The unicorn is a horse. That is the first thing any Kornfeld steppe-hand will tell a visitor, usually with some impatience. It stands heavier than a Feldian draft animal through the chest and shoulder, carries a coarse winter coat, and over a short distance will outrun anything bred for racing. Wild herds range the open grassland of Kornfeld and nowhere else that has been reliably recorded.
The horn
Most unicorns do not have one. Within a herd, a small number of animals develop a horn over several years — a straight, dense, spiralled growth that in a mature animal reaches roughly the length of a broadsword. Foals are not born with it. Which animals grow one appears to depend on the herd itself: remove the horned mare from a band and, some years later, another animal in that band will have started.
The comparison naturalists reach for is the beehive, where the colony decides what an individual becomes. Anselm Reuter of Kirchberg, whose survey of the steppe herds remains the standard work, argued that the trigger is something the animals exchange among themselves and that a herd will only ever carry so many. Others hold that it is diet, or age, or plain bloodline. The argument has run for a century without resolution, largely because the experiment nobody will fund requires forty years and a great many horses.
The horn is a weapon and used as one. Horned animals lead, defend the band against wolves, and settle disputes of rank. Steppe-hands treat them with the wariness they would give a bull.
Riding stock
A trained unicorn is the finest cavalry mount in Feldia and priced accordingly. The legal trade runs through licensed ranchers on the Kornfeld steppe and through Coin factors who handle the paperwork and the credit; buyers are wealthy officers of the mercenary companies, a few noble houses, and the heavy cavalry of Grenzmark. Horned animals are rarely sold as mounts. They are difficult, and the horn is worth more than the horse.
The horn trade
Legally, horn comes off animals that died — of age, of injury, of a bad winter. A lawful horn arrives at market with the rancher’s mark burned into the base and a written note of the death, and traders call this a clean horn. Anything without the mark is a dark horn, and there are a great many dark horns.
The buyers are apothecaries, cutlers, and carvers. Ground horn is sold as a cure for poison, fever and infertility, and country belief holds that a cup turned from it will sweat or crack if something foul is poured into it. Kirchberg physicians have tested this repeatedly and reported nothing at all. It has never affected the price. In the villages they also say a horned mare will not step over a grave, and that a herd will not cross ground where one of theirs was killed by men — which the steppe-hands, who spend their lives with the animals, mostly repeat as a joke and occasionally do not.
The rest of the supply comes from the horn farms. These are known to exist, hidden out on the steppe and in old byres and cellars, where animals are confined in the dark and fed by hand in an attempt to force the growth on demand. The method evidently works. What it produces is a horse that is frightened of everything and cannot be handled, and horn that buyers accept without asking a single question. Every party involved blames another for the practice, and it continues.
Something wrong on the steppe
Over the past several seasons the wild herds have not been right. Ranchers report fewer foals, bands breaking up out of season, and horned animals appearing far younger and far more often than they should. Explanations on offer include the farms bleeding stress back into the wild population, too much crossing within a shrinking range, bad water, and a sickness nobody has named. Reuter’s successors are still counting. Nobody has an answer, and the price of horn has gone up.