"Oh," Molly said. "I'm sorry."
"You can cut off the circulation like that, you know," the magician said severely. He rubbed his arm and took a few steps forward, into the path of the Red Bull. There he stood with his arms folded and his head high, though it drooped now and then, because he was very tired.
"Maybe this time," Molly heard him mutter, "maybe this time. Nikos said – what was it that Nikos said? I don't remember. It has been so long." There was an odd, old sorrow in his voice that Molly had never heard before. Then a gaiety leaped up like a flame as he said, "Well, who knows, who knows? If this is not the time, perhaps I can make it so. There's this much of comfort, friend Schmendrick. For once, I don't see how you can possibly make things any worse than they already are," and he laughed softly.
The Red Bull, being blind, took no notice of the tall figure in the road until he was almost upon it. Then he halted, sniffing the air; storm stirring in his throat, but a certain confusion showing in the swing of his great head. The unicorn stopped when he stopped, and Schmendrick's breath broke to see her so tractable. "Run!" he called to her. "Run now!" but she never looked at him, or back at the Bull, or at anything but the ground.
At the sound of Schmendrick's voice, the Bull's rumble grew louder and more menacing. He seemed eager to be out of the valley with the unicorn, and the magician thought he knew why. Beyond the towering brightness of the Red Bull, he could see two or three sallow stars and a cautious hint of a warmer light. Dawn was near.
"He doesn't care for daylight," Schmendrick said to himself. "That's worth knowing." Once more he shouted to the unicorn to fly, but his only answer came in the form of a roar like a drumroll. The unicorn bolted forward, and Schmendrick had to spring out of her way, or she would have run him down. Close behind her came the Bull, driving her swiftly now, as the wind drives the thin, torn mist. The power of his passage picked Schmendrick up and dropped him elsewhere, tumbling and rolling to keep from being trampled, his eyes jarred blind and his head full of flames. He thought he heard Molly Grue scream.
Scrabbling to one knee, he saw that the Red Bull had herded the unicorn almost to the beginning of the trees. If she would only try one more time to escape – but she was the Bull's and not her own. The magician had one glimpse of her, pale and lost between the pale horns, before the wild red shoulders surged across his sight. Then, swaying and sick and beaten, he closed his eyes and let his hopelessness march through him, until something woke somewhere that had wakened in him once before. He cried aloud, for fear and joy.
What words the magic spoke this second time, he never knew surely. They left him like eagles, and he let them go; and when the last one was away, the emptiness rushed back with a thunderclap that threw him on his face. It happened as quickly as that. This time he knew before he picked himself up that the power had been and gone.
Ahead, the Red Bull was standing still, nosing at something on the ground. Schmendrick could not see the unicorn. He went forward as fast as he could, but it was Molly who first drew near enough to see what the Bull was sniffing. She put her fingers in her mouth, like a child.
At the feet of the Red Bull there lay a young girl, spilled into a very small heap of light and shadow. She was naked, and her skin was the color of snow by moonlight. Fine tangled hair, white as a waterfall, came down almost to the small of her back. Her face was hidden in her arms.
"Oh," Molly said. "Oh, what have you done?" and, heedless of any danger, she ran to the girl and knelt beside her. The Red Bull raised his huge, blind head and swung it slowly in Schmendrick's direction. He seemed to be waning and fading as the gray sky grew light, though he still smoldered as savagely bright as crawling lava. The magician wondered what his true size was, and his color, when he was alone.
Once more the Red Bull snuffled at the still form, stirring it with his freezing breath. Then, without a sound, he bounded away into the trees and was gone from sight in three gigantic strides. Schmendrick had a last vision of him as he gained the rim of the valley: no shape at all, but a swirling darkness, the red darkness you see when you close your eyes in pain. The horns had become the two sharpest towers of old King Haggard's crazy castle.
Molly Grue had taken the white girl's head onto her lap, and was whispering over and over, "What have you done?" The girl's face, quiet in sleep and close to smiling, was the most beautiful that Schmendrick had ever seen. It hurt him and warmed him at the same time. Molly smoothed the strange hair, and Schmendrick noticed on the forehead, above and between the closed eyes, a small, raised mark, darker than the rest of the skin. It was neither a scar nor a bruise. It looked like a flower.
"What do you mean, what have I done?" he demanded of the moaning Molly. "Only saved her from the Bull by magic, that's what I've done. By magic, woman, by my own true magic!" Now he was helpless with delight, for he wanted to dance and he wanted to be still; he shook with shouting and speeches, and yet there was nothing that he wanted to say. He ended by laughing foolishly, hugging himself until he gasped, and sprawling down beside Molly as his legs let go.
"Give me your cloak," Molly said. The magician beamed at her, blinking. She reached over and ungently pulled the shredded cloak from his shoulders. Then she wrapped it around the sleeping girl, as much as it would wrap. The girl shone through it like the sun through leaves.
"Doubtless you are wondering how I plan to return her to her proper shape," Schmendrick offered. "Wonder not. The power will come to me when I need it – I know that much now. One day it will come when I call, but that time is not yet." Impulsively he seized Molly Grue, hugging her head in his long arms. "But you were right," he cried, "you were right! It is there, and it is mine!"
Molly pulled away from him, one cheek roughed red and both ears mashed. The girl sighed in her lap, ceased to smile, turned her face from the sunrise. Molly said, "Schmendrick, you poor man, you magician, don't you see -"
"See what? There's nothing to see." But his voice was suddenly hard and wary, and the green eyes were beginning to be frightened. "The Red Bull came for a unicorn, so she had to become something else. You begged me to change her – what is it frets you now?"
Molly shook her head in the wavering way of an old woman. She said, "I didn't know you meant to turn her into a human girl. You would have done better -" She did not finish, but looked away from him. One hand continued to stroke the white girl's hair.
"The magic chose the shape, not I," Schmendrick answered. "A mountebank may select this cheat or that, but a magician is a porter, a donkey carrying his master where he must. The magician calls, but the magic chooses. If it changes a unicorn to a human being, then that was the only thing to do." His face was fevered with an ardent delirium which made him look even younger. "I am a bearer," he sang. "I am a dwelling, I am a messenger -"
"You are an idiot," Molly Grue said fiercely. "Do you hear me? You're a magician, all right, but you're a stupid magician." But the girl was trying to wake, her hands opening and closing, and her eyelids beating like birds' breasts. As Molly and Schmendrick looked on, the girl made a soft sound and opened her eyes.
They were farther apart than common, and somewhat deeper set, and they were as dark as the deep sea; and illuminated, like the sea, by strange, glimmering creatures that never rise to the surface. The unicorn could have been transformed into a lizard, Molly thought, or into a shark, a snail, a goose, and somehow still her eyes would have given the change away. To me, anyway. I would know.