It took Ben a moment to realize that they were not on guard against Trolls, but against Edgewood Dirk.

Dirk, for his part, ignored them. He was sitting on the tree stump washing when Ben thought to look for him, his silky coat smooth and glistening as if damp from morning dew. He did not glance up or respond to Ben’s good morning. He went on about the business of cleaning himself until he was satisfied that the job was properly completed, then settled down to the contents of a bowl of spring water that Ben had provided. Ben hadn’t thought about it before, but Dirk never seemed to eat much. What he survived on was something of a mystery, but it was a mystery that Ben chose to leave unsolved. He had enough puzzles to deal with without adding another.

They departed shortly after waking, Ben and Dirk leading—depending on how you defined the word “leading,” for once again Dirk seemed to know where Ben was going almost before he did. The gnomes trailed. Fillip and Sot clearly wanted no part of Edgewood Dirk. They stayed well back of the cat and watched him the way you would a snake. Fillip was limping noticeably and Sot appeared to have burned a good portion of the fur off his wrists and the backs of his hands. Neither had anything to say about their injuries, and Ben let them be.

They traveled through the morning at a steady pace, the sun shining brightly from out of a cloudless sky, the smell of wild flowers and fruit trees scenting the air. Signs of the wilt prevailed. They remained small but noticeable, and Ben thought again of Meeks in his guise, of the demons come back out of Abaddon at his bidding, of the lessening of magic in the land, and the stealing of its life. There was a renewed urgency tugging him along, a sense that time was slipping from him too quickly. He was no closer than he had ever been to discovering what had been done to him. He still had no idea why the black unicorn had come back into Landover or what its importance was to Meeks. He knew only that there was a tie connecting all that had happened and he had to unknot it if he were ever to straighten this mess out.

Thinking of that led him to think once again about Edgewood Dirk. It continued to grate on him that the cat chose to remain such an enigma when he could obviously explain himself. Ben was reasonably sure by now that Dirk had not simply stumbled across him that first night in the lake country, but had deliberately sought him out. He was also reasonably sure that Dirk was staying with him for a reason and not simply out of curiosity. But Dirk was not about to explain himself to Ben until he felt like it; and given the cat’s peculiar nature, that explanation was likely to be offered along about the twelfth of never. Still, it seemed abhorrent to Ben simply to accept the beast’s presence without making any further effort whatsoever to learn something of what had brought it to him in the first place.