Read Online Rampant by Diana Peterfreund - Free Book Online

She’s from the Leandrus line, which were supposedly the record keepers. It’s all so silly.
    Almost as silly as the idea that any of our families have power over unicorns at all.
    It was too bad, really. From my few interactions with Lucia, I gathered that she was intrigued by the idea of unicorn hunting. Becoming a nun had been a long-held tradition among the women of her family, but the order she’d chosen was not quite as thrilling as her ancestors’ vows to the Order of the Lioness. And yet she was stuck in a kitchen while my “place was on the battlefield”? I wondered if I could concoct some sort of medical discharge, like one did for the army. Break my leg, maybe. Cut off a pinky toe?
    Ick. Maybe not.
    “I think we’ll have to try below in the chapter house,” Cory said, and led the way back into the dome, grabbing a pair of lanterns on the way. Behind the tableau of Clothilde and the karkadann was a small door, which Cory unlocked with aslender golden key. I followed her into a narrow hallway that descended beneath the cloister courtyard, and Bonegrinder trotted obediently behind. This was the true heart of the Cloisters of Ctesias; not the dormitories or the refectory or even the grand dome. Beneath the ground lay our crypt, our training rooms, holding pens, and even our burial grounds. Here sat the charred remains of our scriptorium, a sort of combination library and laboratory, where Cory had taken me on my first day. There was little left but ashes now, hundreds of years of records reduced to piles of blackened pages. Chairs and tables overturned, frozen in time to the night mobs had invaded this place in a desperate search for the Remedy.
    They’d never found it. Or if they did, the formula was lost to history long ago. No trace remained now. As we passed the burned and broken door to the scriptorium, I glanced in. Tiny bits of glass and brass glittered in the light from my lantern—pieces of the hunters’ alchemy sets, fragments of alembics, crucibles, scales, and phials scattered among the ashen remnants of books, maps, and scrolls. I wondered what family was known for its contributions to science. Bonegrinder paused here, too, and gave the threshold an exploratory sniff. According to Cory, unicorns had a highly advanced sense of smell. They could detect gunpowder from nearly a mile away.
    Whatever this unicorn sensed in the scriptorium, it was clear she wasn’t happy. She shied back against my legs, and even through the denim of my jeans I could feel her shudder.
    Cory tested the rotted wood on each door we passed. “Too much of this area has seen damage,” she said. “It’ll bash through any of these.”
    We stooped as we traveled deeper beneath the Cloisters. Thestone walls closed in on all sides, and I put my hand out to feel my way along the dark stairs. My fingers trailed over tiny knobs and bumps of bones, here and there punctuated by the sharper ridges of a zhi’s screw-shaped alicorn protruding from the masonry. I wondered if the zhi walking beside me recognized these artifacts for what they were. The farther in we got, the less sure the unicorn seemed to be about our path. Her clopping steps turned hesitant, then downright stubborn, and it took both Cory and me to tug her along.
    The strange atmosphere of the Cloisters was stronger down here, pressing in around me more thickly than the walls themselves. My head felt stuffed with it, my sinuses suffused with darkness and death.
    Presently, the corridor dropped into a steep spiral stair, and Bonegrinder stopped dead. Cory grabbed her by the collar, while I shoved against her haunches until she finally began mincing her way down. Around and around we went, on glossy, worn steps that sloped dangerously downward without the benefit of a banister. The lantern light ricocheted off the walls, careening from alicorn to hoof, from a spinal column that bisected the regular rows of stone to the leering, eyeless glare of a skull.
    I reared back