“Siegfried!” Leopold snatched in vain for the reins, his face going red with anger. “Siegfried, what are you doing? What’s wrong with you? That was a woman back there!”
“No it wasn’t,” Siegfried said shortly.
“Of course it was! I saw her with my—” Abruptly, Leopold remembered where he was, in the midst of a forest full of magic, and his mouth shut with a snap. Siegfried looked back at him, saw his face change and allowed the horses to slow. “If it wasn’t a woman, then what was it?”
“That was a Nixie,” Siegfried told him severely. “They’re water spirits. They sing, and they like to take human lovers.”
“They do?” Leopold grabbed for the reins again, eager to get back to the sensuous, nude spirit.
“They like to take them underwater.” Siegfried held on to the reins and waited for that to sink in.
“They like to…oh. Um.”
“So unless you’ve suddenly gotten the ability to breathe underwater…” He let go of the reins. Leopold gathered them up again with a sigh.
“So far, we haven’t found anything I could take to Rosamund,” Leopold grumbled. “Can we go back to the city now?”
Siegfried grinned at that. The prince sounded like a sulky child.
But they hadn’t gone five more paces before something suddenly appeared before them on the path, blocking their way. A beam of light lanced through the canopy overhead, illuminating it from above.
Not that it needed the illumination. It glowed from within.
Leopold blinked, as Siegfried blushed a brilliant crimson. “Siegfried, is that…?” he said, quietly, for once not a single note of mockery in his voice.
“Yes,” Siegfried got out, in a strangled voice.
“A unicorn.”
“Yes.”
“I thought they were extinct!” Leopold exclaimed, drinking in the glorious creature with his eyes.
“Not…exactly…”
Siegfried didn’t blame Leopold for being entranced. She was an exquisite creature, from the tip of her crystal, spiraling horn to the tip of her silken, leonine tail, she glowed with a pearly light that owed nothing to the sunlight she stood in. Her coat looked like the softest of plushy velvet—this mare clearly was of the same variety as in Drachenthal, which needed a thicker coat for the cold mountain winters. In his travels, Siegfried had also seen smooth-coated unicorns, with hides like satin. Her cloven hooves were a shining gold, her mane a fall of silver. Her eyes were gold to match her hooves, her tiny beardlette a dainty thing, as suited a lady unicorn. She moved like water flowing over a stream. There was nothing about her that was not perfection.
Except, perhaps, her brain.
She locked her gaze with his, radiating adoration. Siegfried groaned. Not again. Not another one…
Completely ignoring Leopold, the unicorn paced deliberately toward Siegfried, each hoof leaving an indentation in the moss that glowed for just a moment. Siegfried watched her with the look of dread of a man that sees his inescapable fate bearing down on him.
Well, at least she wasn’t trying to skewer Leopold.
With a sigh, as his bewildered and bedazzled horse stood stock-still, the unicorn lifted her chin and placed it firmly in his lap.
“Hewwo,” she lisped. “I’m Luna. I wove you.”
With a sigh of resignation, Siegfried bowed to the inevitable and scratched her forehead around the crystal horn. “I know you do,” he said, with only a touch of bitterness, waiting for the truth to dawn on Leopold. “That’s all right. I love you, too, Luna. You are a beautiful girl.”
When the truth finally did strike him, his friend fell off his horse, laughing. By that point, Siegfried was crimson.
They rode out of the wood with a necklace of braided unicorn hair folded in a handkerchief and stowed carefully in Leopold’s pouch. It had taken this bribe to get him to stop laughing. Siegfried wasn’t angry—how could he be angry? It was funny. But he was deeply, profoundly embarrassed. Someday this would all be hilarious, he was sure. Someday he would sit at the fireside and tell the story on himself.
Today was not that day.
He hadn’t been able to look Leopold in the eyes since his friend started laughing at him. Not even when he’d given Leopold the necklace. The ride back had been punctuated only by Leopold’s smothered sniggers.
He did not regret going into the forest with Leopold today, and he was glad that they had found his friend a gift to impress the Princess, because he had been feeling a bit guilty about those lessons in defending oneself. He just wished that it had been some other sort of gift.
As they neared the gates of the city, Leopold finally rode up next to him; he seemed to have gotten himself under control at last.
“You are a fine fellow, Siegfried,” he said quietly. “Most men would have punched me in the eye for laughing at them like that. I wouldn’t have blamed you for riding off and leaving me there.”
Siegfried sighed. “I don’t blame you. It’s funny. If it had been you, I would have been the one that was laughing. It had to look awfully funny, too, with that daft thing coming up and planting her head in my lap. At least you got a present for the Princess out of it. I told you something would turn up.”
“Yes, but you were the one who suggested it, and you were the one who braided it. And you were the one who lured the—the—” Leopold’s face twitched as he barely kept himself from laughing again. To Siegfried’s relief, he managed to hold it in this time. “Anyway. If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have this, and I don’t know too many people with a necklace of unicorn hair.”
“Oh, there are plenty, they just don’t come from a live unicorn.” Now Siegfried did let bitterness creep into his voice. He honestly did not hate too many people, but there were exceptions. “Hunters get virgin girls to go sit in the woods, the poor stupid beasts come and lay their heads in the girl’s lap, and the hunters kill them. You saw for yourself that in the presence of a virgin they lose what few thoughts they have, and they aren’t the sharpest swords in the rack to begin with. That’s why they’re rare.”
Leopold choked, which made Siegfried feel a little better about being laughed at. At least Leopold could see how vile the Hunters were. “That’s horrible!”
He nodded. “So are the Hunters. They’re vile, vile men. Only a really vile person would kill something like a unicorn, something that is literally purity and innocence incarnate.”
“Then why do it?” Leopold asked, now bewildered. “I know the horn is valuable, but couldn’t you just wait for it to fall off, or find where they go to die?”
Siegfried shook his head. “Unicorn horn can purify any poison. Nasty people that other people would like to see poisoned like to have a bit of it around, just in case, and unicorns are Fae, and if they don’t live forever, they certainly live a very long time.” Siegfried’s voice was hard. “As for the hair—hair taken from a dead one protects from sickness, and it’s so strong you can’t break it.”
“What about this?” Leopold asked, patting his pocket.
“It’s better.” Siegfried managed to smile. “Hair from a live one, especially hair given freely, is more powerful, though most people don’t know that. It gives you insight into anything magical, it can ward off curses, and nothing inherently evil, like demons and demonic creatures, can come near it. I very much doubt the Princess has anything like that in her jewelry caskets.”
Leopold nodded.
“Just don’t tell anyone where you got it,” Siegfried said, and winced a little. “Or especially how you got it.”
“I promise,” Leopold pledged. But he couldn’t help himself, and Siegfried saw it in his face. “But how did you—I mean, why didn’t you—why are you still—”
He had to ask. Of course he did. “Because up until I left Drachenthal, every single female I met was my aunt! My aunt, Leopold! Even at twelve, I knew better than that! In fact, the Shieldmaiden of Doom is probably my aunt, too, or at least my great-aunt!” He felt his face burning. “Why w
ould anyone want to—with his mother’s sister?”
Leopold waved his hands in the air to stop him. “Wait, wait, I’m confused here. I thought you said you were supposed to fall in love with the first person you see who is not your aunt….”
“I am. I’m supposed to fall in love with the Shieldmaiden, then I’m supposed to forget the Shieldmaiden and fall in love with the person who’s not my aunt and then—” Siegfried let go of the reins to wipe his forehead “—then it gets very complicated and involves all the usual messy things like jealousy and retribution, and unusual things like murder and suicide and the death of gods and the fall of kingdoms and can we just not talk about this anymore?”
They rode on in silence for a good while longer. “Um…there is a way to fix that, you know,” the Prince ventured at last.
“Fix what?” Siegfried turned in his saddle to stare at his friend.
“Being uni—” Leopold’s face twitched, but he managed to hold in his hilarity. “Being unicorn bait. I know a lady. In fact, I know several ladies.”
Siegfried thought that over for a moment. It was tempting. In fact it was very tempting. On the other hand—
“Let’s just leave it for now,” he said. “We know there’s at least one unicorn in the forest now, and we might need more hair.”
“If you’re sure.” Leopold’s face twitched. Siegfried was pretty sure he had more things to say, and most of them would be funny someday. Just not right now.
“We have all sorts of tests ahead of us. Do you want to take the chance we’d need something like unicorn hair?” he asked. “Or unicorn blood? Or unicorn tears? She’ll give me whatever I ask, you know. Unicorn blood cures any disease and most wounds. Unicorn tears mend broken hearts and broken minds. If we need either of those, the situation would be very nasty, and there are not many substitutes.”
Leopold sobered.
“All right then. You go get a silver clasp put on that. Don’t let it out of your sight. Wait while the jeweler does it. If you can help it, don’t tell him what it is. That stuff is worth more than gold.” Siegfried was not about to tell his friend that he had enough hair for several more necklaces in his pouch. No point in letting Leopold’s greed get the better of him. He was going to braid one for himself; it might come in useful.
“How did you learn all these things?” Leopold asked, just before they split up inside the city gate.
Siegfried deadpanned, “A little bird told me.”
Siegfried didn’t particularly want Leopold around as he ran this lot of “errands” anyway. He figured that he had gotten enough teasing from his friend for one day as it was.
His first stop was at the market stalls. This late in the day, everyone was willing to sell him what he wanted at bargain prices, which was good, because it made his money go further. Granted, Leopold was very generous with his winnings, sharing them despite Siegfried’s insistence that he didn’t need them….
But Siegfried generally ended up giving the money away. According to the bird, one of the effects of resisting the Rivergold Ring that the dragon had guarded was that greed had no hold over him, and that made him particularly generous of heart. That might well be so, but he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t given things away.
In all events, since he had arrived here, he had done more, a lot more, than just help that one fox. Leopold had no idea, and Siegfried was fairly sure that he’d find what Siegfried was doing incomprehensible, laughable, or both.
His first stop, because he really wanted to get rid of that fish that was just going stale, was at an old warehouse. As he got off the horse, a cat and three lively kittens came running up to him. He had taken the kittens away from boys who were going to drown them, and rescued the mother from their confederate who intended to tie burning straw to her tail and then let her go, to watch her set fire to everything in her path as she tried to escape. He had taken them to this warehouse where they could earn their living catching mice, and stopped by whenever he could with old fish.
The entire little family spilled out of the warehouse when they caught his scent. The kittens greeted him with happy noises, and the mother cat bumped her head against his hand. “You have a good heart, BigMan,” she said as he put down the fish. “We will remember you, you know.”
He laughed, for this was the clearest thing she had ever said to him, and rubbed her head as she purred like distant thunder. Interesting! Maybe she was a Wise Beast? “Raise big cats to catch rats that make people sick,” he told her. “That is all I ask.”
When he saw that they had eaten their fill and he didn’t need to stave off other cats, dogs or crows, he got on the horse and went on to his next stop.
This time, it was at a stable, where he made sure that an old, slow little donkey was still being cared for properly. The stable owner had a crippled child who was just the right size and weight to ride the tiny beast. He had rescued the poor thing from the enormous cart it was trying to pull. The cart was meant for a full-size horse or ox, not a donkey, but the skinflint drover was bound that the poor old beast was going to pull it, and had been beating her and goading her with an ox-goad. Siegfried tried to reason with him, and when the fellow tried to hit him with the goad, he knocked the man to the ground and beat him as he had beaten his donkey. Then he threw just enough money on the man’s chest to pay for the poor old thing, cut the donkey out of the traces and took her away.
She was happy here. Her sores were healing, she was clean, her coat was shining, and she had something over her bones other than skin. And she loved the little girl; the two had formed an instant bond.
The stable owner loved her, too, not only because she was his child’s favorite companion, but because she ate the thistles that plagued his pasture. Siegfried would have left money for her care, but the owner would have none of it. The donkey came up as he turned to leave, the little child on her back. “Thank you, BigMan,” she said. “I will not forget your kindness.”
“Just love and care for the child,” Siegfried replied, smiling. “That is all I ask.”
Definitely another Wise Beast. Then again…he was smack in the middle of a Kingdom, engaging in Traditional Trials, for the Traditional hand of a Princess.
Maybe he should be surprised he wasn’t encountering more Wise Beasts.
Not long ago he had followed his ears to the door of another warehouse, where he had found a crowd standing around a crude arena, where a bear and a wolf were being forced to fight each other by a showman. The poor things were half-starved, covered with wounds and nearly mad. When he discovered them, lying on the floor of the arena, they were nearly dead.
He had treated the showman as he had the drover, then taken the animals. He had treated their wounds himself, not daring to entrust them to anyone else. At first, they had been too sick and weak to move, and by the time they had recovered their strength, he had won their trust. He kept them in roomy cages in a shed he had rented—in cages for their protection and not to confine them; bars meant no one could get near them to kill or steal them. Slowly, he was able to talk to them; they had been less than sane when he rescued them but with the healing of their bodies, their minds had also healed. He had known from the start, though, that he was going to have to get them out of the city, and as soon as he possibly could. Today would be that day. While not completely healed, they would be able to hunt—in the wolf’s case, he would definitely find his pack, for he could smell them—and recover on their own, so today they were ready to be turned loose.
What he had paid for in the market were two short-lived charms of illusion in the form of cloth collars. They were meant for people who wanted to disguise a valuable animal as something less valuable. He would need those to get them out of the city. While the wolf and the bear would do nothing worse than run for the gate, their presence in the street would cause panic.
He opened the shed and stood in the quiet semidarkness. For days, this place had smelled of blood and fear and pain. Now it smelled of the
musk of bear and the doggy-scent of wolf. “It is I,” he said to the shadows in the cage. “Are you ready to leave?”
“We are, BigMan,” rumbled the bear. The wolf yipped agreement.
He held out the collars and their ropes so that they could see and smell what he had. “I must put cloth about your necks and ropes tied to the cloth. These things will make you look like tame beasts that no one will fear, so that I may take you through the man-paths to the forest. You must not run ahead, but stay at my side like tame beasts. Will you permit this?”
He heard uneasy shuffling and knew why. The cruel showman had kept spiked collars around their necks to control them. But finally the wolf answered. “You have never said us false, BigMan. You healed us, fed us and protected us. We will abide this.”
He opened the wolf’s cage first, and collared him, then the bear. The illusions settled over them, making them look like a pair of goats. He took the ropes in his hand and led them to and out the shed door. And all was well. No one paid him any heed as he walked down some of the quieter streets to one of the city gates—although cats fled in terror, and dogs backed away, hackles raised, trusting their noses rather than their eyes. Perhaps one or two people might have wondered at the sight of a relatively well-dressed man leading two goats himself, but his clothing was modest enough that no one would realize he was one of the Princes unless they actually knew him by sight.
Siegfried took them well into the forest before removing their collars. The wolf, who had been sniffing the air hungrily for some time, gave a happy yelp and vanished into the trees, but the bear paused, turned and looked up at him out of dark little eyes.
“You saved our lives and our minds, BigMan,” the bear said. “Wolf cannot wait to return to his kin, so I will say for both of us. You have a good heart. We will not forget this.”
“Then when you see men, do not fight, but run,” said Siegfried. “This is all I ask.”
He walked back to the city, got his borrowed horse and headed for the King’s Arms.
The Sleeping Beauty Page 24