Unicorns? Get Real!

realized that despite her overwhelming sadness, this night, so different from her life at home in Slobodkonia, did seem almost magical. It was just as she was having this thought that Alicia cried out, “The gleam! I see the gleam!”

Chapter 9
    LOST, THEN FOUND!

    In less than four minutes, the princesses were into their chaps, out of their silk tents, and mounted on their ponies. In less than five minutes, they were pounding across the plains of Wesselwick. Their pigtails flapped madly as they followed Frankie’s lead.
    “Yee haw!” Frankie whooped. “The herd is splitting!” She yelled, “Team captains, listen up.” She turned around in her saddle and, while still galloping, called back directions. “Crimson team, head due east. Purples, due west.”
    Nine princesses on the Purple team followed Maggie, the Schottlandian princess known for her superb riding abilities.
    “Hey, Gundersnap!” Kristen rose in her saddle. “Get with the program! This way!” She turned to Alicia as they crouched low in their saddles and hammered across the plain. “Good grief—literally grief. She is so distracted by that pony that she went off in the wrong direction!”
    “Here, she’s coming our way!” Alicia said. “She can’t miss those braids of Maggie’s.” Directly ahead Princess Maggie’s braids, the color of paprika, flew out behind her as she rode. Her long body hunkered down low on the pony. She looked like a streak across the breaking dawn as she raced toward the herd.
    It was an astounding and beautiful sight to see these magnificent unicorns. Their ivory horns glimmered with a strange light as they sped toward the foothills of the Wesselwick Mountains at the edge of the plains. This was exactly what Frankie had said they would do. If the princesses could get to the unicorns before they entered the forest at the base of the foothills, rounding them up would be much easier.
    The unicorns were running in a tight pack. The scent of roses was carried by the dawn breezes, and soon the plains of Wesselwick smelled like a vast rose garden.
    For a few moments, it was as if the herd’s horns had merged into one luminescent streak of light. But then suddenly the streak melted away.
    “By Saint Kippy’s last kneecap, they’ve gone for the woods!” Princess Maggie cursed.
    “Who the heck is Saint Kippy?” Kristen asked as they rode along.
    “Patron saint of unicorns,” Maggie replied, looking back over her shoulder.
    “Why last kneecap?” asked Gundersnap.
    “Only had one,” Alicia answered breathlessly while pressing her pony forward. “One leg, one kneecap, one arm, one hand, one eye, and one horn growing out of his forehead. So naturally he’d be the saint of the unicorns. He is also called the saint of oneness.”
    “Sounds adorable,” Myrella said, crouching her tiny body low in the saddle and keeping her eyes fastened on the herd. So minuscule was the princess that she appeared as not much more than a bump on the back of her pony.
    Princess Maggie raised her right hand and gave the signal for them to slow to a trot.
    The ten princesses trotted up into a circle at the woods’ edge. “Well, we’ve lost them for now. All we can do is keep sniffing for the rose scent and look for hoofprints. We should meet back here in…what do you say, Kinna?” Maggie asked, consulting her cocaptain.
    From her waistband Kinna took a watch on a chain. “In thirty minutes,” Kinna replied. Then she continued, “The buddy system, remember? Maggie and I will be one team. Rosemary and Hutta, you two go together. Gundersnap and Myrella, Alicia and Kristen. Remember to follow streams when you can.”
    The buddy teams began to thread their ways through the forest in different directions. Standing up in their stirrups, they poked their noses into the air as high as they could to sniff for roses, but all they smelled was the rich earth of the forest floor.
    Gundersnap was lost completely in her own mournful thoughts about Menschmik and, though she had been looking down for hoofprints, her mind was far away as she tried to envision the battlefield in the Empire of Hottompot. Suddenly she noticed a trickle of water. But no, it was more than a trickle, and she wondered how far she had been following it, for very shortly it turned into a lively stream. And then without even lifting her eyes from the ground or her nose into the air, she caught the scent of roses.
     
    “I don’t know where she went. One minute she