50 pages • 1 hour read
A. F. SteadmanSkandar and the Unicorn Thief
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 11-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Island Secrets
The explosion heralds the death of a sentinel near the Mirror Cliffs; the Weaver is attacking sentinels and weakening the guard between them and the Mainland, with the goal of leaving the Island. Despite Skandar’s kindness to his fellow trainees, Mitchell continues to suspect Skandar of secretly working with the Weaver to bring down the Island and all the unicorn riders.
The Mainlanders attend their first “extra” class with Instructor Joby Worsham, a unicorn rider whose unicorn died at the hands of the Executioner. His purpose is to teach the Mainlander children about life on the Island and help fill in their knowledge gaps. With the Weaver’s attacks becoming more frequent, many of the trainees want to know more about the spirit element and how the Weaver came to be. Joby reluctantly explains before redirecting the conversation back to other topics. He next reveals that the Hatchery exam is nothing more than potential riders shaking the hand of an experienced rider who can tell if they have rider potential—it’s magic and destiny, not skill. After class, Skandar and Bobby stay back to ask Joby how someone might stop the Weaver; Joby says only a spirit wielder could stop them, and spirit wielders are illegal. That night, Mitchell and Skandar argue. Mitch blames Skandar for ruining his dreams of having friends and a quartet of people he gets along with. Likewise, Skandar blames Mitch for making his life harder than it needs to be.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Mutation”
Since the Hatchlings cannot attend the Earth Festival due to their training, they all look forward to the next one on the schedule: the Fire Festival. However, the hopeful mood is smothered by the revelation that the Weaver has kidnapped a healer. The mood falls further when Amber tells Skandar that the training dome is coming down today; she knows that once this happens, Skandar won’t be able to hide his affinity so easily. At the moment, he is also using his scarf to hide his spirit wielder mutation.
Instructor Webb removes the dome, and Skandar feels the flow of spirit magic. Scoundrel’s Luck does, too, and the unicorn wants to use the magic. When Skandar fights back, Scoundrel kicks him off for trying to suppress his elemental desires. Webb tries to take Skandar to a healer, but Joby steps in; he does so to lecture Skandar about using spirit magic and emphasize that he must hide his affinity at all costs. Joby also assures Skandar that Amber won’t expose him, because she won’t want people asking questions about her own spirit wielder father. He then closes the door in Skandar’s face before the boy can ask any more questions.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Chocolate Custard”
Skandar leaves Joby’s treehouse and goes to lunch, where Mitchell asks about his status as a rider and then gets confronted by Amber. Skandar steps in to defend Mitchell and throws chocolate custard in Amber’s face, earning him some of Mitchell’s respect and further isolating him from Amber and her quartet. Flo worries that the threats and acting out will cause the instructors to declare Skandar a nomad, but none of the friends can be too bothered as they laugh at the memory of Amber’s face covered in custard.
Weeks later, Skandar writes a letter updating Kenna about the happenings on the Island as much as he can. He then encounters Jamie, the apprentice blacksmith who has chosen to make Skandar and Scoundrel’s armor for the upcoming sky battles. While Jamie gets Scoundrel’s measurements, the two discuss the common thread between all the individuals that the Weaver has kidnapped—they all are non-riders. That night, another attack occurs at Mirror Cliffs, killing three more sentinels. The Weaver gets closer to breaking through to the Mainland. Skandar sees the news about Agatha surviving and discovers that she is the Executioner and is now in the Prison. Now, he tells his friends that she is the one who brought him to the Island. Skandar decides that he must talk to her to get more information and asks Mitchell to help him break into the Prison; Mitchell agrees and suggests using the biggest distraction available—the next day’s Fire Festival.
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Fire Festival”
The morning of the Fire Festival brings the first snow of the season, and all the riders enjoy a morning playing in the snow before their water lesson. The water lesson goes well until Scoundrel once again wants to use the spirit element and resists Skandar’s attempts to suppress it. He goes on another rampage, putting Skandar and the other Hatchlings in danger. To drive home the risk of becoming a nomad, Instructor O’Sullivan takes Skandar to the tree where one-quarter of the elemental pin from every rider declared a nomad gets nailed into the tree—the other three pieces go to the remaining members of the nomad’s quartet. Skandar promises to try harder, and O’Sullivan hopes that he will, emphasizing that Skandar has more potential than he’s seen in a long time.
Skandar’s quartet makes their final arrangements for the plan to break into the prison; Bobby is now suspicious of Mitchell’s intentions, but Skandar trusts him. Passing through the crowd at the Fire Festival, Skandar and his friends see many displays of powerful elemental magic; he also sees a stranger slip a note with a familiar mark on the top to another stranger. Before he can investigate, they move toward the prison. Mitch uses his father’s emergency code to lure the guards away, and then the four use their unique elemental powers, with Skandar representing water, to unlock the prison. Once inside, Skandar finds many other spirit wielders and learns that Amber’s father has never been in prison. He then finds Agatha elsewhere; she slips him the Book of Spirit and asks him to stop the Weaver but not kill them. The quartet decides to leave before they get caught, and they leave right as a stampede of wild unicorns begins.
Chapters 11-14 Analysis
These chapters heavily explore the connection between the themes of Exploring and Expanding Family Bonds and Overcoming Ingrained Biases. Up until now, Skandar and Mitchell have had a fairly contentious relationship, for although Mitchell is not an antagonist, he also has not been a strong source of friendship because his father does not trust spirit wielders. However, Mitch finally accepts that he can trust Skandar when the young spirit wielder defends him against Amber, saying, “Lay one finger on me or Mitchell […] and I will set Scoundrel’s Luck on you. Even if it’s the last thing I do before we get kicked out of the Eyrie” (234). Skandar’s willingness to stand up to Amber and risk losing his position in the Eyrie breaks through Mitch’s biases and allows him to see what Skandar wanted to prove all along—that Skandar is a person who can be trusted. While there is a lot of work still to do, which Mitchell acknowledges when he exclaims “I’ve only been vaguely okay with this whole thing for about five minutes, so I’m sorry if it’s going to take me a little longer to get used to a spirit wielder’s actual mutation” (244-45). This emphasizes the importance of both inner and interpersonal growth. Though Mitchell finally accepts Skandar and trusts him, he still has work to do to finish overcoming the biases that his father instilled in him. Thus, it will still take him a while to fully accept Skandar as a chosen family member rather than simply echoing the views of his own father.
Chapter 14 relies heavily on foreshadowing to increase the tension of the plot. For example, during the Fire Festival, Skandar sees “the flash of a symbol: a wide arc with a black circle beneath it, cut from top to bottom with a jagged white line” (267). Though Skandar does not recognize it right away, the mark is familiar because it is the Weaver’s mark. Unknown to both the reader and Skandar, this scene foreshadows the future revelation that the people who go with the Weaver do so willingly. This early hint of subversive communication therefore implies that the Weaver kidnaps nobody; instead, they recruit people to their cause. This realization will also pave the way for deeper questions about autonomy and choice—though the individual chooses to go with the Weaver, it will remain unclear whether those decisions are fully informed. Despite the book’s designation as a middle-grade fantasy novel, Steadman works to encourage her readers to ask relevant questions of the book to start thinking about the relevance of those questions in the broader world.
The symbolic Prison makes its appearance in Chapter 14, as well. The symbolism tied to the Prison has many layers. The first layer is the way to open it, with “four chains” which “elemental magic will open” (271-72). The only way to get into the prison is to unite all four elements—conveniently, this is one of the few distinguishing features of the spirit element. A spirit wielder can use all four elements equally; the only way to get into the Prison, which holds the other spirit wielders captive, is to embody the unity of a spirit wielder. This contrasts with the earlier symbol of the Divide. Whereas the Divide’s symbolic purpose is to take a unified group and divide them based on arbitrary qualities, the Prison demands the opposite, for to open the Prison, the four divisions must unite to accomplish a greater purpose.
Finally, Steadman continues to develop the theme of The Weight of Keeping Secrets by revealing deeper layers of secrets among the higher-ranked characters on the Island. One of the biggest secrets is that Joby is a former spirit wielder who only remains in the Eyrie because he is knowledgeable about the Mainland. (This knowledge helps the Islanders train the Mainlanders.) Joby’s presence is also only tolerated because he agrees to remain separate from the rest of the riders. Even though he is an illegal spirit wielder, the Island leadership demands that he help them while keeping his secret. For this reason, he is easily angered when Skandar challenges his secrecy, and this touchy reaction foreshadows the later revelation that Joby will side with the Weaver and willingly go with them in order to pursue a new opportunity to be a unicorn rider. While this plot twist has yet to be revealed in the novel, the weight of Joby’s secret pushes him away from the Island community rather than encouraging him to be better than what people believe he is. Ultimately, his sense of separation will lead him to become the monster that many already believe him to be.
