The Whim of the Dragon (21 page)

“I?” said the unicorn, rather sharply. “I made not this bargain.”

Both the unicorn and Laura looked at Ellen, who cleared her throat and said, “I’ll keep it; but may I ask counsel of those wiser than I am?”

“Ask,” said the unicorn, with a great deal of humor.

Ellen stared at it, and then stared at Laura. Laura looked back at her, shrugged helplessly, and then grinned. “Ask what harm will be done,” she suggested. Maybe the unicorns liked ironic situations even when the irony was against them.

Ellen said slowly, “We know thee not. How if to tell us our tale does us harm, or harm to those we love?”

“Bring on thy counselors,” said the unicorn; “this counsel is beyond my ken.”

“I’ll be right back,” said Ellen, and before Laura could move she had scrambled up the slope and disappeared, leaving Laura on the stream’s edge with a unicorn and a motley collection of birds, squirrels, fish, foxes, and badgers. On the other side of the water they lined the bank like a shelf of stuffed animals, they held so still. On her side, Laura could hear them rustling up on the hill, but the only creatures she could see were well up in the trees.

Laura decided that she might as well sit down. She did so very carefully, both because of her horse-battered muscles and because of the animals. As soon as she was quiet again, three squirrels ran down the nearest tree and sat a foot away from her on the sand. She hoped the badgers and the foxes would stay farther back.
But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men
, said a distant voice in her mind. It wasn’t Princess Laura. She wondered if it were the unicorn. She didn’t want to ask. It would only end in another awkward bargain that nobody could see the consequences of. Ellen was brave, but sometimes she seemed to have no sense.

 

Ellen sprinted up the rocky path at a reckless pace, panting, and scattering before her dozens of startled small animals. The squirrels swarmed up the trees and scolded her, and farther overhead than that she heard the harsh, laughing voice of a crow. She could also hear her traveling companions before she was halfway back to the camp. They were singing rounds.

Ellen burst into the clearing. “Come quickly!”

Celia and Patrick stood up, and Patrick said,
“Where’s Laura?”

He was taking his commission from Ted seriously. Ellen felt a twinge of doubt; but in what safer company could she have left Laura? The unicorns might confuse her, but they would never hurt her. Patrick was starting to look murderous, and Celia’s and Fence’s expressions to change from exasperation to concern. Ellen squashed the temptation to make them all squirm, in compensation for not trusting her, and said, “She’s fine. There’s a unicorn, and it wants us to tell it everything!”

“I doubt that,” said Fence, dryly.

“I’m afraid I made a mess of things,” said Ellen, “but you can tell me about it later. Just come on.”

While the grown-ups were exchanging a variety of glances and mutterings, Patrick came over and said, “What’s going on, Ellie?”

“It’s your fault,” said Ellen. “I was testing a hypothesis. But it was right, and then I had a unicorn to deal with. You can’t just say, ‘Thank you so much, go away now’ to a unicorn, the way you can with atomic particles.”

“You can’t say that to them, either,” said Patrick. “The trouble with
you
is that you are treating a problem in sociology, or diplomacy, as if it were an exercise in physics. Have a little sense. Atomic particles aren’t sentient.”

“I think magic is
like
that,” said Ellen. “It seems to have personalities in it.” She explained what she had done, and Patrick snorted.

“That wasn’t magic,” he said. “You weren’t testing a magical hypothesis. You were just—”

“Ellen,” said Celia. “Fence and I had best bear thee company. Patrick, speak not so sharp to thy sister, but help Matthew in the rigging of the tents.”

“Ha!” said Ellen.

“Gloat not,” said Celia. “What’s this but the very thing Patrick is forbidden to do?”

Ellen didn’t know if she meant speaking sharp, or experimenting with the Secret Country. It was not the time to ask. She led Fence and Celia down the steep path to the stream. Laura had sat down; otherwise everything was as it had been. Laura looked around when she heard them, and her face was relieved.

“Give you good even,” said Fence to the unicorn.

“My sister speaketh well of thee,” said the unicorn. Ellen wondered if it meant Chryse.

“I joy to hear it,” said Fence, very gravely.

“Lady Celia,” said the unicorn, “when thou returnst, do thou sing more merry.”

“As you will,” said Celia.

“So, then,” said the unicorn, “these are thy counselors?”

“They are,” said Ellen.

“Ask their counsel, then,” said the unicorn.

“Should we tell the unicorn who we are?” said Ellen.

“Mercy, child,” said Celia, swiping a loosened strand of yellow hair off her scarred forehead and sitting down on a rock. A pigeon and two mice scuttered off behind her. The unicorn made a little whistling noise at them, and the mice came out of the clump of asters they had hidden in and sat by Celia’s right boot. Celia didn’t look at them. “How should I know?” she said to Ellen. “Thy story’s odd, but not o’er-merry. How like the unicorns but half a loaf?”

“Fence,” said Ellen, feeling impatient.

“How madest thou this tangle?” said Fence to Ellen.

“Out of curiosity and thoughtlessness,” said the unicorn.

“Is such advantage to thy credit?” demanded Fence.

The unicorn considered him with a large, purple, dubious eye; but when it spoke, it sounded on the verge of laughter. “We’ll take the cash,” it said, “and let the credit go.”

Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum
, said some other voice, dimly. Ellen saw that Laura jumped and Celia rolled her eyes, and surmised that they had heard it too.

Fence said, “These two are strangers; they know thee not.”

“They shall,” said the unicorn. “Wherefore, first must I know them. Tell thy tale, black maiden; thy fair cousin’s cold.”

Tom’s a-cold
, came the distant voice, that was neither inside your head nor outside it.
Do poor Tom some charity, whom the foul fiend vexes.

Ellen felt rather cold herself. “Couldn’t Fence tell it?” she said. “He’ll take less time than I would.”

Love’s not Time’s fool
, remarked the voice.

“Hold your tongues,” said the unicorn, mildly.

Everybody was quiet, including the voice. The unicorn said, “Very well, then Fence shall tell’t.”

Celia sat down by Laura; Ellen, feeling disgraced without knowing what she would have wanted to do differently, stayed lurking in the background with the bolder squirrels; and Fence came to what would have been front stage, center, if the unicorn had been a theatre audience, and began to speak.

He did in fact deliver an admirably abbreviated account of their story; its flaw was that it stated as facts a number of things Ellen thought were just conjecture. He described their game briefly, and said that the power of their thoughts had been so great that Claudia had become aware of them, and knitted them unawares into her schemes. He said that she had killed the real royal children in order to allow the five who had played them into the Secret Country. Everything else he told scrupulously.

The unicorn stood perfectly still during this recitation, with its eye bent on Fence in a way Ellen thought should unnerve him. It looked skeptical, but as if it were willing to put up with much for the sake of a good story. When Fence had finished, it said, “This is none of our doing. What name did the red man give himself?”

Fence looked at Laura, who said, “Apsinthion.”

“Wormwood,” said the unicorn. “My lord Fence, knowest thou not that name?”

Fence stood very still, in the way he had; then he smacked his hand into his forehead. “The Judge of the Dead,” he said. “Oh, this likes me not. Wormwood indeed! That’s the unchanciest power I know.”

Let the galled jade wince. The worm is your only emperor for diet
, said the distant voice. Others joined it.
Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. Then worms shall try this—

“Hold your tongues!” said the unicorn in the water, in a way that chilled Ellen’s skin like an ice cube going down her back. “Be of good cheer, thou wizard. Anyone may put on a name, as one may put on a red robe and an aspect somewhat like thine and somewhat like thy student’s. Where’s he?”

It asked this question reflectively, but Ellen saw Fence jump. “He goeth south, with an embassy to the Dragon King, whom lately we bested in battle.”

“Bid him have a care,” said the unicorn.

There was a long pause; Ellen saw that Fence was quite simply frozen where he stood, and that Celia was appalled. It meant something, then, if a unicorn told someone to have a care. Whom were they talking about? Fence’s student; was that Ted, or Randolph? Probably Randolph. Fence gave himself a little shake, and bent his knee. “More thanks than I can say,” he said.

“Thou shalt say it in time,” said the unicorn.

Ellen didn’t like the sound of this. She said, “Excuse me. Was your answer about the cardinals or your reading of our riddle, or can you tell us more? I mean,” she amended hastily, “will you?”

“Ask,” said the unicorn, pleasantly enough.

“
Several
cardinals have done mysterious things,” said Ellen, and we’d like to know on whose orders they did them.”

“Say on.”

“First of all,” said Ellen, “in our world, a cardinal showed Ted and Laura the Secret House.”

“Spare those stories,” said the unicorn. “All events in your own world you must lay on the doorstep of the Outside Powers. We have no kingdom there.”

“Drat!” said Ellen. “Sorry. Okay. The first day we came here, Benjamin cross-examined Ted about why he was acting so oddly. And a cardinal whistled, and Benjamin stopped.”

“Nay,” said the unicorn. “None of ours.”

“Were
any
of the ones that rescued us from betraying ourselves yours?”

“How so, when we knew naught you might betray?”

The unicorn’s words were impatient, but its tone was not. It sounded like somebody musing over his letters in a friendly game of Scrabble. Ellen decided that she could go on. “All right, then. The strange place, where the air is like a sheet of glass and the sky is the wrong color and you feel too small, the place Lady Ruth stood in to bargain with the Guardian of the River of King Edward’s life. She was there another time—”

“Playing the fool with Shan’s Ring. We know.”

“There was a cardinal singing in the yard.”

“The burden of that song,” said the unicorn, rather grimly, “was ‘get thee gone.’”

“Thank you,” said Ellen. “She did.” She fought down the desire to question the unicorn in detail about the strange place Ruth had visited. That wasn’t in the bargain. She would have to consider carefully just how much any information was worth to her, before she asked the unicorns for more of it. She had known what they were like; she had made much of it up. But, perhaps because she still felt them to be her own creations, even though she knew better, she had not really taken them seriously until now. She hoped her frivolity would not cost somebody else dear. “Just a few more,” she said. “What about the cardinal that brought Claudia to Laura, after the Unicorn Hunt?”

“That cardinal did bring Chryse,” said the unicorn. “Did Claudia choose to come, blame not the cardinal.”

“I’ll tell you something, then,” said Laura. Ellen had almost forgotten she was there. “Either Claudia or the cardinal wanted to make me think the cardinal brought her.”

“The cardinal deceiveth not,” said the unicorn. “But Claudia is a tale-weaver.”

It sounded definitely, thoroughly, unmistakably amused. Ellen was seized with irritation. “It’s nothing to snort at,” she said. “We are all tale-weavers too, and look what we’ve done. And we didn’t even know. Claudia knows. What if she weaves a tale about
you
?”

“She hath,” said the unicorn, with a sort of rippling chuckle like somebody running a hand along the keys of an out-of-tune piano. “She did tell thy fair cousin that all our kind run south for the winter, as if we were the robin or the cuckoo. Yet here am I to jest with thee.”

“No, no!” said Ellen, exasperated beyond bearing. “She only
said
that, off the top of her head. What if she wove a real tale about you, with all her mirrors and her little diamond windows, nudging you around the way she nudged Lord Randolph?”

There was a very long silence. The forest about them was dark. Their clearing had still a thin gray light like that of a rainy afternoon. It was not coming from the unicorn precisely; if you looked at the shadows, it appeared to be coming from directly overhead; but up there were only the dark branches of the shadowy trees. Ellen could see Celia’s intent, somber profile, and the back of Fence’s untidy head, and Laura’s hunched figure with the braids unraveling down her back. Finally Fence stirred.

“Forgive us,” he said, “but I fear me you must think on this.”

“No,” said the unicorn. “Thou thinkst we must fear’t.”

“’Twould serve,” said Celia, in the brisk tone of somebody telling you to take out the garbage, “if thou didst but answer the question.”

“What if?” said the unicorn. “What then? Why, then we should see infinite jest and most excellent fancy.” It looked from one to the other of them, Celia, Fence, Laura, then Ellen, with its great purple eyes; and then back, very thoughtfully, at Fence. It bowed its head so low that the fringe of its mane trailed in the water. “Fare you well,” it said. “This meeting shall cost some dear.” It flung its head back and plunged down the stream, showering Fence and Laura with water, sprinkling Celia, and hitting Ellen with exactly three drops, one in each eye and the third smack on top of her head.