As they stumbled along, he hurriedly told Prince Lír the tale of their adventures, beginning with his own strange history and stranger doom; recounting the ruin of the Midnight Carnival and his flight with the unicorn, and continuing through their meeting with Molly Grue, the journey to Hagsgate, and Drinn’s story of the double curse on the town and the tower. Here he halted, for beyond lay the night of the Red Bull: a night that ended, for good or ill, with magic‌—‌and with a naked girl who struggled in her body like a cow in quicksand. He hoped that the prince would be more interested in learning of his heroic birth than in the origins of the Lady Amalthea.

Prince Lír marveled suspiciously, which is an awkward thing to manage. “I have known for a very long time that the king is not my father,” he said. “But I tried hard to be his son all the same. I’m the enemy of any who plot against him, and it would take more than a crone’s gibbering to make me work his downfall. As for the other, I think there are no unicorns any more, and I know that King Haggard has never seen one. How could any man who had looked upon a unicorn even once‌—‌let alone thousands with every tide‌—‌possibly be as sad as King Haggard is? Why, if I had only seen her once, and never again—” Now he himself paused in some confusion, for he also felt that the talk was going on to some sorrow from which it could never be called back. Molly’s neck and shoulders were listening intently, but if the Lady Amalthea could hear what the two men were saying, she gave no sign.

“Yet the king has a joy hidden somewhere about his life,” Schmendrick pointed out. “Have you never seen a trace of it, truly‌—‌never seen its track in his eyes? I have. Think for a moment, Prince Lír.”

The prince was silent, and they wound further into the foul dark. They could not always tell whether they were climbing or descending; nor, sometimes, if the passage were bending once again, until the gnarly nearness of stone at their shoulders suddenly became the bleak rake of a wall against their faces.

There was not the smallest sound of the Red Bull, or any glimmer of the wicked light; but when Schmendrick touched his damp face, the smell of the Bull came off on his fingers.

Prince Lír said, “Sometimes, when he has been on the tower, there is something in his face. Not a light, exactly, but a clearness. I remember. I was little, and he never looked like that when he looked at me, or at anything else. And I had a dream.” He was walking very slowly now, scuffing his feet. “I used to have a dream,” he said, “the same dream over and over, about standing at my window in the middle of the night and seeing the Bull, seeing the Red Bull—” He did not finish.