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HUNT

They were four days gone from Elderew, east and slightly south of Rhyndweir in the heart of the Greensward, when they came upon the hunter.

“Black it was, like the coal brought down out of the north mines, like some shadow that hasn’t ever seen the daylight. Sweet mother! It came right past me, so close that it seemed I might reach out and touch it. It was all grace and beauty, leaping as if the earth couldn’t hold it to her, speeding past us all like a bit of wind that you can feel and sometimes see, but never touch. Oh, I didn’t want to touch it, mind. I didn’t want to touch something that … pure. It was like watching fire—clean, but it burns you if you come too close. I didn’t want to come too close.”

The hunter’s voice was quick and husky with emotions that lay all too close to the surface of the man. He sat with Ben and Dirk in the early evening hours about a small campfire built in the shelter of an oak grove and a ridgeline. Sunset scattered red and purple across the western horizon, and blue-gray dusk hovered east. The close of the day was still and warm, the rain clouds of four nights past a memory. Birds sang their evening songs in the trees, and the smell of flowers was in the air.

Ben watched the hunter closely. The hunter was a big, rawboned man with sun-browned, weathered skin and calloused hands. He wore woodsman’s garb with high leather boots softened by hand for comfort and stealth, and he carried a crossbow and bolts, long bow and arrows, a bolo, and a skinning knife. His face was long and high-boned, a mask of angles and flat planes with the skin stretched tightly across and the features strained by the tension. He had the look of a dangerous man; in other times, he might have been.

But not this night. This night he was something less.

“I’m getting ahead of myself,” the man muttered suddenly, an admonishment as much as a declaration. He wiped at his forehead with one big hand and hunkered down closer to the flames of the campfire as if to draw their warmth. “I almost wasn’t there at all, you know. I was almost gone to the Melchor hunting bighorn. Had my gear all packed and ready when Dain found me. He caught up with me at the crossroads out, running like his woman had found out the worst, calling after me like some fool. I slowed and waited, and that made me the real fool. ‘There’s a hunt being organized,’ he said. ‘The King himself has called it. His people are out everywhere, drawing the best and the quickest to net something you won’t believe. A black unicorn! Yea, it’s so,’ he says. ‘A black unicorn that’s to be hunted down if it takes all month, and we have to chase the beast from valley’s end to valley’s end. You got to come,’ he says. ‘They’re giving each man twenty pieces a day and food and, if you’re the one who snares him, another five thousand!’

The hunter laughed sullenly. “Five thousand pieces. Seemed like the best chance I’d ever get at the time—more money than I’d see in ten years’ work any other way. I looked at Dain and wondered if he’d lost his mind, then saw the way his eyes were lit and knew it was all real, that there was a hunt, that there was a bounty of five thousand, that some fool—King or otherwise—believed there was a black unicorn out there to be caught.”

Ben glanced momentarily at Dirk. The cat sat a few feet from him, eyes fixed intently on the speaker, paws curled up underneath so that they didn’t show. He hadn’t moved or spoken since the hunter had come across their tiny camp and asked if he might share their meal. Dirk was to all outward appearances a normal cat. Ben couldn’t help wondering what he might be thinking.

“So we went, Dain and me—us and another two thousand of the same mind. We went to Rhyndweir where the hunt was to begin. The whole plain between the split in the rivers was packed tight with hunters camped and waiting. There was beaters and drivers, there was the Lord Kallendbor and all the other high-and-mighty landsmen with all their knights in armor and foot soldiers. There was horses and mules, wagons loaded down with provisions, carriers and retainers, a whole sea of moving parts and sounds that would have frightened any other prey from ten miles distant! Mother’s blood, it was a mess! But I stayed on anyway, still thinking about the money, but thinking about something else now, too—thinking about that black unicorn. There wasn’t any such creature, I knew—but what if there was? What if it was out there? I might not catch it, but, Lord, just to see it!

“That same evening we were all called before the castle gates. The King wasn’t there; his wizard was—the one they call Questor Thews. He was a sight! Patchwork robe and sashes made him look like a scarecrow! And there was this dog with him that dressed like you and me and walked on his hind legs. Some said he could talk, but I never heard it. They stood up there with the Lord Kallendbor and whispered to him things no one else could hear. The wizard had a face like chalk—looked scared to death. Not Kallendbor, though—not him. He never looks afraid of anything, that one! Sure as death itself and ready to pronounce judgment. He called out to us in that big, booming voice you could hear for a mile on those plains. He called out and told us that this unicorn was a real live beast and it could be tracked and caught like any other beast. There were enough of us and we would have it or know the reason why! He gave us our places and the line of sweep and sent us off to sleep. The hunt was to begin at dawn.”

The hunter paused, remembering. His eyes looked past Ben in the growing darkness to some point distant in time and place from where they sat now. “It was exciting, you know. All those men gathered together like that—a hunt greater than any I had ever heard tell. There were to be Trolls north along the Melchor and a number of the fairy tribes south above the lake country. They didn’t seem to think the unicorn would be south of there—don’t know why. But the plan was to start on the eastern border and drive west, closing the ends north and south like a huge net. Beaters and horsemen would work from the east; hunters and snares would set up west in moving pockets. It was a good plan.”

He smiled faintly. “It started right on schedule. The line east began to move west, clearing out everything in its path. Hunters like myself set up in the hill country where we could see everything that moved in the grasslands and beyond. Some rode chaser all along the front and ends, flushing whatever was hidden there. It was something, all those men, all that equipment. Looked like the whole valley was gathered in that one huge hunt. Looked like the whole world. The line came west all that day from the wastelands to Rhyndweir and beyond—beaters and chasers, horsemen and foot soldiers, wagonloads of provisions going back and forth from castles and towns. Don’t know how they got it organized so fast and still made it work—but they did. Never saw a thing, though. Camped that night in a line that stretched from the Melchor down to Sterling Silver. Campfires burned north to south like a big, winding snake. You could see it from the hills where Dain and I were set up with the other hunters. We stayed out of the main camps. We’re more at home up there anyway—can see as well at night as in day and had to keep watch so that nothing sneaked past in the dark.

“The second day went the same. We got to the western foothills at the edge of the grasslands, but saw nothing. Camped again and waited. Watched all that night.”

Ben was thinking of the time he had wasted since leaving Elderew just to get this far north. Four days. The weather had slowed his travel in the lake country, and he had been forced to skirt east of Sterling Silver to avoid an encounter with the guard—his guard—because they might recognize him as the stranger that the King had ordered out of the country. He had been forced to travel afoot the entire way, because he had no money for horses and was not yet reduced to stealing. He must have missed the hunt by less than twenty-four hours. He was beginning to wonder what that had cost him.

The hunter cleared his throat and continued. “There was some unpleasantness by now among the men,” he advised solemnly. “Some felt this was a waste of time. Twenty pieces a day or not, no one wants to be part of something foolish. The Lords were having their say, too, griping that we weren’t doing our share, that we weren’t watching as close as we should, that something might have sneaked through. We knew that wasn’t the case, but that wasn’t something they wanted to hear. So we said we’d try harder, keep looking. But we wondered among ourselves if there was anything out there to look for.

“The third day we closed the line west to the mountains, and that’s when we found it.” The hunter’s eyes had suddenly come alive, bright in the firelight with excitement. “It was late afternoon, the sun screened away by the mountains and the mist, and the patches of forest we searched in that hill country were thick with shadows. It was the time of day when everything seems a little unclear, when you see movement where there is none. We were working a heavy pine grove surrounded by hardwood and thick with scrub and brush. There were six of us, I think, and you could hear dozens more all about, and the lines of beaters shouting and calling from just east where the line was closing. It was hot in the hills—odd for the time of day. But we were all worn down to the bone and weary of chasing ghosts. There was a feeling that this hunt had come down to nothing. Sweat and insects made the work unpleasant now; aches and pains slowed us. We had shoved away thoughts of the unicorn beyond completing the hunt and getting home again. The whole business was a joke.”

He paused. “Then suddenly there was movement in the pine—just a shadow of something, nothing more than that. I remember thinking that my eyes were playing tricks on me yet another time. I was going to say something to Dain; he was working just off to my left. But I held my tongue—too tired, maybe, to want to say anything. I just sort of stopped what I was doing there in the brush and the heat and I watched the place of the movement to see if there was going to be any more.”

He took a deep breath, and his jaw tightened down. “There was this darkening of the little sunlight that remained then—as if clouds had screened it away for a moment. I remember how it felt. The air was all hot and still; the wind had died down into nothing. I was looking, and the brush came apart and there it was—the unicorn, all black and fluid like water. It seemed so tiny. It stood there staring at me—I don’t know how long. I could see the goat’s feet, the lion’s tail, the mane that ran down its neck and back, the fetlocks, that ridged horn. It was just as the old stories described it—but more beautiful than they could ever make it. Sweet mother, it was glorious! The others saw it, too, a few of them anyway. Dain caught a glimpse; another two said they saw it close up. But not as close as me, Lord! No, I was right next to it, it seemed! I was right there!

“Then it bolted. No, not bolted—it didn’t flee like that. It bounded up and seemed to fly right past me; all that motion and grace, like the shadow of some bird in flight cast down on the earth by the sun passing. It came by me in the blink of an eye—whisk!—and it was gone. I stood there looking after it, wondering if I’d really seen it, knowing I had, thinking how marvelous it was to view, thinking it truly was real …”

He choked on the words as they tumbled out one after the other, released from his throat in a rush of strange emotion. His hands were raised before him, knotting with the intensity of the telling of his story. Ben quit breathing momentarily, awed by what he was seeing, not wanting to break the spell.

The hunter’s eyes lowered then, and the hands followed. “I heard later that it flew right into the teeth of the chase. I heard it went past the whole mess of them like wind through a forest of rooted trees. Dozens saw it. There was a chance to hold it, maybe—but I kind of wonder. It came right over the nets. There was a chase, but … but you know what?” The eyes lifted again. “The unicorn came right up against the Lords of the Greensward and the King’s men—right up against them, sweet mother! And the wizard—the very one that organized all this—conjured up some nonsense and it rained flowers and butterflies all over everything. The chase broke up in the confusion, and the unicorn was gone before you could spit!” He smiled suddenly. “Flowers and butterflies—can you imagine that?”

Ben smiled with him. He could.

The hunter drew up his knees then and hugged them. The smile disappeared. “That was it, then. That was all she wrote. The hunt was done. Everyone sort of broke up and went away after that. There was some talk of continuing, of taking the whole line back east again, but it never came to anything. No one wanted any part of that. It was like the heart had gone out of the chase. It was like everyone was glad the unicorn got away. Or maybe it was just that no one thought it could ever be caught anyway.”

The hard eyes lifted. “Strange times we live in. The King sacked the wizard and the dog, I hear. Threw them out the minute he heard what had happened. Just dismissed them out of hand for what the wizard had done—or what he thought he’d done. I don’t think the wizard could have done much one way or the other anyway. Not with that creature, not with it. No one could have. It was too much a ghost for anything mortal, too much a dream …”

There were sudden tears in the hunter’s eyes. “I think I touched it, you know, when it went past me. I think I touched it. Sweet mother, I can still feel the silk of its skin brushing me, like fire, like … a woman’s touch, maybe. I had a woman touch me once that way, long ago. The unicorn felt like that. Now I can’t forget it. I try to think of other things, try to be reasonable about the fact of it having happened at all, but the sense of it stays with me.” He tightened his face against what he was feeling. “I been looking for it on my own since I left, thinking maybe one man could have better luck than a whole hunting party. I don’t want to catch it exactly; I don’t think I could. I just want to see it again. I just want to maybe touch it one more time—just once, just for a moment …”

He trailed off again. The campfire sparked suddenly in the stillness, a sharp crackling. No one moved. Darkness had settled down across the valley, and the last daylight had dropped from view. Stars and moons had appeared, their light faint and distant, their colors muted. Ben glanced down at Edgewood Dirk. The cat had his eyes closed.

“I just want to touch it once more,” the hunter repeated softly. “Just for a moment.”

He stared vacantly at Ben. The ghost of who and what he had been was swallowed in the silence that followed.

That same night Willow dreamed again of the black unicorn. She slept huddled close to the faithful Parsnip in a gathering of pine at the edge of the Deep Fell, concealed within a covering of boughs and shadows. Her journey north from Elderew was five days gone. She was now only hours ahead of Ben Holiday. The hunt for the black unicorn had delayed her for almost a day as it swept the hill country west of the Greensward and turned her east. She had no idea what the hunt was about. She had no idea that Ben was searching for her.

The dream came at midnight, stealing into her sleep like a mother to her slumbering child’s room, a presence that was warm and comforting. There was no fear this time, only sadness. Willow moved through forest trees and grassland spaces, and the black unicorn watched, as if a ghost come from some nether region to trail the living. It appeared and faded like sunshine from behind a cloud, now in the shade of a massive old maple, now in the lea of a copse of fir. It was never all visible, but only in part. It was black and featureless save for its eyes—and its eyes were a mirror of all the sadness that ever was and would ever be.

The eyes made Willow cry, and her tears stained her cheeks as she slept. The eyes were troubled, filled with pain she could only imagine, haunted beyond anything she had believed possible. The black unicorn of this dream was no demon spawn; it was a delicate, wondrous creature that somehow had been terribly misused …

She came awake with a start, the image of the unicorn clearly etched in her mind, its eyes fixed and staring. Parsnip slept next to her, undisturbed. Dawn was still hours away, and she shivered with the night’s chill. Her slim body trembled at the whisper of the dream’s words in her memory, and she felt the magic of their presence in her fairy way.

This dream was real, she realized suddenly. This dream was the truth.

She straightened back against the pine’s roughened trunk, swallowed the dryness in her throat, and forced herself to consider what the dream had shown her. Something required it—the eyes of the unicorn, perhaps. They sought something from her. It was no longer enough to think simply of retrieving the golden bridle and carrying it to Ben. That was the command of her first dream, the dream that had brought her on this quest—but the truth of that dream was now in doubt. The unicorn of that dream was entirely different than the unicorn of this. One was demon, the other victim. One was pursuer, the other … hunted? She thought perhaps so. There was a need for help in the unicorn’s eyes. It was almost as if it was begging her for that help.

And she knew she must give it.

She shuddered violently. What was she thinking? If she even came close to the unicorn, she could be lost. She should forget this madness! She should go to Ben …

She let the unfinished thought trail off, huddled down against the night and the stillness, and wrestled with her indecision. She wished her mother were there to comfort her or that she could seek again the counsel of the Earth Mother.

She wished most of all for Ben.

But none of them was there. Except for Parsnip, she was alone.

The moments slipped by. Suddenly she rose, a soundless shadow, left Parsnip asleep in the gathering of pines, and disappeared silently into the Deep Fell. She went not on reason, but on instinct, without doubt or fear, but with certainty that all would be well and she would be kept safe.

By dawn, she had returned. She did not have the golden bridle in her possession, but she knew now where it was. Her fairy senses had told her what even the Earth Mother could not. The bridle had been stolen yet again.

She woke Parsnip, gathered together her few things, cast a brief glance back at the dark bowl of the hollows, and started walking east.