She whispered it. The name was strange on her tongue, and she stumbled over it. The unicorn laughed, a sound at once like water and fire and springtime. “Close enough,” it said. “But tell me, mortal, why are you following me?”
Her trust complete, and her fingers twined with white-blue strands of silk, Mouse told the star. She told it everything about the Silent Lady and the dungeon and the Diggings and the message for Etanun.
“Ah!” Cé Imral said when she spoke of Etanun and the sword. “Of course. I have sung this chorus and will sing it again, but for you the time has come. The Murderer will return, the Smallman will claim Fireword, and kingdoms will, for a breath, be established. This is much for you to understand, is it not?”
Mouse did not understand, but she didn’t really care. “Can you help me?” she asked. “Can you lead me to Etanun?”
“Yes. But if I do, will you then fulfill what you have purposed in your heart?” Cé Imral asked.
Mouse bowed her head, wondering why she should suddenly feel ashamed. “I must . . . I must do as I am told. I am not a great lady, and I am not wise or strong. I must do as I am told.”
“As must I,” said the unicorn. It tossed its mane, and Mouse stepped away, though without fear now that she’d touched it. It could have run her through with that glorious horn, and she would not have made a sound.
“You stand in the Between,” Cé Imral said. “On both sides of you are the Near World and the Far, all close and all more distant than you can imagine. I will lead you through the half-light and bring you to where Etanun awaits your coming. But once there, I will return to the heavens and you will be alone.”
Mouse nodded. “I understand.”
“No. You don’t.”
And the unicorn turned and started through the Wood. The trees backed away, bowing reverently after it, and the river laughed and waved as though pleased to see an old friend; for rivers, even the deadly ones, love the stars and feel close kinship with the sky. Mouse followed in the unicorn’s wake. They did not move in Time, or not in a flow of Time familiar to Mouse. But she was not afraid, though perhaps she should have been. When she dared snatch a look away from the unicorn’s streaming tail, she caught glimpses of vistas she had never imagined, waterfalls and forest glades and desolate shadows. Sometimes she even thought she peered into other worlds entirely, so strange and unearthly were the sights she saw.
At last the unicorn turned to her, and those deep eyes filled her vision, love driving out her fear.
“Here I leave you. Here you will find what you seek,” Cé Imral said.
The next moment, it was gone.
Mouse found herself standing on the edge of a small, sparse copse. Dead leaves of autumn littered the ground, and a sudden biting wind blew through the branches. She was no longer in the vast Wood. She stood on the borders of low fields, gazing out across a winter-tinted landscape to a river, a rise, and a high stone castle, above which gleamed a shining blue star.
1
FIRE! FIRE! FLAME AT NIGHT!
Hri Sora, they called me, and they spoke rightly! My delicate feathers burned away, replaced by the mighty sweep of leathery dragon’s wings, and the boiling of jealousy and rage inside me was replaced by a furnace that demolished my heart and pumped lava through my veins.
A woman’s body cannot support such heat, so mine gave way into the scale-armored form of a vast dragon. I became that which had lurked deep inside me since I first drew breath.
“Sister. Child,” the Dragon called me. “My beautiful firstborn.”
The cat sat with his eyes half closed, his tail curled about his paws as it twitched slightly at the tip. Surrounding him was the Haven, a place of comfort, of familiarity, yet it was made strange now. Without Imraldera, it felt as foreign to him as the court of the Mherking.
He watched Mouse as she told her tale. He was not naturally intuitive, for cats tend to live in the moment, and the moment is focused on self. But he was more than a cat these days. He was a Knight of Farthest Shore, and as such he had begun to learn what it meant to put himself in another’s shoes. Not like Imraldera. No one, he believed with something close to religious conviction, could possibly be as empathetic as she, able to weep at the death of monsters, able to look in the face of hell’s hounds and see something to love!
But he was learning.
It wasn’t love he felt for Mouse as he watched her, however, only deep suspicion. He flicked one ear when she told of the unicorn. In all the long ages of his immortal life, he had never seen one of Hymlumé’s children come down from the heavens. Yet the girl’s face was full of earnest honesty that he could not help believing. Who could invent a lie so fantastic?
The cat’s tail lashed once, then wrapped tightly against his body. If only Imraldera were here! She would know what to believe and what not. Or would she?
After all, she’d believed the Murderer.