Ben fought the command, struggled to rise, and found he could not. For once, the wizard’s magic was working right on the first try. Ben was slipping back against the rough trunk of the fir, downward into a bed of needles. His companions drew close. Abernathy’s furry, bespeckled face peered at him through a gathering of shadows. Bunion’s teeth gleamed like daggers. Fillip and Sot were vague images that wavered and voices that murmured and seemed to draw steadily farther away. He found comfort in their presence, strength, and reassurance—his friends, all there with him except Parsnip—and Willow!

“Willow,” he whispered.

He spoke her name once and was asleep.

He dreamed of Willow while he slept, and the dream was a revelation that shocked him, even in his slumber. He searched for the sylph through the forests, hills, and plains of Landover, a solitary quest that drew him on as a magnet would iron. The country through which he traveled was familiar and yet foreign, too, a mix of sunshine and shadows that shimmered with the inconsistency of an image reflected on water. There were things that moved all about him, but they lacked face and form. He hunted alone, his search a seemingly endless one that took him from one end of the valley and back again, swift and certain in its pace but fruitless nevertheless.

He was driven by an urgency that surprised him. There was a need to find the sylph that defied explanation. He was frightened for her without understanding the reason for his fear. He was desperate to be with her, yet his desperation lacked cause. It was as if he were captive to his emotions and they determined his course where reason could not. He could sense Willow’s presence as he searched, a closeness that teased him. It was as if she waited behind each tree and beyond each hill, and he need only journey a bit further to find her. Weariness did not slow him as he traveled; strength of purpose carried him on.

After a time, he began to hear voices. They whispered to him from all about, some in warning, some in admonishment. He heard the River Master, distrustful yet of who Ben was, strangely anxious that the daughter he could not quite love and who could not quite love him be found. He heard the Earth Mother, asking him to repeat again the promise he had made to her to find and protect Willow, insistent that he honor it. He heard that solitary, defeated hunter speak once more in hollow tones of the black unicorn, of the touch that had stolen away his soul. He heard Meeks, his voice a dark and vengeful hiss that promised ruin if the girl and the golden bridle should escape him.

Still he went on.

And then he heard Edgewood Dirk.

It was the voice of the prism cat that slowed him, aware suddenly of how frantic his search for Willow had become. He stopped, his breath ragged in his ears, his chest pounding. He stood within a forest glade that was cool and solitary, a mix of shadows and light, of boughs canopied overhead and moss grown thick underfoot. Dirk sat upon a knoll within that glade, prim and sleek and inscrutable.