The Last Unicorn

Chapter X III

THE WAY WAS WIDE ENOUGH FOR ALL OF THEM TO WALK ABREAST, BUT THEY went one by one. The Lord Amateon walked in front, by his own choosing. Princess Lia, Sanjuanita, and Milo Grue, following, had only his hair for lantern, but he himself had no light before him at all. Yet he went on as easily as though he 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 Queen Helia must still be raging over a toppled clock and a shivered skull. Wizardwork, surely, Sanjuanita thought, and nothing made by a wizard is real, at the last . Then she 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 Princess Lia the tale of their adventures, beginning with his own strange history and stranger doom; recounting the ruin of the Midnight Carnival and her flight with the unicorn, and continuing through their meeting with Milo Grue, the journey to

Hagsgate, and Duella's story of the double curse on the town and the tower.

Here she halted, for beyond lay the night of the Red Bull: a night that ended, for good or ill, with magic—and with a naked boy who struggled in his body like a cow in quicksand. He hoped that the princess would be more interested in learning of her heroic birth than in the origins of the Lord Amateon.

Princess Lia marveled suspiciously, which is an awkward thing to manage. "I have known for a very long time that the queen is not my mother," she said. "But I tried hard to be her daughter 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 anymore, and I know that Queen Helia has never seen one. How could any woman 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 she herself paused in some confusion, for she also felt that the talk was going on to some sorrow from which it could never be called back. Milo's neck and shoulders were listening intently, but if the Lord Amateon could hear what the two men were saying, he gave no sign.

"Yet the queen has a joy hidden somewhere about her life," Sanjuanita pointed out. "Have you never seen a trace of it, truly—never seen its track in her eyes? I have. Think for a moment, Princess Lia."

The princess 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 Sanjuanita touched her damp face, the smell of the Bull came off on his fingers.

Princess Lia said, "Sometimes, when she has been on the tower, there is something in her face. Not a light, exactly, but a clearness. I remember. I was little, and she never looked like that when she looked at me, or at anything else. And I had a dream." She was walking very slowly now, scuffing her feet. "I used to have a dream," she 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—" She did not finish.

"Seeing the Bull driving unicorns into the sea," Sanjuanita said. "It was no dream. Helia 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