O

h, Amaroq despises the feeling of being hunted. 

He knows, he knows, he is not the only thing in Novus’ waters with sharp teeth and sharper hunger. After he had Made the pegasus (a used pair of wings, she had said, a vessel for duty; he wonders if she knows differently now, if she marvels at her wolf’s teeth and lion’s instincts, she who had seemed so numb, half-dead) the kelpie had left the waters of the mainland. There he had waited out the winter and mourned the passing of the zenith of his powers, and there he had wondered whether he might be pursued.

But it is not the horses of Novus he is wary of now. From that first roiling of sea and earth, from that eruption of smoke and birds thick and fleeing and chaotic, the unicorn sensed the change. Something was different. Something was loose. Behemoth shapes slid long as structures in the dark far beneath the surface, and things with too many tentacles, and monsters that would dare to chase a kelpie back to the frothing shores of Denocte. 

Yet the pull of the magic is stronger still. 

It draws them all, a hum at the back of their throats, a buzzing in their blood, a new kind of need. It draws Amaroq, too - but not until night, and not until late, when the ivy is withered and all the pearls have been swept into the sea. Only then does he come, dark beneath the starless night, the seafoam color of his mane and tail like the path of the moon on the water as it sweeps over glistening black rock. When he arrives he keeps to himself; when he chances to meet another he listens only, long teeth hidden behind dark lips, nothing but another stranger in a crowd of them. There are many rumors, and none are of a kelpie who attacked a girl. They are far more interesting than that. 

He is not sure he believes in gods, of Novus or no. But he believes in magic, and that is a thick thing here, almost electric. And he believes in power, and that is what the Relic must be. And Amaroq believes in monsters, and oh, those are here too, he can smell their hot breath, hear their panting in the dark. 

The island is all strange - trees and plants that fruit and flower out of season, birthing things of metal and stone. Birds who sing too many notes in terrible patterns, too many eyes that shine out of the dark. But it is Amaroq who feels out of place here, with ice in his veins against the wet heat of the place, wandering inland from a sea that churns with creatures who have woken from a slumber of dread dreams. 

The unicorn picks his way through the forest in the dark, and ice melts in his footprints like the ring beneath a glass. No stars can cut through the canopy; the only light is the flicker of insects, the glow of mushrooms, the blue gleam that curls up the stalks of vines. He follows the sound of a stream (but nothing so commonplace as the laugh and chuckle of a brook - this water wails like a violin, it crescendos and fades like a symphony) until he finds the source of it. It cuts black, black, black across his path, and he can’t make out the bottom. 

The water laughs, and sings, and he wonders if it is singing in him, too, if it is a black thread to the heart of the island - 

Before he can drink, a figure separates from the tangle of foliage across the water. The way Amaroq lowers his horn then is both question and answer.

T

his place is like a fairy-tale - though even more unfathomable than that, to a man whose childhood fantasies were still of places caked in ice, glaciers blue as the cold heart of the moon, beasts that drifted like birds through frigid waters. It is like a myth, and so he he is not at all surprised at the woman who steps forward into just enough light to make plain her bald face, pale as a skull.

She greets him, like to like, and Amaroq smiles in a way that leaves his teeth hidden. But his tongue touches them, a press against sharp points, the way one might pinch themselves in a dream. All the birds fall silent, sensing a predator; between them, a thick silver ribbon, the water laughs and cries.

“You think it wails to me?” he says softly, and touches the tip of his horn to the water. At once ice blooms there, like a flower, but the current is too swift: it takes the new bloom and whisks it downriver, tumbling it away, a small ice-floe that may never reach the sea. He wishes he could freeze the length of it, choking it to silence, and walk his bridge of ice to the secret heart of the island, the birthplace of the stream. The shells and bones in his hair chime against each other, rattling like teeth, as he lifts his head again. He is not smiling now.

“This island is no place for those who must rely on a bridge to go to safety.” He does not blink, when his ice-chip eyes seize her like a fist. There is a challenge there, a wolf to a tiger, beast to beast. For the moment, he disregards all else that might wait and hunt in the dark of the trees, in the deep of the sea. He watches her step forward, the way the light slides against her stripes and each hard plane of muscle, the gleam of her crimson eyes cat-like in the dim. Once more there is water between them, and something else just as quick and just as deadly. “Are you going to run again?” This time, there is almost humor in the question. This time, he thinks he might pursue her if she did.

But he does not think she will.

I

t feels like a dream, here below the trees. Amaroq is grateful for the mercy of the night; in daylight so much chaos and color and noise would turn him away. The air smells vivid green: the green of sap from a branch just-snapped, the green of rot below tangles of roots and blankets of leaves, the green of things forever growing and dying. She is not wrong, when she suggests that he is out of his element. All he knows is blue and white and a bare and biting kind of cold. But this is far from the first adaptation he’s had to make to survive, and all streams run eventually to the sea.

He watches, impassive, as she steps nearer. The pale strands of his mane cling to his neck fine as spiderwebs and his eyes gleam as pale as the moon and the stream. When the wind sighs through the winding curl of his horn he smiles in a way that says something is always wailing in the night.

But he is not all stillness, not all ice. When she leaps the kelpie rounds on her like a wolf, angling his chest toward hers, his head high with warning. Yet the flash of color that limns her white face catches him, and when she looks down to the water he follows her gaze, falling back unmoving but for the rise and fall of his breath. Even the silver of that catches in his throat to look at the colors unfolding below them, blooming and receding. When his eyes sting it takes him a moment to realize why -

that it looks like home. That it is a kind of imitation of the curtain of blues and greens and golds and reds that once unfurled across his frigid sky like one world opening onto another. He remembers how it felt to swim in waters of emerald and violet with his people and hear the voices of the whales as they sang songs of wonder. How holy those nights were, such long ago glories.

Sorrow makes him furious, but beauty and wildness softens him; when he withdraws from her, turning his finely carved head away, it is because he doesn’t trust his teeth. Cold radiates from him the way heat does from her, as though she’s painted with living fire. It’s a wonder there isn’t a storm between them, and now Amaroq can feel his heart beating in his chest like a sealskin drum with the ferocity of his feeling. “No place worth knowing is,” he answers her, but his words are as flat as a glacier plane. Amaroq can feel her eyes on him, burning like cupped flame, but he does not meet them.

Not until she dips her tail into that painted water, and colors him with it. Then he looks at her, and he is not quite smiling, but there is something unsettled in his eyes, a mad kind of wildness. The thought of home is an anchor that can still drown him, but he wills it buried in the dark silt of his heart. I will not run, she says, and the water she flicked on him turns to ice on his skin, and with the way the blues and greens trace her, softening and deepening her crimson, they could be underwater.

He says nothing when she turns his question back on him. But he reaches out, and the charms in his hair cry out in little voices of warning, and if she does not turn away he touches his nose to her cheek. There is something tender in the gesture, despite the war-drum of his heart, like something fae marking a child for wonders unknown. His skin is as velvet-soft as a seals’; compared to his ice her body seems to burn, like it’s stolen the warmth of fire along with the color.

“Hunt with me,” the kelpie says, and it is not quite a question.

W

hat will we hunt? she asks, and she does not turn away from his touch - she responds to it, she turns it back on him like a parry, like they are playing at war.

Well, aren’t they always? Isn’t he always, in a way, when his life comes down forever to another creature’s death - blood and salt?

Amaroq smiles at the sound their horns make, rattling softly together like spears. He smiles at the sear of her skin on his, her teeth near his throat, stripes against spots, predators each. Against the cold of his skin, humidity-slick, she’s as warm as a fire - and when he inhales, there is the faint smell of smoke, too, bonfires of cedar and incense. The unicorn-queen’s city on a hill, he thinks. She had invited him there, when they met many full moons ago, and he had said not yet.

Nothing waits for a wolf in a city but death. Such places were for rats and sheep. Without the wind, without the stars, without the heartbeat of the ocean in his ears and the pull of the moon, his teeth would be blunted, his mind dulled.

Amaroq wonders if that is all that separates them. If there is a part of her that wants to be feral, that sneers at a life made easy.

(What will we hunt?)

The kelpie laughs, low and black, water below ice. “A relic,” he says, and when he pushes himself away from her, pale as moonlight against the black, his strange cold eyes ask And what else would you hunt, side-by-side with such as me?

H

e watches as she circles, the pale moon-shine of his eyes following her, his teeth barely kept behind his dark lips. When she snaps her tail toward him like a whip a shiver runs through his muscles, a tensing like his body is wanting to leap. But the unicorn only follows her with a tilt of his head, the long bone of his horn pointing like an accusing finger. “Is there nothing you would ask, if you won a favor from a god?” His voice is flat, distant and cold on this humid, symphonic island.

But he knows that she is right. Amaroq keeps no gods (none but the sea, and the stars, and the ice) and there is nothing this relic could mean to him, nothing suggested by the scant rumors he has chanced to hear. And yet - there is the island. There are the animals with eyes of stone and the flowers that drop pearls like perfect fruit. There is the music he has heard, sometimes, as he’s moved through the heart of the island like a patch of moonlight, a strange song born of the wind or the trees or the birds that shouldn’t be. And what else has the kelpie to do here (hunted, and alone) but look?

She stops. The crimson of her hair and head is the color of dried blood in the bluish night and her eyes burn out from the bone-pale of her face, needful, demanding. Impudent. If she were of his people (and how that thought stirs something in him, a want he quells with the cold control of a strangling fist) she might be praised for her questions, numerous as a new-whelped pup’s, or cuffed.

But she is foreign, strange as the island - except for the way she watches the sea. Except for the way she says the hunt.

For a long moment he is quiet, regarding her. Even in the wet heat of the island night his breath is a silver cloud between his teeth. There is only the stream laughing out to the sea, and the jungle dark and choking on both sides, and a woman who moves quick and restless as fire and himself, stoic and hard as ice. But this time, when he speaks, his voice is soft, and shifting, and holy as the aurora.

“I love that even the hare is made divine when the wolf’s teeth close around it’s neck.” His eyes flicker silver; the wind rises, pulling fingers through their hair, setting the bones and shells in his to soft chiming.

“I love how my body sings of purpose in each stretching sinew on a wild night coursing seals beneath the sickle moon.” It is hard not to think of home (to ache with the thought of it), and there is frost creeping up his fetlocks, forming delicate as lace in fractals down his back.

“I love how it is to hunt with my people, in harmony down to our breaths, each knowing the role they must play if we are to fill our bellies before the freeze comes.” And now that ice must have reached his heart, for it is tight with pain, seized between jaws that are closing. If he closed his eyes, he might see them: scores of kelpies limned in moonlight, horns like masts jutting from the surface of the sea, the blue-grey-silver of their pelts quick beneath the water. But Amaroq does not close his eyes; they seek out her own, they swallow her up.

At last he moves, quick as though coursing through water. His chest is a hairs-breadth from her shoulder, and he wonders if she feels the cold of him the way he feels the heat rolling off of her; he wonders how hot her blood runs beneath her flesh, whether it might smoke like a dragon’s if spilled. His muscular neck is arched, his muzzle above the nape of her neck, his teeth hidden behind dark lips until he begins to smile (and there is nothing kind in it; it is fierce with pride, a savage kind of joy).

”I love to know that for another day I am the strongest.”

It is difficult, to turn his head away until his gaze is level with hers. It is difficult, when he is so close, not to touch, not to taste, not to wonder -

And to know that she must be wondering, too.

Yet there is no blood in the air, only a night blooming strange around them. And his smile melts away until once more he is cold and impassive as a star.

“But I hunt to live, walker. It is my purpose and my birthright. Why do you?”