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 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Death Element”
Mitchell explains the illegal fifth element (spirit) to Skandar and Bobby, informing them that the Silver Circle outlawed spirit wielders after the Weaver first attacked years ago. Scoundrel’s Luck has a white stripe on his forehead, which is the mark of a spirit unicorn. By extension, this makes Skandar a spirit wielder. Instead of reporting him to the authorities, however, Flo convinces Mitch to give Skandar a chance until they reach the fault lines—the place where everyone receives confirmation of their affinity element (typically earth, fire, air, or water). Though Mitch doesn’t like this plan, he agrees. They use ink that Agatha gave Skandar to cover Scoundrel’s white stripe, and the four leave the Hatchery together and join the crowd moving toward the Eyrie.
During the long walk to the Eyrie, several wild unicorns attack Flo and Mitch, who are behind the group. Skandar recklessly charges in and attracts the unicorns’ attention, and rather than attacking him, the creatures connect with him and leave without causing any harm. This concerns Mitch, but even he thanks Skandar for risking his life to save the group. Hesitantly, Flo explains that the Weaver is also able to connect with wild unicorns. It becomes clear that those in charge will view any new spirit wielders as being part of the Weaver’s plans. This information makes Skandar hope that he is anything but a spirit wielder.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Eyrie”
The new riders enter the Eyrie, the training location for all beginner riders. The narrative explains that the students go through five years of training: Hatchling, Nestling, Fledgling, Rookie, and Predator. As first years, they will focus on gaining control of their magic and strengthening their bond with their unicorns. By the fifth year, they will have enough skills to try and qualify for the Chaos Cup, unless they lose the graded competitions or fail to meet the trainers’ expectations. In that case, they would be banished from the Eyrie and declared “nomads.”
Now, once the unicorns settle into their stables, Skandar, Bobby, Flo, and Mitchell talk about the upcoming Walk—the stage of initiation in which each trainee walks the fault lines at the Divide. Doing so causes one of the four fault lines to light up, revealing the riders’ affinity element. However, the trainees know that Skandar’s walk will ignite all four fault lines at once, giving away his status as a spirit wielder. Mitch comes up with a plan to distract everyone while Skandar completes his walk; he asserts he is not helping Skandar, but he doesn’t want to owe a debt to a spirit wielder, either.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Fault Lines”
Aspen McGrath, winner of the Chaos Cup, welcomes the new riders to the Eyrie and to their first steps as unicorn riders—the Walk. While she talks to the new trainees, and they all talk about what element they believe they’ll align with, Mitchell whispers instructions to execute his plan. One by one, riders enter the Divide and separate into groups based on their elements. Bobby aligns with air, Mitchell with fire, and Flo with earth. When Skandar approaches the circle, he pauses until he hears someone shout that the Weaver stole Flo’s unicorn, Silver Blade. While everyone panics, Skandar completes his walk; all fault lines explode at once, but he chooses to walk the water elemental fault line and create the pretense that he has been aligned with water. Nobody notices his unusual Walk, and he receives his elemental pin identifying him as a water wielder. Before the wielders can go to bed, they must first choose the group of four with whom they will live—each person aligned with a different element. Bobby, Skandar, Flo, and Mitch agree to live together as they’re the only four who know Skandar’s secret.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Silver Trouble”
As training begins in earnest, Mitch continues to isolate Skandar for being different while Flo tries to keep the peace between them. When Skandar notices that Bobby is missing on their way to their first training session, he goes to look for her. He finds her in the stables having a panic attack, and he talks her through it while giving her a bag to breathe into. She’s embarrassed that someone else saw her panic attack, but he assures her that he doesn’t judge her because of it—he has seen plenty of them. However, he promises to keep her secret for her.
They join their peers who arrive for the first day of training, and the fire instructor, Instructor Anderson, introduces them to some basic principles. First, they learn that there is a protective dome limiting the magic they can do while within its bubble. The trainees are also told that they will participate in the Training Trial at the end of the year, and the bottom five competitors will be declared nomads. For the moment, however, their goal is to get a feel for how their magic works. Instructor Anderson then tells everyone to mount their unicorns. Mitch struggles, and Amber makes fun of him. Skandar steps in to defend Mitch and accidentally triggers his spirit magic; Amber notices, though she does not say anything.
The lesson continues and everyone successfully summons their first flames. However, Flo and Silver Blade become engulfed in a cyclone of fire. Flo loses control of her unicorn while simultaneously mutating—an occurrence in which an elemental wielder takes on a permanent display of their element. After the lesson, Skandar goes and writes a letter to Kenna telling her as much as he’s able to about his training and magic. Once he sends the letter, he returns to the treehouse where Flo sits anxiously. She fears that she cannot control Silver Blade and that he’ll accidentally kill her in an outburst. Before Skandar can say much, there is an explosion from outside.
Chapters 7-10 Analysis
Whereas the first set of chapters establishes Skandar’s character for the coming-of-age story, the second set of chapters establishes the secrets that Skandar carries and builds a foundation for the theme of The Weight of Keeping Secrets. Not only do Skandar’s secrets create a heavy burden for him, but they also affect his friends, for Bobby and Flo’s decision to help Skandar keep his spirit element connection a secret puts them at risk of being “locked up for assisting a spirit wielder,” which could bring about “the end of their riding careers, and probably their lives” (107). Steadman uses the issue of Skandar’s spirit magic to quickly emphasize the unpleasant reality that secrets rarely impact a single individual, for others often become drawn in and entangled in the growing web of lies. In this case, secrets can be deadly because, by agreeing to help him hide his true affinity element, Skandar’s friends are aiding an illegal spirit wielder. Upon discovery, the best-case scenario is that the Silver Circle will banish them from the Eyrie and declare them nomads. As nomads, they would have no status and no influence in the greater happenings of unicorn riders, but they would at least be able to keep their lives and their unicorns. In a worst-case scenario, their association with Skandar will cause them to share his fate if they are caught. Their predicament poses the larger question of whether secrets and lies can sometimes be justified, or whether keeping secrets inevitably compromises a good person’s ethics and integrity.
Steadman discusses the deeper complexities of the question of how keeping secrets affects an individual through Mitchell and Flo’s reactions to Skandar in Chapter 7 and his saving their lives from the wild unicorns in Chapter 8. When Mitchell wants to turn Skandar over to the authorities at once, Flo refuses to do so because “Skandar and Scoundrel’s Luck haven’t done anything to [her]” (106). Flo further solidifies her choice to aid Skandar when he saves both her and Mitchell from a wild unicorn attack. She recognizes that they “barely said a nice word to him, and he just saved [their] lives” (115). Flo and her silver unicorn therefore become symbolic of the ethical questions underlying the theme of The Weight of Keeping Secrets. While the weight of secrets can be a heavy burden to bear and can have negative effects on all parties involved, Flo’s position emphasizes that Skandar’s largest secret doesn’t make him a bad person; in fact, he has thus far proven himself to be an honorable person. Even though he keeps important secrets from those in authority, he continues to want to help rather than harm.
As the main themes continue to develop, Chapter 9 brings forward one of the primary symbols of the book—The Divide. This is the place “where the fault lines meet” and is also adorned with a golden hoop in which the trainees stand before their affinity element is revealed. Though the fault lines occur naturally, the addition of the golden hoop creates a symbolic separation of a previously united front. While they are still standing in the center of the circle, which is symbolic of the time before they begin their training, the trainees are all one—unicorn riders. Only once they ride the fault lines and accept the labels of earth, air, fire, or water do they become elemental wielders first and unicorn riders second. With the creation of the Divide, Steadman’s larger philosophical goal is to emphasize that people are more similar than they are different, and that although social divisions create artificial rifts, everyone is really united, and the divisions that create smaller groups are often arbitrary in nature. For example, individual characters sometimes assign specific characteristics to a group, such as when Flo asserts that “fairness is something a lot of earth wielders are known for” (157). Assigning labels and groups is a quick shorthand that makes people feel as though they know others without truly knowing them; this is the trap that Mitchell falls into, and the trap that Steadman implicitly warns readers to avoid. The third-person limited perspective works well for this underlying message, for because Steadman makes Skandar’s thoughts and feelings known, it is much easier for readers to see that his intentions are pure even when other characters believe him to be a threat to their way of living. The novel therefore encourages readers to judge people by their intentions rather than their classifications, even in unknown situations in the real world.
