Melody's Unicorn

by Richard Swan

  ‘Needed?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t exactly know why, or where, or even when, but I think you’ll discover soon enough. I can see it in you.’

  ‘You said nobody could see the future.’

  ‘I did. But I said that some of us can see the present, and I believe you’re needed.’

  Melody was silent again, and remained silent all the way back to the house. As they turned into the road she looked automatically in case the wolf was about, because she’d have liked Corann to see it and discover what he thought it was, but the street was deserted.

  ‘A nice job you made of the front door,’ said Corann approvingly as he opened it.

  ‘Cush did the work.’

  ‘That’s not what she says,’ Corann commented quietly. ‘Now I must go and catch up on my work. I’ve another three chapters to proofread today, and the publishers will kill me if I miss the deadline. You could go and make a start on supper. I think Ruric said something about a yearning for goulash, so if you want to make yourself popular you could go and assemble the ingredients. I wouldn’t bother with the recipe – he makes it himself, and gets pretty angry if anyone dares to suggest they can do it too.’

  Melody smiled. ‘I’ll go and see what I can do to help. Another bridge?’

  ‘Another bridge. Talking of bridges, a cup of coffee would help strengthen the one in my direction.’

  Corann disappeared into the study clutching his new envelopes, and Melody was left to go along to the kitchen in search of coffee, and meat and paprika for the goulash. As she worked she pondered on Corann’s words. Could she really be needed, and if so, how could she find out who needed her?

  Hyde Park

  The goulash had obviously softened Ruric’s mood, because next morning at breakfast he was almost pleasant to Melody, and she found herself more relaxed in his presence than she had thought possible. Something had clearly been said to Tamar too. He’d been away the whole of the previous day, and Melody hadn’t seen him since he’d stormed out of the room after the incident with the ring. She’d been dreading the moment when she had to meet him again, but when he came down to breakfast he acted as if the event had never happened. He wasn’t exactly cheerful or pleased to see her, but he hid any resentment and even managed to ask her if she’d had an interesting day. She explained about the door, but didn’t mention her strange encounter with the Big Issue seller. When she asked him what he’d been doing, he shrugged non-committedly.

  ‘I had some jobs to do, and I went to see my sister. I ate with her, so I didn’t get back till late.’

  Melody thought fast. Tamar had only mentioned one sister, and he’d said she thought he was a waste of space. Surely this couldn’t be the same person? Before she had time to ask, Corann spoke.

  ‘I’m glad you mentioned her. Melody, Tamar’s sister is called Alwyn, and she’s the seer I mentioned to you the other day. I want you to go and visit her. I think that’s particularly important in the light of what’s been happening to you. Tamar can go with you and stop you getting lost. She lives in Green Street, which is just off Oxford Street, so he can show you around there as well.’

  Neither of them looked very happy at the arrangement. Although Melody was excited at the thought of visiting a seer, she would have wished it to be anybody except Tamar’s sister, particularly if she was such a dragon as he’d portrayed her. And Tamar looked as if he’d been asked to eat sour lemons for breakfast. Even if this wasn’t the same sister, he either wasn’t keen to introduce Melody to her, or wasn’t keen to spend the day in Melody’s company, or both.

  As usual the walk to the station was accomplished in silence. They boarded the Central Line tube train, and because Ealing Broadway was a terminus they found seats easily enough, facing each other. There were few other passengers on the train yet, and nothing to distract them. Melody couldn’t bear the tension.

  ‘Is Alwyn your only sister?’ she asked obliquely, hoping that she wasn’t.

  ‘Of course,’ answered Tamar shortly. ‘And she’s my half-sister. I told you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Melody, floundering for her words for once. ‘I thought you said you didn’t get on.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought you didn’t like her.’

  ‘I do like her. Everybody does. She’s always been the achiever, the one who got good results at school. It’s just that she thinks I’m no good at anything, and when your elder sister says that it grates, and you want to prove yourself, and you can’t. I couldn’t, anyway. She’s always done everything better than me. My parents didn’t care what I did, so I wanted to prove myself to her. That’s why I came to stay with Ruric and Corann. It’s been better since I’ve been here, she doesn’t keep on at me so much, but she still reckons I’m useless. And so far I haven’t been able to show her she’s wrong.’

  Melody didn’t know what to say. She began to see Tamar’s problem, his need to impress an elder sister who always beat him. Even at magic, it seemed, if she was really a seer. Still, he had his power, his ability to create fire. Didn’t that convince her? She put the question to Tamar.

  ‘It doesn’t count with her. She says any vandal can set fire to things, it doesn’t take any special skill.’

  ‘But what about the future. She’s a seer, isn’t she? What does she see for you?’

  ‘That’s the odd thing. She doesn’t. If I ever ask her about that she goes all weird and says she can’t see me. I don’t know what that means. I think she does it to annoy me.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like a great sort of sister.’

  ‘She’s OK. I like her in lots of ways. She can be kind, and funny, and she sort of cares about me in a way my parents never seem to. But it’s hard, too.’

  ‘It must be,’ said Melody, thinking of her own lonely past. She’d have loved to have had a sister, but she saw that it wasn’t necessarily easy. She decided to reserve judgment about this Alwyn until she’d seen her and had the chance to make up her own mind.

  The journey took less than half an hour. Melody loved travelling on the Underground. They started above ground as in an ordinary train, but then they began to go through cuttings, and finally dived into a noisy and rushing tunnel. It felt like they were a spear, shearing in towards the heart of the city. All too soon they arrived at Marble Arch, where they got off and emerged into the pale sunshine of Oxford Street. Melody was pleased to see the Marble Arch itself, and opposite was the entrance to Hyde Park.

  ‘I want to go there,’ she announced suddenly.

  ‘Why?’ asked Tamar.

  ‘We talked about it, back on Ealing Common. You said we were exactly five miles west of Hyde Park, so we’ve been following the old straight track, sort of, only underground. A different sort of track, maybe, but straight enough. I want to see what’s in there.’

  ‘What do you expect’s in there? There’s grass, and trees, and a big lake. The sort of stuff you get in parks.’

  ‘I still want to go. Your sister’s not expecting us at any particular time, is she?’

  ‘Well no, but …’

  Tamar’s words trailed off. Melody was already heading towards the nearest pedestrian crossing, and by the time Tamar caught up with her she was half way across the busy junction.

  ‘What’s so important about Hyde Park?’

  ‘I don’t know. It may not be. But I want to go and have a look.’

  ‘Do you think we should? Corann’s always saying it’s dangerous.’

  ‘I know. He told me. A centre of power, something like that. But that’s why I want to see it. I want to find out what it feels like.’ Even though she spoke confidently, Melody wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing. She remembered Corann’s words, that ‘we’ don’t go there very often, and that she might meet more than dryads in it. A small part of her was afraid. But that wasn’t the dominant part of her character, and anyway, Corann had also said it contained a gateway to the Otherworld, to Faërie. Surely that was worth searching fo
r?

  There was something important about Hyde Park. Melody didn’t know what it was, but she could feel it as soon as she entered the park gates. Like Ealing Common, this green area had been left untouched in the middle of a city that threatened to eat it up from all directions. Londoners might believe that it had been deliberately left to give the city’s inhabitants a green refuge, but Melody knew better. She could immediately see that the park was inviolate, and all the city could do was to fence it in and hope to keep it from spreading out and taking over the land around it. It was bursting with life, and not all of it was of the ordinary kind. There was the unmistakable aura of power all round her. There would be dryads here, she was sure, and maybe other things too. She doubted if dryads would reveal themselves in such a well-frequented spot, but there might be areas of the park where there were fewer signs of human life. The park was certainly big enough, on first impression. She’d like to find the point that was precisely five miles due east of the sentinel tree in Ealing. She had no idea what might be there, but she thought that it might give her a clue as to her own purpose.

  She wandered about for several minutes, but although her sense of power didn’t diminish, it didn’t increase either. This was a magical place, but the centre of the magic wasn’t easily found. She made her way into a small grove of fir trees, whose darkness seemed suitably mysterious. Emerging on the other side, she came face to face with a wolf.

  Tamar came out of the trees behind her, and she grabbed his arm and stopped him. She pointed. She didn’t say anything, but she caught the sudden tension in his arm.

  The wolf was joined by another, circling from their right. The animals didn’t move directly towards them, didn’t seem directly hostile, but were watchful, alert.

  Melody wasn’t sure whether to move backwards, but a noise from amongst the trees suggested that there might be a creature there too. Still holding Tamar’s arm, she began to move to her left. The wolves watched. Then followed. For each pace Melody and Tamar took, the wolves took one. A third wolf came out of the trees and joined the others.

  Slowly Melody and Tamar backed away, looking around to see if there was a way out, or even other people to whom they could call. But this was one of the areas Melody had originally wanted, farther from the usual paths, nowhere near a road. They moved on, and the wolves followed.

  They were in open space now, heading for nowhere in particular, when the leading wolf uttered a low growl. It was answered, but not from in front of them. Glancing round, they saw two more wolves appear from another belt of trees. They stopped, trapped. The wolves stopped too, but their alertness had gained a malicious quality, and Melody felt it was only a matter of time before they attacked.

  ‘Do something!’ whispered Tamar.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Melody. ‘I can’t attack them all at once, and if I tackle the ones in front, the ones behind will get us. We need a ring of fire around us.’ Her words were not a plea, but Tamar heard their desperate tone.

  ‘I can’t burn thin air!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Try,’ she said, and this time there was an entreaty in her voice. She needed him to be able to do it.

  Reluctantly, Tamar raised his arm and pointed to a spot on the grass in front of him, midway between them and the watching wolves.

  He spoke a word, and a thin pillar of flame rose from the grass and made the leading wolf freeze into immobility. Tamar turned to face the ones behind, and another flame rose at his command. The two flames flickered there in the sunlight, pale but daunting, and the wolves looked at them with wary eyes.

  Melody held her breath, wondering if it would be enough. The creatures seemed perplexed, and remained dead still. The magic wasn’t strong enough to drive them back, but they didn’t know how to react now or whether the flames were real enough to harm them. Melody raised her own hand, and pointed at the leading wolf.

  The creature seemed to focus its gaze on her ring. For a moment it stood there, pale eyes intent, then it slowly turned and began to move off. The two wolves with it turned to follow, and twisting round Melody could see the other two also retreating. Involuntarily she clutched Tamar’s arm in relief.

  ‘You did it!’ she said.

  ‘Did I? What did I do? How did I do it?’

  She looked at the pillars of flame, still burning steadily and evenly, then at him.

  ‘You made fire,’ she said quietly. ‘You made fire where there was nothing to burn. You saved us.’

  He shook off her arm and stepped away, thinking. ‘I did. I never imagined I could do that. But why didn’t you kill the wolf at the end, when you had the chance?’

  ‘I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t kill it unless it attacked me. And anyway, it recognised my ring.’

  ‘What do you mean, recognised? How can a wolf recognise a ring?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. But it stopped when it saw it. I think it must have seen it before, somehow.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Yes, I’d say the same. But I think that’s what happened, nevertheless. Let’s leave it for now. We can talk about it later. Perhaps you’d better put those flames out, in case they attract other unwelcome creatures.’

  Tamar did so. ‘I think we ought to leave the park altogether, before anything else happens. There’s too much going on here I don’t understand.’

  ‘Perhaps your sister will be able to help.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  They walked together through the park, keeping to the most well frequented and widest paths. They had no wish to discover the secrets of the place any more, and were anxious to be back in the relative safety of the London streets without any further incident. Tamar’s sigh of relief was audible as they passed through the park gates, but Melody couldn’t resist one last reference to their recent encounter.

  ‘You admit they were wolves, then?’ she said, with a suggestion of a smile on her lips. Tamar gazed at her levelly and didn’t smile.

  ‘I admit they were wolves.’

  Encounter

  Tamar’s half-sister lived in a first floor flat in a handsome terrace in Green Street. The road was a quiet backwater with no traffic, and it was impossible to believe that the bustle of Marble Arch and Oxford Street were only a few yards away. The building itself was an elegant four-storey structure of red brick, with a graceful classical façade and a step up to the heavy dark door. Melody felt awkward and out of place confronted by such luxury and style, and wasn’t helped by Tamar’s words.

  ‘Just don’t break the door down,’ he commented with a clear edge of irony, then pushed the intercom button and announced his arrival. A woman’s voice answered, and the door lock clicked to let them in.

  Alwyn was unlike anything that Melody had envisaged, although when she thought about it she realised that she hadn’t had any definite expectation of the woman at all. She was in her mid-twenties, tall and slim, with a neat round face and straight dark hair that fell just below her ears. She was dressed in jeans and a loose top, and looked so entirely ordinary that Melody had difficulty believing either that she was the fearsome sister that Tamar had described, or that she had the kind of powers that Corann had assigned to her.

  ‘Hi,’ she said as she let them into the flat. ‘Make yourselves at home. I’ll get some tea.’

  Tamar led the way into the lounge, which Melody decided had been furnished cheerfully rather than tastefully, at odds with the elegance of the building and the spacious dimensions of the room. There was an old sofa draped with a bright red throw, probably designed to hide the shabbiness of the furniture underneath. There were two non-matching easy chairs, and a variety of tables strewn with magazines. Against the walls were two bookcases, housing a litter of books and ornaments. Nothing seemed to be designed or organised or even thought about, but Melody found it strangely pleasing. It wasn’t like any home she’d ever been in, but its occupant was obviously comfortable with it, and Melody felt comfortable too. She began to relax, and lost any nervousness about Alwyn t
hat she had unconsciously been harbouring. The homely disorder of the place even made her forget the fear she had felt in the park, and their encounter with the wolves seemed distant and slightly unreal.

  Melody was put further at ease when Alwyn returned carrying a tray which held three ill-assorted and battered mugs, together with a plate of biscuits. Chocolate digestives! Melody settled back into the cushions on her chair and felt all the tension leave her body. She accepted a biscuit and tea gratefully and curled up with her legs under her. She let her mind wander as Tamar and his sister exchanged pleasantries and small talk, idly looking around her to see if there were any clues as to Alwyn’s interests and obsessions from the items in the room.

  Her eye was caught by a model of a unicorn on one of the shelves opposite. It was about six inches high, and resembled a white stallion with a horn jutting proudly and prominently from the centre of its forehead. All wrong, she thought. Too dominating, too obvious. Unicorns would be less intrusive, less noticeable, she felt. And she smiled as she wondered what made her think that.

  The smile died on her lips as she realised that Alwyn had stopped speaking to her brother, and had turned to look at Melody with curious intensity.

  ‘What are you?’ Alwyn asked, her voice dark with puzzlement and uncertainty.

  Melody’s blood ran cold. It was the words of the Big Issue seller, but here there was no escape. She couldn’t ignore the question or the questioner. She stared back at Alwyn, wondering how she could have misjudged her so badly. The woman wasn’t ordinary at all. Her apparent normality, her untidy and cluttered flat, were disguises designed to draw attention away from her. Now that Melody looked closely, she recognised the unmistakable aura of power, the complexity and secretiveness of someone whose abilities were almost limitless. She instantly saw how Tamar must have been scared of having such an elder sister, and how he must have been a disappointment. Whatever powers he possessed, Alwyn possessed in far greater measure. Melody squirmed in her seat and subconsciously hid her left hand under her legs. She was sure that Alwyn would recognise her ring, just as the wolves had done. She didn’t want that recognition, or an explanation of what the ring signified. Nor did she want an answer to Alwyn’s question.