I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins.
I cannot hear the song that my sister is looking for.
I cannot hear anything besides the sound of both our hearts beating at once, and the way we make every bone and rotten branch in the forest cry out in response.
I cannot hear anything besides the sound of both our hearts beating at once, and the way we make every bone and rotten branch in the forest cry out in response.
I
solt is not listening to the castle-keeper’s story that night.She is braiding dead leaves and the bones from a sparrow she had caught into her sister’s mane, and in her mind a bramblebear is running through the heart of the Court. In her mind she is imagining all the ways another monster from the woods might teach the people of this city what it feels like to be hungry. And the story that runs through her dreams that night is far more feral, and violent, and terrible than any the castle-keeper might have imagined.
And when she wakes up trembling beside her sister, it is not from fear.
It is — as it always is — from hunger.
The forest grows darker and darker the further into it they go, like a beast swallowing them bit by terrible bit. And what little light is left crawls down the hollows of her horn and sits there like another disease, making every shadow of it deeper and every line sharper, and hungrier. And her wanting hangs there with it like a weight, until her head bows low, low, low enough to guide herself through the forest with it, wielding it like a warning to all the wild creatures that know to hide when they see the two unicorns coming. Beside her her twin is still searching, and listening, and tracking down legends like a hound following a blood trail.
Every time Danaë pauses to listen Isolt stops beside her, and presses her ear to her ribcage like she is hoping to hear the song echoing inside of her. And that is how they enter the belly of the beast together.
At first it does not feel any different than the forest they have already passed through.
The trees are still silent, turning their faces away from the two unicorns as they pass. The wind is suddenly still, as though the world has lost its breath. Beneath her hooves the ground groans, as the undergrowth bows its head and dons the crown of rot that she offers.
But there is this, too: the sudden turning over of bones in their graves, a trembling so thin and subtle another unicorn (a true unicorn) might have missed it.
Isolt misses nothing.
She does not tell her sister that she has found the trail, not in words. She only pricks her ears and lowers her head like a wolf, and with only a look she says follow me. Her heartbeat turns to chanting inside of her chest, the sound of ancient packs coming together again for one final hunt. It leads her on, as the darkness turns malevolent with old hungers that had never been satiated.
The forest is no longer silent around them. And the shadows do not sit so. quietly beneath the trees, but press in closer, and closer, and closer.
All of them are purring, and hungry, and terribly awake.
And Isolt almost does not notice the way the bones beneath the earth are arranged in a sickle moon that leads them in deeper, and deeper, and deeper until they are surrounded by the trembling earth.
