Yet she was going to do it anyway. The decision had already been made. The black unicorn was more than a legend out of tales a thousand years old, more than the dream that had drawn her on, more even than the reality of its physical being. It was an inescapable want that was an integral and undeniable part of her, a mystery that she must solve. The emerald eyes of the creature reflected her most secret urgings. She could keep nothing of herself hidden. Her own body betrayed her, its need for the unicorn an irresistible force. There was desire in her that surpassed anything she had ever known. The dangers that the black unicorn might pose, imagined or real, paled beside such desire. She had to solve its puzzle, whatever the cost. She had to know its truth.

She went hot and cold and she felt feather light as she rose and started forward. She was trembling, the horror and the anticipation mixing within her in equal measures, driving her reason from her, and leaving only her need.

Oh, Ben, she thought desperately! Why aren’t you here?

The black unicorn waited patiently, an ebony statue in the dappled shadows, eyes locked on Willow’s. There was a curious sense of its both not and always being mirrored in the sylph—as if it were her most carefully guarded wish, projected into being from her mind.

“I have to know,” she whispered to the unicorn as she stood at last before it.

Slowly, her hands came up.

The meadow, once grassy and bright with wild flowers, lay in ruins, a charred, smoking stretch of barren earth amid the forest trees. Questor Thews stood at its edge and peered futilely through the haze. He was covered with dust and ash, his tall, stooped figure more ragtag in appearance than ever, gray robes and colored silks singed and torn, harlequin leather boots scuffed and smudged. That last exchange of magic between Meeks, the demon, and Edgewood Dirk had sent him flying. The wind had been knocked from him, and he’d found himself resting rather precariously in the branches of an aged crimson maple, an object of great delight for the squirrels and birds nesting there. Abernathy, the kobolds, and the gnomes were nowhere to be seen. Ben Holiday, Willow, and the black unicorn had disappeared. Questor had climbed down from that maple and gone searching for them all. He hadn’t found a one.

Now his wanderings had brought him back to where he had last seen any of them. And none of them appeared to be here either.

He sighed deeply, his owlish face lined with worry. He wished he knew more of what was going on. He accepted now that the stranger who claimed to be Ben Holiday was in fact who he said he was; the man who appeared to be Ben Holiday was in fact Meeks. The dreams Willow, Ben, and he had experienced had been, in fact, the creations of his half-brother, all part of some bigger plan to gain control over Landover and the magic. But acceptance of all this gained him nothing. He still didn’t know what the black unicorn had to do with anything nor did he understand yet what plan Meeks was trying to implement. Worst of all, he didn’t have any idea at all how to find any of this out.