"And the girl?" the unicorn asked. "Did he kill the girl too?"
"No, he married her. He said she was only an aimless child, angry at her family, and that all she really needed was a good man. Which he was, then and always, for even Nikos could never give him back his first form. He died old and respected — of a surfeit of violets, some say — he never could get enough violets. There were no children."
The story lodged itself somewhere in the unicorn's breath. "The magician did him no service, but great ill," she said softly. "How terrible it would be if all my people had been turned human by well-meaning wizards — exiled, trapped in burning houses. I would sooner find that the Red Bull had killed them all."
"Where you are going now," Schmendrick answered, "few will mean you anything but evil, and a friendly heart — however foolish — may be as welcome as water one day. Take me with you, for laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you."
The rain faded as he spoke, the sky began to clear, and the wet grass glowed like the inside of a seashell. The unicorn looked away, searching through a fog of kings for one king, and through a snowy glitter of castles and palaces for one built on the shoulders of a bull. "No one has ever traveled with me," she said, "but then no one ever caged me before, or took me for a white mare, or disguised me as myself. Many things seem determined to happen to me for the first time, and your company will surely not be the strangest of them, nor the last. So you may come with me if you like, though I wish you had asked me for some other reward."
Schmendrick smiled sadly. "I thought about it." He looked at his fingers, and the unicorn saw the halfmoon marks where the bars had bitten him. "But you could never have granted my true wish."
There it is, the unicorn thought, feeling the first spidery touch of sorrow on the inside of her skin. That is how it will be to travel with a mortal, all the time. "No," she replied. "I cannot turn you into something you are not, no more than the witch could. I cannot turn you into a true magician."
"I didn't think so," Schmendrick said. "It's all right. Don't worry about it."
"I'm not worrying about it," the unicorn said.
A blue jay swooped low over them on that first day of their journey, said, "Well, I'll be a squab under glass," and flapped straight home to tell his wife about it. She was sitting on the nest, singing to their children in a dreary drone.
"Saw a unicorn today," the blue jay said as he lit.
"You didn't see any supper, I notice," his wife replied coldly. "I hate a man who talks with his mouth empty."
"Baby, a unicorn!" The jay abandoned his casual air and hopped up and down on the branch. "I haven't seen one of those since the time —"
"You've never seen one," she said. "This is me, remember? I know what you've seen in your life, and what you haven't."
The jay paid no attention. "There was a strange-looking party in black with her," he rattled. "They were going over Cat Mountain. I wonder if they were heading for Haggard's country." He cocked his head to the artistic angle that had first won his wife. "What a vision for old Haggard's breakfast," he marveled. "A unicorn coming to call, bold as you please, rat-tat-tat on his dismal door. I'd give anything to see —"
"I suppose the two of you didn't spend the whole day watching unicorns," his wife interrupted with a click of her beak. "At least, I understand that she used to be considered quite imaginative in matters of spare time." She advanced on him, her neck feathers ruffling.
"Honey, I haven't even seen her —" the blue jay began, and his wife knew that he hadn't, and wouldn't dare, but she batted him one anyway. She was one woman who knew what to do with a slight moral edge.
The unicorn and the magician walked through the spring, over soft Cat Mountain and down into a violet valley where apple trees grew. Beyond the valley were low hills, as fat and docile as sheep, lowering their heads to sniff at the unicorn in wonder as she moved among them. After these came the slower heights of summer, and the baked plains where the air hung shiny as candy. Together she and Schmendrick forded rivers, scrambled up and down brambly banks and bluffs, and wandered in woods that reminded the unicorn of her home, though they could never resemble it, having known time. So has my forest, now, she thought, but she told herself that it did not matter, that all would be as before when she returned.
At night, while Schmendrick slept the sleep of a hungry, footsore magician, the unicorn crouched awake waiting to see the vast form of the Red Bull come charging out of the moon. At times she caught what she was sure was his smell — a dark, sly reek easing through the night, reaching out to find her. Then she would spring to her feet with a cold cry of readiness, only to find two or three deer gazing at her from a respectful distance. Deer love and envy unicorns. Once, a buck in his second summer, prodded forward by his giggling friends, came quite close to her and mumbled without meeting her eyes, "You are very beautiful. You are just as beautiful as our mothers said."
The unicorn looked silently back at him, knowing that he expected no answer from her. The other deer snickered and whispered, "Go on, go on." Then the buck raised his head and cried out swiftly and joyously, "But I know someone more beautiful than you!" He wheeled and dashed away in the moonlight, and his friends followed him. The unicorn lay down again.
Now and then in their journey they came to a village, and there Schmendrick would introduce himself as a wandering wizard, offering, as he cried in the streets, "to sing for my supper, to bother you just a little bit, to trouble your sleep ever so slightly, and pass on." Few were the towns where he was not invited to stable his beautiful white mare and stay the night, and before the children went to bed he would perform in the market square by lantern light. He never actually attempted any greater magic than making dolls talk and turning soap into sweets, and even this trifling sorcery sometimes slipped from his hands. But the children liked him, and their parents were kindly with supper, and the summer evenings were lithe and soft. Ages after, the unicorn still remembered the strange, chocolate stable smell, and Schmendrick's shadow dancing on walls and doors and chimneys in the leaping light.
In the mornings they went on their way, Schmendrick's pockets full of bread and cheese and oranges, and the unicorn pacing beside him: sea white in the sun, sea green in the dark of the trees. His tricks were forgotten before he was out of sight, but his white mare troubled the nights of many a villager, and there were women who woke weeping from dreams of her.
One evening, they stopped in a plump, comfortable town where even the beggars had double chins and the mice waddled. Schmendrick was immediately asked to dinner with the Mayor and several of the rounder Councilmen; and the unicorn, unrecognized as always, was turned loose in a pasture where the grass grew sweet as milk. Dinner was served out of doors, at a table in the square, for the night was warm and the Mayor was pleased to show off his guest. It was an excellent dinner.