VIII

He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A terrible light poured from him like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another. His horns were as pale as scars.

For one moment the unicorn faced him, frozen as a wave about to break. Then the light of her horn went out, and she turned and fled. The Red Bull bellowed again, and leaped down after her.

The unicorn had never been afraid of anything. She was immortal, but she could be killed: by a harpy, by a dragon or a chimera, by a stray arrow loosed at a squirrel. But dragons could only kill her—they could never make her forget what she was, or themselves forget that even dead she would still be more beautiful than they. The Red Bull did not know her, and yet she could feel that it was herself he sought, and no white mare. Fear blew her dark then, and she ran away, while the Bull’s raging ignorance filled the sky and spilled over into the valley.

The trees lunged at her, and she veered wildly among them; she who slipped so softly through eternity without bumping into anything. Behind her they were breaking like glass in the rush of the Red Bull. He roared once again, and a great branch clubbed her on the shoulder so hard that she staggered and fell. She was up immediately, but now roots humped under her feet as she ran, and others burrowed as busily as moles to cut across the path. Vines struck at her like strangling snakes, creepers wove webs between the trees, dead boughs crashed all around her. She fell a second time. The Bull’s hoofs on the earth boomed through her bones, and she cried out.

She must have found some way out of the trees, for she was running on the hard, bald plain that lay beyond the prosperous pasture lands of Hagsgate. Now she had room to race, and a unicorn is only loping when she leaves the hunter kicking his burst and sinking horse. She moved with the speed of life, winking from one body to another or running down a sword; swifter than anything burdened with legs or wings. Yet without looking back, she knew that the Red Bull was gaining on her, coming like the moon, the sullen, swollen hunter’s moon. She could feel the shock of the livid horns in her side, as though he had already struck.

Ripe, sharp cornstalks leaned together to make a hedge at her breast, but she trampled them down. Silver wheatfields turned cold and gummy when the Bull breathed on them; they dragged at her legs like snow. Still she ran, bleating and defeated, hearing the butterfly’s icy chiming: “They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them.” He had killed them all.

Suddenly the Bull was facing her, as though he had been lifted like a chess piece, swooped through the air, and set down again to bar her way. He did not charge immediately, and she did not run. He had been huge when she first fled him, but in the pursuit he had grown so vast that she could not imagine all of him. Now he seemed to curve with the curve of the bloodshot sky, his legs like great whirlwinds, his head rolling like the northern lights. His nostrils wrinkled and rumbled as he searched for her, and the unicorn realized that the Red Bull was blind.

If he had rushed her then, she would have met him, tiny and despairing with her darkened horn, even though he stamped her to pieces. He was swifter than she; better to face him now than to be caught running. But the Bull advanced slowly, with a kind of sinister daintiness, as though he were trying not to frighten her, and again she broke before him. With low, sad cry, she whirled and ran back the way she had come: back through the tattered fields and over the plain, toward King Haggard’s castle, dark and hunched as ever. And the Red Bull went after her, following her fear.

Schmendrick and Molly had been spun away like chips when the Bull went by—Molly slammed breathless and witless against the ground, and the magician hurled into a tangle of thorns that cost him half his cloak and an eighth of his skin. They got up when they could, and went limping in pursuit, leaning on one another. Neither one said a word.

The way through the trees was easier for them than the unicorn had found it, for the Red Bull had been there since. Molly and the magician scrambled over great treetrunks not only smashed but trodden halfway into the ground, and dropped to hands and knees to crawl around crevasses they could not fathom in the dark. No hoofs could have made these, Molly thought dazedly; the earth had torn itself shrinking from the burden of the Bull. She thought of the unicorn, and her heart paled.

When they came out on the plain, they saw her—far and faint, a tuft of white water on the wind, almost invisible in the glare of the Red Bull. Molly Grue, a little crazy with weariness and fear, saw them moving the way stars and stones move through space: forever falling, forever following, forever alone. The Red Bull would never catch the unicorn, not until Now caught up with New, Bygone with Begin. Molly smiled serenely.

But the blazing shadow loomed over the unicorn until the Bull seemed to be all around her. She reared, swerved, and sprang away in another direction, only to meet the Bull there, his head lowered and his jaws drooling thunder. Again she turned, and again, backing and sidling, making crafty little dashes to this side or that; and each time the Red Bull headed her off by standing still. He did not attack, but he left her no way to go, save one.

“He’s driving her,” Schmendrick said quietly. “If he wanted to kill her, he could have done it by now. He’s driving her the way he drove the others—to the castle, to Haggard. I wonder why.”

Molly said, “Do something.” Her voice was strangely calm and casual, and the magician answered her in the same tone.

“There is nothing I can do.”

The unicorn fled once more, pitifully tireless, and the Red Bull let her have room to run, but none to turn. When she faced him for a third time, she was close enough for Molly to see her hind legs shivering like those of a frightened dog. Now she set herself to stand, pawing the ground wickedly and laying back her small, lean ears. But she could make no sound, and her horn did not grow bright again. She cowered when the Red Bull’s bellow made the sky ripple and crack, and yet she did not back away.

“Please,” Molly Grue said. “Please do something.”

Schmendrick turned on her, and his face was wild with helplessness. “What can I do? What can I do, with my magic? Hat tricks, penny tricks, or the one where I scramble stones to make an omelet? Would that entertain the Red Bull, do you think, or shall I try the trick with the singing oranges? I’ll try whatever you suggest, for I would certainly be happy to be of some practical use.”

Molly did not answer him. The Bull came on, and the unicorn crouched lower and lower, until she seemed about to snap in two. Schmendrick said, “I know what to do. If I could, I’d change her into some other creature, some beast too humble for the Bull to be concerned with. But only a great magician, a wizard like Nikos, who was my teacher, would have that kind of power. To transform a unicorn—anyone who could do that could juggle the seasons and shuffle years like playing cards. And I have no more power than you have; less, for you can touch her, and I cannot.” Then he said suddenly, “Look. It is over.”

The unicorn was standing very still before the Red Bull, her head down and her whiteness drabbled to a soapy gray. She looked gaunt and small; and even Molly, who loved her, could not keep from seeing that a unicorn is an absurd animal when the shining has gone out of her. Tail like a lion’s tail, deerlegs, goatfeet, the mane cold and fine as foam over my hand, the charred horn, the eyes—oh the eyes! Molly took hold of Schmendrick’s arm and dug her nails into it as hard as she could.

“You have magic,” she said. She heard her own voice, as deep and clear as a sibyl’s. “Maybe you can’t find it, but it’s there. You called up Robin Hood, and there is no Robin Hood, but he came, and he was real. And that is magic. You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it.”

Schmendrick regarded her in silence, staring as hard as though his green eyes were beginning the search for his magic in Molly Grue’s eyes. The Bull stepped lightly toward the unicorn, no longer pursuing, but commanding her with the weight of his presence, and she moved ahead of him, docile, obedient. He followed like a sheepdog, guiding her in the direction of King Haggard’s jagged tower and the sea.

“Oh, please!” Molly’s voice was crumbling now. “Please, it’s not fair, it can’t be happening. He’ll drive her to Haggard, and no one will ever see her again, no one. Please, you’re a magician, you won’t let him.” Her fingers struck even deeper into Schmendrick’s arm. “Do something!” She wept. “Don’t let him, do something!”

Schmendrick was prying futilely at her clenched fingers. “I’m not going to do a damn thing,” he said through his teeth, “until you let go of my arm.”

“Oh,” Molly said. “I’m sorry.”

“You can cut off the circulation like that, you know,” the magician said severely. He rubbed his arm and took a few steps forward, into the path of the Red Bull. There he stood with his arms folded and his head high, though it drooped now and then, because he was very tired.

“Maybe this time,” Molly heard him mutter, “maybe this time. Nikos said—what was it that Nikos said? I don’t remember. It has been so long.” There was an odd, old sorrow in his voice that Molly had never heard before. Then a gaiety leaped up like a flame as he said, “Well, who knows, who knows? If this is not the time, perhaps I can make it so. There’s this much of comfort, friend Schmendrick. For once, I don’t see how you can possibly make things any worse than they already are,” and he laughed softly.

The Red Bull, being blind, took no notice of the tall figure in the road until he was almost upon it. Then he halted, sniffing the air; storm stirring in his throat, but a certain confusion showing in the swing of his great head. The unicorn stopped when he stopped, and Schmendrick’s breath broke to see her so tractable. “Run!” he called to her. “Run now!” but she never looked at him, or back at the Bull, or at anything but the ground.

At the sound of Schmendrick’s voice, the Bull’s rumble grew louder and more menacing. He seemed eager to be out of the valley with the unicorn, and the magician thought he knew why. Beyond the towering brightness of the Red Bull, he could see two or three sallow stars and a cautious hint of a warmer light. Dawn was near.

“He doesn’t care for daylight,” Schmendrick said to himself. “That’s worth knowing.” Once more he shouted to the unicorn to fly, but his only answer came in the form of a roar like a drumroll. The unicorn bolted forward, and Schmendrick had to spring out of her way, or she would have run him down. Close behind her came the Bull, driving her swiftly now, as the wind drives the thin, torn mist. The power of his passage picked Schmendrick up and dropped him elsewhere, tumbling and rolling to keep from being trampled, his eyes jarred blind and his head full of flames. He thought he heard Molly Grue scream.

Scrabbling to one knee, he saw that the Red Bull had herded the unicorn almost to the beginning of the trees. If she would only try one more time to escape—but she was the Bull’s and not her own. The magician had one glimpse of her, pale and lost between the pale horns, before the wild red shoulders surged across his sight. Then, swaying and sick and beaten, he closed his eyes and let his hopelessness march through him, until something woke somewhere that had wakened in him once before. He cried aloud, for fear and joy.

What words the magic spoke this second time, he never knew surely. They left him like eagles, and he let them go; and when the last one was away, the emptiness rushed back with a thunderclap that threw him on his face. It happened as quickly as that. This time he knew before he picked himself up that the power had been and gone.

Ahead, the Red Bull was standing still, nosing at something on the ground. Schmendrick could not see the unicorn. He went forward as fast as he could, but it was Molly who first drew near enough to see what the Bull was sniffing. She put her fingers in her mouth, like a child.

At the feet of the Red Bull there lay a young girl, spilled into a very small heap of light and shadow. She was naked, and her skin was the color of snow by moonlight. Fine tangled hair, white as a waterfall, came down almost to the small of her back. Her face was hidden in her arms.

“Oh,” Molly said. “Oh, what have you done?” and, heedless of any danger, she ran to the girl and knelt beside her. The Red Bull raised his huge, blind head and swung it slowly in Schmendrick’s direction. He seemed to be waning and fading as the gray sky grew light, though he still smoldered as savagely bright as crawling lava. The magician wondered what his true size was, and his color, when he was alone.

Once more the Red Bull snuffled at the still form, stirring it with his freezing breath. Then, without a sound, he bounded away into the trees and was gone from sight in three gigantic strides. Schmendrick had a last vision of him as he gained the rim of the valley: no shape at all, but a swirling darkness, the red darkness you see when you close your eyes in pain. The horns had become the two sharpest towers of old King Haggard’s crazy castle.

Molly Grue had taken the white girl’s head onto her lap, and was whispering over and over, “What have you done?” The girl’s face, quiet in sleep and close to smiling, was the most beautiful that Schmendrick had ever seen. It hurt him and warmed him at the same time. Molly smoothed the strange hair, and Schmendrick noticed on the forehead, above and between the closed eyes, a small, raised mark, darker than the rest of the skin. It was neither a scar nor a bruise. It looked like a flower.

“What do you mean, what have I done?” he demanded of the moaning Molly. “Only saved her from the Bull by magic, that’s what I’ve done. By magic, woman, by my own true magic!” Now he was helpless with delight, for he wanted to dance and he wanted to be still; he shook with shouting and speeches, and yet there was nothing that he wanted to say. He ended by laughing foolishly, hugging himself until he gasped, and sprawling down beside Molly as his legs let go.

“Give me your cloak,” Molly said. The magician beamed at her, blinking. She reached over and ungently pulled the shredded cloak from his shoulders. Then she wrapped it around the sleeping girl, as much as it would wrap. The girl shone through it like the sun through leaves.

“Doubtless you are wondering how I plan to return her to her proper shape,” Schmendrick offered. “Wonder not. The power will come to me when I need it—I know that much now. One day it will come when I call, but that time is not yet.” Impulsively he seized Molly Grue, hugging her head in his long arms. “But you were right,” he cried, “you were right! It is there, and it is mine!”

Molly pulled away from him, one cheek roughed red and both ears mashed. The girl sighed in her lap, ceased to smile, turned her face from the sunrise. Molly said, “Schmendrick, you poor man, you magician, don’t you see—“

“See what? There’s nothing to see.” But his voice was suddenly hard and wary, and the green eyes were beginning to be frightened. “The Red Bull came for a unicorn, so she had to become something else. You begged me to change her—what is it frets you now?”

Molly shook her head in the wavering way of an old woman. She said, “I didn’t know you meant to turn her into a human girl. You would have done better—“ She did not finish, but looked away from him. One hand continued to stroke the white girl’s hair.

“The magic chose the shape, not I,” Schmendrick answered. “A mountebank may select this cheat or that, but a magician is a porter, a donkey carrying his master where he must. The magician calls, but the magic chooses. If it changes a unicorn to a human being, then that was the only thing to do.” His face was fevered with an ardent delirium which made him look even younger. “I am a bearer,” he sang. “I am a dwelling, I am a messenger—“

“You are an idiot,” Molly Grue said fiercely. “Do you hear me? You’re a magician, all right, but you’re a stupid magician.” But the girl was trying to wake, her hands opening and closing, and her eyelids beating like birds’ breasts. As Molly and Schmendrick looked on, the girl made a soft sound and opened her eyes.

They were farther apart than common, and somewhat deeper set, and they were as dark as the deep sea; and illuminated, like the sea, by strange, glimmering creatures that never rise to the surface. The unicorn could have been transformed into a lizard, Molly thought, or into a shark, a snail, a goose, and somehow still her eyes would have given the change away. To me, anyway. I would know.

The girl lay without moving, her eyes finding herself in Molly’s eyes, and in Schmendrick’s. Then, in one motion, she was on her feet, the black cloak falling back across Molly’s lap. For a moment she turned in a circle, staring at her hands, which she held high and useless, close to her breast. She bobbed and shambled like an ape doing a trick, and her face was the silly, bewildered face of a joker’s victim. And yet she could make no move that was not beautifuL Her trapped terror was more lovely than any joy that Molly had ever seen, and that was the most terrible thing about it.

“Donkey,” Molly said. “Messenger.”

“I can change her back,” the magician answered hoarsely. “Don’t worry about it. I can change her back.”

Shining in the sun, the white girl hobbled to and fro on her strong young legs. She stumbled suddenly and fell, and it was a bad fall because she did not know how to catch herself with her hands. Molly flew to her, but the girl crouched on the ground staring at her, and spoke in a low voice. “_What have you done to me?_” Molly Grue began to cry.

Schmendrick came forward, his face cold and wet, but his voice level. “I turned you into a human being to save you from the Red Bull. There was nothing else I could do. I will turn you to yourself again, as soon as I can.”

“The Red Bull,” the girl whispered. “Ah!” She was trembling wildly, as though something were shaking and hammering at her skin from within. “He was too strong,” she said, “too strong. There was no end to his strength, and no beginning. He is older than I.”

Her eyes widened, and it seemed to Molly that the Bull moved in them, crossing their depths like a flaming fish, and vanishing. The girl began to touch her face timidly, recoiling from the feel of her own features. Her curled fingers brushed the mark on her forehead, and she closed her eyes and gave a thin, stabbing howl of loss and weariness and utter despair.

“What have you done to me?” she cried. “I will die here!” She tore at the smooth body, and blood followed her fingers. “I will die here! I will die!” Yet there was no fear in her face, though it ramped in her voice, in her hands and feet, in the white hair that fell down over her new body. Her face remained quiet and untroubled.

Molly huddled over her, as near as she dared, begging her not to hurt herself. But Schmendrick said, “Be still,” and the two words cracked like autumn branches. He said, “The magic knew what it was doing. Be still and listen.”

“Why did you not let the Bull kill me?” The white girl moaned. “Why did you not leave me to the harpy? That would have been kinder than closing me in this cage.” The magician winced, remembering Molly Grue’s mocking accusation, but he spoke with a desperate calmness.

“In the first place, it’s quite an attractive shape,” he said. “You couldn’t have done much better and still remained human.”

She looked at herself: sideways at her shoulders and along her arms, then down her scratched and welting body. She stood on one foot to inspect the sole of the other; cocked her eyes up to see the silver brows, squinted down her cheeks to catch a flash of her nose; and even peered closely at the sea-green veins inside her wrists, themselves as gaily made as young otters. At last she turned her face to the magician, and again he caught his breath. I have made magic, he thought, but sorrow winked sharp in his throat, like a fishhook setting fast.

“All right,” he said. “It would make no difference to you if I had changed you into a rhinoceros, which is where the whole silly myth got started. But in this guise you have some chance of reaching King Haggard and finding out what has become of your people. As a unicorn, you would only suffer their fate—unless you think you could defeat the Bull if you met him a second time.”

The white girl shook her head. “No,” she answered, “never. Another time, I would not stand so long.” Her voice was too soft, as though its bones had been broken. She said, “My people are gone, and I will follow them soon, whatever shape you trap me in. But I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.”

“No, it never thinks that,” the magician agreed. “That’s why it goes on being a rhinoceros and will never be welcome even at Haggard’s court. But a young girl, a girl to whom it can never mean anything that she is not a rhinoceros—such a girl, while the king and his son seek to solve her, might unravel her own riddle until she comes to its end. Rhinoceri are not questing beasts, but young girls are.”

The sky was hot and curdled; the sun had already melted into a lion-colored puddle; and on the plain of Hagsgate nothing stirred but the stale, heavy wind. The naked girl with the flower-mark on her forehead stared silently at the green-eyed man, and the woman watched them both. In the tawny morning, King Haggard’s castle seemed neither dark nor accursed, but merely grimy, rundown, and poorly designed. Its skinny spires looked nothing like a bull’s horns, but rather like those on a jester’s cap. Or like the horns of a dilemma, Schmendrick thought. They never have just two.

The white girl said, “I am myself still. This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?” Molly Grue put the magician’s cloak around her shoulders again, not for modesty or seemliness, but out of a strange pity, as though to keep her from seeing herself.

“I will tell you a story,” Schmendrick said. “As a child I was apprenticed to the mightiest magician of all, the great Nikos, whom I have spoken of before. But even Nikos, who could turn cats into cattle, snowflakes into snowdrops, and unicorns into men, could not change me into so much as a carnival cardsharp. At last he said to me, ‘My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known. Unfortunately, it seems to be working backward at the moment, and even I can find no way to set it right. It must be that you are meant to find your own way to reach your power in time; but frankly, you should live so long as that will take you. Therefore I grant it that you shall not age from this day forth, but will travel the world round and round, eternally inefficient, until at last you come to yourself and know what you are. Don’t thank me. I tremble at your doom.’”

The white girl regarded him out of the unicorn’s clear, amaranthine eyes—gentle and frightening in the unused face—but she said nothing. It was Molly Grue who asked, “And if you should find your magic—what then?”

“Then the spell will be broken and I will begin to die, as I began at my birth. Even the greatest wizards grow old, like other men, and die.” He swayed and nodded, and then snapped awake again: a tall, thin, shabby man, smelling of dust and drink. “I told you that I was older than I look,” he said. “I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful—more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?”

“No,” she said.

The magician smiled wearily. “You will. You’re in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no. If you want to find your people, if you want to become a unicorn again, then you must follow the fairy tale to King Haggard’s castle, and wherever else it chooses to take you. The story cannot end without the princess.”

The white girl said, “I will not go.” She stepped away, her body wary and the cold hair falling down. She said, “I am no princess, no mortal, and I will not go. Nothing but evil has happened to me since I left my forest, and nothing but evil can have become of unicorns in this country. Give me my true shape again, and I will return to my trees, to my pool, to my own place. Your tale has no power over me. I am a unicorn. I am the last unicorn.”

Had she said that once before, long ago, in the blue-green silence of the trees? Schmendrick continued to smile, but Molly Grue said, “Change her back. You said you could change her. Let her go home.”

“I cannot,” the magician answered. “I told you, the magic is not mine to command, not yet. That is why I too must go on to the castle, and the fate or fortune that waits there. If I tried to undo the transformation now, I might actually turn her into a rhinoceros. That would be the best thing that could happen. As for the worst—“ He shivered and fell silent.

The girl turned from them and looked away at the castle that stooped over the valley. She could see no movement at any window or among the tottering turrets, or any sign of the Red Bull. Yet she knew that he was there, brooding at the castle’s roots till night should fall again: strong beyond strength, invincible as the night itself. For a second time she touched the place on her forehead where her horn had been.

When she turned again, they were asleep where they sat, the man and the woman. Their heads were pillowed on air, and their mouths hung open. She stood by them, watching them breathe, one hand holding the black cloak closed at her throat. Very faintly, for the first time, the smell of the sea came to her.

IX

The sentinels saw them coming a little before sunset, when the sea was flat and blinding. The sentinels were pacing the second tallest of the many wry towers that sprouted up from the castle and made it resemble one of those odd trees that grow with their roots in the air. From where they stood, the two men could survey the entire valley of Hagsgate as far as the town and the sharp hills beyond, as well as the road that ran from the rim of the valley to the great, though sagging, front gate of King Haggard’s castle.

“A man and two women,” said the first sentinel. He hurried to the far side of the tower; a stomach-startling motion, since the tower tilted so that half of the sentinels’ sky was sea. The castle sat on the edge of a cliff which dropped like a knife blade to a thin yellow shore, frayed bare over green and black rocks. Soft, baggy birds squatted on the rocks, snickering, “saidso, saidso.”

The second man followed his comrade across the tower at an easier pace. He said, “A man and a woman. The third one, in the cloak—I am not certain of the third.” Both men were clad in homemade mail—rings, bottlecaps, and links of chain sewn onto half-cured hides—and their faces were invisible behind rusted visors, but the second sentinel’s voice and gait alike marked him as the elder. “The one in the black cloak,” he said again. “Do not be too sure of that one too soon.”

But the first sentinel leaned out into the orange glare of the tipped-up sea, scraping a few studs loose from his poor armor on the parapet. “It is a woman,” he declared. “I would doubt my own sex before hers.”

“And well you may,” the other observed sardonically, “since you do nothing that becomes a man but ride astraddle. I warn you again: be slow to call that third male or female. Wait a little, and see what you see.”

The first sentinel answered him without turning. “If I had grown up never dreaming that there were two separate secrets to the world, if I had taken every woman I met to be exactly like myself, still I would know that this creature was different from anything I had ever seen before. I have always been sorry that I have never pleased you; but now, when I look at her, I am sorry that I have never pleased myself. Oh, I am sorry.”

He bent still further over the wall, straining his eyes toward the three slow figures on the road. A chuckle clattered behind his visor. “The other woman looks sore-footed and bad-tempered,” he reported. “The man appears an amiable sort, though plainly of the strolling life. A minstrel, like enough, or a player.” He said nothing more for a long while, watching them draw near.

“And the third?” the older man inquired presently. “Your sundown fancy with the interesting hair? Have you outworn her in a quarter of an hour—already seen her closer than love dares?” His voice rustled in his helmet like small, clawed feet.

“I don’t think I could ever see her closely,” the sentinel replied, “however close she came.” His own voice was hushed and regretful, echoing with lost chances. “She has a newness,” he said. “Everything is for the first time. See how she moves, how she walks, how she turns her head—all for the first time, the first time anyone has ever done these things. See how she draws her breath and lets it go again, as though no one else in the world knew that air was good. It is all for her. If I learned that she had been born this very morning, I would only be surprised that she was so old.”

The second sentinel stared down from his tower at the three wanderers. The tall man saw him first, and next the dour woman. Their eyes reflected nothing but his armor, grim and cankered and empty. But then the girl in the ruined black cloak raised her head, and he stepped back from the parapet, putting out one tin glove against her glance. In a moment she passed into the shadow of the castle with her companions, and he lowered his hand.

“She may be mad,” he said calmly. “No grown girl looks like that unless she is mad. That would be annoying, but far preferable to the remaining possibility.”

“Which is?” the younger man prompted after a silence.

“Which is that she was indeed born this morning. I would rather that she were mad. Let us go down now.”

When the man and the women reached the castle, the two sentries were standing on either side of the gate, their blunt, bent halberds crossed and their falchions hitched round in front of them. The sun had gone down, and their absurd armor grew steadily more menacing as the sea faded. The travelers hesitated, looking at one another. They had no dark castle at their backs, and their eyes were not hidden.

“Give your names,” said the parched voice of the second sentinel.

The tall man stepped a pace forward. “I am Schmendrick the Magician,” he said. “This is Molly Grue, my helper—and this is the Lady Amalthea.” He stumbled over the name of the white girl, as though he had never before spoken it. “We seek audience with King Haggard,” he continued. “We have come a long way to see him.”

The second sentinel waited for the first to speak, but the younger man was looking only at the Lady Amalthea. Impatiently he said, “State your business with King Haggard.”

“I will,” the magician replied, “to Haggard himself. What kind of royal matter could it be that I might confide to doormen and porters? Take us to the king.”

“What kind of royal matter could a wandering wizard with a foolish tongue have to discuss with King Haggard?” the second sentinel asked somberly. But he turned and strode through the castle gate, and the king’s visitors straggled after him. Last wandered the younger sentinel, his step grown as tender as that of the Lady Amalthea, whose every movement he imitated unaware. She stayed a moment before the gate, looking out to sea, and the sentinel did the same.

His former comrade called angrily to him, but the young sentry was on a different duty, answerable to a new captain for his derelictions. He entered at the gate only after the Lady Amalthea had chosen to go in. Then he followed, singing to himself in a dreamy drone.

“What is it that is happening to me?

What is it that is happening to me?

I cannot tell whether to be glad or be afraid.

What is it that is happening to me?”

They crossed a cobbled courtyard where cold laundry groped their faces, and passed through a smaller door into a hall so vast that they could not see the walls or the ceiling in the darkness. Great stone pillars rushed up to them as they trudged across the hall, and then leaned away without ever really letting themselves be seen. Breath echoed in that huge place, and the footsteps of other, smaller creatures sounded just as clearly as their own. Molly Grue stayed quite close to Schmendrick.

After the great hall, there came another door and then a thin stair. There were few windows, and no lights. The stair coiled tighter and tighter as it ascended, until it seemed that every step turned round on itself, and that the tower was closing on them all like a sweaty fist. The darkness looked at them and touched them. It had a rainy, doggy smell.

Something rumbled somewhere deep and near. The tower trembled like a ship run aground, and answered with a low, stone wail. The three travelers cried out, scrambling to keep their feet on the shuddering stairs, but their guide pressed on without faltering or speaking. The younger man whispered earnestly to the Lady Amalthea, “It’s all right, don’t be afraid. It’s just the Bull.” The sound was not repeated.

The second sentinel halted abruptly, produced a key from a secret place, and jabbed it—apparently—straight into the blank wall. A section of the wall swung inward, and the small procession filed into a low, narrow chamber with one window and a chair at the far end. There was nothing else: no other furnishings, no rug, no draperies, no tapestries. In the room were five people, the tall chair, and the mealy light of the rising new moon.

“This is King Haggard’s throne room,” said the sentinel.

The magician gripped him by his mailed elbow and turned him until they faced each other. “This is a cell. This is a tomb. No living king sits here. Take us to Haggard, if he is alive.”

“You must judge that for yourself,” replied the scurrying voice of the sentinel. He unlaced his helmet and lifted it from his gray head. “I am King Haggard,” he said.

His eyes were the same color as the horns of the Red Bull. He was taller than Schmendrick, and though his face was bitterly lined there was nothing fond or foolish in it. It was a pike’s face: the jaws long and cold, the cheeks hard, the lean neck alive with power. He might have been seventy years old, or eighty, or more.

The first sentinel came forward now with his own helmet under his arm. Molly Grue gasped when she saw his face, for it was the friendly, rumpled face of the young prince who had read a magazine while his princess tried to call a unicorn. King Haggard said, “This is Lír.”

“Hi,” said Prince Lír. “Glad to meet you.” His smile wriggled at their feet like a hopeful puppy, but his eyes—a deep, shadowy blue behind stubby lashes—rested quietly on the eyes of the Lady Amalthea. She looked back at him, silent as a jewel, seeing him no more truly than men see unicorns. But the prince felt strangely, happily certain that she had looked him round and through, and down into caverns that he had never known were there, where her glance echoed and sang. Prodigies began to waken somewhere southwest of his twelfth rib, and he himself—still mirroring the Lady Amalthea—began to shine.

“What is your concern with me?”

Schmendrick the Magician cleared his throat and bowed to the pale-eyed old man. “We seek to enter your service. Far and wide has the fabled court of King Haggard—“

“I need no servants.” The king turned away, his face and body suddenly slack with indifference. Yet Schmendrick sensed a curiosity lingering in the stone-colored skin and at the roots of the gray hair. He said cautiously, “But surely you keep some suite, some following. Simplicity is the richest adornment of a king, I grant you, but for such a king as Haggard—“

“You are losing my interest,” the rustling voice interrupted him again, “and that is very dangerous. In a moment I will have forgotten you quite entirely, and will never be able to remember just what I did with you. What I forget not only ceases to exist, but never really existed in the first place.” As he said this, his eyes, like those of his son, turned to meet the Lady Amalthea’s eyes.

“My court,” he continued, “since you choose to call it that, consists of four men-at-arms. I would do without them if I could, for they cost more than they are worth, like everything else. But they take their turns as sentries, and as cooks, and they give the appearance of an army, from a distance. ‘What other attendants should I need?”

“But the pleasures of court,” the magician cried, “the music, the talk, the women and the fountains, the hunts and the masques and the great feasts—“

“They are nothing to me,” King Haggard said. “I have known them all, and they have not made me happy. I will keep nothing near me that does not make me happy.”

The Lady Amalthea moved quietly past him to the window, and looked out at the night sea.

Schmendrick came about to catch the wind again, and declared, “I understand you perfectly! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to you all the uses of this world! You are bored with bliss, satiated with sensation, jaded with jejune joys. It is a king’s affliction, and therefore no one wants the services of a magician more than a king does. For only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power. To a magician, March is May, snow is green, and grass is gray; this is that, or whatever you say. Get a magician today!”

He finished on one knee with both arms flung wide. King Haggard stepped nervously away from him, muttering, “Get up, get up, you make my head hurt. Besides, I already have a royal magician.”

Schmendrick rose heavily to his feet, his face red and empty. “You never said. What is his name?”

“He is called Mabruk,” King Haggard replied. “I do not often speak of him. Even my men-at-arms do not know that he lives here in the castle. Mabruk is all that you have said a wizard should be, and much more that I doubt you dream of. He is known in his trade as ‘the magician’s magician.’ I can see no reason to replace him with some vagrant, nameless, clownish—“

“Ah, but I can!” Schmendrick broke in desperately. “I can think of one reason, uttered by you yourself not a minute since. This marvelous Mabruk does not make you happy.”

Over the king’s fierce face there fell a slow shadow of disappointment and betrayal. For a breath, he looked like a bewildered young man. “Why no, that is true,” King Haggard murmured. “Mabruk’s magic has not delighted me for a long time. How long has it been, I wonder?” He clapped his hands briskly, crying out, “Mabruk! Mabruk! Appear, Mabruk!”

“I am here,” said a deep voice from a far corner of the room. An old man in a dark, spangled gown and a pointed, spangled hat was standing there, and no one could say surely that he had not been standing there in plain sight since they entered the throne room. His beard and brows were white, and the cast of his face was mild and wise, but his eyes were as hard as hailstones. “What does Your Majesty wish of me?”

“Mabruk,” King Haggard said, “this gentleman is of your fraternity. His name is Schmendrick.”

The old wizard’s icy eyes widened slightly, and he peered at the shabby man. “Why, so it is!” he exclaimed in seeming pleasure. “Schmendrick, my dear boy, how nice to see you! You won’t remember me, but I was a dear, dear friend of your tutor, dear old Nikos. He had such high hopes for you, the poor man. Well, well, this is a surprise! And are you really still in the profession? My, you’re a determined fellow! I always say perseverance is nine-tenths of any art—not that it’s much help to be nine-tenths an artist, of course. But what can it be that brings you here?”

“He has come to take your place.” King Haggard’s voice was flat and final. “He is now my royal magician.”

Schmendrick’s start of amazement was not lost on old Mabruk, though the wizard himself seemed little surprised by the king’s decision. For a moment he obviously considered the worth of wrath, but instead he chose a tone of genial amusement. “As Your Majesty wills it, now and always,” he purred. “But perhaps Your Majesty might be interested in learning a bit of the history of his new magician. I’m sure dear Schmendrick won’t mind my mentioning that he is already something of a legend in the trade. Indeed, among adepts, he is best remembered as ‘Nikos’s Folly.’ His charming and complete inability to master the simplest rune; his creative way with the most childish rhyme of theurgy, let alone—“

King Haggard made a thin motion with the edge of one hand, and Mabruk was suddenly silent. Prince Lír giggled. The king said, “I do not need to be persuaded of his unfitness for the position. A single glance at him tells me that, as a glance makes it plain that you are one of the great wizards of the world.” Mabruk swelled gently, fondling his glorious beard and wrinkling his benign brow.

“But that also is nothing to me,” King Haggard went on. “In the past, you have performed whatever miracle I required of you, and all it has done has been to spoil my taste for miracles. No task is too vast for your powers—and yet, when the wonder is achieved, nothing has changed. It must be that great power cannot give me whatever it is that I really want. A master magician has not made me happy. I will see what an incompetent one can do. You may go, Mabruk.” He nodded his head to dismiss the old wizard.

Mabruk’s semblance of affability vanished like a spark on snow, and with the same sound. His whole face became like his eyes. “I am not packed off as easily as that,” he said very softly. “Not on a whim, even a king’s whim, and not in favor of a fool. Beware, Haggard! Mabruk is no one to anger lightly.”

A wind began to rise in the dark chamber. It came as much from one place as another—through the window, through the half-open door—but its true source was the clenched figure of the wizard. The wind was cold and rank, a wet, hooty marsh wind, and it leaped here and there in the room like a gleeful animal discovering the flimsiness of human beings. Molly Grue shrank against Schmendrick, who looked uncomfortable. Prince Lír fidgeted his sword in and out of its sheath.

Even King Haggard gave back a step before the triumphant grin of old Mabruk. The walls of the room seemed to thaw and run away, and the wizard’s starry gown became the huge, howling night. Mabruk spoke no word himself, but the wind was beginning to make a wicked, grunting sound as it gained strength. In another moment it would become visible, burst into shape. Schmendrick opened his mouth, but if he were shouting a counterspell it could not be heard, and it did not work.

In the darkness, Molly Grue saw the Lady Amalthea turning far away, stretching out a hand on which the ring and middle fingers were of equal length. The strange place on her forehead was glowing as bright as a flower.

Then the wind was gone as though it had never been, and the stone walls were around them once more, the dull chamber as gay as noon after Mabruk’s night. The wizard was crouched almost to the floor, staring at the Lady Amalthea. His wise, benevolent face looked like the face of a drowned man, and his beard dripped thinly from his chin, like stagnant water. Prince Lír took him by the arm.

“Come on, old man,” he said, not unkindly. “This way out, granddad. I’ll write you a reference.”

“I am going,” Mabruk said. “Not from fear of you—you lump of stale dough—nor of your mad, ungrateful father; nor of your new magician, much happiness may you have of him.” His eyes met King Haggard’s hungry eyes, and he laughed like a goat.

“Haggard, I would not be you for all the world,” he declared. “You have let your doom in by the front door, though it will not depart that way. I would explain myself more fully, but I am no longer in your service. That is a pity, for there will come a time when none but a master will be able to save you—and in that hour, you will have Schmendrick to call upon! Farewell, poor Haggard, farewell!”

Still laughing, he disappeared; but his mirth dwelled forever in the corners of that chamber, like the smell of smoke, or of old, cold dust.

“Well,” said King Haggard in the gray moonlight. “Well.” He came slowly toward Schmendrick and Molly, his feet silent, his head weaving almost playfully. “Stand still,” he commanded when they moved. “I want to see your faces.”

His breath rasped like a knife on a grindstone as he peered from one of them to the other. “Closer!” he grumbled, squinting through the dark. “Come closer—closer! I want to see you.”

“Light a light then,” said Molly Grue. The calmness of her own voice frightened her more than the fury of the old wizard had. It is easy to be brave for her sake, she thought, but if I begin being brave on my own account, where will it end?

“I never light lights,” the king replied. “What is the good of light?”

He turned from them, muttering to himself, “One face is almost guileless, almost foolish, but not quite foolish enough. The other is a face like my face, and that must mean danger. Yet I saw all that at the gate—why did I let them enter, then? Mabruk was right; I have grown old and daft and easy. Still, I see only Haggard when I look in their eyes.”

Prince Lír stirred nervously as the king paced across the throne room toward the Lady Amalthea. She was again gazing out of the window, and King Haggard had drawn very near before she wheeled swiftly, lowering her head in a curious manner. “I will not touch you,” he said, and she stood still.

“Why do you linger at the window?” he demanded. “What are you looking at?”

“I am looking at the sea,” said the Lady Amalthea. Her voice was low and tremorous; not with fear, but with life, as a new butterfly shivers in the sun.

“Ah,” said the king. “Yes, the sea is always good. There is nothing that I can look at for very long, except the sea.” Yet he stared at the Lady Amalthea’s face for a long time, his own face giving back none of her light—as Prince Lír’s had—but taking it in and keeping it somewhere. His breath was as musty as the wizard’s wind, but the Lady Amalthea never moved.

Suddenly he shouted, “What is the matter with your eyes? They are full of green leaves, crowded with trees and streams and small animals. Where am I? Why can I not see myself in your eyes?”

The Lady Amalthea did not answer him. King Haggard swung around to face Schmendrick and Molly. His scimitar smile laid its cold edge along their throats. “Who is she?” he demanded.

Schmendrick coughed several times. “The Lady Amalthea is my niece,” he offered. “I am her only living relative, and so her guardian. No doubt the state of her attire puzzles you, but it is easily explained. On our journey, we were attacked by bandits and robbed of all our—“

“What nonsense are you jabbering? What about her attire?” The king turned again to regard the white girl, and Schmendrick suddenly understood that neither King Haggard nor his son had noticed that she was naked under the rags of his cloak. The Lady Amalthea held herself so gracefully that she made shreds and tatters seem the only fitting dress for a princess; and besides, she did not know that she was naked. It was the armored king who seemed bare before her.

King Haggard said, “What she wears, what may have befallen you, what you all are to one another—these things are fortunately no concern of mine. In such matters you may lie to me as much as you dare. I want to know who she is. I want to know how she broke Mabruk’s magic without saying a word. I want to know why there are green leaves and fox cubs in her eyes. Speak quickly, and avoid the temptation to lie, especially about the green leaves. Answer me.”

Schmendrick did not reply quickly. He made a few small sounds of an earnest nature, but not a sensible word was among them. Molly Grue gathered her courage to answer, even though she suspected that it was impossible to speak the truth to King Haggard. Something in his winter presence blighted all words, tangled meanings, and bent honest intentions into shapes as tormented as the towers of his castle. Still she would have spoken, but another voice was heard in the gloomy chamber: the light, kind, silly voice of the young Prince Lír.

“Father, what difference does it make? She is here now.”

King Haggard sighed. It was not a gentle sound, but low and scraping; not a sound of surrender, but the rumbling meditation of a tiger taut to spring. “Of course you are right,” he said. “She is here, they are all here, and whether they mean my doom or not, I will look at them for a while. A pleasant air of disaster attends them. Perhaps that is what I want.”

To Schmendrick he said curtly, “As my magician, you will entertain me when I wish to be entertained, in manners variously profound and frivolous. You will be expected to know when you are required, and in what guise, for I cannot be forever identifying my moods and desires for your benefit. You will receive no wages, since that is certainly not what you came here for. As for your drab, your assistant, whatever you choose to call her, she will serve me also if she wishes to remain in my castle. From this evening, she is cook and maidservant together, scrubwoman and scullery maid as well.”

He paused, seemingly waiting for Molly to protest, but she only nodded. The moon had moved away from the window, but Prince Lír could see that the dark room was no darker for that. The cool brightness of the Lady Amalthea grew more slowly than had Mabruk’s wind, but the prince understood quite well that it was far more dangerous. He wanted to write poems by that light, and he had never wanted to write poems before.

“You may come and go as you please,” said King Haggard to the Lady Amalthea. “It may have been foolish of me to admit you, but I am not so foolish as to forbid you this door or that. My secrets guard themselves—will yours do the same? What are you looking at?”

“I am looking at the sea,” the Lady Amalthea replied again.

“Yes, the sea is always good,” said the king. “We will look at it together one day.” He walked slowly to the door. “It will be curious,” he said, “to have a creature in the castle whose presence causes Lír to call me ‘father’ for the first time since he was five years old.”

“Six,” said Prince Lír. “I was six.”

“Five or six,” the king said, “it had stopped making me happy long before, and it does not make me happy now. Nothing has yet changed because she is here.” He was gone almost as silently as Mabruk, and they heard his tin boots ticking on the stairs.

Molly Grue went softly to the Lady Amalthea and stood by her at the window. “What is it?” she asked. “What do you see?” Schmendrick leaned on the throne, regarding Prince Lír with his long green eyes. Away in the valley of Hagsgate, the cold roar sounded again.

“I will find quarters for you,” said Prince Lír. “Are you hungry? I will get you something to eat. I know where there is some cloth, fine satin. You could make a dress.”

No one answered him. The heavy night swallowed his words, and it seemed to him that the Lady Amalthea neither heard nor saw him. She did not move, and yet he was certain that she was going away from him as he stood there, like the moon. “Let me help you,” Prince Lír said. “What can I do for you? Let me help you.”

X

“What can I do for you?” Prince Lír asked. “Nothing very much just now,” Molly Grue said. “The water was all I needed. Unless you want to peel the potatoes, which would be all right with me.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I mean yes, I will if you want me to, but I was talking to her. I mean, when I talk to her, that’s what I keep asking.”

“Sit down and peel me a few potatoes,” Molly said. “It’ll give you something to do with your hands.”

They were in the scullery, a dank little room smelling strongly of rotting turnips and fermenting beets. A dozen earthenware dishes were piled in one corner, and a very small fire was shivering under a tripod, trying to boil a large pot of gray water. Molly sat at a rude table which was covered with potatoes, leeks, onions, peppers, carrots, and other vegetables, most of them limp and spotty. Prince Lír stood before her, rocking slowly along his feet and twisting his big, soft fingers together.

“I killed another dragon this morning,” he said presently.

“That’s nice,” Molly answered. “That’s fine. How many does that make now?”

“Five. This one was smaller than the others, but it really gave me more trouble. I couldn’t get near it on foot, so I had to go in with the lance, and my horse got pretty badly burned. It was funny about the horse—“

Molly interrupted him. “Sit down, Your Highness, and stop doing that. I start to twitch all over just watching you.” Prince Lír sat down opposite her. He drew a dagger from his belt and moodily began peeling potatoes. Molly regarded him with a slight, slow smile.

“I brought her the head,” he said. “She was in her chamber, as she usually is. I dragged that head all the way up the stairs to lay it at her feet.” He sighed, and nicked his finger with the dagger. “Damn. I didn’t mind that. All the way up the stairs it was a dragon’s head, the proudest gift anyone can give anyone. But when she looked at it, suddenly it became a sad, battered mess of scales and horns, gristly tongue, bloody eyes. I felt like some country butcher who had brought his lass a nice chunk of fresh meat as a token of his love. And then she looked at me, and I was sorry I had killed the thing. Sorry for killing a dragon!” He slashed at a rubbery potato and wounded himself again.

“Cut away from yourself, not toward,” Molly advised him. “You know, I really think you could stop slaying dragons for the Lady Amalthea. If five of them haven’t moved her, one more isn’t likely to do it. Try something else.”

“But what’s left on earth that I haven’t tried?” Prince Lír demanded. “I have swum four rivers, each in full flood and none less than a mile wide. I have climbed seven mountains never before climbed, slept three nights in the Marsh of the Hanged Men, and walked alive out of that forest where the flowers burn your eyes and the nightingales sing poison. I have ended my betrothal to the princess I had agreed to marry—and if you don’t think that was a heroic deed, you don’t know her mother. I have vanquished exactly fifteen black knights waiting by fifteen fords in their black pavilions, challenging all who come to cross. And I’ve long since lost count of the witches in the thorny woods, the giants, the demons disguised as damsels; the glass hills, fatal riddles, and terrible tasks; the magic apples, rings, lamps, potions, swords, cloaks, boots, neckties, and nightcaps. Not to mention the winged horses, the basilisks and sea serpents, and all the rest of the livestock.” He raised his head, and the dark blue eyes were confused and sad.

“And all for nothing,” he said. “I cannot touch her, whatever I do. For her sake, I have become a hero—I, sleepy Lír, my father’s sport and shame—but I might just as well have remained the dull fool I was. My great deeds mean nothing to her.”

Molly took up her own knife and began to slice the peppers. “Then perhaps the Lady Amalthea is not to be won by great deeds.” The prince stared at her, frowning in puzzlement.

“Is there another way to win a maiden?” he asked earnestly. “Molly, do you know another way? Will you tell it to me?” He leaned across the table to seize her hand. “I like being brave well enough, but I will be a lazy coward again if you think that would be better. The sight of her makes me want to do battle with all evil and ugliness, but it also makes me want to sit still and be unhappy. What should I do, Molly?”

“I don’t know,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “Kindness, courtesy, good works, that sort of thing. A good sense of humor.” A small copper-and-ashes cat with a crooked ear jumped into her lap, purring thunderously and leaning against her hand. Hoping to change the subject, she asked, “What about your horse? What was funny?”

But Prince Lír was staring at the little cat with the crooked ear. “Where did he come from? Is he yours?”

“No,” Molly said. “I just feed him, and hold him sometimes.” She stroked the cat’s thin throat, and it closed its eyes. “I thought he lived here.”

The prince shook his head. “My father hates cats. He says that there is no such thing as a cat—it is just a shape that all manner of imps, hobs, and devilkins like to put on, to gain easy entrance into the homes of men. He would kill it if he knew you had it here.”

“What about the horse?” Molly asked.

Prince Lír’s face grew glum again. “That was strange. When she took no delight in the gift itself, I thought she might be interested to hear how it was won. So I told her about the view and the charge—you know—about the hissing and the naked wings and the way dragons smell, especially on a rainy morning; and the way the black blood jumped at the point of my lance. But she heard none of it, not a word, until I spoke of the rush of fire that nearly burned my poor horse’s legs from under him. Then—ah, then she came back from wherever she goes when I talk to her, and she said that she must go and see my horse. So I led her to the stable where the poor brute stood crying with the pain, and she put her hand on him, on his legs. And he stopped moaning. That’s a terrible sound they make when they’re really hurt. When they stop, it’s like a song.”

The prince’s dagger lay glittering among the potatoes. Outside, great gusts of rain growled round and round the castle walls, but those in the scullery could only hear it, for there was not a single window in the cold room. Nor was there any light, except for the meager glow of the cooking fire. It made the cat dozing in Molly’s lap look like a heap of autumn leaves.

“And what happened then?” she asked. “When the Lady Amalthea touched your horse.”

“Nothing happened. Nothing at all.” Prince Lír suddenly seemed to become angry. He slammed his hand down on the table, and leeks and lentils leaped in all directions. “Did you expect something to happen? She did. Did you expect the beast’s burns to heal on the instant—the crackling skin to knit, the black flesh to be whole again? She did—by my hope of her I swear it! And when his legs didn’t grow well under her hand, then she ran away. I don’t know where she is now.”

His voice softened as he spoke, and the hand on the table curled sadly on its side. He rose and went to look into the pot over the fire. “It’s boiling,” he said, “if you want to put the vegetables in. She wept when my horse’s legs did not heal—I heard her weeping—and yet there were no tears in her eyes when she ran away. Everything else was there, but no tears.”

Molly put the cat gently on the floor and began gathering the venerable vegetables for the pot. Prince Lír watched her as she moved back and forth, around the table and across the dewy floor. She was singing.

“If I danced with my feet

As I dance in my dreaming,

As graceful and gleaming

As Death in disguise—

Oh, that would be sweet,

But then would I hunger

To be ten years younger,

Or wedded, or wise?”

The prince said, “Who is she, Molly? What kind of woman is it who believes—who knows, for I saw her face—that she can cure wounds with a touch, and who weeps without tears?” Molly went on about her work, still humming to herself.

“Any woman can weep without tears,” she answered over her shoulder, “and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that’s riddle enough.”

But the prince stood up to bar her way, and she stopped, her apron full of herbs and her hair trailing into her eyes. Prince Lír’s face bent toward her: older by five dragons, but handsome and silly still. He said, “You sing. My father sets you to the weariest work there is to do, and still you sing. There has never been singing in this castle, or cats, or the smell of good cooking. It is the Lady Amalthea who causes this, as she causes me to ride out in the morning, seeking danger.”

“I was always a fair cook,” Molly said mildly. “Living in the greenwood with Cully and his men for seventeen years—“

Prince Lír continued as though she had not spoken. “I want to serve her, as you do, to help her find whatever she has come here to find. I wish to be whatever she has most need of. Tell her so. Will you tell her so?”

Even as he spoke, a soundless step sounded in his eyes, and the sigh of a satin gown troubled his face. The Lady Amalthea stood in the doorway.

A season in King Haggard’s chill domain had not dimmed or darkened her. Rather, the winter had sharpened her beauty until it invaded the beholder like a barbed arrow that could not be withdrawn. Her white hair was caught up with a blue ribbon, and her gown was lilac. It did not fit her well. Molly Grue was an indifferent seamstress, and satin made her nervous. But the Lady Amalthea seemed more lovely for the poor work, for the cold stones and the smell of turnips. There was rain in her hair.

Prince Lír bowed to her; a quick, crooked bow, as though someone had hit him in the stomach. “My lady,” he mumbled. “You really should cover your head when you go out, this weather.”

The Lady Amalthea sat down at the table, and the little autumn-colored cat immediately sprang up before her, purring swiftly and very softly. She put out her hand, but the cat slid away, still purring. He did not appear frightened, but he would not let her touch his rusty fur. The Lady Amalthea beckoned, and the cat wriggled all over, like a dog, but he would not come near.

Prince Lír said hoarsely, “I must go. There is an ogre of some sort devouring village maidens two days’ ride from here. It is said that he can be slain only by one who wields the Great Ax of Duke Alban. Unfortunately, Duke Alban himself was one of the first consumed—he was dressed as a village maiden at the time, to deceive the monster—and there is little doubt who holds the Great Ax now. If I do not return, think of me. Farewell.”

“Farewell, Your Highness,” Molly said. The prince bowed again, and left the scullery on his noble errand. He looked back only once.

“You are cruel to him,” Molly said. The Lady Amalthea did not look up. She was offering her open palm to the crook-eared cat, but he stayed where he was, shivering with the desire to go to her.

“Cruel?” she asked. “How can I be cruel? That is for mortals.” But then she did raise her eyes, and they were great with sorrow, and with something very near to mockery. She said, “So is kindness.”

Molly Grue busied herself with the cooking pot, stirring the soup and seasoning it, bustling numbly. In a low voice, she remarked, “You might give him a gentle word, at the very least. He has undergone mighty trials for you.”

“But what word shall I speak?” asked the Lady Amalthea. “I have said nothing to him, yet every day he comes to me with more heads, more horns and hides and tails, more enchanted jewels and bewitched weapons. What will he do if I speak?”

Molly said, “He wishes you to think of him. Knights and princes know only one way to be remembered. It’s not his fault. I think he does very well.” The Lady Amalthea turned her eyes to the cat again. Her long fingers twisted at a seam of the satin gown.

“No, he does not want my thoughts,” she said softly. “He wants me, as much as the Red Bull did, and with no more understanding. But he frightens me even more than the Red Bull, because he has a kind heart. No, I will never speak a promising word to him.”

The pale mark on her brow was invisible in the gloom of the scullery. She touched it and then drew her hand away quickly, as though the mark hurt her. “The horse died,” she said to the little cat. “I could do nothing.”

Molly turned quickly and put her hands on the Lady Amalthea’s shoulders. Beneath the sleek cloth, the flesh was cold and hard as any stone of King Haggard’s castle. “Oh, my lady,” she whispered, “that is because you are out of your true form. When you regain yourself, it will all return—all your power, all your strength, all your sureness. It will come back to you.” Had she dared, she would have taken the white girl in her arms and lulled her like a child. She had never dreamed of such a thing before.

But the Lady Amalthea answered, “The magician gave me only the semblance of a human being—the seeming, but not the spirit. If I had died then, I would still have been a unicorn. The old man knew, the wizard. He said nothing, to spite Haggard, but he knew.”

Of itself, her hair escaped the blue ribbon and came hurrying down her neck and over her shoulders. The cat was all but won by this eagerness; he lifted a paw to play with it, but then he drew back once more and sat on his haunches, tail curled around his front feet, queer head to the side. His eyes were green, speckled with gold.

“But that was long ago,” the girl said. “Now I am two—myself, and this other that you call ‘my lady.’ For she is here as truly as I am now, though once she was only a veil over me. She walks in the castle, she sleeps, she dresses herself, she takes her meals, and she thinks her own thoughts. If she has no power to heal, or to quiet, still she has another magic. Men speak to her, saying ‘Lady Amalthea,’ and she answers them, or she does not answer. The king is always watching her out of his pale eyes, wondering what she is, and the king’s son wounds himself with loving her and wonders who she is. And every day she searches the sea and the sky, the castle and the courtyard, the keep and the king’s face, for something she cannot always remember. What is it, what is it that she is seeking in this strange place? She knew a moment ago, but she has forgotten.”

She turned her face to Molly Grue, and her eyes were not the unicorn’s eyes. They were lovely still, but in a way that had a name, as a human woman is beautiful. Their depth could be sounded and learned, and their degree of darkness was quite describable. Molly saw fear and loss and bewilderment when she looked into them, and herself; and nothing more.

“Unicorns,” she said. “The Red Bull has driven them all away, all but you. You are the last unicorn. You came here to find the others, and to set them free. And so you will.”

Slowly the deep, secret sea returned to the Lady Amalthea’s eyes, filling them until they were as old and dark and unknowable and indescribable as the sea. Molly watched it happen, and was afraid, but she gripped the bowed shoulders even more tightly, as though her hands could draw despair like a lightning rod. And as she did so, there shivered in the scullery floor a sound she had heard before: a sound like great teeth—molars—grinding together. The Red Bull was turning in his sleep. I wonder if he dreams, Molly thought.

The Lady Amalthea said, “I must go to him. There is no other way, and no time to spare. In this form or my own, I must face him again, even if all my people are dead and there is nothing to be saved. I must go to him, before I forget myself forever, but I do not know the way, and I am lonely.” The little cat switched his tail and made an odd sound that was neither a miaow nor a purr.

“I will go with you,” Molly said. “I don’t know the way down to the Bull either, but there must be one. Schmendrick will come too. He’ll make the way for us if we can’t find it.”

“I hope for no help from the magician,” the Lady Amalthea replied disdainfully. “I see him every day playing the fool for King Haggard, amusing him by his failures, by blundering at even the most trifling trick. He says that it is all he can do until his power speaks in him again. But it never will. He is no magician now, but the king’s clown.”

Molly’s face suddenly hurt her, and she turned away to inspect the soup again. Answering past a sharpness in her throat, she said, “He is doing it for you. While you brood and mope and become someone else, he jigs and jests for Haggard, diverting him so that you may have time to find your folk, if they are to be found. But it cannot be long before the king tires of him, as he tires of all things, and casts him down to his dungeons, or some place darker. You do wrong to mock him.”

Her voice was a child’s thin, sad mumble. She said, “But that will never happen to you. Everyone loves you.”

They had a moment to look at each other, the two women: the one fair and foreign in the cold, low room; the other appearing quite at home in such surroundings—an angry little beetle with her own kitchen beauty. Then they heard boots scraping, armor clicking, and the gusty voices of old men. King Haggard’s four men-at-arms came trooping into the scullery.

They were all at least seventy years old, gaunt and limping, fragile as crusted snow, but all clad from head to foot in King Haggard’s miserly mail and bearing his wry weapons. They entered hailing Molly Grue cheerfully and asking what she had made for their supper, but at the sight of the Lady Amalthea all four became very quiet and bowed deep bows that made them gasp.

“My lady,” said the oldest of the men, “command your servants. We are used men, spent men—but if you would see miracles, you have only to request the impossible of us. We will become young again if you wish it so.” His three comrades muttered their agreement.

But the Lady Amalthea whispered in answer, “No, no, you will never be young again.” Then she fled from them, with her wild, blinding hair hiding her face, and the satin gown hissing.

“How wise she is!” the oldest man-at-arms declared. “She understands that not even her beauty can do battle with time. It is a rare, sad wisdom for one so young. That soup smells delicious, Molly.”

“It smells too savory for this place,” a second man grumbled as they all sat down around the table. “Haggard hates good food. He says that no meal is good enough to justify all the money and effort wasted in preparing it. ‘It is an illusion,’ says he, ‘and an expense. Live as I do, undeceived.’ Brraaahh!” He shuddered and grimaced, and the others laughed.

“To live like Haggard,” said another man-at-arms as Molly spooned the steaming soup into his bowl. “That will be my fate in the next world, if I don’t behave myself in this one.”

“Why do you stay in his service, then?” Molly demanded. She sat down with them and rested her chin on her hands. “He pays you no wages,” she said, “and he feeds you as little as he dares. He sends you out in the worst weather to steal for him in Hagsgate, for he never spends a penny of the wealth in his strong room. He forbids everything, from lights to lutes, from fires to fairs and singing to sinning; from books and beer and talk of spring to games you play with bits of string. Why not leave him? What in the world is there to keep you here?”

The four old men looked nervously at one another, coughing and sighing. The first said, “It is our age. Where else could we go? We are too old to be wandering the roads, looking for work and shelter.”

“It is our age,” said the second man-at-arms. “When you are old, anything that does not disturb you is a comfort. Cold and darkness and boredom long ago lost their sharp edges for us, but warmth, singing, spring—no, they would all be disturbances. There are worse things than living like Haggard.”

The third man said, “Haggard is older than we are. In time Prince Lír will be king in this country, and I will not leave the world until I have seen that day. I have always been fond of the boy, since he was small.”

Molly found that she was not hungry. She looked around at the faces of the old men, and listened to the sounds their seamy lips and shrunken throats made as they drank her soup; and she was suddenly glad that King Haggard always had his meals alone. Molly inevitably came to care for anyone she fed.

Cautiously she asked them, “Have you ever heard a tale that Prince Lír is not Haggard’s adopted nephew at all?” The men-at-arms showed no surprise at the question.

“Ay,” the eldest replied, “we know that story. It may well be true, for the prince certainly bears no family resemblance to the king. But what of it? Better a stolen stranger ruled the land than a true son of King Haggard.”

“But if the prince was stolen from Hagsgate,” Molly cried, “then he is the man who will make the curse on this castle come true!” And she repeated the rhyme that the man Drinn had recited in the inn at Hagsgate.

“Yet none but one of Hagsgate town

May bring the castle swirling down.”

But the old men shook their heads, grinning with teeth as rusty as their casques and corselets. “Not Prince Lír,” the third man said. “The prince may slay a thousand dragons, but he will level no castles, overthrow no kings. It is not in his nature. He is a dutiful son who seeks—alas—only to be worthy of the man he calls his father. Not Prince Lír. The rhyme must speak of some other.”

“And even if Prince Lír were the one,” the second man added, “even if the curse had marked him for its messenger, still he would fail. For between King Haggard and any doom stands the Red Bull.”

A silence sprang into the room and stood there, darkening all faces with its savage shadow and chilling the good hot soup with its breath. The little autumn cat stopped purring on Molly’s lap, and the thin cooking fire cowered down. The cold scullery walls seemed to draw closer together.

The fourth man-at-arms, who had not spoken before, called across the dark to Molly Grue, “There is the true reason that we stay in Haggard’s employ. He does not wish us to leave, and what King Haggard wishes or does not wish is the only concern of the Red Bull. We are Haggard’s minions, but we are the Red Bull’s prisoners.”

Molly’s hand was steady as she stroked the cat, but her voice was pinched and dry when she spoke. “What is the Red Bull to King Haggard?”

It was the oldest man-at-arms who answered. “We do not know. The Bull has always been here. It serves Haggard as his army and his bulwark; it is his strength and the source of his strength; and it must be his one companion as well, for I am sure he descends to its lair betimes, down some secret stair. But whether it obeys Haggard from choice or compulsion, and whether the Bull or the king is the master—that we have never known.”

The fourth man, who was the youngest, leaned toward Molly Grue, his pink, wet eyes suddenly eager. He said, “The Red Bull is a demon, and its reckoning for attending Haggard will one day be Haggard himself.” Another man interrupted him, insisting that the clearest evidence showed that the Bull was King Haggard’s enchanted slave, and would be until it broke the bewitchment that held it and destroyed its former lord. They began to shout and spill their soup.

But Molly asked, not loudly, but in a way that made them all be still, “Do you know what a unicorn is? Have you ever seen one?”

Of everything alive in the little room, only the cat and the silence seemed to look back at her with any understanding. The four men blinked and belched and rubbed their eyes. Deep, restless, the sleeping Bull stirred again.

The meal being over, the men-at-arms saluted Molly Grue and left the scullery, two for their beds, two to take up their night’s vigil in the rain. The oldest of the men waited until the others were gone before he said quietly to Molly, “Be careful of the Lady Amalthea. When she first came here, her beauty was such that even this accursed castle became beautiful too—like the moon, which is only a shining stone. But she has been here too long. Now she is as beautiful as ever, but the rooms and roofs that contain her are somehow meaner for her presence.”

He gave a long sigh, which frayed into a whine. “I am familiar with that kind of beauty,” he said, “but I had never seen that other sort before. Be careful of her. She should go away from here.”

Alone, Molly put her face in the little cat’s random fur. The cooking fire fluttered low, but she did not get up to feed it. Small, swift creatures scuttled across the room, making a sound like King Haggard’s voice; and the rain rumbled against the castle walls, sounding like the Red Bull. Then, as though in answer, she heard the Bull. His bellow shattered the stones under her feet, and she clutched desperately at the table to keep herself and the cat from plunging down to him. She cried out.

The cat said, “He is going out. He goes out every sundown to hunt for the strange white beast that escaped him. You know that perfectly well. Don’t be stupid.”

The hungering roar came again, further away. Molly caught her breath and stared at the little cat. She was not as amazed as another might have been; these days she was harder to surprise than most women. “Could you always talk?” she asked the cat. “Or was it the sight of the Lady Amalthea that gave you speech?”

The cat licked a front paw reflectively. “It was the sight of her that made me feel like talking,” he said at length, “and let us leave it at that. So that is a unicorn. She is very beautiful.”

“How do you know she is a unicorn?” Molly demanded. “And why were you afraid to let her touch you? I saw you. You were afraid of her.”

“I doubt that I will feel like talking for very long,” the cat replied without rancor. “I would not waste time in foolishness if I were you. As to your first question, no cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them. As for your second question—“ Here he faltered, and suddenly became very interested in washing; nor would he speak until he had licked himself fluffy and then licked himself smooth again. Even then he would not look at Molly, but examined his claws.

“If she had touched me,” he said very softly, “I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me, but I could not let her. No cat will. We let human beings caress us because it is pleasant enough and calms them—but not her. The price is more than a cat can pay.”

Molly picked him up then, and he purred into her neck for such a long while that she began to fear that his moment of speech had passed. But presently he said, “You have very little time. Soon she will no longer remember who she is, or why she came to this place, and the Red Bull will no longer roar in the night for her. It may be that she will marry the good prince, who loves her.” The cat pushed his head hard into Molly’s suddenly still hand. “Do that,” he commanded. “The prince is very brave, to love a unicorn. A cat can appreciate valiant absurdity.”

“No,” Molly Grue said. “No, that cannot be. She is the last.”

“Well then, she must do what she came to do,” the cat replied. “She must take the king’s way down to the Bull.”

Molly held him so fiercely that he gave a mouselike squeak of protest. “Do you know the way?” she asked, as eagerly as Prince Lír had demanded of her. “Tell me the way, tell me where we must go.” She put the cat down on the table and took her hands off him.

The cat made no answer for a long time, but his eyes grew brighter and brighter: gold shivering down to cover the green. His crooked ear twitched, and the black tip of his tail, and nothing more.

“When the wine drinks itself,” he said, “when the skull speaks, when the clock strikes the right time—only then will you find the tunnel that leads to the Red Bull’s lair.” He tucked his paws under his chest and added, “There’s a trick to it, of course.”

“I’ll bet,” Molly said grimly. “There is a horrible, crumbly old skull stuck up high on a pillar in the great hall, but it hasn’t had anything to say for some time. The clock that stands nearby is mad, and strikes when it pleases—midnight every hour, seventeen o’clock at four, or perhaps not a sound for a week. And the wine—oh, cat, wouldn’t it be simpler just to show me the tunnel? You know where it is, don’t you?”

“Of course I know,” answered the cat, with a glinting, curling yawn. “Of course it would be simpler for me to show you. Save a lot of time and trouble.”

His voice was becoming a sleepy drawl, and Molly realized that, like King Haggard himself, he was losing interest. Quickly she asked him, “Tell me one thing, then. What became of the unicorns? Where are they?”

The cat yawned again. “Near and far, far and near,” he murmured. “They are within sight of your lady’s eyes, but almost out of reach of her memory. They are coming closer, and they are going away.” He closed his eyes.

Molly’s breath came like rope, fretting against her harsh throat. “Damn you, why won’t you help me?” she cried. “Why must you always speak in riddles?”

One eye opened slowly, green and gold as sunlight in the woods. The cat said, “I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.”

His last few words drowsed away into a deep, regular purr, and he was asleep with the one eye partly open. Molly held him on her lap and stroked him, and he purred in his sleep, but he did not speak again.

XI

Prince Lír came home three days after he set out to slay the maiden-fancying ogre, with the Great Ax of Duke Alban slung behind him and the ogre’s head bumping at his saddlebow. He offered neither prize to the Lady Amalthea, nor did he rush to find her with the monster’s blood still brown on his hands. He had made up his mind, as he explained to Molly Grue in the scullery that evening, nevermore to trouble the Lady Amalthea with his attentions, but to live quietly in the thought of her, serving her ardently until his lonely death, but seeking neither her company, her admiration, nor her love. “I will be as anonymous as the air she breathes,” he said, “as invisible as the force that holds her on the earth.” Thinking about it for a little, he added, “I may write a poem for her now and then, and slip it under her door, or just leave it somewhere for her to chance upon. But I won’t ever sign the poem.”

“It’s very noble,” Molly said. She felt relieved that the prince was giving up his courtship, and amused as well, and somewhat sad. “Girls like poems better than dead dragons and magic swords,” she offered. “I always did, anyway, when I was a girl. The reason I ran off with Cully—“

But Prince Lír interrupted her, saying firmly, “No, do not give me hope. I must learn to live without hope, as my father does, and perhaps we will understand each other at last.” He dug into his pockets, and Molly heard paper crackling. “Actually, I’ve already written a few poems about it—hope and her, and so on. You might look them over if you wanted to.”

“I’d be very pleased,” Molly said. “But will you never go out again, then, to fight with black knights and ride through rings of fire?” The words were meant teasingly, but she found as she spoke that she would have been a little sorry if it were so, for his adventures had made him much handsomer and taken off a lot of weight, and given him, besides, a hint of the musky fragrance of death that clings to all heroes. But the prince shook his head, looking almost embarrassed.

“Oh, I suppose I’ll keep my hand in,” he muttered. “But it wouldn’t be for the show of it, or for her to find out. It was like that at first, but you get into the habit of rescuing people, breaking enchantments, challenging the wicked duke in fair combat—it’s hard to give up being a hero, once you get used to it. Do you like the first poem?”

“It certainly has a lot of feeling,” she said. “Can you really rhyme ‘bloomed’ and ‘ruined’?”

“It needs a bit of smoothing out,” Prince Lír admitted. “’Miracle’ ‘s the word I’m worried about.”

“I was wondering about ‘grackle’ myself.”

“No, the spelling. Is it one r and two _l_s, or the other way round?”

“One r, anyway, I think,” Molly said. “Schmendrick”—for the magician had just stooped through the doorway—“how many _r_s in ‘miracle’?”

“Two,” he answered wearily. “It has the same root as ‘mirror.’” Molly ladled him out a bowl of broth, and he sat down at the table. His eyes were hard and cloudy as jade, and one of the lids was twitching.

“I can’t do this very much longer,” he said slowly. “It isn’t this horrible place, and it isn’t having to be listening for him all the time—I’m getting rather good at that—it’s the wretched cheapjack flummery he has me perform for him, hours on end—all night last night. I wouldn’t mind if he asked for the real magic, or even for simple conjuring, but it’s always the rings and the goldfish, the cards and the scarves and the string, exactly as it was in the Midnight Carnival. I can’t do it. Not much more.”

“But that was what he wanted you for,” Molly protested. “If he wanted real magic, he’d have kept the old magician, that Mabruk.” Schmendrick raised his head and gave her a look that was almost amused. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “Besides, it’s only for a little while, until we find the way to the Red Bull that the cat told me about.”

She lowered her voice to a whisper as she spoke this last, and both of them glanced quickly over at Prince Lír; but he was sitting on a stool in the corner, evidently writing another poem. “Gazelle,” he murmured, tapping his pen against his lips. “Demoiselle, citadel, asphodel, philomel, parallel . . .” He chose ‘farewell,’ and scribbled rapidly.

“We will never find the way,” Schmendrick said very quietly. “Even if the cat told the truth, which I doubt, Haggard will make sure we never have time to investigate the skull and the clock. Why do you suppose he piles more work on you every day, if not to keep you from prowling and prying in the great hall? Why do you think he keeps me entertaining him with my carnival tricks? -- why do you think he took me as his wizard in the first place? Molly, he knows, I’m sure of it! He knows what she is, though he doesn’t quite believe it yet—but when he does, he’ll know what to do. He knows. I see it in his face sometimes.”

“The lift of longing, and the crash of loss,” Prince Lír said. “The bitterness of tumpty-umpty-oss. Cross, boss, moss. Damn.”

Schmendrick leaned across the table. “We can’t stay here and wait for him to strike. The only hope we have is to escape at night—by sea, perhaps, if I can lay hold of a boat somewhere. The men-at-arms will look the other way, and the gate—“

“But the others!” she cried softly. “How can we leave, when she has come so far to find the other unicorns, and we know they are here?” Yet one small, tender, treacherous part of her was suddenly eager to be convinced of the quest’s failure, and she knew it, and was angry at Schmendrick. “Well, but what about your magic?” she asked, “what about your own little search? Are you going to give that up too? Will she die in human shape, and you live forever? You might as well let the Bull have her then.”

The magician sank back, his face gone as pale and crumpled as a washerwoman’s fingers. “It doesn’t really matter, one way or the other,” he said, almost to himself. “She’s no unicorn now, but a mortal woman—someone for that lout to sigh over and write poems about. Maybe Haggard won’t find her out after all. She’ll be his daughter, and he’ll never know. That’s funny.” He put his soup aside untasted and leaned his head into his hands. “I couldn’t change her back into a unicorn if we did find the others,” he said. “There’s no magic in me.”

“Schmendrick—“ she began; but at that moment he jumped to his feet and rushed out of the scullery, though she had not heard the king summon him. Prince Lír never looked up, but went on drumming meters and sampling rhymes. Molly hung a kettle over the fire for the sentries’ tea.

“I’ve got it all but the final couplet,” Lír said presently. “Do you want to hear it now, or would you rather wait?”

“Whichever you like,” she said, so he read it then, but she never heard a word of it. Fortunately, the men-at-arms came in before he had finished reading, and he was too shy to ask her opinion in their presence. By the time they left he was working on something else, and it was very late when he bade her good night. Molly was sitting at the table, holding her motley cat.

The new poem was meant to be a sestina, and Prince Lír’s head was jangling happily as he juggled the end words on his way up the stairs to his chamber. “I will leave the first one at her door,” he thought, “and save the others until tomorrow.” He was debating his original decision against signing his work, and playing with such pen names as “The Knight of the Shadows,” and “_Le Chevalier Mel-Aimé_,” when he turned a corner and met the Lady Amalthea. She was coming down quickly in the dark, and when she saw him she made a strange, bleating sound and stood still, three steps above him.

She wore a robe that one of the king’s men had stolen for her in Hagsgate. Her hair was down, and her feet were bare, and the sight of her on the stair sent such sorrow licking along Prince Lír’s bones that he dropped his poems and his pretenses together and actually turned to run. But he was a hero in all ways, and he turned bravely back to face her, saying in a calm and courtly manner, “Give you good evening, my lady.”

The Lady Amalthea stared at him through the gloom, putting out a hand, but drawing it back before she touched him. “Who are you?” she whispered. “Are you Rukh?”

“I’m Lír,” he answered, suddenly frightened. “Don’t you know me?” But she backed away, and it seemed to the prince that her steps were as flowing as an animal’s, and that she even lowered her head in the way of a goat or a deer. He said, “I’m Lír.”

“The old woman,” said the Lady Amalthea. “The moon went out. Ah!” She shivered once, and then her eyes recognized him. But all her body was still wild and watchful, and she came no nearer to him.

“You were dreaming, my lady,” he said, finding knightly speech again. “I would that I might know your dream.”

“I have dreamed it before,” she answered slowly. “I was in a cage, and there were others—beasts in cages, and an old woman. But I will not trouble you, my lord prince. I have dreamed it many times before.”

She would have left him then, but he spoke to her in a voice that only heroes have, as many animals develop a certain call when they become mothers. “A dream that returns so often is like to be a messenger, come to warn you of the future or to remind you of things untimely forgotten. Say more of this, if you will, and I will try to riddle it for you.”

Thereupon she halted, looking at him with her head a little turned, still with the air of some slim, furred creature peering out of a thicket. But her eyes held a human look of loss, as though she had missed something she needed, or suddenly realized that she had never had it. If he had even blinked, she would have been gone; but he did not blink, and he held her, as he had learned to hold griffins and chimeras motionless with his steady gaze. Her bare feet wounded him deeper than any tusk or riving talon ever had, but he was a true hero.

The Lady Amalthea said, “In the dream there are black, barred wagons, and beasts that are and are not, and a winged being that clangs like metal in the moonlight. The tall man has green eyes and bloody hands.”

“The tall man must be your uncle, the magician,” Prince Lír mused. “That part’s clear enough, anyway, and the bloody hands don’t surprise me. I never cared much for his looks, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Is that all the dream?”

“I cannot tell you all of it,” she said. “It is never finished.” Fear came back to her eyes like a great stone falling into a pool: all was clouded and swirling, and quick shadows were rushing everywhere. She said, “I am running away from a good place where I was safe, and the night is burning around me. But it is day too, and I am walking under beech trees in the warm, sour rain, and there are butterflies, and a honey sound, and dappled roads, and towns like fishbones, and the flying thing is killing the old woman. I am running and running into the freezing fire, however I turn, and my legs are the legs of a beast—“

“Lady,” Prince Lír broke in, “my lady, by your leave, no more.” Her dream was darkening into shape between them, and suddenly he did not want to know what it meant. “No more,” he said.

“But I must go on,” said the Lady Amalthea, “for it is never finished. Even when I wake, I cannot tell what is real, and what I am dreaming as I move and speak and eat my dinner. I remember what cannot have happened, and forget something that is happening to me now. People look at me as though I should know them, and I do know them in the dream, and always the fire draws nearer, though I am awake—“

“No more,” he said desperately. “A witch built this castle, and to speak of nightmares here often makes them come true.” It was not her dream that chilled him, but that she did not weep as she told it. As a hero, he understood weeping women and knew how to make them stop crying—generally you killed something—but her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining. When he spoke again, his voice was young and stumbling.

“I would court you with more grace,” he said, “if I knew how. My dragons and my feats of arms weary you, but they are all I have to offer. I haven’t been a hero for very long, and before I was a hero I was nothing at all, nothing but my father’s dull, soft son. Perhaps I am only dull in a new way now, but I am here, and it is wrong of you to let me go to waste. I wish you wanted something of me. It wouldn’t have to be a valiant deed—just useful.”

Then the Lady Amalthea smiled at him for the first time since she had come to stay in King Haggard’s castle. It was a small smile, like the new moon, a slender bend of brightness on the edge of the unseen, but Prince Lír leaned toward it to be warm. He would have cupped his hands around her smile and breathed it brighter, if he had dared.

“Sing to me,” she said. “That would be valiant, to raise your voice in this dark, lonely place, and it will be useful as well. Sing to me, sing loudly—drown out my dreams, keep me from remembering whatever wants me to remember it. Sing to me, my lord prince, if it please you. It may not seem a hero’s task, but I would be glad of it.”

So Prince Lír sang out lustily, there on the cold stairway, and many damp, unseen creatures went flopping and scurrying for cover before the daylight gaiety of his voice. He sang the first words that came to him, and they were these:

“When I was a young man, and very well thought of,

I couldn’t ask aught that the ladies denied.

I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins,

And I never spoke love but I knew that I lied.

“But I said to myself, ‘Ah, they none of them know The secret I shelter and savor and save.

I wait for the one who will see through my seeming,

And I’ll know when I love by the way I behave.’

“The years drifted over like clouds in the heavens;

The ladies went by me like snow on the wind.

I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled,

And I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned.

“But I said to myself, ‘Ah, they none of them see There’s part of me pure as the whisk of a wave.

My lady is late, but she’ll find I’ve been faithful,

And I’ll know when I love by the way I behave.’

“At last came a lady both knowing and tender, Saying, ‘You’re not at all what they take you to be.’ I betrayed her before she had quite finished speaking, And she swallowed cold poison and jumped in the sea.

“And I say to myself, when there’s time for a word, As I gracefully grow more debauched and depraved, ‘Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger, And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.”

The Lady Amalthea laughed when he was done, and that sound seemed to set the old, old darkness of the castle hissing back from them both. “That was useful,” she said. “Thank you, my lord.”

“I don’t know why I sang that one,” Prince Lír said awkwardly. “One of my father’s men used to sing it to me. I don’t really believe it. I think that love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time, and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last.” The Lady Amalthea smiled again, but she did not answer, and the prince took a single step closer to her.

Marveling at his own boldness, he said softly, “I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.”

Before she could speak, if she meant to, they heard footsteps below them on the winding stair, and King Haggard’s veiled voice saying, “I heard him singing. What business had he to be singing?”

Then Schmendrick, the royal wizard, his own voice meek and hurried. “Sire, it was but some heroic lay, some chanson de geste, such as he often sings when he rides out to glory, or rides home to renown. Be assured, Your Majesty—“

“He never sings here,” the king said. “He sings continuously on his fool’s wanderings, I am sure, because that is what heroes do. But he was singing here, and not of battle and gallantry either, but of love. Where is she? I knew he was singing of love before I ever heard him, for the very stones shuddered as they do when the Bull moves in the earth. Where is she?”

The prince and the Lady Amalthea looked at each other in the darkness, and in that moment they were side by side, though neither moved. With this came fear of the king, for whatever had been born between them, it might be something he wanted. A landing above them gave onto a corridor; they turned and ran together, though they could not see beyond their breaths. Her feet were as silent as the promise she had given him, but his own heavy boots rang exactly like boots on the stone floor. King Haggard made no pursuit, but his voice rustled down the hallway after them, whispering under the magician’s words, “Mice, my lord, beyond a doubt. Fortunately, I am possessed of a singular spell—“

“Let them run,” the king said. “It suits me well that they should run.”

When they stopped running, wherever they stopped, they looked at each other again.

So the winter whined and crept along, not toward any spring, but toward the brief, devouring summer of King Haggard’s country. Life in the castle went on in the silence that fills a place where no one hopes for anything. Molly Grue cooked and laundered, scrubbed stone, mended armor and sharpened swords; she chopped wood, milled flour, groomed horses and cleaned their stalls, melted down stolen gold and silver for the king’s coffers, and made bricks without straw. And in the evenings, before she went to bed, she usually read over Prince Lír’s new poems to the Lady Amalthea, and praised them, and corrected the spelling.

Schmendrick fooled and juggled and flimflammed as the king bade him, hating it, and knowing that Haggard knew he hated it and took his pleasure thereby. He never again suggested to Molly that they escape from the castle before Haggard made sure of the truth of the Lady Amalthea; but he no longer sought to discover the secret way down to the Red Bull, even when he was allowed time to himself. He seemed to have surrendered, not to the king but to some far older, crueler enemy that had caught up with him at last, this winter in this place.

The Lady Amalthea grew as much more beautiful every day as that day was grimmer and gloomier than the one before. The old men-at-arms, coming down drenched and shivering from walking their posts in the rain, or in from stealing things for the king, opened as quietly as flowers when they met her on the stairs or in the hallways. She would smile at them, and speak gently; but when she had passed by, the castle always seemed darker than ever, and the wind outside would rattle the thick sky like a sheet on a clothesline. For her beauty was human and doomed, and there was no comfort in it for old men. They could only draw their dripping cloaks tighter and limp on down to the small fire in the scullery.

But the Lady Amalthea and Prince Lír walked and spoke and sang together as blithely as though King Haggard’s castle had become a green wood, wild and shadowy with spring. They climbed the crooked towers like hills, picnicked in stone meadows under a stone sky, and splashed up and down stairways that had softened and quickened into streams. He told her everything he knew, and what he thought about all of it, and happily invented a life and opinions for her, which she helped him do by listening. Nor was she deceiving him, for she truly remembered nothing before the castle and him. She began and ended with Prince Lír—except for the dreams, and they soon faded, as he had said they would.

They seldom heard the hunting roar of the Red Bull at night any more, but when the hungering sound came to her ears, then she would be frightened, and the walls and the winter would grow up around them again, as though their spring were all of her making, her joy’s gift to the prince. He would have held her at such times, but he had long known her dread of being touched.

One afternoon the Lady Amalthea stood on the highest tower of the castle, watching for Prince Lír’s return from an expedition against a brother-in-law of the ogre he had slain; for he still went out on occasional errantries, as he had told Molly he might. The sky was piled up over the valley of Hagsgate, the color of dirty soap, but it was not raining. Far below, the sea slid out toward the smoky horizon in hard bands of silver and green and kelpy brown. The ugly birds were restless: they flew out often, two and three together, circled swiftly over the water, and then returned to strut on the sand, chortling and cocking their heads at King Haggard’s castle on the cliff. “Saidso, saidso!” The tide was low, and near to turning.

The Lady Amalthea began to sing, and her voice balanced and hovered in the slow, cold air like another sort of bird.

“I am a king’s daughter,

And I grow old within

The prison of my person,

The shackles of my skin.

And I would run away

And beg from door to door—“

She did not remember having heard the song before, but the words pinched and plucked at her like children, trying to drag her back to some place that they wanted to see again. She moved her shoulders to get away from them.

“But I am not old,” she said to herself, “and I am no prisoner. I am the Lady Amalthea, beloved of Lír, who has come into my dreams so that I may not doubt myself even while I sleep. Where could I have learned a song of sorrow? I am the Lady Amalthea, and I know only the songs that Prince Lír has taught me.”

She lifted a hand to touch the mark on her forehead. The sea wheeled by, calm as the zodiac, and the ugly birds screamed. It troubled her a little that the mark would not go away.

“Your Majesty,” she said, though there had been no sound. She heard the rustling chuckle at her back, and turned to see the king. He wore a gray cloak over his mail, but his head was bare. The black lines on his face showed where the fingernails of age had skidded down the hard skin, but he looked stronger than his son, and wilder.

“You are quick for what you are,” he said, “but slow, I think, for what you were. It is said that love makes men swift and women slow. I will catch you at last if you love much more.”

She smiled at him without replying. She never knew what to say to the pale-eyed old man whom she so rarely saw, except as a movement on the edge of the solitude that she shared with Prince Lír. Then armor winked deep in the valley, and she heard the scrape of a weary horse stumbling on a stone. “Your son is coming home,” she said. “Let us watch him together.”

King Haggard came slowly to stand beside her at the parapet, but he gave no more than a glance to the tiny, glinting figure riding home. “Nay, what concern have you or I with Lír, truly?” he asked. “He’s none of mine, either by birth or belonging. I picked him up where someone else had set him down, thinking that I had never been happy and never had a son. It was pleasant enough at first, but it died quickly. All things die when I pick them up. I do not know why they die, but it has always been so, save for the one dear possession that has not turned cold and dull as I guarded it—the only thing that has ever belonged to me.” His grim face gave the sudden starved leap of a sprung trap. “And Lír will be no help to you in finding it,” he said. “He has never even known what it is.”

Without warning, the whole castle sang like a plucked string as the beast asleep at its root shifted his dire weight. The Lady Amalthea caught her balance easily, being well used to this, and said lightly, “The Red Bull. But why do you think I have come to steal the Bull? I have no kingdom to keep, and no wish for conquest. What would I do with him? How much does he eat?”

“Do not mock me!” the king answered. “The Red Bull is no more mine than the boy is, and he does not eat, and he cannot be stolen. He serves anyone who has no fear—and I have no more fear than I have rest.” Yet the Lady Amalthea saw forebodings sliding over the long, gray face, scuttling in the shadows of brows and bones. “Do not mock me,” he said. “Why will you play that you have forgotten your quest, and that I am to remind you of it? I know what you have come for, and you know very well that I have it. Take it, then, take it if you can—but do not dare to surrender now!” The black wrinkles were all on edge, like knives.

Prince Lír was singing as he rode, though the Lady Amalthea could not yet hear the words. She said quietly to the king, “My lord, in all your castle, in all your realm, in all the kingdoms that the Red Bull may bring you, there is only one thing I desire—and you have just told me that he is not yours to give or to keep. Whatever it is you treasure that is not he, I truly wish you joy of it. Good day, Your Majesty.”

She moved toward the tower stairway, but he stood in her way and she paused, looking at him with her eyes as dark as hoofprints in snow. The gray king smiled, and a strange kindness for him chilled her for an instant, for she suddenly fancied that they were somehow alike. But then he said, “I know you. I almost knew you as soon as I saw you on the road, coming to my door with your cook and your clown. Since then, there is no movement of yours that has not betrayed you. A pace, a glance, a turn of the head, the flash of your throat as you breathe, even your way of standing perfectly still—they were all my spies. You have made me wonder for a little while, and in my own way I am grateful. But your time is done.”

He looked seaward over his shoulder, and suddenly stepped to the parapet with the thoughtless grace of a young man. “The tide is turning,” he said. “Come and see it. Come here.” He spoke very softly, but his voice suddenly held the crying of the ugly birds on the shore. “Come here,” he said fiercely. “Come here, I won’t touch you.”

Prince Lír sang:

“I will love you as long as I can,

However long that may be . . .”

The horrible head on his saddle was harmonizing in a kind of bass falsetto. The Lady Amalthea went to stand with the king.

The waves were coming in under the thick, swirling sky, growing as slowly as trees as they bulged across the sea. They crouched as they neared the shore, arching their backs higher and higher, and then sprang up the beach as furiously as trapped animals bounding at a wall and falling back with a sobbing snarl to leap again and again, claws caked and breaking, while the ugly birds yelled mournfully. The waves were gray and green as pigeons until they broke, and then they were the color of the hair that blew across her eyes.

“There,” a strange, high voice said close to her. “There they are.” King Haggard was grinning at her and pointing down to the white water. “There they are,” he said, laughing like a frightened child, “there they are. Say that they are not your people, say that you did not come here searching for them. Say now that you have stayed all winter in my castle for love.”

He could not wait for her answer, but turned away to look at the waves. His face was changed beyond believing: delight coloring the somber skin, rounding over the cheekbones, and loosening the bowstring mouth. “They are mine,” he said softly, “they belong to me. The Red Bull gathered them for me, one at a time, and I bade him drive each one into the sea. What better place could there be to keep unicorns, and what other cage could hold them? For the Bull keeps guard over them, awake or asleep, and he daunted their hearts long ago. Now they live in the sea, and every tide still carries them within an easy step of the land, but they dare not take that step, they dare not come out of the water. They are afraid of the Red Bull.”

Nearby, Prince Lír sang, “Others may offer more than they can give, All that they have for as long as they live . . .” The Lady Amalthea closed her hands on the parapet and wished for him to come to her, for she knew now that King Haggard was mad. Below them lay the thin, sallow beach, and the rocks, and the rising tide, and nothing more.

“I like to watch them. They fill me with joy.” The childish voice was all but singing. “I am sure it is joy. The first time I felt it, I thought I was going to die. There were two of them in the early morning shadows. One was drinking from a stream, and the other was resting her head on his back. I thought I was going to die. I said to the Red Bull, ‘I must have that. I must have all of it, all there is, for my need is very great.’ So the Bull caught them, one by one. It was all the same to the Bull. It would have been the same if I had demanded tumblebugs or crocodiles. He can only tell the difference between what I want and what I do not want.”

He had forgotten her for the moment as he leaned over the low wall, and she might have fled the tower then. But she stayed where she was, for an old bad dream was waking all around her, though it was daylight. The tide shattered on the rocks and tumbled together again, and Prince Lír rode along singing, “But I will love you as long as I can, And never ask if you love me.”

“I suppose I was young when I first saw them,” King Haggard said. “Now I must be old—at least I have picked many more things up than I had then, and put them all down again. But I always knew that nothing was worth the investment of my heart, because nothing lasts, and I was right, and so I was always old. Yet each time I see my unicorns, it is like that morning in the woods, and I am truly young in spite of myself, and anything can happen in a world that holds such beauty.”

In the dream I looked down at four white legs, and felt the earth under split hoofs. There was a burning on my brow, as there is now. But there were no unicorns coming in on the tide. The king is mad. He said, “I wonder what will become of them when I am gone. The Red Bull will forget them immediately, I know, and be off to find a new master, but I wonder if they will take their freedom even then. I hope not, for then they will belong to me forever.”

Then he turned to look at her again, and his eyes were as gentle and greedy as Prince Lír’s eyes became when he looked at her. “You are the last,” he said. “The Bull missed you because you were shaped like a woman, but I always knew. How did you manage the change, by the way? Your magician couldn’t have done it. I don’t think he could turn cream into butter.”

If she had let go of the parapet she would have fallen, but she answered him quite calmly, “My lord, I do not understand. I see nothing at all in the water.”

The king’s face shivered as though she were looking at him through fire. “Do you still deny yourself?” he whispered. “Do you dare deny yourself? Nay, that’s as false and cowardly as though you were truly human. I’ll hurl you down to your folk with my own hands if you deny yourself.” He took a step toward her, and she watched him with her eyes open, unable to move.

The tumult of the sea filled her head, together with Prince Lír’s singing and the blubbering death wail of the man named Rukh. King Haggard’s gray face hung over her like a hammer, muttering, “It must be so, I cannot be mistaken. Yet her eyes are as stupid as his—as any eyes that never saw unicorns, never saw anything but themselves in a glass. What cheat is this, how can it be? There are no green leaves in her eyes now.”

Then she did close her eyes, but she shut in more than she kept out. The bronze-winged creature with a hag’s face swung by, laughing and prattling, and the butterfly folded its wings to strike. The Red Bull moved silently through the forest, pushing the bare branches aside with his pale horns. She knew when King Haggard went away, but she did not open her eyes.

It was long after, or only a little while later, that she heard the magician’s voice behind her. “Be still, be still, it’s over.” She had not known that she was making any sound.

“In the sea,” he said. “In the sea. Well, don’t feel too bad about it. I didn’t see them either, not this time or any other that I’ve stood here and watched the tide coming in. But he saw them—and if Haggard sees something, it’s there.” He laughed with a sound like an ax falling on wood. “Don’t feel bad. This is a witch-castle, and it’s hard to look closely at things, living here. It’s not enough to be ready to see—you have to be looking all the time.” He laughed again, more gently. “All right,” he said. “We’ll find them now. Come on. Come with me.”

She turned to him, moving her mouth to make words, but no words came out. The magician was studying her face with his green eyes. “Your face is wet,” he said worriedly. “I hope that’s spray. If you’ve become human enough to cry, then no magic in the world—oh, it must be spray. Come with me. It had better be spray.”

XII

In the great hall of King Haggard’s castle, the clock struck six. Actually, it was eleven minutes past midnight, but the hall was little darker than it had been at six o’clock, or at noon. Yet those who lived in the castle told time by the difference in the dark. There were hours when the hall was cold simply for want of warmth and gloomy for lack of light; when the air was stale and still, and the stones stank of old water because there were no windows to let in the scouring wind. That was daytime.

But at night, as some trees hold a living light all day, hold it with the undersides of their leaves until long after sundown—so at night the castle was charged and swarming with darkness, alive with darkness. Then the great hall was cold for a reason; then the small sounds that slept by day woke up to patter and scratch in the corners. It was night when the old smell of the stones seemed to rise from far below the floor.

“Light a light,” Molly Grue said. “Please, can you make a light?”

Schmendrick muttered something curt and professional. For a moment nothing happened, but then a strange, sallow brightness began to spread over the floor, scattering itself about the room in a thousand scurrying shards that shone and squeaked. The little night beasts of the castle were glowing like fireflies. They darted here and there in the hall, raising swift shadows with their sickly light and making the darkness even colder than before.

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Molly said. “Can you turn them off again? The purple ones, anyway, with the—with the legs, I guess.”

“No, I can’t,” Schmendrick answered crossly. “Be quiet. Where’s the skull?”

The Lady Amalthea could see it grinning from a pillar, lemon-small in the shadows and dim as the morning moon, but she said nothing. She had not spoken since she came down from the tower.

“There,” the magician said. He strode to the skull and peered into its split and crumbling eyesockets for a long time, nodding slowly and making solemn sounds to himself. Molly Grue stared with equal earnestness, but she glanced often at the Lady Amalthea. At last Schmendrick said, “All right. Don’t stand so close.”

“Are there really spells to make a skull speak?” Molly asked. The magician stretched out his fingers and gave her a small, competent smile.

“There are spells to make everything speak. The master wizards were great listeners, and they devised ways to charm all things of the world, living and dead, into talking to them. That is most of it, being a wizard—seeing and listening.” He drew a long breath, suddenly looking away and rubbing his hands together. “The rest is technique,” he said. “Well. Here we go.”

Abruptly he turned to face the skull, put one hand lightly on the pale crown, and addressed it in a deep, commanding voice. The words marched out of his mouth like soldiers, their steps echoing with power as they crossed the dark air, but the skull made no answer at all.

“I just wondered,” the magician said softly. He lifted his hand from the skull and spoke to it again. This time the sound of the spell was reasonable and cajoling, almost plaintive. The skull remained silent, but it seemed to Molly that a wakefulness slipped across the faceless front and was gone again.

In the scuttling light of the radiant vermin, the Lady Amalthea’s hair shone like a flower. Appearing neither interested nor indifferent, but quiet in the way that a battlefield is sometimes quiet, she watched as Schmendrick recited one incantation after another to a desert-colored knob of bone that spoke not one word more than she did. Each charm was uttered in a more despairing tone than the last, but the skull would not speak. And yet Molly Grue was certain that it was aware and listening, and amused. She knew the silence of mockery too well to mistake it for death.

The clock struck twenty-nine—at least, it was at that point that Molly lost count. The rusty strokes were still clanking to the floor when Schmendrick suddenly shook both fists at the skull and shouted, “All right, all right for you, you pretentious kneecap! How would you like a punch in the eye?” On the last words, his voice unraveled completely into a snarl of misery and rage.

“That’s right,” the skull said. “Yell. Wake up old Haggard.” Its own voice sounded like branches creaking and knocking together in the wind. “Yell louder,” it said. “The old man’s probably around here somewhere. He doesn’t sleep much.”

Molly gave a small cry of delight, and even the Lady Amalthea moved a step nearer. Schmendrick stood with his fists shut and no triumph in his face. The skull said, “Come on. Ask me how to find the Red Bull. You can’t go wrong asking my advice. I’m the king’s watchman, set to guard the way to the Bull. Even Prince Lír doesn’t know the secret way, but I do.”

A little timidly, Molly Grue asked, “If you are truly on guard here, why don’t you give the alarm? Why do you offer to help us, instead of summoning the men-at-arms?”

The skull gave a rattling chuckle. “I’ve been up on this pillar a long time,” it said. “I was Haggard’s chief henchman once, until he smote off my head for no reason. That was back in the days when he was being wicked to see if that was what he really liked to do. It wasn’t, but he thought he might as well get some use out of my head, so he stuck it up here to serve as his sentinel. Under the circumstances, I’m not as loyal to King Haggard as I might be.”

Schmendrick spoke in a low voice. “Answer the riddle, then. Tell us the way to the Red Bull.”

“No,” said the skull. Then it laughed like mad.

“Why not?” Molly cried furiously. “What kind of a game -- ?” The skull’s long yellow jaws never moved, but it was some time before the mean laughter chattered to a halt. Even the hurrying night things paused for a moment, stranded in their candy light, until it stopped.

“I’m dead,” said the skull. “I’m dead, and I’m hanging in the dark watching over Haggard’s property. The only small amusement I have is to irk and exasperate the living, and I don’t get much chance of that. It’s a sad loss, because in life mine was a particularly exasperating nature. You’ll pardon me, I’m sure, if I indulge myself with you a little. Try me tomorrow. Maybe I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“But we have no time!” Molly pleaded. Schmendrick nudged her, but she rushed on, stepping close to the skull and appealing directly to its uninhabited eyes. “We have no time. We may be too late now.”

“I have time,” the skull replied reflectively. “It’s really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space—that’s the way life was meant to be. You’re supposed to be too late for some things. Don’t worry about it.”

Molly would have entreated further, but the magician gripped her arm and pulled her aside. “Be still!” he said in a swift, fierce voice. “Not a word, not another word. The damned thing spoke, didn’t it? Maybe that’s all the riddle requires.”

“It isn’t,” the skull informed him. “I’ll talk as much as you like, but I won’t tell you anything. That’s pretty rotten, isn’t it? You should have seen me when I was alive.”

Schmendrick paid no attention. “Where’s the wine?” he demanded of Molly. “Let me see what I can do with the wine.”

“I couldn’t find any,” she said nervously. “I looked everywhere, but I don’t think there’s a drop in the castle.” The magician glared at her in vast silence. “I looked,” she said.

Schmendrick raised both arms slowly and let them fall to his sides. “Well,” he said. “Well, that’s it, then, if we can’t find the wine. I have my illusions, but I can’t make wine out of the air.”

The skull giggled in a clacking, tocky way. “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed,” it remarked. “Not by most magicians, anyway.”

From a fold of her dress Molly produced a small flask that gleamed faintly in the darkness. She said, “I thought if you had some water to start with . . .” Schmendrick and the skull gave her very much the same look. “Well, it’s been done,” she said loudly. “It’s not as though you’d have to make up something new. I’d never ask that of you.”

Hearing herself, she looked sideways at the Lady Amalthea; but Schmendrick took the flask from her hand and studied it thoughtfully, turning it over and murmuring curious, fragile words to himself. Finally he said, “Why not? As you say, it’s a standard trick. There was quite a vogue for it at one time, I remember, but it’s really a bit dated these days.” He moved one hand slowly over the flask, weaving a word into the air.

“What are you doing?” the skull asked eagerly. “Hey, do it closer, do it over here. I can’t see a thing.” The magician turned away, holding the flask to his breast and bowing over it. He began a whispery chant that made Molly think of the sounds that a dead fire continues to make, long after the last coal has faded.

“You understand,” he said, interrupting himself, “it won’t be anything special. Vin ordinaire, if that.” Molly nodded solemnly. Schmendrick said, “And it’s usually too sweet; and how I’m supposed to get it to drink itself, I haven’t the faintest idea.” He took up the incantation again, even more softly, while the skull complained bitterly that it couldn’t see or hear anything. Molly said something quiet and hopeful to the Lady Amalthea, who neither looked at her nor replied.

The chant stopped abruptly, and Schmendrick raised the flask to his lips. He sniffed at it first, muttering, “Weak, weak, hardly any bouquet at all. Nobody ever made good wine by magic.” Then he tilted it to drink—then shook it, then stared at it; and then, with a small, horrible smile, turned it over. Nothing ran out, nothing at all.

“That’s done it,” Schmendrick said almost cheerfully. He touched a dry tongue to his dry lips and repeated, “That’s done it, that has finally done it.” Still smiling, he lifted the flask again to hurl it across the hall.

“No, wait—hey, don’t!” The skull’s clattering voice protested so wildly that Schmendrick halted before the flask left his hand. He and Molly turned together to regard the skull, which—so great was its anguish—had actually begun to wriggle where it hung, cracking its weathered occiput hard against the pillar as it strove to free itself. “Don’t do that!” it walled. “You people must be crazy, throwing away wine like that. Give it to me if you don’t want it, but don’t throw it away!” It rocked and lurched on the pillar, whimpering.

A dreamy, wondering look crossed Schmendrick’s face, rather like a raincloud drifting over dry country. Slowly he asked, “And what use have you for wine, with no tongue to taste it, no ribby palate to savor it, no gullet to gulp it down? Fifty years dead, can it be that you still remember, still desire -- ?”

“Fifty years dead, what else can I do?” The skull had ceased its grotesque twitching, but frustration had made its voice almost human. “I remember,” it said. “I remember more than wine. Give me a swallow, that’s all—give me a sip—and I’ll taste it as you never will, with all your runny flesh, all your buds and organs. I’ve had time to think. I know what wine is like. Give it to me.”

Schmendrick shook his head, grinning. He said, “Eloquent, but I’ve been feeling a bit spiteful myself lately.” For a third time, he lifted the empty flask, and the skull groaned in mortal misery.

Out of pity, Molly Grue began to say, “But it isn’t—“ but the magician stepped on her foot. “Of course,” he mused aloud, “if you should happen to remember the entrance to the Red Bull’s cavern as well as you remember wine, we might bargain yet.” He twiddled the flask casually between two fingers.

“Done!” the skull cried instantly. “Done, for a dram, but give it to me now! I am more thirsty with thinking of wine than ever I was in life, when I had a throat to be dry. Only give me a single swig now, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” The rusted jaws were beginning to grind sideways on each other. The skull’s slaty teeth were trembling and splitting.

“Give it to him,” Molly whispered to Schmendrick. She was terrified that the naked eyesockets might start to fill up with tears. But Schmendrick shook his head again.

“I will give it all to you,” he said to the skull. “After you tell us how we may find the Bull.”

The skull sighed, but never hesitated. “The way is through the clock,” it said. “You simply walk through the clock and there you are. Now can I have the wine?”

“Through the clock.” The magician turned to peer into a far corner of the great hall, where the clock stood. It was tall and black and thin, the sundown shadow of a clock. The glass over its face was broken, and the hour hand was gone. Behind gray glass, the works could barely be seen, twitching and turning as fretfully as fish. Schmendrick said, “You mean, when the clock strikes the right time it opens, and then there is a tunnel, a hidden stair.” His voice was doubtful, for the clock seemed far too lean to conceal any such passageway.

“I don’t know anything about that,” the skull replied. “If you wait for this clock to strike the hour, you’ll be here till you’re as bald as I am. Why complicate a simple secret? You walk through the clock, and the Red Bull is on the other side. Gimme.”

“But the cat said—“ Schmendrick began. Then he turned and walked toward the clock. The darkness made him seem to be going away down a hill, growing small and stooped. When he reached the clock he kept walking without pause, as though it were truly no more than a shadow. But he bumped his nose.

“This is stupid,” he said coldly to the skull as he returned. “How do you think to cheat us? The way to the Bull may well lead through the clock, but there is something more to know. Tell me, or I will spill the wine out on the floor, for you to remember the smell and look of it as much as you choose. Be quick!”

But the skull was laughing again; this time making a thoughtful, almost kindly noise. “Remember what I told you about time,” it said. “When I was alive, I believed—as you do—that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said ‘one o’clock’ as though I could see it, and ‘Monday’ as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year’s Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls.”

Molly blinked bewilderedly, but Schmendrick was nodding. “Yes,” he said. “That’s how the real magicians do it. But then the clock—“

“The clock will never strike the right time,” the skull said. “Haggard scrambled the works long ago, one day when he was trying to grab hold of time as it swung by. But the important tiling is for you to understand that it doesn’t matter whether the clock strikes ten next, or seven, or fifteen o’clock. You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that—then any time at all will be the right time for you.”

At that moment, the clock struck four. The last bang had not yet faded when there came an answering sound from beneath the great hall. Neither a bellow nor the savage grumble that the Red Bull often made when he dreamed, it was a low, inquiring sound, as though the Bull had awakened sensing something new in the night. Every flagstone buzzed like a snake, and the darkness itself seemed to shudder as the glowing night creatures scampered wildly to the edges of the hall. Molly knew, suddenly and surely, that King Haggard was near.

“Give me the wine,” the skull said. “I have kept my part of the bargain.” Silently Schmendrick tipped the empty flask to the empty mouth, and the skull gurgled and sighed and smacked. “Ah,” it said at last, “ah, that was the real stuff, that was wine! You’re more of a magician than I took you for. Do you understand me now, about time?”

“Yes,” Schmendrick answered. “I think so.” The Red Bull made his curious sound again, and the skull rattled against the pillar. Schmendrick said, “No. I don’t know. Is there no other way?”

“How can there be?” Molly heard footsteps; then nothing; then the thin, cautious ebb and flow of breathing. She could not tell where it came from. Schmendrick turned to her, and his face seemed to be smudged from within, like the inside of a lantern glass, with fear and confusion. There was a light too, but it shook like a lantern in a storm.

“I think I understand,” he said, “but I’m sure I don’t. I’ll try.”

“I still think it’s a real clock,” Molly said. “That’s all right, though. I can walk through a real clock.” She spoke partly to comfort him, but she felt a brightness in her own body as she realized that what she had said was true. “I know where we have to go,” she said, “and that’s as good as knowing the time any day.”

The skull interrupted her. It said, “I’ll give you a bit of advice in the bargain, because the wine was so good.” Schmendrick looked guilty. The skull said, “Smash me. Just knock me to the floor and let me break in pieces. Don’t ask why, just do it.” It was speaking very quickly, almost whispering.

Together Schmendrick and Molly said, “What? Why?” The skull repeated its request. Schmendrick demanded, “What are you saying? Why on earth should we break you?”

“Do it!” the skull insisted. “Do it!” The sound of breath came nearer from all directions, though only on one pair of feet.

“No,” Schmendrick said. “You’re crazy.” He turned his back and started a second time toward the gaunt, dark clock. Molly took the Lady Amalthea by her cold hand and followed him, trailing the white girl like a kite.

“All right,” the skull said sadly. “I warned you.” In a terrible voice, a voice like hail on iron, it began at once to cry, “Help ho, the king! Guards, to me! Here are burglars, bandits, mosstroopers, kidnapers, housebreakers, murderers, character assassins, plagiarists! King Haggard! Ho, King Haggard!”

Now over their heads and all around them, feet came clattering, and they heard the whistling voices of the aged men-at-arms calling as they ran. No torches flared, for no light could be struck in the castle unless the king himself ordered it, and Haggard was yet silent. The three thieves stood confounded and undone, gaping helplessly at the skull.

“I’m sorry,” it said. “I’m just like that, treacherous. But I did try—“ Then its vanished eyes suddenly saw the Lady Amalthea, and they went wide and bright, although they could not have. “Oh no,” it said softly. “No, you don’t. I’m disloyal, but I’m not that disloyal.”

“Run,” Schmendrick said, as he had said it long ago to the wild, sea-white legend that he had just set free. They fled across the great hall while the men-at-arms blundered loudly in the dark, and the skull shrieked, “Unicorn! Unicorn! Haggard, Haggard, there she goes, down to the Red Bull! Mind the clock, Haggard—where are you? Unicorn! Unicorn!”

Then the king’s voice, rustling savagely under the uproar. “Fool, traitor, it was you who told her!” His quick, secret footsteps sounded close by, and Schmendrick set himself to turn and fight; but there came a grunt, and a crack, and a scraping noise, and then the bouncing crunch of old bone on old stone. The magician ran on.

When they stood before the clock, there was little grace either for doubting or understanding. The men-at-arms were in the hall now, and their clashing steps sent echoes booming back and forth between the walls, while King Haggard hissed and cursed them on. The Lady Amalthea never hesitated. She entered the clock and vanished as the moon passes behind clouds—hidden by them, but not in them, thousands of miles alone.

As though she were a dryad, Molly thought madly, and time were her tree. Through the dim, speckled glass Molly could see the weights and the pendulum and the cankered chimes, all swaying and burning as she stared. There was no door beyond, through which the Lady Amalthea might have gone. There was only the rusty avenue of the works, leading her eyes away into rain. The weights drifted from side to side like seaweed.

King Haggard was shouting, “Stop them! Smash the clock!” Molly started to turn her head, meaning to tell Schmendrick that she thought she knew what the skull had meant; but the magician had disappeared, and so had the great hall of King Haggard. The clock was gone too, and she was standing beside the Lady Amalthea in a cold place.

The king’s voice came to her from very far away, not so much heard as remembered. She went on turning her head, and found herself looking into the face of Prince Lír. Behind him there fell a bright mist, shivering like the sides of a fish, and bearing no resemblance at all to corroded clockwork. Schmendrick was nowhere to be seen.

Prince Lír bent his head gravely to Molly, but it was to the Lady Amalthea that he spoke first. “And you would have gone without me,” he said. “You haven’t been listening at all.”

She answered him then, when she had not spoken to Molly or the magician. In a low, clear voice, she said, “I would have come back. I do not know why I am here, or who I am. But I would have come back.”

“No,” said the prince, “you would never have come back.”

Before he could say anything more, Molly broke in—much to her own surprise—crying, “Never mind all that! Where’s Schmendrick?” The two strangers looked at her in courteous wonder that anyone else in the world should be able to speak, and she felt herself shake once from head to heels. “Where is he?” she demanded. “I’ll go back myself, if you won’t,” and she turned round again.

He came out of the mist, walking with his head down, as though he were leaning against a strong wind. He was holding a hand to his temple, and when he took it away the blood came softly down.

“It’s all right,” he said when he saw that the blood was falling on Molly Grue’s hands. “It’s all right, it’s not deep. I couldn’t get through until it happened.” He bowed shakily to Prince Lír. “I thought it was you who went by me in the dark,” he said. “Tell me, how did you pass through the clock so easily? The skull said you didn’t know the way.”

The prince looked puzzled. “What way?” he asked. “What was there to know? I saw where she had gone, and I followed.”

Schmendrick’s sudden laugh rubbed itself raw against the snaggy walls that came swimming in on them as their eyes grew familiar with this new darkness. “Of course,” he said. “Some things have their own time by nature.” He laughed again, shaking his head, and the blood flew. Molly tore a piece out of her dress.

“Those poor old men,” the magician said. “They didn’t want to hurt me, and I wouldn’t have hurt them if I could. We dodged around and around, apologizing to each other, and Haggard was yelling, and I kept bumping into the clock. I knew that it wasn’t a real clock, but it felt real, and I worried about it. Then Haggard came up with his sword and hit me.” He closed his eyes as Molly bound his head. “Haggard,” he said. “I was getting to like him. I still do. He looked so frightened.” The dim, removed voices of the king and his men seemed to be growing louder.

“I don’t understand,” Prince Lír said. “Why was he frightened—my father? What did he -- ?” But just then from the far side of the clock, they heard a wordless squall of triumph and the beginning of a great crash. The shimmering haze vanished immediately, and black silence caved in on them all.

“Haggard has destroyed the clock,” Schmendrick said presently. “Now there is no way back, and no way out but the Bull’s way.” A slow, thick wind began to wake.

XIII

The way was wide enough for all of them to walk abreast, but they went one by one. The Lady Amalthea walked in front, by her own choosing. Prince Lír, Schmendrick, and Molly Grue, following, had only her hair for lantern, but she herself had no light before her at all. Yet she went on as easily as though she had been this way before.

Where they truly were, they never knew. The cold wind seemed real, as did the cold reek that rode it, and the darkness let them pass far more grudgingly than had the clock. The path itself was enough of a fact to bruise feet, and to be partly choked in places by real stones and real earth that had crumbled down the sides of the cave. But its course was the impossible way of a dream: pitched and skewed, rounding on itself; now dropping almost sheer, now seeming to rise a little; now working out and slowly down, and now wandering back to take them, perhaps, once again below the great hall where old King Haggard must still be raging over a toppled clock and a shivered skull. Witchwork, surely, Schmendrick thought, and nothing made by a witch is real, at the last. Then he added, But this must be the last. It will all be real enough if this is not the last.

As they stumbled along, he hurriedly told Prince Lír the tale of their adventures, beginning with his own strange history and stranger doom; recounting the ruin of the Midnight Carnival and his flight with the unicorn, and continuing through their meeting with Molly Grue, the journey to Hagsgate, and Drinn’s story of the double curse on the town and the tower. Here he halted, for beyond lay the night of the Red Bull: a night that ended, for good or ill, with magic—and with a naked girl who struggled in her body like a cow in quicksand. He hoped that the prince would be more interested in learning of his heroic birth than in the origins of the Lady Amalthea.

Prince Lír marveled suspiciously, which is an awkward thing to manage. “I have known for a very long time that the king is not my father,” he said. “But I tried hard to be his son all the same. I’m the enemy of any who plot against him, and it would take more than a crone’s gibbering to make me work his downfall. As for the other, I think there are no unicorns any more, and I know that King Haggard has never seen one. How could any man who had looked upon a unicorn even once—let alone thousands with every tide—possibly be as sad as King Haggard is? Why, if I had only seen her once, and never again—“ Now he himself paused in some confusion, for he also felt that the talk was going on to some sorrow from which it could never be called back. Molly’s neck and shoulders were listening intently, but if the Lady Amalthea could hear what the two men were saying, she gave no sign.

“Yet the king has a joy hidden somewhere about his life,” Schmendrick pointed out. “Have you never seen a trace of it, truly—never seen its track in his eyes? I have. Think for a moment, Prince Lír.”

The prince was silent, and they wound further into the foul dark. They could not always tell whether they were climbing or descending; nor, sometimes, if the passage were bending once again, until the gnarly nearness of stone at their shoulders suddenly became the bleak rake of a wall against their faces. There was not the smallest sound of the Red Bull, or any glimmer of the wicked light; but when Schmendrick touched his damp face, the smell of the Bull came off on his fingers.

Prince Lír said, “Sometimes, when he has been on the tower, there is something in his face. Not a light, exactly, but a clearness. I remember. I was little, and he never looked like that when he looked at me, or at anything else. And I had a dream.” He was walking very slowly now, scufling his feet. “I used to have a dream,” he said, “the same dream over and over, about standing at my window in the middle of the night and seeing the Bull, seeing the Red Bull—“ He did not finish.

“Seeing the Bull driving unicorns into the sea,” Schmendrick said. “It was no dream. Haggard has them all now drifting in and out on the tides for his delight—all but one.” The magician drew a deep breath. “That one is the Lady Amalthea.”

“Yes,” Prince Lír answered him. “Yes, I know.”

Schmendrick stared at him. “What do you mean, you know?” he demanded angrily. “How could you possibly know that the Lady Amalthea is a unicorn? She can’t have told you, because she doesn’t remember it herself. Since you took her fancy, she has thought only of being a mortal woman.” He knew quite well that the truth was the other way around, but it made no difference to him just then. “How do you know?” he asked again.

Prince Lír stopped walking and turned to face him. It was too dark for Schmendrick to see anything but the cool, milky shining where his wide eyes were.

“I did not know what she was until now,” he said. “But I knew the first time I saw her that she was something more than I could see. Unicorn, mermaid, lamia, sorceress, Gorgon—no name you give her would surprise me, or frighten me. I love whom I love.”

“That’s a very nice sentiment,” Schmendrick said. “But when I change her back into her true self, so that she may do battle with the Red Bull and free her people—“

“I love whom I love,” Prince Lír repeated firmly. “You have no power over anything that matters.”

Before the magician could reply, the Lady Amalthea was standing between them, though neither man had seen or heard her as she came back along the passageway. In the darkness she gleamed and trembled like running water. She said, “I will go no farther.”

It was to the prince that she spoke, but it was Schmendrick who said, “There is no choice. We can only go on.” Molly Grue came nearer: one anxious eye and the pale start of a cheekbone. The magician said again, “We can only go on.”

The Lady Amalthea would not look straight at him. “He must not change me,” she said to Prince Lír. “Do not let him work his magic on me. The Bull has no care for human beings—we may walk out past him and get away. It is a unicorn the Bull wants. Tell him not to change me into a unicorn.”

Prince Lír twisted his fingers until they cracked. Schmendrick said, “It is true. We might very well escape the Red Bull that way even now, as we escaped before. But if we do, there will never be another chance. All the unicorns of the world will remain his prisoners forever, except one, and she will die. She will grow old and die.”

“Everything dies,” she said, still to Prince Lír. “It is good that everything dies. I want to die when you die. Do not let him enchant me, do not let him make me immortal. I am no unicorn, no magical creature. I am human, and I love you.”

He answered her, saying gently, “I don’t know much about enchantments, except how to break them. But I know that even the very greatest wizards are powerless against two who keep to each other—and this one is only poor Schmendrick, after all. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid of anything. Whatever you have been, you are mine now. I can hold you.”

She turned to look at the magician at last, and even through the darkness he could feel the terror in her eyes. “No,” she said. “No, we are not strong enough. He will change me, and whatever happens after that, you and I will lose each other. I will not love you when I am a unicorn, and you will love me only because you cannot help it. I will be more beautiful than anything in the world, and live forever.”

Schmendrick began to speak, but the sound of his voice made her cower like a candle flame. “I will not have it. I will not have it so.” She was looking back and forth from the prince to the magician, holding her voice together like the edges of a wound. She said, “If there is left a single moment of love when he changes me, you will know it, for I will let the Red Bull drive me into the sea with the others. Then at least I will be near you.”

“There’s no need for all that.” Schmendrick spoke lightly, making himself laugh. “I doubt I could turn you back if you wished it. Nikos himself never could turn a human being into unicorn—and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact. Let it end here then, let the quest end. Is the world any the worse for losing the unicorns, and would it be any better if they were running free again? One good woman more in the world is worth every single unicorn gone. Let it end. Marry the prince and live happily ever after.”

The passageway seemed to be growing lighter, and Schmendrick imagined the Red Bull stealing toward them, grotesquely cautious, setting his hoofs down as primly as a heron. The thin glimmer of Molly Grue’s cheekbone went out as she turned her face away. “Yes,” said the Lady Amalthea. “That is my wish.”

But at the same moment, Prince Lír said, “No.”

The word escaped him as suddenly as a sneeze, emerging in a questioning squeak—the voice of a silly young man mortally embarrassed by a rich and terrible gift. “No,” he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king’s voice: not Haggard, but a king whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give.

“My lady,” he said, “I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch’s door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”

The Lady Amalthea did not answer him. Schmendrick asked, “Why not? Who says so?”

“Heroes,” Prince Lír replied sadly. “Heroes know about order, about happy endings—heroes know that some things are better than others. Carpenters know grains and shingles, and straight lines.” He put his hands out to the Lady Amalthea, and took one step toward her. She did not draw back from him, nor turn her face; indeed, she lifted her head higher, and it was the prince who looked away.

“You were the one who taught me,” he said. “I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling. I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you. Also to find some way of starting a conversation.” But the Lady Amalthea spoke no word to him.

Pale as lime, the brightness was rising in the cavern. They could see one another clearly now, each gone tallowy and strange with fear. Even the beauty of the Lady Amalthea drained away under that dull, hungry light. She looked more mortal than any of the other three.

“The Bull is coming,” Prince Lír said. He turned and set off down the passageway, taking the bold, eager strides of a hero. The Lady Amalthea followed him, walking as lightly and proudly as princesses are taught to try to walk. Molly Grue stayed close to the magician, taking his hand as she had been used to touch the unicorn when she was lonely. He smiled down at her, looking quite pleased with himself.

Molly said, “Let her stay the way she is. Let her be.”

“Tell that to Lír,” he replied cheerfully. “Was it I who said that order is all? Was it I who said that she must challenge the Red Bull because it will be more proper and precise that way? I have no concern for regulated rescues and official happy endings. That’s Lír.”

“But you made him do it,” she said. “You know that all he wants in the world is to have her give up her quest and stay with him. And he would have done it, but you reminded him that he is a hero, and now he has to do what heroes do. He loves her, and you tricked him.”

“I never,” Schmendrick said. “Be quiet, he’ll hear you.” Molly felt herself growing light-headed, silly with the nearness of the Bull. The light and the smell had become a sticky sea in which she floundered like the unicorns, hopeless and eternal. The path was beginning to tilt downward, into the deepening light; and far ahead Prince Lír and the Lady Amalthea went marching along to disaster as calmly as candles burning down. Molly Grue snickered.

She went on, “I know why you did it too. You can’t become mortal yourself until you change her back again. Isn’t that it? You don’t care what happens to her, or to the others, just as long as you become a real magician at last. Isn’t that it? Well, you’ll never be a real magician, even if you change the Bull into a bullfrog, because it’s still just a trick when you do it. You don’t care about anything but magic, and what kind of magician is that? Schmendrick, I don’t feel good. I have to sit down.”

Schmendrick must have carried her for a time, because she was definitely not walking and his green eyes were ringing in her head. “That’s right. Nothing but magic matters to me. I would round up unicorns for Haggard myself if it would heighten my power by half a hair. It’s true. I have no preferences and no loyalties. I have only magic.” His voice was hard and sad.

“Really?” she asked, rocking dreamily in her terror, watching the brightness flowing by. “That’s awful.” She was very impressed. “Are you really like that?”

“No,” he said, then or later. “No, it’s not true. How could I be like that, and still have all these troubles?” Then he said, “Molly, you have to walk now. He’s there. He’s there.”

Molly saw the horns first. The light made her cover her face, but the pale horns struck bitterly through hands and eyelids to the back of her mind. She saw Prince Lír and the Lady Amalthea standing before the horns, while the fire flourished on the walls of the cavern and soared up into the roofless dark. Prince Lír had drawn his sword, but it blazed up in his hand, and he let it fall, and it broke like ice. The Red Bull stamped his foot, and everyone fell down.

Schmendrick had thought to find the Bull waiting in his lair, or in some wide place with room enough to do battle. But he had come silently up the passageway to meet them; and now he stood across their sight, not only from one burning wall to the other, but somehow in the walls themselves, and beyond them, bending away forever. Yet he was no mirage, but the Red Bull still, steaming and snuffling, shaking his blind head. His jaws champed over his breath with a terrible wallowing sound.

Now. Now is the time, whether I work ruin or great good. This is the end of it. The magician rose slowly to his feet, ignoring the Bull, listening only to his cupped self, as to a seashell. But no power stirred or spoke in him; he could hear nothing but the far, thin howling of emptiness against his ear; as old King Haggard must have heard it waking and sleeping, and never another sound. It will not come to me. Nikos was wrong. I am what I seem.

The Lady Amalthea had stepped back a pace from the Bull, but no more, and she was regarding him quietly as he pawed with his front feet and snorted great, rumbling, rainy blasts out of his vast nostrils. He seemed puzzled about her, and almost foolish. He did not roar. The Lady Amalthea stood in his freezing light with her head tipped back to see all of him. Without turning her head, she put her hand out to find Prince Lír’s hand.

Good, good. There is nothing I can do, and I am glad of it. The Bull will let her by, and she will go away with Lír. It is as right as anything. I am only sorry about the unicorns. The prince had not yet noticed her offered hand, but in a moment he would turn and see, and touch her for the first time. He will never know what she has given him, but neither will she. The Red Bull lowered his head and charged.

He came without warning, with no sound but the rip of his hoofs; and if he had chosen, he could have crushed all four of them in that one silent onslaught. But he let them scatter before him and flatten themselves into the wrinkled walls; and he went by without harming them, though he might easily have horned them out of their shallow shelters like so many periwinkles. Supple as fire, he turned where there was no room to turn and met them again, his muzzle almost touching the ground, his neck swelling like a wave. It was then that he roared.

They fled and he followed: not as swiftly as he had charged, but quickly enough to keep each one alone, friendless in the wild dark. The ground tore under their feet, and they cried out, but they could not even hear themselves. Every bellow of the Red Bull brought great slides of stones and earth shuddering down on them; and still they scrambled along like broken insects and still he came after them. Through his mad blaring they heard another sound: the deep whine of the castle itself as it strained at its roots, drumming like a flag in the wind of his wrath. And very faintly there drifted up the passageway the smell of the sea.

He knows, he knows! I fooled him once that way, but not again. Woman or unicorn, he will hunt her into the sea this time, as he was bidden, and no magic of mine will turn him from it. Haggard has won.

So the magician thought as he ran, all hope gone for the first time in his long, strange life. The way widened suddenly, and they emerged into a kind of grotto that could only have been the Bull’s den. The stench of his sleeping hung so thick and old here that it had a loathly sweetness about it; and the cave brooded gullet-red, as though his light had rubbed off on the walls and crusted in the cracks and crevices. Beyond lay the tunnel again, and the dim gleam of breaking water.

The Lady Amalthea fell as irrevocably as a flower breaks. Schmendrick leaped to one side, wheeling to drag Molly Grue with him. They brought up hard against a split slab of rock, and there they crouched together as the Red Bull raged by without turning. But he came to a halt between one stride and the next; and the sudden stillness—broken only by the Bull’s breathing and the distant grinding of the sea—would have been absurd, but for the cause of it.

She lay on her side with one leg bent beneath her. She moved slowly, but she made no sound. Prince Lír stood between her body and the Bull, weaponless, but with his hands up as though they still held a sword and shield. Once more in that endless night, the prince said, “No.”

He looked very foolish, and he was about to be trampled flat. The Red Bull could not see him, and would kill him without ever knowing that he had been in the way. Wonder and love and great sorrow shook Schmendrick the Magician then, and came together inside him, and filled him, filled him until he felt himself brimming and flowing with something that was none of these. He did not believe it, but it came to him anyway, as it had touched him twice before and left him more barren than he had been. This time, there was too much of it for him to hold: it spilled through his skin, sprang from his fingers and toes, welled up equally in his eyes and his hair and the hollows of his shoulders. There was too much to hold, too much ever to use; and still he found himself weeping with the pain of his impossible greed. He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.

The Lady Amalthea lay where she had fallen, though now she was trying to rise, and Prince Lír still guarded her, raising his naked hands against the enormous shape that loomed over him. The tip of the prince’s tongue stuck out of one corner of his mouth, making him look as serious as a child taking something apart. Long years later, when Schmendrick’s name had become a greater name than Nikos’s and worse than afreets surrendered at the sound of it, he was never to work the smallest magic without seeing Prince Lír before him, his eyes squinted up because of the brightness and his tongue sticking out.

The Red Bull stamped again, and Prince Lír fell on his face and got up bleeding. The Bull’s rumble began, and the blind, bloated head started down, lowering like one half of the scales of doom. Lír’s valiant heart hung between the pale horns, as good as dripping from their tips, himself as good as smashed and scattered; and his mouth buckled a little, but he never moved. The sound of the Bull grew louder as the horns went down.

Then Schmendrick stepped into the open and said a few words. They were short words, undistinguished either by melody or harshness, and Schmendrick himself could not hear them for the Red Bull’s dreadful bawling. But he knew what they meant, and he knew exactly how to say them, and he knew that he could say them again when he wanted to, in the same way or in a different way. Now he spoke them gently and with joy, and as he did so he felt his immortality fall from him like armor, or like a shroud.

At the first word of the spell, the Lady Amalthea gave a thin, bitter cry. She reached out again to Prince Lír, but he had his back to her, protecting her, and he did not hear. Molly Grue, heartsick, caught at Schmendrick’s arm, but the magician spoke on. Yet even when the wonder blossomed where she had been—sea-white, sea-white, as boundlessly beautiful as the Bull was mighty—still the Lady Amalthea clung to herself for a moment more. She was no longer there, and yet her face hovered like a breath in the cold, reeky light.

It would have been better if Prince Lír had not turned until she was gone, but he turned. He saw the unicorn, and she shone in him as in a glass, but it was to the other that he called—to the castaway, to the Lady Amalthea. His voice was the end of her: she vanished when he cried her name, as though he had crowed for day.

Things happened both swiftly and slowly as they do in dreams, where it is really the same thing. The unicorn stood very still, looking at them all out of lost, elsewhere eyes. She seemed even more beautiful than Schmendrick remembered, for no one can keep a unicorn in his head for long; and yet she was not as she had been, no more than he was. Molly Grue started toward her, speaking softly and foolishly, but the unicorn gave no sign that she knew her. The marvelous horn remained dull as rain.

With a roar that set the walls of his lair belling out and cracking like circus canvas, the Red Bull charged for the second time. The unicorn fled across the cave and into darkness. Prince Lír, in turning had stepped a little to one side, and before he could wheel back again, the Bull’s plunging pursuit smashed him down, stunned, with his mouth open.

Molly would have gone to him, but Schmendrick took hold of her and dragged her along after the Bull and the unicorn. Neither beast was in sight, but the tunnel still thundered from their desperate passage. Dazed and bewildered, Molly stumbled beside the fierce stranger who would neither let her fall nor slacken her pace. Over her head and all around, she could feel the castle groaning, creaking in the rock like a loosening tooth. The witch’s rhyme jangled in her memory, over and over.

“Yet none but one of Hagsgate town

May bring the castle swirling down.”

Suddenly it was sand slowing their feet, and the smell of the sea—cold as the other smell, but so good, so friendly that they both stopped running and laughed aloud. Above them, on the cliff, King Haggard’s castle splayed up towards a gray-green morning sky splashed with thin, milky clouds. Molly was sure that the king himself must be watching from one of the tremulous towers, but she could not see him. A few stars still fluttered in the heavy blue sky over the water. The tide was out, and the bald beach had the gray, wet gleam of a stripped shellfish, but far down the strand the sea was bending like a bow, and Molly knew that the ebb had ended.

The unicorn and the Red Bull stood facing each other at the arch of the bow, and the unicorn’s back was to the sea. The Bull moved in slowly, not charging, but pressing her almost gently towards the water, never touching her. She did not resist him. Her horn was dark, and her head was down, and the Bull was as much her master as he had been on the plain of Hagsgate, before she became the Lady Amalthea. It might have been that same hopeless dawn, except for the sea.

Yet she was not altogether beaten. She backed away until one hind foot actually stepped into the water. At that, she sprang through the sullen smolder of the Red Bull and ran away along the beach: so swift and light that the wind of her passing blew her footprints off the sand. The Bull went after her.

“Do something,” a hoarse voice said to Schmendrick, as Molly had said it long ago. Prince Lír stood behind him, his face bloody and his eyes mad. He looked like King Haggard. “Do something,” he said. “You have power. You changed her into a unicorn—do something now to save her. I will kill you if you don’t.” He showed the magician his hands.

“I cannot,” Schmendrick answered him quietly. “Not all the magic in the world can help her now. If she will not fight him, she must go into the sea with the others. Neither magic nor murder will help her.”

Molly heard small waves slapping on the sand—the tide was beginning to turn. She saw no unicorns tumbling in the water, though she looked for them, willing them to be there. What if it is too late? What if they drifted out on the last ebb tide, out to the deepest sea where no ships go, because of the kraken and the sea-drake, and because of the floating jungles of wrack that tangle and drown even these? She will never find them then. Would she stay with me?

“Then what is magic for?” Prince Lír demanded wildly. “What use is wizardry if it cannot save a unicorn?” He gripped the magician’s shoulder hard, to keep from falling.

Schmendrick did not turn his head. With a touch of sad mockery in his voice, he said, “That’s what heroes are for.”

They could not see the unicorn for the hugeness of the Bull; but suddenly she doubled on her track and came flying up the beach toward them. Blind and patient as the sea, the Red Bull followed her, his hoofs gouging great ditches in the damp sand. Smoke and fire, spray and storm, they came on together, neither one gaining, and Prince Lír gave a soft grunt of understanding.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “That is exactly what heroes are for. Wizards make no difference, so they say that nothing does, but heroes are meant to die for unicorns.” He let go of Schmendrick’s shoulder, smiling to himself.

“There is a basic fallacy in your reasoning,” Schmendrick began indignantly, but the prince never heard what it was. The unicorn flashed by them—her breath streaming blue-white, and her head carried too high—and Prince Lír leaped into the path of the Red Bull. For a moment, he disappeared entirely, like a feather in a flame. The Bull ran over him and left him lying on the ground. One side of his face cuddled too hard into the sand, and one leg kicked the air three times before it stopped.

He fell without a cry, and Schmendrick and Molly alike were stricken as silent as he, but the unicorn turned. The Red Bull halted when she did, and wheeled to put her once more between himself and the sea. He began his mincing, dancing advance again, but he might have been a courting bird for all the attention the unicorn paid him. She stood motionless, staring at the twisted body of Prince Lír.

The tide was grumbling in hard now, and the beach was already a slice narrower. Whitecaps and skipper’s-daughters spilled up into the sprawling dawn, but Molly Grue still saw no other unicorn but her own. Over the castle, the sky was scarlet, and on the highest tower King Haggard stood up as clear and black as a winter tree. Molly could see the straight scar of his mouth, and his nails darkening as he gripped the parapet. But the castle cannot fall now. Only Lír could have made it fall.

Suddenly the unicorn screamed. It was not at all like the challenging bell with which she had first met the Red Bull; it was an ugly, squawking wail of sorrow and loss and rage, such as no immortal creature ever gave. The castle quaked, and King Haggard shrank back with one arm across his face. The Red Bull hesitated, shuffling in the sand, lowing doubtfully.

The unicorn cried out again and reared up like a scimitar. The sweet sweep of her body made Molly close her eyes, but she opened them again in time to see the unicorn leap at the Red Bull, and the Bull swerve out of her way. The unicorn’s horn was alight again, burning and shivering like a butterfly.

Again she charged, and again the Bull gave ground, heavy with perplexity but still quick as a fish. His own horns were the color and likeness of lightning, and the slightest swing of his head made her stagger; but he retreated and retreated, backing steadily down the beach, as she had done. She lunged after him, driving to kill, but she could not reach him. She might have been stabbing at a shadow, or at a memory.

So the Red Bull fell back without giving battle, until she had stalked him to the water’s edge. There he made his stand, with the surf swirling about his hoofs and the sand rushing away under them. He would neither fight nor fly, and she knew now that she could never destroy him. Still she set herself for another charge, while he muttered wonderingly in his throat.

For Molly Grue, the world hung motionless in that glass moment. As though she were standing on a higher tower than King Haggard’s, she looked down on a pale paring of land where a toy man and woman stared with their knitted eyes at a clay bull and a tiny ivory unicorn. Abandoned playthings—there was another doll, too, half-buried; and a sandcastle with a stick king propped up in one tilted turret. The tide would take it all in a moment, and nothing would be left but the flaccid birds of the beach, hopping in circles.

Then Schmendrick shook her back to his side, saying, “Molly.” Far out to sea, the combers were coming in: the long, heavy rollers, curling over white across their green hearts; tearing themselves to smoke on the sandbars and the slimy rocks, rasping up the beach with a sound like fire. The birds flew up in yelling clumps, their strident outrage lost in the cry of the waves like pins.

And in the whiteness, of the whiteness, flowering in the tattered water, their bodies arching with the streaked marble hollows of the waves, their manes and tails and the fragile beards of the males burning in the sunlight, their eyes as dark and jeweled as the deep sea—and the shining of the horns, the seashell shining of the horns! The horns came riding in like the rainbow masts of silver ships.

But they would not come to land while the Bull was there. They rolled in the shallows, swirling together as madly as frightened fish when the nets are being hauled up; no longer with the sea, but losing it. Hundreds were borne in with each swell and hurled against the ones already struggling to keep from being shoved ashore, and they in their turn struck out desperately, rearing and stumbling, stretching their long, cloudy necks far back.

The unicorn lowered her head one last time and hurled herself at the Red Bull. If he had been either true flesh or a windy ghost, the blow would have burst him like rotten fruit. But he turned away unnoticing, and walked slowly into the sea. The unicorns in the water floundered wildly to let him by, stamping and slashing the surf into a roiling mist which their horns turned rainbow; but on the beach, and atop the cliff, and up and down through all of Haggard’s kingdom, the land sighed when his weight had passed from it.

He strode out a long way before he began to swim. The hugest waves broke no higher than his hocks, and the timid tide ran away from him. But when at last he let himself sink onto the flood, then a great surge of the sea stood up behind him: a green and black swell, as deep and smooth and hard as the wind. It gathered in silence, folding from one horizon to the other, until for a moment it actually hid the Red Bull’s humped shoulders and sloping back. Schmendrick lifted the dead prince, and he and Molly ran until the cliff face stopped them. The wave fell like a cloudburst of chains.

Then the unicorns came out of the sea.

Molly never saw them clearly—they were a light leaping toward her and a cry that dazzled her eyes. She was wise enough to know that no mortal was ever meant to see all the unicorns in the world, and she tried to find her own unicorn and look only at her. But there were too many of them, and they were too beautiful. Blind as the Bull, she moved to meet them, holding out her arms.

The unicorns would surely have run her down, as the Red Bull had trampled Prince Lír, for they were mad with freedom. But Schmendrick spoke, and they streamed to the right and left of Molly and Lír and himself—some even springing over them—as the sea shatters on a rock and then comes whirling together again. All around Molly there flowed and flowered a light as impossible as snow set afire, while thousands of cloven hoofs sang by like cymbals. She stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand.

“Look up,” Schmendrick said. “The castle is falling.”

She turned and saw that the towers were melting as the unicorns sprang up the cliff and flowed around them, exactly as though they had been made out of sand and the sea were sliding in. The castle came down in great cold chunks that turned thin and waxen as they swirled in the air, until they disappeared. It crumbled and vanished without a sound, and it left no ruins, either on land or in the memories of the two who watched it fall. A minute later, they could not remember where it had stood, or how it had looked.

But King Haggard, who was quite real, fell down through the wreckage of his disenchanted castle like a knife dropped through clouds. Molly heard him laugh once, as though he had expected it. Very little ever surprised King Haggard.

XIV

Once the sea had taken back their diamond-shaped footprints, there was no sign that they had ever been there, any more than King Haggard’s castle had been. The only difference was that Molly Grue remembered unicorns very well.

“It’s good that she went without saying good-by,” she said to herself. “I would have been stupid. I’m going to be stupid in a minute, anyway, but it really is better like this.” Then a warmth moved over her cheek and into her hair, like sunlight, and she turned and put her arms around the unicorn’s neck.

“Oh, you stayed!” she whispered, “you stayed!” She was about to be very foolish then, and ask, “Will you stay?” but the unicorn slipped gently from her and moved to where Prince Lír lay with his dark blue eyes already losing their color. She stood over him, as he had guarded the Lady Amalthea.

“She can restore him,” Schmendrick said softly. “A unicorn’s horn is proof against death itself.” Molly looked closely at him, as she had not done for a long time, and she saw that he had come at last to his power and his beginning. She could not say how she knew, for no wild glory burned about him, and no recognizable omens occurred in his honor, just at that moment. He was Schmendrick the Magician, as ever—and yet somehow it was for the first time.

It was long that the unicorn stood by Prince Lír before she touched him with her horn. For all that her quest had ended joyously, there was weariness in the way she held herself, and a sadness in her beauty that Molly had never seen. It suddenly seemed to her that the unicorn’s sorrow was not for Lír but for the lost girl who could not be brought back; for the Lady Amalthea, who might have lived happily ever after with the prince. The unicorn bowed her head, and her horn glanced across Lír’s chin as clumsily as a first kiss.

He sat up blinking, smiling at something long ago. “Father,” he said in a quick, wondering voice. “Father, I had a dream.” Then he saw the unicorn, and he rose to his feet as the blood on his face began to shine and move again. He said, “I was dead.”

The unicorn touched him a second time, over the heart, letting her horn rest there for a little space. They were both trembling. Prince Lír put his hands out to her like words. She said, “I remember you. I remember.”

“When I was dead—“ Prince Lír began, but she was away. Not a stone rattled down after her, not a bush tore out as she sprang up the cliff: she went as lightly as the shadow of a bird; and when she looked back, with one cloven foot poised, and the sunlight on her sides, with her head and neck absurdly fragile for the burden of the horn—then each of the three below called to her in pain. She turned and vanished; but Molly Grue saw their voices thump home into her like arrows, and even more than she wished the unicorn back, she wished that she had not called.

Prince Lír said, “As soon as I saw her, I knew that I had been dead. It was so the other time, when I looked down from my father’s tower and saw her.” He glanced up then and drew in his breath. It was the only sound of grief for King Haggard that any living thing ever made.

“Was it I?” he whispered. “The curse said that I would be the one to bring the castle down, but I would never have done it. He was not good to me, but it was only because I was not what he wanted. Is it my doing that he is fallen?”

Schmendrick replied, “If you had not tried to save the unicorn, she would never have turned on the Red Bull and driven him into the sea. It was the Red Bull who made the overflow, and so set the other unicorns free, and it was they who destroyed the castle. Would you have it otherwise, knowing this?”

Prince Lír shook his head, but he said nothing. Molly asked, “But why did the Bull run from her? Why didn’t he stand and fight?”

There was no sign of him when they looked out to sea, though he was surely too vast to have swum out of sight in so short a time. But whether he reached some other shore, or whether the water drew even his great bulk down at last, none of them knew until long after; and he was never seen again in that kingdom.

“The Red Bull never fights,” Schmendrick said. “He conquers, but he never fights.”

He turned to Prince Lír and put a hand on his shoulder. “Now you are the king,” he said. He touched Molly as well, said something that was more of a whistle than a word, and the three of them floated up the air like milkweed plumes to the top of the cliff. Molly was not frightened. The magic lifted her as gently as though she were a note of music and it were singing her. She could feel that it was never very far from being wild and dangerous, but she was sorry when it set her down.

No stone of the castle remained, nor any scar; the earth was not even a shade paler where it had stood. Four young men in rusty, ragged armor wandered gaping through the vanished corridors, and turned around and around in the absence that had been the great hall. When they saw Lír, Molly, and Schmendrick, they came running toward them, laughing. They fell on their knees before Lír and cried out together, “Your Majesty! Long live King Lír!”

Lír blushed, and actually tried to pull them to their feet. “Never mind that,” he mumbled, “never mind that. Who are you?” He peered in amazement from one face to the next. “I know you—I do know you—but how can it be?”

“It is true, Your Majesty,” the first of the young men said happily. “We are indeed King Haggard’s men-at-arms—the same who served him for so many cold and weary years. We fled the castle after you disappeared into the clock, for the Red Bull was roaring, and all the towers were trembling, and we were afraid. We knew that the old curse must be coming home at last.”

“A great wave took the castle,” said a second man-at-arms, “exactly as the witch, foretold. I saw it go spilling down the cliff as slowly as snow, and why we did not go with it, I cannot tell.”

“The wave parted to go around us,” another man said, “as I never saw any wave do. It was strange water, like the ghost of a wave, boiling with a rainbow light, and for a moment it seemed to me—“ He rubbed his eyes and shrugged, and smiled helplessly. “I don’t know. It was like a dream.”

“But what has happened to you all?” Lír demanded. “You were old men when I was born, and now you are younger than I am. What miracle is this?”

The three who had spoken giggled and looked embarrassed, but the fourth man replied, “It is the miracle of meaning what we said. Once we told the Lady Amalthea that we would grow young again if she wished it so, and we must have been telling the truth. Where is she? We will go to her aid if it means facing the Red Bull himself.”

King Lír said, “She is gone. Find my horse and saddle him. Find my horse.” His voice was harsh and hungry, and the men-at-arms scrambled to obey their new lord.

But Schmendrick, standing behind him, said quietly, “Your Majesty, it may not be. You must not follow her.”

The king turned, and he looked like Haggard. “Magician, she is mine!” He paused, and then went on in a gentler tone, close to pleading. “She has twice raised me up from death, and what will I be without her but dead for a third time?” He took Schmendrick by the wrists with a grip strong enough to powder bones, but the magician did not move. Lír said, “I am not King Haggard. I have no wish to capture her, but only to spend my life following after her—miles, leagues, even years behind—never seeing her, perhaps, but content. It is my right. A hero is entitled to his happy ending, when it comes at last.”

But Schmendrick answered, “This is not the end, either for you or for her. You are the king of a wasted land where there has never been any king but fear. Your true task has just begun, and you may not know in your life if you have succeeded in it, but only if you fail. As for her, she is a story with no ending, happy or sad. She can never belong to anything mortal enough to want her.”

Most strangely then, he put his arms around the young king and held him so for a time. “Yet be content, my lord,” he said in a low voice. “No man has ever had more of her grace than you, and no other will ever be blessed by her remembrance. You have loved her and served her—be content, and be king.”

“But that is not what I want!” Lír cried. The magician answered not a word, but only looked at him. Blue eyes stared back into green; a face grown lean and lordly into one neither so handsome nor so bold. The king began to squint and blink, as though he were gazing at the sun, and it was not long before he lowered his eyes and muttered, “So be it. I will stay and rule alone over a wretched people in a land I hate. But I will have no more joy of my rule than poor Haggard ever had.”

A small autumn cat with a crooked ear stalked out of some secret fold in the air and yawned at Molly. She caught him up against her face, and he tangled his paws in her hair. Schmendrick smiled, and said to the king, “We must leave you now. Will you come with us and see us in friendship to the edge of your domain? There is much between here and there that is worth your study—and I can promise you that there will be some sign of unicorns.”

Then King Lír shouted for his horse again, and his men searched for it and found it; but there were none for Schmendrick and Molly. Yet when they came back with the king’s horse, they turned at his amazed stare and saw two more horses trailing docilely behind them: one black and one brown, and both already saddled and bridled. Schmendrick took the black for himself, and gave the brown horse to Molly.

She was afraid of them at first. “Are they yours?” she asked him. “Did you make them? Can you do that now—just make things?” The king’s whisper echoed her wonder.

“I found them,” the magician answered. “But what I mean by finding is not what you mean. Ask me no more.” He lifted her into the saddle, and then leaped up himself.

So the three of them rode away, and the men-at-arms followed on foot. No one looked back, for there was nothing to see. But King Lír said once, without turning, “It is strange to have grown to manhood in a place, and then to have it gone, and everything changed—and suddenly to be king. Was none of it real at all? Am I real, then?” Schmendrick made no reply.

King Lír wished to go swiftly, but Schmendrick held them to a leisurely pace and a roundabout road. When the king fretted for speed, he was admonished to consider his walking men—though they, marvelously, never tired for all the length of the journey. But Molly soon understood that the magician was delaying in order to make Lír gaze long and closely at his realm. And to her own surprise, she discovered that the land was worth the look.

For, very slowly, spring was coming to the barren country that had been Haggard’s. A stranger would not have noticed the change, but Molly could see that the withered earth was brightening with a greenness as shy as smoke. Squat, snaggly trees that had never yet bloomed were putting forth flowers in the wary way an army sends out scouts; long-dry streams were beginning to rustle in their beds, and small creatures were calling to one another. Smells slipped by in ribbons: pale grass and black mud, honey and walnuts, mint and hay and rotting applewood; and even the afternoon sunlight had a tender, sneezy scent that Molly would have known anywhere. She rode beside Schmendrick, watching the gentle advent of the spring and thinking of how it had come to her, late but lasting.

“Unicorns have passed here,” she whispered to the magician. “Is that the cause, or is it Haggard’s fall and the Red Bull’s going? What is it, what is happening?”

“Everything,” he answered her, “everything, all at once. It is not one springtime, but fifty; and not one or two great terrors flown away, but a thousand small shadows lifted from the land. Wait and see.”

Speaking for Lír’s ear, he added, “Nor is this the first spring that ever has been in this country. It was a good land long ago, and it wants little but a true king to be so again. See how it softens before you.”

King Lír said nothing, but his eyes roved left and right as he rode, and he could not but observe the ripening. Even the valley of Hagsgate, of evil memory, was stirring with all manner of wildflowers—columbine and harebell, lavender and lupine, foxglove and yarrow. The rutted footprints of the Red Bull were growing mellow with mallow.

But when they came to Hagsgate, deep in the afternoon, a strange and savage sight awaited them. The plowed fields were woefully torn and ravaged, while the rich orchards and vineyards had been stamped down, leaving no grove or arbor standing. It was such shattering ruin as the Bull himself might have wrought; but it seemed to Molly Grue as though fifty years’ worth of foiled griefs had struck Hagsgate all at once, just as that many springtimes were at last warming the rest of the land. The trampled earth looked oddly ashen in the late light.

King Lír said quietly, “What is this?”

“Ride on, Your Majesty,” the magician replied. “Ride on.”

The sun was setting as they passed through the overthrown gates of the town and guided their horses slowly down streets that were choked with boards and belongings and broken glass; with pieces of walls and windows, chimneys, chairs, kitchenware, roofs, bathtubs, beds, mantels, dressing tables. Every house in Hagsgate was down; everything that could be broken was. The town looked as though it had been stepped on.

The people of Hagsgate sat on their doorsteps wherever they could find them, considering the wreckage. They had always had the air of paupers, even in the midst of plenty, and real ruin made them appear almost relieved, and no whit poorer. They hardly noticed Lír when he rode up to them, until he said, “I am the king. What has befallen you here?”

“It was an earthquake,” one man murmured dreamily, but another contradicted him, saying, “It was a storm, a nor’easter straight off the sea. It shook the town to bits, and hail came down like hoofs.” Still another man insisted that a mighty tide had washed over Hagsgate; a tide as white as dogwood and heavy as marble, that drowned none and smashed everything. King Lír listened to them all, smiling grimly.

“Listen,” he said when they were done. “King Haggard is dead, and his castle has fallen. I am Lír, the son of Hagsgate who was abandoned at birth in order to keep the witch’s curse from coming true, and this from happening.” He swept an arm around him at the burst houses. “Wretched, silly people, the unicorns have returned—the unicorns, that you saw the Red Bull hunting, and pretended not to see. It was they who brought the castle down, and the town as well. But it is your greed and your fear that have destroyed you.”

The townsfolk sighed in resignation, but a middle-aged woman stepped forward and said with some spirit, “It all seems a bit unfair, my lord, begging your pardon. What could we have done to save the unicorns? We were afraid of the Red Bull. What could we have done?”

“One word might have been enough,” King Lír replied. “You’ll never know now.”

He would have wheeled his horse and left them there, but a feeble, roupy voice called to him, “Lír—little Lír—my child, my king!” Molly and Schmendrick recognized the man who came shuffling up with his arms open, wheezing and limping as though he were older than he truly was. It was Drinn.

“Who are you?” the king demanded. “What do you want of me?”

Drinn pawed at his stirrups, nuzzling his boots. “You don’t know me, my boy? No—how should you? How should I deserve to have you know me? I am your father—your poor old overjoyed father. I am the one who left you in the marketplace on that winter night long ago, and handed you over to your heroic destiny. How wise I was, and how sad for so long, and how proud I am now! My boy, my little boy!” He could not quite cry real tears, but his nose was running.

Without a word, King Lír tugged at his horse’s reins, backing him out of the crowd. Old Drinn let his outstretched arms drop to his sides. “This is what it is to have children!” he screeched. “Ungrateful son, will you desert your father in the hour of his distress, when a word from your pet wizard would set everything right again? Despise me if you will, but I have played my part in putting you where you are, and you dare not deny it! Villainy has its rights too.”

Still the king would have turned away, but Schmendrick touched his arm and leaned near. “It’s true, you know,” he whispered. “But for him—but for them all—the tale would have worked out quite another way, and who can say that the ending would have been even as happy as this? You must be their king, and you must rule them as kindly as you would a braver and more faithful folk. For they are a part of your fate.”

Then Lír lifted his hand to the people of Hagsgate, and they pushed and elbowed one another for silence. He said, “I must ride with my friends and keep them company for a way. But I will leave my men-at-arms here, and they will help you begin to build your town again. When I return, in a little time, I also will help. I will not begin to build my new castle until I see Hagsgate standing once more.”

They complained bitterly that Schmendrick could do it all in a moment by means of his magic. But he answered them, “I could not, even if I would. There are laws that govern the wizard’s art, as laws command the seasons and the sea. Magic made you wealthy once, when all others in the land were poor; but your days of prosperity are ended, and now you must start over. What was wasteland in Haggard’s time shall grow green and generous again, but Hagsgate will yield a living exactly as miserly as the hearts that dwell there. You may plant your acres again, and raise up your fallen orchards and vineyards, but they will never flourish as they used to, never—until you learn to take joy in them, for no reason.”

He gazed on the silent townsfolk with no anger in his glance, but only pity. “If I were you, I would have children,” he said; and then to King Lír, “How says Your Majesty? Shall we sleep here tonight and be on our way at dawn?”

But the king turned and rode away out of ruined Hagsgate as fast as he could spur. It was long before Molly and the magician came up with him, and longer still before they lay down to sleep.

For many days they journeyed through King Lír’s domain, and each day they knew it less and delighted in it more. The spring ran on before them as swiftly as fire, clothing all that was naked and opening everything that had long ago shut up tight, touching the earth as the unicorn had touched Lír. Every sort of animal, from bears to black beetles, came sporting or shambling or scurrying along their way, and the high sky, that had been as sandy and arid as the soil itself, now blossomed with birds, swirling so thickly that it seemed like sunset most of the day. Fish bent and flickered in the whisking streams, and wildflowers raced up and down the hills like escaped prisoners. All the land was noisy with life, but it was the silent rejoicing of the flowers that kept the three travelers awake at night.

The folk of the villages greeted them cautiously, and with little less dourness than they had shown when Schmendrick and Molly first came that way. Only the oldest among them had ever seen the spring before, and many suspected the rampaging greenness of being a plague or an invasion. King Lír told them that Haggard was dead and the Red Bull gone forever, invited them to visit him when his new castle was raised, and passed on. “They will need time to feel comfortable with flowers,” he said.

Wherever they stopped, he left word that all outlaws were pardoned, and Molly hoped that the news would come to Captain Cully and his merry band. As it happened, it did, and all the merry band immediately abandoned the life of the greenwood, saving only Cully himself and Jack Jingly. Together they took up the trade of wandering minstrels and were reported to have become reasonably popular in the provinces.

One night, the three slept at the farthest frontier of Lír’s kingdom, making their beds in high grass. The king would bid them farewell in the morning and return to Hagsgate. “It will be lonely,” he said in the darkness. “I would rather go with you, and not be king.”

“Oh, you’ll get to like it,” Schmendrick replied. “The best young men of the villages will make their way to your court, and you will teach them to be knights and heroes. The wisest of ministers will come to counsel you, the most skillful musicians and jugglers and storytellers will come seeking your favor. And there will be a princess, in time—either fleeing her unspeakably wicked father and brothers, or seeking justice for them. Perhaps you will hear of her, shut away in a fortress of flint and adamant, her only companion a compassionate spider—“

“I don’t care about that,” King Lír said. He was silent for so long that Schmendrick thought he had fallen asleep, but presently he said, “I wish I could see her once more, to tell her all my heart. She will never know what I really meant to say. You did promise that I would see her.”

The magician answered him sharply. “I promised only that you would see some sign of unicorns, and so you have. Your realm is blessed beyond any land’s deserving because they have passed across it in freedom. As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn’t say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits. Think of that, and be still.” The king spoke no more after that, and Schmendrick repented of his words.

“She touched you twice,” he said in a little while. “The first touch was to bring you to life again, but the second was for you.” Lír did not answer, and the magician never knew if he had heard or not.

Schmendrick dreamed that the unicorn came and stood by him at moonrise. The thin night wind lifted and spilled her mane, and the moon shone on the snowflake crafting of her small head. He knew it was a dream, but he was happy to see her. “How beautiful you are,” he said. “I never really told you.” He would have roused the others, but her eyes sang him a warning as clearly as two frightened birds, and he knew that if he moved to call Molly and Lír he would wake himself, and she would vanish. So he said only, “They love you more, I think, though I do the best I can.”

“That is why,” she said, and he could not tell what she was answering. He lay very still, hoping that he would remember the exact shape of her ears when he did wake in the morning. She said, “You are a true and mortal wizard now, as you always wished. Does it make you happy?”

“Yes,” he replied with a quiet laugh. “I’m not poor Haggard, to lose my heart’s desire in the having of it. But there are wizards and wizards; there is black magic and white magic, and the infinite shades of gray between—and I see now that it is all the same. “Whether I decide to be what men would call a wise and good magician—aiding heroes, thwarting witches, wicked lords, and unreasonable parents; making rain, curing woolsorter’s disease and the mad staggers, getting cats down from trees—or whether I choose the retorts full of elixirs and essences, the powders and herbs and banes, the padlocked books of gramarye bound in skins better left unnamed, the muddy mist darkening in the chamber and the sweet voice lisping therein—why, life is short, and how many can I help or harm? I have my power at last, but the world is still too heavy for me to move, though my friend Lír might think otherwise.” And he laughed again in his dream, a little sadly.

The unicorn said, “That is true. You are a man, and men can do nothing that makes any difference.” But her voice was strangely slow and burdened. She asked, “Which will you choose?”

The magician laughed for a third time. “Oh, it will be the kind magic, undoubtedly, because you would like it more. I do not think that I will ever see you again, but I will try to do what would please you if you knew. And you—where will you be for the rest of my life? I thought you would have gone home to your forest by now.”

She turned a little away from him, and the sudden starlight of her shoulders made all his talk of magic taste like sand in his throat. Moths and midges and other night insects too small to be anything in particular came and danced slowly around her bright horn, and this did not make her appear foolish, but them most wise and lovely as they celebrated her. Molly’s cat rubbed in and out between her forefeet.

“The others have gone,” she said. “They are scattered to the woods they came from, no two together, and men will not catch sight of them much more easily than if they were still in the sea. I will go back to my forest too, but I do not know if I will live contentedly there, or anywhere. I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.”

Schmendrick hid his face like a child, though he was a great magician. “I am sorry, I am sorry,” he mumbled into his wrist. “I have done you evil, as Nikos did to the other unicorn, with the same good will, and I can no more undo it than he could. Mommy Fortuna and King Haggard and the Red Bull together were kinder to you than I.”

But she answered him gently, saying, “My people are in the world again. No sorrow will live in me as long as that joy—save one, and I thank you for that, too. Farewell, good magician. I will try to go home.”

She made no sound when she left him, but he was awake, and the crook-eared cat was miaowing lonesomely. Turning his head, he saw the moonlight trembling in the open eyes of King Lír and Molly Grue. The three of them lay awake till morning, and nobody said a word.

At dawn, King Lír rose up and saddled his horse. Before he mounted, he said to Schmendrick and Molly, “I would like it if you came to see me one day.” They assured him that they would, but still he lingered with them, twisting the dangling reins about his fingers.

“I dreamed about her last night,” he said.

Molly cried, “So did I!” and Schmendrick opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

King Lír said hoarsely, “By our friendship, I beg you—tell me what she said to you.” His hands gripped one hand each of theirs, and his clutch was cold and painful.

Schmendrick gave him a weak smile. “My lord, I so rarely remember my dreams. It seems to me that we spoke solemnly of silly things, as one does—grave nonsense, empty and evanescent—“ The king let go of his hand and turned his half-mad gaze on Molly Grue.

“I’ll never tell,” she said, a little frightened, but flushing oddly. “I remember, but I’ll never tell anyone, if I die for it—not even you, my lord.” She was not looking at him as she spoke, but at Schmendrick.

King Lír let her hand fall as well, and he swung himself into the saddle so fiercely that his horse reared up across the sunrise, bugling like a stag. But Lír kept his seat and glared down at Molly and Schmendrick with a face so grim and scored and sunken that he might well have been king as long as Haggard before him.

“She said nothing to me,” he whispered. “Do you understand? She said nothing to me, nothing at all.”

Then his face softened, as even King Haggard’s face had gone a little gentle when he watched the unicorns in the sea. For that moment he was again the young prince who had liked to sit with Molly in the scullery. He said, “She looked at me. In my dream, she looked at me and never spoke.”

He rode away without good-by, and they watched after him until the hills hid him: a straight, sad horseman, going home to be king. Molly said at last, “Oh, the poor man. Poor Lír.”

“He has not fared so badly,” the magician answered. “Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.” But his voice was a little doubtful, and he laid his arm softly around Molly’s shoulders. “It cannot be an ill fortune to have loved a unicorn,” he said. “Surely it must be the dearest luck of all, though the hardest earned.”

By and by, he put her as far from him as his fingers’ ends and asked her, “Now will you tell me what it was she said to you?” But Molly Grue only laughed and shook her head till her hair came down, and she was more beautiful than the Lady Amalthea. The magician said, “Very well. Then I’ll find the unicorn again, and perhaps she will tell me.” And he turned calmly to whistle up their steeds.

She said no word while he saddled his horse, but when he began on her own she put her hand on his arm. “Do you think—do you truly hope that we may find her? There was something I forgot to say.”

Schmendrick looked at her over his shoulder. The morning sunlight made his eyes seem gay as grass; but now and then, when he stooped into the horse’s shadow, there stirred a deeper greenness in his gaze—the green of pine needles that has a faint, cool bitterness about it. He said, “I fear it, for her sake. It would mean that she too is a wanderer now, and that is a fate for human beings, not for unicorns. But I hope, of course I hope.” Then he smiled at Molly and took her hand in his. “Anyway, since you and I must choose one road to follow, out of the many that run to the same place in the end, it might as well be a road that a unicorn has taken. We may never see her, but we will always know where she has been. Come, then. Come with me.”

So they began their new journey, which took them in its time in and out of most of the folds of the sweet, wicked, wrinkled world, and so at last to their own strange and wonderful destiny. But that was all later, and first, not ten minutes out of Lír’s kingdom, they met a maiden who came hurrying toward them on foot. Her dress was torn and smirched, but the richness of its making was still plain to see, and though her hair was tumbled and brambled, her arms scratched, and her fair face dirty, there was no mistaking her for anyone but a princess in woeful distress. Schmendrick lighted down to support her, and she clutched him with both hands as though he were a grapefruit hull.

“A rescue!” she cried to him, “a rescue, au secours! An ye be a man of mettle and sympathy, aid me now. I hight the Princess Alison Jocelyn, daughter to good King Giles, and him foully murdered by his brother, the bloody Duke Wulf, who hath ta’en my three brothers, the Princes Corin, Colin, and Galvin, and cast them into a fell prison as hostages that I will wed with his fat son, the Lord Dudley, but I bribed the sentinel and sopped the dogs—“

But Schmendrick the Magician raised his hand, and she fell silent, staring up at him in wonder out of wide lilac eyes. “Fair princess,” he said gravely to her, “the man you want just went that way,” and he pointed back toward the land they had so lately quitted. “Take my horse, and you will be up with him while your shadow is still behind you.”

He cupped his hands for the Princess Alison Jocelyn, and she climbed wearily and in some bewilderment to the saddle. Schmendrick turned the horse, saying, “You will surely overtake him with ease, for he will be riding slowly. He is a good man, and a hero greater than any cause is worth. I send all my princesses to him. His name is Lír.”

Then he slapped the horse on the rump and sent it off the way King Lír had gone; and then he laughed for so long that he was too weak to get up behind Molly and had to walk beside her horse for a while. When he caught his breath again, he began to sing, and she joined with him. And this is what they sang as they went away together, out of this story and into another:

“’I am no king, and I am no lord,

And I am no soldier at arms,’ said he.

‘I’m none but a harper, and a very poor harper,

That am come hither to wed with ye.’

“’If you were a lord, you should be my lord,

And the same if you were a thief,’ said she.

‘And if you are a harper, you shall be my harper,

For it makes no matter to me, to me,

For it makes no matter to me.’

“’But what if it prove that I am no harper?

That I lied for your love most monstrously?’

‘Why, then I’ll teach you to play and sing,

For I dearly love a good harp,’ said she.”

THE END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter S. Beagle, born in New York City in 1939, was graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1959. His first book, the novel A Fine and Private Place, was published the following year. He lived in Paris and traveled in France, Italy, and England and then spent a year at Stanford University on a Writing Fellowship. His second book, I See by My Outfit, an account of a cross-country trip by motor scooter, was published in 1965. Mr. Beagle has published stories and articles in The Atlantic and Holiday, among other periodicals. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.