There were sudden tears in the hunter’s eyes. “I think I touched it, you know, when it went past me. I think I touched it. Sweet mother, I can still feel the silk of its skin brushing me, like fire, like… a woman’s touch, maybe. I had a woman touch me once that way, long ago. The unicorn felt like that. Now I can’t forget it. I try to think of other things, try to be reasonable about the fact of it having happened at all, but the sense of it stays with me.” He tightened his face against what he was feeling. “I been looking for it on my own since I left, thinking maybe one man could have better luck than a whole hunting party. I don’t want to catch it exactly; I don’t think I could. I just want to see it again. I just want to maybe touch it one more time — just once, just for a moment…”
He trailed off again. The campfire sparked suddenly in the stillness, a sharp crackling. No one moved. Darkness had settled down across the valley, and the last daylight had dropped from view. Stars and moons had appeared, their light faint and distant, their colors muted. Ben glanced down at Edgewood Dirk. The cat had his eyes closed.
“I just want to touch it once more,” the hunter repeated softly. “Just for a moment.”
He stared vacantly at Ben. The ghost of who and what he had been was swallowed in the silence that followed.
* * *
That same night Willow dreamed again of the black unicorn. She slept huddled close to the faithful Parsnip in a gathering of pine at the edge of the Deep Fell, concealed within a covering of boughs and shadows. Her journey north from Elderew was five days gone. She was now only hours ahead of Ben Holiday. The hunt for the black unicorn had delayed her for almost a day as it swept the hill country west of the Greensward and turned her east. She had no idea what the hunt was about. She had no idea that Ben was searching for her.
The dream came at midnight, stealing into her sleep like a mother to her slumbering child’s room, a presence that was warm and comforting. There was no fear this time, only sadness. Willow moved through forest trees and grassland spaces, and the black unicorn watched, as if a ghost come from some nether region to trail the living. It appeared and faded like sunshine from behind a cloud, now in the shade of a massive old maple, now in the lea of a copse of fir. It was never all visible, but only in part. It was black and featureless save for its eyes — and its eyes were a mirror of all the sadness that ever was and would ever be.
The eyes made Willow cry, and her tears stained her cheeks as she slept. The eyes were troubled, filled with pain she could only imagine, haunted beyond anything she had believed possible. The black unicorn of this dream was no demon spawn; it was a delicate, wondrous creature that somehow had been terribly misused…
She came awake with a start, the image of the unicorn clearly etched in her mind, its eyes fixed and staring. Parsnip slept next to her, undisturbed. Dawn was still hours away, and she shivered with the night’s chill. Her slim body trembled at the whisper of the dream’s words in her memory, and she felt the magic of their presence in her fairy way.
This dream was real, she realized suddenly. This dream was the truth.
She straightened back against the pine’s roughened trunk, swallowed the dryness in her throat, and forced herself to consider what the dream had shown her. Something required it — the eyes of the unicorn, perhaps. They sought something from her. It was no longer enough to think simply of retrieving the golden bridle and carrying it to Ben. That was the command of her first dream, the dream that had brought her on this quest — but the truth of that dream was now in doubt. The unicorn of that dream was entirely different than the unicorn of this. One was demon, the other victim. One was pursuer, the other… hunted? She thought perhaps so. There was a need for help in the unicorn’s eyes. It was almost as if it was begging her for that help.