This is to rhodielady_47‘s prompt.

Unicorn/Factory has a landing page here

“What do we do with this?”

The villagers of Lastowe surrounded the newly-minted unicorn foal. The foal that was supposed to be a unicorn.

“I heard over in Cardenborn…”

“Cardenborn is different. That sort of thing doesn’t happen here.”

“What about that thing in Shepachdar?”

“You know about those sheep-herding towns. Lawstowe is a holy hill.”

Aaron might have sounded more firm about it if he hadn’t been connected to the unicorn-not-a-unicorn, if his daughter wasn’t leaning over the thing, protecting it and sobbing.

It was easy to say there was an abomination in another village. It had been easy, Aaron remembered hearing, for his ancestor to say not us. We won’t give our virgins to the unicorn, no matter what the other towns do. It was always easy to condemn other people’s problems.

Aaron looked around at the women, who were, to a one, watching Aaron’s daughter Susanna. At the men, watching the women. At the children, hiding and pretending they weren’t watching what was going on. He looked at the thing on the ground, and coughed.

There was a lot of coughing. Lawstowe was a very tall hill, the reason for some of its holiness. And the factory smokestacks, whose clouds of black smoke rolled over the valley towns and brushed lightly by the lowlands, tainted the air in Lawstowe more and more in recent years. Even Susanna was coughing…

…and then the thing that wasn’t quite a unicorn nosed her, and the coughing stopped. The circle of villagers fell silent. Susanna sat up, and breathed. Once, twice, her lungs sounding clear and healthy.

“Lawstowe is a holy hill.” Aaron stood up taller. This thing had come of his family’s blood. He would make it be all right. “A holy hill touched by the blemish of the Factories for too long. And this wingéd creature, this is the blessing given to us, to protect us from the pollution of the air.”

The creature on the ground spread one feathered wing carefully, and then the other, as it tottered to its feet. As one, the villagers breathed out. “Awwww.”

“Of course.” The murmurs started again, but now they were proud. “We’re a holy place.”

“This sort of thing blesses us. We are honored.”

“Let’s see Shepachdar try to beat this.”

“Let’s see the Factories do something now..”

“We’ve got ourselves something special.”

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This story totally did not come out how I intended.

“I hear in Cardenborn, their unicorns went weird.”

Burghard Doser heard lots of things. He was the sort of man that you found in any tavern, any where in the Seven Counties, anywhere in the Five Kingdoms, anywhere in the world. He Heard Things. But unicorns going weird, that might have been something Burghard should not have heard, not that day.

The girl on his lap tensed. “Why would you say something like that, you?”

Nobody wanted the girls in the tavern to get unhappy. Shepachdar was a small village, a glorified sheep camp on a bald hill. That they had a couple woman of the sort who liked to spend time in taverns – that they had woman in the village who were not their mothers or sisters or daughters – was a luxury the little hamlet had not often seen. Nobody wanted to scare them off.

“That’s just his ale talking.” Rolf’s own ale made the answer hurried and brash, but it was an answer nonetheless. “You don’t want to listen to Burghard when he’s in his cups.”

“Oh, but I might.” Ursel was a pretty thing, young and bright. The sort of girl that might make a good wife, if she could be coaxed out of the taverns. And Rolf had just lost her off his lap. “I’ve heard of unicorns going strange before. Being born bad.”

“We don’t talk about that.” The girl on Burghard’s lap was getting very unhappy. Uncomfortable, even, an unbiased observer might notice.

“Why not, Adalinda?” Fazenia leaned forward over her ale. She had no need of a pretty wife, no need to keep difficult women in the town. “When a unicorn is second-born, everyone knows. When they are second-born wrong, everyone speaks of it. Don’t they do that where you come from?”

“Who’s to say what is wrong and what is strange?” Adalinda stood up, her skirts swishing. Burghard reached for her, but his hands were clumsy, and she was not. “Who’s to say what is simply change?”

“Change,” Fazenia pointed out, “is what brought us the Factories.”

“Evil brought us the Factories.” Ursel glared at the older woman. “And change let us live through them.”

“You weren’t there, you little stripling.”

“And neither were you.” She tossed her hair angrily, the silken curls shaking away from her forehead. “We all change.”

The tavern had frozen. Ursel’s fair forehead, normally covered in long fair hair, bore the tiniest bump of iridescent horn. A unicorn who had not been second-born. A unicorn acting as a tavern wench. A unicorn whose horn had not come in. A female unicorn.

She was aware, by this time, of their attention. She tossed her hair again, and looked around at the suddenly-more-sober crowd.

“Some of us just don’t… Change.” She offered it up nervously, looking at them all.

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My Giraffe Call is Open here! Stop in and leave a prompt!

Unicorn/Factory has a landing page here

The word went up and down the water, up and down the silver road. It was whispered, not shouted, murmured, not spoken, alluded to and never written down. Nobody wanted the factories to find out, the Town to find out, but everyone else wanted to know.

The word did go into the Towns, too – the Towns hired any number of Villagers, after all, and, perhaps most especially, the Towns employed women of an age but not an inclination to know better. Sujennia’s mother called them, into her pottage, “no better than they should be.” When it came to Cardenborn, however, the opinion was quickly coming that they were far better than expected. Sujennia and her age-mates certainly thought so.

Cardenborn, a thicket-ringed village near the lake end of a wide stream, had been home to a small family of unicorns for far longer than any other Village in the area; even before the factories had come, the most-downstream places often found themselves with water needing purifying.

They had made their deals, the same as any village. Generation after generation, they had purified their water and given their virgins to the unicorns. Nobody had really noticed – except, Sujennia guessed, unicorns from other villages, who never came too close to Cardenborn – that their unicorns weren’t quite as white. At first, the grandmothers told, the unicorns had just been a little grey. Then they’d been a little greyer, and a little less fussy about the purity of the virgins sent to them.

Sujennia’s great-auntie told of a time when, during her youth, a white unicorn had ventured near Cardenborn. “That thing, let me tell you, sniffed the air once and ran away. And there were our unicorns, laughing the whole time.”

And now? Now the black unicorns of Cardenborn were a whisper, a legend, a sneaky rumor, and every working girl in the seven counties was working their way to the thicket. Because the black unicorns would not touch maids like Sujennia and her age-mates, no. The onyx horns wanted only experienced women.

And the Villagers of Cardenborn were more than willing to pay for a few hours of working girls’ time, because it meant their maids all lived, all intact, to pass their virginity on in a more human manner.

And the waters might shimmer oddly, but they were as pure as any in the seven counties.

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