broken ones.

Simply put, being around unicorns was healing my brain.

Not that we could test it. No one would let us bring Bone-grinder into a room with a CAT scan.

Phil said she didn’t care how it worked as long as it did, which Dr. Sachetti and I both agreed was a very limited way of thinking. I don’t mind saying that Dr. Sachetti was actually quite impressed with my opinion on the subject. Because, if we didn’t know how it worked, how could we make sure it kept on working? I wanted to get fully back to normal.

As soon as I knew what that was.

Even in the presence of the zhi, I was still missing stuff. For instance, I saw Zelda three times before it occurred to me that she shouldn’t be there. “What about David?” I asked Phil in a whisper that, it turned out, was far too loud.

“Zelda heard about you and Rosamund when she landed in Fiji,” Phil explained. “Grace called—the rest of us were too much of a mess to try. We just wanted to tell her, you know? They’d been roommates. But she came back anyway.”

“She broke up with David?” I asked. Zelda, polishing a sword at the other end of the Cloisters courtyard, shot me a glare.

Phil sighed and told me we could talk about it later. Except we didn’t—or if we did, I don’t remember.

Rosamund’s death had hit all the hunters pretty hard. Dorcas, they said, rarely left her room anymore. Ursula had apparently been barred from going on any hunts.

“Her parents?” I’d asked Cory.

“No,” she replied. “Her sister.”

A few days later, I surprised Melissende in the middle of target practice. I hadn’t seen her since the accident. At least, I didn’t think I had.

“Hi,” I said from the courtyard gate. She cast me a quick, furtive glance, then hurried over to the target to retrieve her bolts.

“Are you done?” I picked up her crossbow.

In two long strides she was upon me and snatched it out of my grip. “Don’t touch that!”

I held up my hands. “Sorry!”

“You’ll—” She grunted and turned away.

“I’ll what?” I asked. “Break it with my clumsy hands? Shoot you accidentally?”

She froze, back to me. Her black hair was pulled up in a messy ponytail, hanging in tangles against the shoulders of her black sweater. “Shoot me on purpose,” she said without turning around. “What difference does it make?”

My brow furrowed. “The difference is you’d be dead?”

Her shoulders hunched and I heard her take a sharp, shuddering breath. And then she ran off.

I think I didn’t see her again for a few days, but it was tough to tell time now, what with my odd sleeping schedule and the way events sometimes got confused in my head. I know that one day Phil came to take me for a walk outside the magical safety net of the Cloisters. We were supposed to get gelato.

I don’t remember much of the gelato. But I do remember coming back to myself beneath the statue of Clothilde and Bucephalus in the rotunda. Phil was dabbing at my face with a napkin, and my fingers were sticky with melted goo.

Melissende stood in the door to the chapter house, her face a mask of disgust. “Don’t you think this is a waste of time?” she asked Phil. “Lock her up; throw away the key.”

“Hey, I’m right here,” I snapped.

“No, you’re not,” she said in a monotone. “You’re still up on that mountain. I left you there smeared across a cliff face.”

Phil stiffened, and the napkin paused in its trip across my cheek.

“I killed that re’em, and I saw that you—at least”—her voice shook, but she pressed on—”still had a heartbeat. I had to pick, though I knew there were other unicorns around. And I knew they might—”

“Stop it,” Phil whispered.

But Melissende had no intention of stopping.
“Eat her,”
she blurted out. “But what could I do? You were dying. I carried you down the trail … but it didn’t matter.”

“I said, stop it!” Phil whirled on her.

“You’re kidding yourself, Phil.
Your
Astrid is gone. Rosamund’s dead, Astrid’s brain dead, Cory’s as good as dead—we’re all going to end up like that if this keeps up. That’s why I won’t let Ursula go on a hunt.”

Phil turned back to me, returned her attention to my fingers. “Then leave. If you feel like that, then just leave. Get rid of your eligibility.”

“No way.” Melissende gave a bitter laugh. “Leave so one day some unicorn can sneak up on Ursula and actually succeed in killing her this time? I’m okay with dying, as long as I can make sure that never happens.”

Phil had moved herself between Melissende and me. I pushed her aside, ignoring the stickiness of the gelato still clinging to my fingers. “Thank you for saving my life, Melissende. I appreciate it immensely, and someday, I promise I’ll be well enough to return the favor.”

She snorted. “You? Hunt again? Don’t count on it, genius.” She walked away.

I looked at Phil. “Don’t worry about her. She’s wrong. Soon I’ll be well enough to help again.”

Phil didn’t respond.

But things were improving. Time was I couldn’t remember anything that happened when I wasn’t around a unicorn. Time was, Phil told me, that I couldn’t even string a sentence together unless Bonegrinder was sitting on top of me. But I could even read again now. First in the Cloisters, with the background buzz of the artifact net, and then, during my therapy sessions in the hospital, with nothing remotely related to unicorns anywhere around.

I was getting better. One of these days, I’d be back in classes. One of these days, I’d be a doctor.

But maybe only if they let me bring Bonegrinder to my medical school.

Weeks passed, and I threw myself into training. It was easy. In fact, unicorn hunting was the only thing that was easy anymore. I’d tried picking up my calculus textbook the other day, but the numbers just blurred together. The same thing happened when Phil gave me her latest environmental presentation to read. I’d tried to concentrate on it for forty-five minutes, then threw the papers to the floor, went outside, and hit fifty-seven bull’s-eyes in a row.

The scar on my head had shrunk down somewhat, and the doctor told me that once my hair grew out, no one would notice it anymore. I asked to visit Rosamund’s grave, but Phil told me her parents had taken her body back to Vienna.

“Then let’s go to Vienna,” I said.

But Phil just shook her head and ignored me.

That night, I shot sixty-three bull’s-eyes in a row.

That’s the part I really hated about all this. Because I sometimes got confused or said outrageous things, everyone simply wrote off completely rational suggestions as utterly preposterous. Why shouldn’t I go to Vienna? Hadn’t I traveled across the ocean a year ago all by myself? Hadn’t I gone to France all by myself? Now I couldn’t go to Vienna with a companion? It was ridiculous. I wasn’t even planning to leave the EU. I couldn’t visit the grave of the girl who’d died trying to save my life?

Rosamund would have thought that was ridiculous as well. I knew she would.

I missed her music in the chapter house. Sometimes I went down there and placed my hand on the trophy wall and closed my eyes and breathed until I could hear the chord. It wasn’t the same as Rosamund at her piano, but it was still nice.

Phil and Neil wouldn’t let me hunt, either, as if afraid I’d get “disoriented” in the middle of the action and, I don’t know, shoot Grace by mistake. Again, ridiculous. How could they be arguing on one hand that I was constantly getting better and on the other hand that I couldn’t tell the difference between Grace Bo and a unicorn?

“To start with,” I muttered as I shot my seventy-fifth bull’s-eye, “Grace is a bitch. And she walks on two legs.”

After my eighty-second bull’s-eye, I dropped the bow to the ground. What was the point of all this training if I wasn’t allowed to hunt? What was the point of teaching my mind to do math again if I wasn’t going to be able to be a doctor? What was the point of growing my hair out to cover my scars if no one was ever going to let me beyond the doors of the Cloisters?

I kicked at the alicornshaped columns. Flayer and Bonegrinder paused in their game of tug-of-war over an old hambone to look at me curiously.

I screamed at the sky.

“Señorita?”

Oops. Father Guillermo stood at the entrance to the rotunda, his hands folded before him. Great. Now I looked crazy in front of the priest.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m brain damaged, haven’t you heard?”

“Hmm …” Father Guillermo began a lazy circuit around the edge of the courtyard, keeping a wide berth between himself and the two zhi. I had to admit, Wen had pulled off something miraculous with Flayer. He seemed to understand that humans were not for eating, and ever since he’d been around, Bonegrinder, as if in solidarity, had been relaxing around nonhunters as well.

“I imagine this must be very frustrating for you,” Father Guillermo said.

“That’s putting it lightly.”

“Cogito, ergo sum,”
he said. “Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It’s more Latin. Descartes, actually. A philosopher. It means, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It means that our minds are the only things we can trust. Everything else in the world could be a lie, except for the fact that we can think. We think, therefore we are.”

“And if I can’t trust my own mind …” I began.

Father Guillermo nodded. “Then you can’t know who you are.”

I laughed. It was much easier for me to laugh these days. Everything seemed so funny. Either funny or truly tragic.

Or both.

“I didn’t even know who I was
before
this happened to me,
Padre
. I wanted to be a doctor, but I was really a high school dropout. I was supposed to be a unicorn hunter, but I didn’t want to kill them anymore. I thought I was in love with my boyfriend, but I kissed another guy. And I thought all the time. I was the thinkiest person I knew.”

He studied me for a moment. “Then perhaps you are looking for a different piece of philosophy, Astrid.
Cognosce te ipsum.”

“And what does that mean?” I asked as he finished his circuit of the courtyard and drew close to me.

He laid his hand upon my brow as if blessing me. “‘Know thyself.’“

For some strange reason, my bruised cerebrum found it much easier to learn Latin than to wrestle with derivatives, tangents, and secants, so when I finally was allowed to resume my course work, I dropped calculus in favor of ancient languages. I rationalized the change with the argument that if I ever got better enough to start thinking in terms of premed again, the Latin would come in handy in anatomy classes.