“Hello, Esrithalan,” she said, breathless. “May I join you?”
“Yes,” it said prettily.
Nothing knelt near enough to touch the unicorn but without crowding it. “I’m Nothing,” she said. It smelled of salt and brine.
The unicorn snorted. “Hardly,” it replied.
“It’s my name.”
“Is it?”
Frowning, Nothing said, “Yes. It is.”
“Is that what you are?”
She supposed she ought to have expected as much from the unicorn. They were avatars of the gods, according to priests: neither spirit nor living creature, not quite a god. Made of god-stuff, not aether nor matter. Nothing remembered Kirin liking the definition when they’d been taught it, and the phrase god-stuff. Because it was both generic and specific.
Nothing said, “The sorceress thinks I’m her demon.”
“Are you?”
“I’m just a girl.”
“What is just a girl?”
Nothing opened her mouth, then glanced down at her body, unsure what to say. She touched her lips, then her chest, and slid her hand down over a breast and let it fall into her lap. Everyone had assumed Kirin was a boy because of his body. Was she making the same mistake? Assuming she was a girl because of her body?
The unicorn closed its long-lashed eyes. It spoke as though it had overheard her thought: “If a body was all it took to be something, there would be no demons.”
Nothing paused to understand. Demons were dead spirits and needed a new house, a new body, to exist. “Demons possess new bodies all the time,” she murmured. “I don’t feel like I’m possessed.”
“I wonder what that feels like,” the unicorn said.
“You aren’t a very helpful unicorn,” Nothing said.
The unicorn made a huffing sound she suspected was laughter.
Sunlight glinted off the lake, and Nothing sighed. Flowers bent and danced in the breeze and that breeze chased their ripples straight across the lake, marring the reflected sky with tiny wavelets. Nothing loved it here, too. There was so much she loved about the Fifth Mountain and its foothills and lava fields. Was that because it was beautiful, or because in another life it had been her home?
She drew a deep breath, focused on her chest and lungs, the weight of air against her stomach, and she listened to the brush of hair on her shoulders as she nodded, felt the press of her heels against her bottom, her bent knees, the line of her shins against the earth itself. Sunlight at the nape of her neck, the cinch of the sash holding her tunic tightly closed.
“I can’t be a demon,” Nothing said.
The unicorn said, “All right.”
Relief melted her backward, until she lay in the grass beside Esrithalan, legs stretched toward the lake, hands under her head. Mountain breeze—the breath of the Fifth Mountain, Nothing thought whimsically—fluttered the alder leaves. They twitched and shivered like little drops of molten gold.
“What does it feel like to be a girl?” the unicorn asked.
Nothing answered without thinking: “Sometimes I feel like a mountain, but other times I feel small and like I’m being watched. Judged. Like I’ll never be good enough.”
“For what?”
“For anything,” she whispered.
“That certainly doesn’t sound like something a demon would say.”
Anger surged up her spine. “What does it feel like to be a unicorn?” she demanded.
“Like being a unicorn.”
Nothing groaned, but the answer deflated her anger. She took another deep breath, her chest lifting, and blew it out in a stream. Like the mountain breeze. Maybe it felt like this to be a mountain: the earth your body, bones of ancient crystals, blood like rivers of magma heating you up. Flowers and stones for skin and your mouth a lake. If she was a mountain, she wasn’t a girl. Unless one could be both a girl and a mountain. Like Kirin was both a prince and a maiden. Her sleep-melting mind liked the thought.
The unicorn plopped its head onto her stomach, sighing like a weary dog. Nothing buried a hand in the silky fur at its neck and relaxed further. The air was cool and hazy, and the alder leaves flashed like tiny oval mirrors, catching light in a slow dazzle. The sun made the unicorn’s horn into a curve of pure luminescence, a sickle moon.
For a moment Nothing thought she understood what it felt like to be a unicorn.
EIGHTEEN
WHEN NOTHING WOKE, SHE was alone. Annoyed at herself for not asking the unicorn more practical questions—about magic, about finding her way around the mountain—she got up and went to visit Sky.
But in the silent altar room where the warrior slept, with its ceiling of crystal rain, Sky was not alone. A person sat against the base of the altar, youthful and lean. Nothing couldn’t tell if they were a boy or a girl, and in a moment of clarity left over from her time with the unicorn she decided it didn’t matter. They seemed younger than her, maybe fifteen years old, though in a place like this was it even possible to judge age or gender or more elusive things like humanity? The sorceress looked like a strange young woman, but if the rumors of when she’d arrived at the Fifth Mountain were true, she had to be closer to one hundred years old!
“What are you doing here?” she asked darkly.
The youth opened vivid gray eyes that seemed to fill half their pale, narrow face. Sleek blond-white hair fell to their chin in fine, straight lines, and they wore a gray robe and gray trousers belted with white. They blinked up at her, then drew one knee up against their chest and hugged it to them with oddly long hands. “Guarding him,” they said. They were barefoot too and had oddly long feet to match their hands.
“Is he in danger?” Nothing neared the altar, hunting Sky’s sleeping face for signs of damage or trouble.
“Not from me,” the youth said. “I admire him.” As Nothing walked toward Sky’s head, they tilted their face to follow her with their gaze. She glanced down at their watery gray eyes. The gray flecks in their irises shifted like tiny ripples. Definitely not human.
“Hmm,” Nothing said, and touched Sky’s cheek. He was cool, but not cold, and his chest rose and fell as smoothly and slowly as it had yesterday.
“Is he crying? His tears…” The youth trailed off wistfully.
Nothing put both hands on Sky protectively. “Selegan River spirit!”
The dragon stood too fast to be seen and stared imploringly at her. “I want him to live.”
Nothing and the dragon were of a height, both slender and small, and for the briefest moment Nothing wondered if they were more the same than different. She bit her bottom lip and leaned her hip against the altar. One hand remained resting against Sky’s chest. She stared at the dragon. “When you said ‘I know you,’ were you talking to me or to Sky?”
“You.” The dragon frowned prettily. “Don’t I know you? You seem familiar.”
“Familiar how? Do I look like someone you know?”
“I am unsure,” the dragon said. “The potential of the moment has passed—I might have been able to answer had you asked me then.”
Nothing sighed in annoyance. Neither spoke for a moment, sizing the other up. Eventually she said, “Do you know where Kirin is?”