Free Ascendant by Diana Peterfreund

the size of a rhinoceros to find a good hiding spot. I hadn’t seen him for months, hadn’t even dreamed about him for weeks. He’d told me he was going away, and yet I still searched.
    Because he was the only one I knew who had any answers.
    As I passed through the door into the rotunda, I saw Rosamund standing with Father Guillermo, their heads both bowed in whispered prayer. I stopped, afraid of interrupting them, and after a moment, he made the sign of the cross over the girl’s auburn head, then smiled at her.
    “Vaya con Dios, Hermanita,”
said Father Guillermo.
    “Vielen Dank,”
Rosamund said. “I am feeling much better now.” She turned and caught sight of me. “Astrid!”
    I shied behind the edge of the stuffed Bucephalus. “I didn’t mean to interrupt—”
    “No,” Rosamund said, and beckoned to me. She gathered up her music, which was arranged in a pile at her feet. “Ever since I heard of Cory’s … problem, I have not been able to sleep. I am so afraid it will happen to us all. I asked
Herr Pfarrer
to bless me. For protection from … whatever this may be.”
    “I will be happy to bless you as well,” said Father Guillermo.
    I looked down. “No, thank you.”
    “Or any of the other hunters.” He took in my clingy yoga clothes. “I take it you have been exercising?”
    I swallowed. “Yes. Yoga. In the privacy of the Cloisters courtyard. We are all alone here.” Couldn’t embarrass him or the Church or the Order.
    He shook his head and smiled.
“Señorita
, please do not be alarmed. This is not a police state, and I am not your enemy.”
    I brushed past them both and took the stairs to the dorm floor. Yeah, well, the last time some strange man holding the purse strings told us that, he was Marten Jaeger.
    And when he’d tried to destroy us, I’d turned the tables and let him be killed.
    In the shower, I washed off the sweat of the Italian afternoon and tried to rinse the memory of Clothilde’s voice from my brain. As a nun—even a lapsed one—Clothilde would have been Catholic. She would have been raised in the original Order of the Lioness, the kind that carved prayers into their swords and truly believed that they were vessels of God, charged to kill unicorns and dispense doses of the Remedy as the Church saw fit.
    That was the Order that Clothilde had rebelled against. That had been the life she’d faked her own death to escape.
    I wish I’d known more about her, this mysterious, revered, misunderstood ancestor of mine. It was well documented in Cloisters’s records that most hunters who sought to escape their duties turned to the services of what the Order had long called “actaeons,” after the mythological man who’d spied on the hunter goddess, Diana, in her bath. An actaeon was a fancy name for a lover—a guy specifically employed to divest a unicorn hunter of her virginity and thus her magic. The mythological Actaeon had been punished for his boldness when Diana had turned him into a stag to be torn to pieces by his own dogs. When the ancient Order of the Lioness caught an actaeon in the act, they fed him to their house zhi.
    Yes, I was part of a long line of extremely hard-core nuns.
    But Clothilde had not gone the actaeon route. She was still a hunter—had to have been to be able to communicate—when she made the deal with Bucephalus that had sent every unicorn in the world into hiding and had convinced the world they’d become extinct.
    Naturally, all records of Clothilde had disappeared from the history. I did know, however, that she’d married and had children. I was a direct descendant, on my father’s side. A father that my unicorn-obsessed mother had long ago tracked down and seduced. Possibly—I had recently realized with disgust—for the sheer purpose of getting a hunter daughter with a more prestigious lineage.
    Lucky Lilith, not to have borne a son.
    The Order of the Lioness may not know what happened to Clothilde, but my mother somehow did.