THE LAST UNICORN

They haggled for half an hour, Schmendrick demanding a hundred gold pieces, and Drinn refusing to offer more than forty. At last they settled at seventy, half to be paid then and half upon Schmendrick's successful return. Drinn counted out the money on the spot from a leather pouch at his belt. "You'll spend the night in Hagsgate, of course," he said. "I would be pleased to put you up myself."

But the magician shook his head. "I think not. We will go on to the castle, since we're so near it now. The sooner there, the sooner back, eh?" And he grinned a crafty and conspiratorial grin.

"Haggard's castle is always dangerous," Drinn warned. "But it is never more dangerous than at night."

"They say that about Hagsgate too," Schmendrick replied. "You mustn't believe everything you hear, Drinn." He walked to the door of the inn, and Molly followed him. There he turned and beamed at the folk of Hagsgate, hunched in their finery. "I would like to leave you with this last thought," he told them. "The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart. Good night."

Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars. There was no moon. Schmendrick stepped out boldly, chuckling to himself and jingling his gold coins. Without looking at Molly, he said, "Suckers. To assume so lightly that all magicians dabble in death. Now if they had wanted me to lift the curse – ah, I might have done that for no more than the meal. I might have done it for a single glass of wine."

"I'm glad you didn't," Molly said savagely. "They deserve their fate, they deserve worse. To leave a child out in the snow -"

"Well, if they hadn't, he couldn't have grown up to be a prince. Haven't you ever been in a fairy tale before?" The magician's voice was kind and drunken, and his eyes were as bright as his new money. "The hero has to make a prophecy come true, and the villain is the one who has to stop him – though in another kind of story, it's more often the other way around. And a hero has to be in trouble from the moment of his birth, or he's not a real hero. It's a great relief to find out about Prince Lнr. I've been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man."

The unicorn was there as a star is suddenly there, moving a little way ahead of them, a sail in the dark. Molly said, "If Lнr is the hero, what is she?"

"That's different. Haggard and Lнr and Drinn and you and I – we are in a fairy tale, and must go where it goes. But she is real. She is real." Schmendrick yawned and hiccupped and shivered all at once. "We'd better hurry," he said. "Perhaps we should have stayed the night, but old Drinn makes me nervous. I'm sure I deceived him completely, but all the same."

It seemed to Molly, dreaming and waking as she walked, that Hagsgate was stretching itself like a paw to hold the three of them back, curling around them and batting them gently back and forth, so that they trod in their own tracks over and over. In a hundred years they reached the last house and the end of the town; in another fifty years they had blundered through the damp fields, the vineyards, and the crouching orchards. Molly dreamed that sheep leered at them from treetops, and that cold cows stepped on their feet and shoved them off the withering path. But the light of the unicorn sailed on ahead, and Molly followed it, awake or asleep.

King Haggard's castle was stalking in the sky, a blind black bird that fished the valley by night. Molly could hear the breathing of its wings. Then the unicorn's breath stirred in her hair, and she heard Schmendrick asking, "How many men?"

"Three men," the unicorn said. "They have been behind us since we left Hagsgate, but now they are coming swiftly. Listen."

Steps too soft for their quickness; voices too muffled to mean any good. The magician rubbed his eyes. "Perhaps Drinn has started to feel guilty about underpaying his poisoner," he murmured. "Perhaps his conscience is keeping him awake. Anything is possible. Perhaps I have feathers." He took Molly by the arm and pulled her down into a hard hollow by the side of the road. The unicorn lay nearby, still as moonlight.

Daggers gleaming like fishtrails on a dark sea. A voice, suddenly loud and angry. "I tell you, we've lost them. We passed them a mile back, where I heard that rustling. I'm damned if I'll run any farther."

"Be still!" a second voice whispered fiercely. "Do you want them to escape and betray us? You're afraid of the magician, but you'd do better to be afraid of the Red Bull. If Haggard finds out about our half of the curse, he'll send the Bull to trample us all into crumbs."

The first man answered in a softer tone. "It isn't that I'm afraid. A magician without a beard is no magician at all. But we're wasting our time. They left the road and cut across country as soon as they knew we were following. We could chase along here all night and never come up with them."