The Magic Kingdom of Landover , Volume 1 (71 page)

“Where?” Ben asked at once.

The Earth Mother was silent again for a moment, as if debating something with herself. “High Lord, you must promise me something,” she said finally. “I know you are troubled. I know you are afraid. Perhaps you will even become desperate. The road you travel now is a difficult one. But you must promise me that whatever befalls you and however overwhelming your feelings because of it, your first concern will always be for Willow. You must promise that you will do whatever it lies within your power to do to keep her safe.”

Ben hesitated a moment before replying, puzzled. “I don’t understand. Why do you ask this?”

The Earth Mother’s arms folded into her body. “Because I must, High Lord. Because of who I am. That has to be answer enough for you.”

Ben frowned. “What if I cannot keep this promise? What if I choose
not
to keep it?”

“Once the promise is given, it must be kept. You will keep it because you have no choice.” The Earth Mother’s eyes blinked once. “You give it to me, remember, and a promise given to me by you cannot be broken. The magic binds us in that way.”

Ben weighed the matter carefully for several long moments, undecided. It wasn’t so much the idea of committing himself to Willow that bothered him; it was the fact of the promise itself. It was a foreclosure of all other options without knowing yet what those options might be, a blind vow that lacked future sight.

But then again, that was how life often worked. You didn’t always get the choices offered to you up front. “I promise,” he said, and the lawyer part of him winced.

“Willow has gone north,” the Earth Mother said. “Probably to the Deep Fell.”

Ben stiffened. “The Deep Fell? Probably?”

“The bridle was a fairy magic woven long, long ago by the land’s wizards. It has passed through many hands over the years and been all but forgotten. In the recent past, it has been the possession of the witch Nightshade. The witch stole it and hid it with her other treasures. She hordes the things she finds beautiful and brings them out to view when she wishes. But Nightshade has
had the bridle stolen from her several times by the dragon Strabo, who also covets such treasures. The theft of the bridle has become something of a contest between the two. It was last in the possession of the witch.”

A lot of unpleasant memories surged to the fore at the mention of Nightshade and the Deep Fell. There were a good many places that Ben did not care to visit again soon in the Kingdom of Landover, and the home of the witch was right at the top of the list.

But, then, Nightshade was gone, wasn’t she, into the fairy world … ?

“Willow left when I told her of the golden bridle, High Lord,” the Earth Mother interrupted his thoughts. “That was two days ago. You must hurry if you are to catch her.”

Ben nodded absently, already aware of a lightening of the sky beyond the swamp’s unchanging murk. Dawn was almost upon them.

“I wish you well, High Lord,” the Earth Mother called. She had begun to sink back into the swamp, her shape changing rapidly as she descended. “Find Willow and help her. Remember your promise.”

Ben started to call back to her, a dozen unanswered questions on his lips, but she was gone almost at once. She simply sank back into the mudhole and disappeared. Ben was left staring at the empty, placid surface.

“Well, at least I know which way Willow’s gone,” he said to himself. “Now all I have to do is find my way out of this swamp.”

As if by magic, the mud puppy reappeared, slipping from beneath a gathering of fronds. It regarded him solemnly, started away, turned back again, and waited.

Ben sighed. Too bad all of his wishes weren’t granted so readily. He glanced down at Dirk. Dirk stared back at him.

“Want to walk north for a while?” he asked the cat.

The cat, predictably, said nothing.

HUNT

T
hey 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 if 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.”