She tried to remove her hands from the fairy creature’s neck and found she could not. She was joined to the unicorn. She was one with it.

Then the ridged horn began to glow white with magic, and a jumble of images ripped through her mind. There was a place of empty coldness. There were chains and fire, tapestries of white on which unicorns bounded and leaped, dark-robed wizards, and spells being cast in endless succession. There was Meeks, Ben, and the Paladin.

And finally there was a cry of such terror and longing that it shattered the images as if they had been formed of glass.

Set me free!

The pain of that cry was too much for her to bear. She screamed, and her scream jerked her sharply backward, tearing her free at last of the unicorn. She stumbled and almost fell—would have fallen, had not Abernathy’s arms come quickly about her to hold her upright.

“I saw!” she gasped and could speak no more.

But the sound of her scream still echoed through the trees.

COMBAT

The scream reached Ben Holiday as he knelt alone in the forest beside the tiny stream, restored to himself at last, the medallion of Landover’s High Lords a brilliant silver wonder cradled gingerly, unbelievingly within the cup of his hands. The scream rose out of the trees, a thin, high wail of anguish and fear, and lingered like the whistle of the wind through canyon drops in the still mountain air.

Ben’s head jerked up, his neck craning. There was no mistaking that cry. It was Willow’s.

He leaped to his feet, hands closing possessively over the medallion, eyes searching the forest shadows as if whatever threatened the sylph might be waiting there for him as well. A mix of fear and horror raced through him. What had been done to Willow? He started forward, stopped, whirled about desperately, and realized that he could not trace the direction of the scream. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. Damn! Meeks would hear that scream as surely as he—Meeks and that winged demon. Perhaps Meeks already had …

He was holding the medallion so tightly that it was cutting into his palms. Willow! A vision of the sylph blossomed in his mind, a frail and beautiful creature whose life was his special charge. He recalled again the words of the Earth Mother investing him with responsibility for seeing that she stayed safe and his promise to keep her so. His emotions tore at him and left him ragged and frantic. Truths to which he had not yet given heed flayed his soul.

The truths all reduced to one.

He loved Willow.

He experienced a warm rush of surprise and frantic relief. All this time he had denied his feelings, unable to come to terms with them. He had wanted no one close to him again, not after Annie, his dead wife. Love brought responsibility and the possibility of hurt and loss. He had wanted none of it. But the feelings had remained—as such feelings do—because they had never been his to deny in the first place. The reality of their existence had been forced upon him that first night out in the eastern wastes after fleeing Strabo and Nightshade—revealed in a dream in his dialogue with Edgewood Dirk on the reason for the urgency of his hunt for Willow.