T

he city is a fairy-tale in winter. 

Snow dusts the rooflines, and the thin sunlight turns everything to old gold and ancient diamonds. It’s a cold day for this early in the season, enough that even the raven’s breath is visible, as are all the prayers of the monks in their mountain monastery. In the low streets near the markets and docks all the little dragons are curled atop stoves, dreaming of warm food and warm days. 

And what is Amaroq, in this slumbering story, but the wolf that waits outside the door? 

Today the sleepers need not fear him. Today he prowls far from the city, where the forests of shaggy pine march right up to the coast, and the only beaches are hidden coves with pebbles like teeth and driftwood like bones, buried in fog. He is hungry, but not enough to hunt; there are deer and elk in the forest, and seals in the sea, but their big dark eyes do not watch him pass. Today he is nothing but another unicorn, and when is a unicorn something for a wild thing to fear? 

T

here is a ripple of sound from the trees and then two fragments of moon-shine separate themselves from the darkness.

Amaroq falls still and so, too, do the bells and bones that chime soft notes from where they are wound in his pale hair. His horn points like a finger to the shadowed place beneath the rotting trunks, but his gaze is not accusatory but beckoning.

Such things as he see well in the darkness. Such things as he do not fear snarls from wolves or girl-children, not even wraith wolves, not even unicorns.

The air smells of saltwater and snow. It is difficult to know where the first comes from; the second is threatening in the clouds that crowd the horizon, and the ice crystals that ring the moon like an eye. Amaroq breathes out a long plume of vapor, and his eyes do not leave the wolf and the girl. There is a smile on his mouth but it is faint as a shadow from starlight, faint as the waterline on the dead pines.

The kelpie does not snarl back, but his voice is still as low as a growl when he says, almost tenderly, “Won’t you come out?”

And maybe he is thinking of the last unicorn he saw in a place where the air smelled of salt and brine, and winter frost kissed the grass, and a young beast guarded her and licked its teeth in want.

T

hat smile of his doesn’t waver as the girl answers back, no matter the gale in her voice. All his life he’s learned the sound of warnings, and which he must take heed of, and which he can ignore, and which he can provoke.

“Am I the hunter?” he asks, all innocence, a killer whale with its belly well full.

There are other things he thinks to say - I thought this forest belonged to the queen, for one - but as he watches her come forward from her cover, he only adds, “The wisdom of my kind is different from yours.” And that is when his smile fades, for he, too, is thinking of war; even as his pale eyes study her movements he thinks she is like one of the spears of the northern people, crafted from bits of fallen star, gleaming silver and sharper and truer than ice.

Oh, but her eyes are dark, the sea beneath the new moon. And she is not smiling at all - her mouth is a slash like a black crevasse, her wolf is becoming a monster (for this he spares a quick glance, and measures the distance of the sea from his back), and then she is before him, all bold, and her horn falls like the flat of a sword against the bone of his.

That is when she smiles.

And Amaroq’s mouth stretches wider, until it is almost a grin, until it shows a promise of teeth. It covers his surprise. They stand in the moonlight, silver beacons in the fog, and the sea breathes beyond them in the mist, and ice groans as it grows from his horn all along her own, reaching for her brow, reaching for the stars unfeeling above them.

“Unless,” he says softly, and his breath is white mist against her throat, “you are like me.”

It is almost a question - one it pains him too much to ask in full.

T

he sound their horns make together carries him home, a home that is far away, and long ago, and gone. But he carries the ghost of it as their weapons clack like autumn stags’, like the tusks of narwhals below the aurora with their breath steaming above them. And that sound of challenge is enough to warm his blood, to shake him from the winter dream he lives in.

His tail twines, sinuous, an arc toward the wolf like a hand ordering a dog to sit, be still. A wolf does not wonder if a coyote will leap for its throat, and Amaroq keeps his focus on the girl, wild thing she is, the color of angry ocean froth streaked with blue from well below the surface. He can smell the saltwater in her clearly, now, and if she were older he might feel threatened - or something else, something as ancient - but she is not.

I am better, she says, and by some magic sends his ice where he did not ask it to go.

Swift as any toothsome thing striking prey, Amaroq knocks his skull against hers in an impact hard enough to make his vision flash white. Even as it fades his lips are peeling back, teeth as pearl-white and sharp as hers in jaws that have killed many more than her youth can claim.

Just for a moment they reach for her throat - until he withdraws enough to regard her with a gaze holding all the impersonal hostility of winter. “I forgive your arrogance as youth,” he says, and his breath now is cold enough itself to bite. "But only once."

T

he girl-unicorn, savage thing she is, does not learn well. In the background - loud enough, strange enough now to draw Amaroq’s eye - her companion is transforming. The stallion doesn’t know whether the wolf is becoming or being unmade; there is only the furious sound of its snarling, the unnatural splintering of bones that multiply and lengthen, pale magic crawling over him like hoarfrost.

Eat him, the girl says, and Amaroq’s eyes are as hard, as cold, as the wall of an iceberg jutting above the ruinous black sea. For a moment - for a heartbeat, as the girl spits blood and the thing-that-was-a-wolf throws back its head to howl, the kelpie considers running her through. How long has it been, since his horn was more than decoration and warning? How long since it was consecrated?

But he knows that if he did - if he took the time - he would die. And he is not ready for that, not at the jaws of some pet beast. In the next half-breath he is turning, gnashing his teeth even as he springs with the snow flying up from his heels and the wolf following after. It is not his nature to flee. But it is to survive, and he is no fool to not realize when he is outmatched.

And oh, he is. Behind him, limned by moonlight, the beast leaps. Amaroq, running for the shore and the quiet surf beyond, calls up his magic, coating his skin in a crust of ice thick as armor, and even so the wolf’s claws and the force of his leap cut through, making the ice shriek like scraped glass, raking Amaroq’s hindquarters beneath. The kelpie kicks hard and continues to run, and inside he is howling too, even as his breath comes harsh between his jaws and the ice regrows over his skin.

Then he is at the beach, in the waves, knee-high, chest-high, chin-high and gone, down where no wolf could follow, and no girl would dare.