Finally it seemed as if Kellen was able to think again, and not just stare. Not only a unicorn—but a talking unicorn. It was too much to comprehend all at once. "You're—going to get me out?" Kellen suggested feebly. "Of the City lands?" he added, stammering.
"Yes, but—you know why J am here," the unicorn said implacably.
Kellen suddenly remembered something he'd read about unicorns and felt himself blushing hotly. Unicorns only came to virgins. A virgin could tame a unicorn; non-virgins got skewered if they approached too closely or threatened one.
"There is a price for my help, and it is this: that you will remain chaste and celibate—you do know the difference?" the unicorn asked, interrupting itself.
There was a pause. Kellen realized that the unicorn was waiting for him to answer. Fortunately his lessons with Undermage Anigrel had been of some use, and he did know the difference. Celibate meant simply that he wouldn't marry. Chaste meant that he also wouldn't have sex, or engage in sexual or erotic practices of any sort. He nodded, swallowing hard to cover his embarrassment at the topic of the conversation.
"—for a year and a day from now," the unicorn finished. "If you break this promise…" It lowered its head and brandished its horn meaningfully. The tip—just as sharp as it had looked—whispered against the front of Kellen's tunic, barely touching it, below the belt line.
Up this close, now that he wasn't just dazzled by its eldritch beauty, Kellen could see that the unicorn was male. Its implication was clear: break his promise, and he wouldn't be any longer. Well, he hadn't had any trouble staying a virgin until now, and it didn't seem like a price that would be particularly difficult to pay—or one that would hurt other people if he paid it.
You can still back out, a small voice inside him said.
"I… yes. Okay. I agree," Kellen said quickly.
"Then by the blood you have sacrificed, Wildmage, you are bound by your vow," the unicorn said formally. "Now get on my back—quickly. We have a long way to go before sunrise." It turned sideways, lashing its tufted tail just like an impatient cat.
Awkwardly, Kellen stepped forward. He was worried about hurting it— it was so small, so graceful, and thinking about getting on its back was like thinking of riding a deer, or a foal—but refusing to do as the unicorn asked was impossible now, and Kellen had to suppose it knew what it was doing. With only a little difficulty, he managed to scramble onto its narrow back. The thick fur was just as soft as a cat's fur—and just as slippery. Feeling the flex of its muscles between his thighs, Kellen realized the unicorn was much stronger than it looked.
It was also much harder to stay aboard than any horse Kellen had ever ridden, bareback or otherwise. Kellen began sliding sideways on the oil-slick fur just as the unicorn went from a dead stop to a full-out running plunge into the forest. He grabbed at its mane, but found no handholds in the short coarse bristles, and barely managed to fling himself forward and wrap his arms around the unicorn's slender neck in time to keep from falling off altogether as the creature broke into a clearing.
Its fur smelled like cinnamon.
If he'd thought about riding a unicorn at all—and he hadn't—Kellen would have imagined that it would gallop like a horse.
It didn't.
Once it reached its top speed, the unicorn bounded like a deer in full flight—not that Kellen, child of the City, had ever seen a deer except in carefully tended City parks—launching itself directly into the deepest part of the forest. It bounded over fallen logs and through thickets, occasionally running flat-out for a minute or two before gathering itself to spring into the air once more. Every time it sprang forward, Kellen thought he'd slide right off the back, and when it landed, he nearly broke his nose on the unicorn's neck.
Speed seemed to be its only concern. It paid no attention to the branches that whipped and tore at Kellen's flesh and clothing, lacerating him as if he were running a gantlet of riding-crops wielded by sadistic riders. He buried his face in the unicorn's neck, low against its shoulder, to protect his eyes, and was very glad he had—brambles plucked at his arms and legs, ripped his clothing, tore at his hair, and once, for one terrifying moment, the hood of his cloak caught on something, threatening to strangle him or drag him from the unicorn's back. He clung to its neck with all his strength as the unicorn strained, until at last the cheap cloth of the Felon's Cloak gave, tearing free to be left behind.
And still it ran, tireless, faster than the fastest horse Kellen could imagine. He knew from the burning along every exposed part of him, the outsides of arms and legs, and to a lesser extent his shoulders and back, that he was bleeding from a thousand scrapes and scratches all along his arms and legs—if he had not shed enough blood to seal the pact between them before, he was certainly shedding it now.
His chest was bruised, he was battered from neck to toes by collisions with branches, and he was having trouble breathing as his arms and chest muscles began to ache from the sheer effort of holding on. Battered and breathless with sheer speed, Kellen wondered if he'd specified anything in his spell about reaching the boundaries of City lands alive—this almost seemed worse than anything the Outlaw Hunt could do to him.
When the unicorn seemed to have settled into a straightforward bounding motion—and Kellen hadn't been hit by anything for a while— he decided to risk a glimpse at his surroundings. Raising his head cautiously, he looked around.
They were out in the open, and up ahead, Kellen could see the flicker of moonlight on water. There was a stream ahead, its flat surface glistening in the moonlight, a stretch of water perhaps a hundred yards wide. He loosened his stranglehold on the unicorn's neck, assuming he was going to dismount and wade across.
"Don't do that," the unicorn said briefly.
It didn't slow down.
Kellen watched in horror as the unicorn approached the river at top speed and launched itself from the bank with an enormous leap. It hit the water with a splash that drenched both of them, but the river was only a few feet deep and it forged quickly across through the chest-high water while Kellen clung on for dear life. It lunged up the other bank and was running again before Kellen had even managed to catch his breath from the icy shock of his dousing.
Fortunately, that was the widest of the streams they had to cross that night, because, as Kellen quickly discovered, the unicorn did not mean to stop for anything. It jumped ditches and logs and rivulets; what it could not jump it climbed. What it could neither jump nor climb it went through, leaving Kellen to cling to its back like a tick, and fend for himself as best he could. He was chilled to the bone, with every scratch tracing a separate line of fire along his skin, and every bruise aching with every jolt.
They soon found themselves back among trees again. Kellen had long since buried his face against the unicorn's neck once more, risking only occasional quick glimpses of his surroundings. Even so, he got the impression that the ground was rising, and that their path was becoming even more difficult. Once or twice the unicorn actually had to slow down, as if it had to pick its way carefully, and a couple of times it came to a complete stop before launching itself vigorously into space. At those times, Kellen was just as glad he couldn't see where they were going. He certainly wasn't eager to look down at any point.
He could tell that it was getting colder, though, even if his stream-soaked clothes had long since been air-dried to no more than a faint clamminess by the speed of their flight and the heat of the unicorn's body. There was a sharp different smell in the air; the scent of pine trees.
Nothing had hit him for the past chime or so, so he raised his head cautiously again and looked around. It seemed they had been fleeing forever.
Once again, as his arms complained that he had been holding on for far too long, he noted that they seemed to be moving through a more open area, one where it might be safe to risk a look around. Cautiously— very cautiously—he raised his head again.
By now Kellen had lost all real sense of time, but he knew they'd been going for a long time—bells, and not just a few chimes. Every muscle he possessed cried out with cold and stiffness as it flexed; he was utterly spent, but if he was exhausted from nothing more than clinging to the unicorn's back all night, how much more weary must the magical creature itself be? It had never slowed its hectic pace for more than a tenth-chime; even now it moved forward as fast as a galloping horse, its footfalls eerily muffled by the bed of fallen pine needles. The trees on either side were little more than a dark blur as they passed.
The forest through which they now rode was mostly evergreen, with little in the way of treacherous underbrush to attack Kellen. He sat up as far as he could while still holding tightly on to the unicorn's neck and realized that when he looked back through a gap in the trees he could see down into the valley behind. He could see for leagues.
Surely they'd reached the edge of the City lands by now?
He looked up, into the sky overhead, and could no longer see the moon, only the bright unfamiliar stars of the darkest part of the night. He looked ahead, and when he could not see the moon through the trees, Kellen realized it must be low in the western sky. It was setting. The night must be nearly over. In a bell—less—dawn would come.
And with dawn, the Outlaw Hunt would be released.
The horror of the thought made him flinch. He would certainly have lost his grip on the unicorn's neck then except for the fact that by now his clenched hands seemed frozen in place.
A low'hanging branch brushed his cheek, and Kellen quickly ducked his head again.
AFTER that, if possible, the terrain over which they rode got even rougher. They seemed to spend as much time going down as up, over territory that would have made a mountain goat think twice. Half the time, Kellen was hanging over the unicorn's shoulder, the other half, trying to keep from sliding off the unicorn's rump. He'd have offered to walk, but there was no way he, a City-bred boy whose only experience in climbing was in climbing stairs and the occasional wall or tree, could have kept up with the unicorn. Their path led them down into deep ravines, into which the unicorn slid as much as galloped, and up the other side, with Kellen dangling from its neck, his whole weight hanging from his aching arms. He tried to wrap his legs around the unicorn's narrow torso, but the slick fur didn't give him much to grip on to.
The unicorn pushed its way through thickets that reopened the crusted scratches on his arms and legs and gouged new ones, and once, leaping some obstacle Kellen couldn't see in the dark, it landed badly, slipping and falling and rolling over and over down a slope covered with the rotting remains of last year's leaves, Kellen tangled up with it and desperately trying to avoid its razor-sharp horn and thrashing hooves.
He thought he'd been in pain before; he realized in that moment that he'd had no idea of how much pain a single person could be in. It felt as if every bone in his body was being systematically broken; he yelped with every impact until the moment when a boulder hit him square in the stomach. He finally rolled free and landed against a rock—hard—gasping in protest as the breath was knocked out of him.
He sat up, blinking and shaking his head, trying to see where they were. He was liberally smeared with mud and last year's rotting leaves; they had a sour smell, like the dregs of cold tea left too long. This was much worse than falling out of the tree back in the garden.
"Come on. Get up," the unicorn said remorselessly. It was standing a few feet away. Kellen could see it, faintly glowing in the darkness exactly as if it were the ghost of a unicorn, but he could see nothing else. If it had been injured at all in the fall, it certainly didn't sound like it.
Kellen shook his head. Stars danced in his vision, and pain lanced through his head and ribs when he moved. In that moment he hated the unicorn, hated magic, hated everyone and everything that had brought him to this place—bruised, aching, and essentially alone in the freezing dark. He didn't know where he was, or what he was doing here, he didn't know how any of this would end—he was cut off from both the future and the past, and he had no way to predict what might happen next.
"Don't tell me you can't," the unicorn said nastily. "If you're still alive, you can."
With a snarl, Kellen used the rock to push himself to his feet. He staggered through the slippery stinking mush of last autumn's leaves toward the unicorn, certain that when he reached it he would use the last of his strength to throttle the life out of the maddening creature. But when he reached it, he was too tired—
So there was nothing to do but drag himself onto its back once more, gasping hollowly with the dull, bone-deep ache of hot new bruises that screamed in agony when he moved and throbbed with pain when he didn't. His muscles shook as he forced his arms around the unicorn's neck once more.
And they were off again.
At that point, in the midst of the pain and the dark and cold, Kellen felt tears prickle at the back of his eyes—not because of the fall, or the pain, but because he knew that somehow he was going to get through all this. Thanks to the unicorn, he was going to live to see the border and beyond. And then he'd be out of City lands, in a whole new world, and—
And then what?
He had no idea. Where would he go? What would he do?