The hunter’s voice was quick and husky with emotions that lay all too close to the surface of the man. He sat with Ben and Dirk in the early evening hours about a small campfire built in the shelter of an oak grove and a ridgeline. Sunset scattered red and purple across the western horizon, and blue-gray dusk hovered east. The close of the day was still and warm, the rain clouds of four nights past a memory. Birds sang their evening songs in the trees, and the smell of flowers was in the air.

Ben watched the hunter closely. The hunter was a big, rawboned man with sun-browned, weathered skin and calloused hands. He wore woodsman’s garb with high leather boots softened by hand for comfort and stealth, and he carried a crossbow and bolts, long bow and arrows, a bolo, and a skinning knife. His face was long and high-boned, a mask of angles and flat planes with the skin stretched tightly across and the features strained by the tension. He had the look of a dangerous man; in other times, he might have been.

But not this night. This night he was something less.

“I’m getting ahead of myself,” the man muttered suddenly, an admonishment as much as a declaration. He wiped at his forehead with one big hand and hunkered down closer to the flames of the campfire as if to draw their warmth. “I almost wasn’t there at all, you know. I was almost gone to the Melchor hunting bighorn. Had my gear all packed and ready when Dain found me. He caught up with me at the crossroads out, running like his woman had found out the worst, calling after me like some fool. I slowed and waited, and that made me the real fool. ‘There’s a hunt being organized,’ he said. ‘The King himself has called it. His people are out everywhere, drawing the best and the quickest to net something you won’t believe. A black unicorn! Yea, it’s so,’ he says. ‘A black unicorn that’s to be hunted down if it takes all month, and we have to chase the beast from valley’s end to valley’s end. You got to come,’ he says. ‘They’re giving each man twenty pieces a day and food and, if you’re the one who snares him, another five thousand!’

The hunter laughed sullenly. “Five thousand pieces. Seemed like the best chance I’d ever get at the time—more money than I’d see in ten years’ work any other way. I looked at Dain and wondered if he’d lost his mind, then saw the way his eyes were lit and knew if was all real, that there was a hunt, that there was a bounty of five thousand, that some fool—King or otherwise—believed there was a black unicorn out there to be caught.”

Ben glanced momentarily at Dirk. The cat sat a few feet from him, eyes fixed intently on the speaker, paws curled up underneath so that they didn’t show. He hadn’t moved or spoken since the hunter had come across their tiny camp and asked if he might share their meal. Dirk was to all outward appearances a normal cat. Ben couldn’t help wondering what he might be thinking.