Prince Lír said, “As soon as I saw her, I knew that I had been dead. It was so the other time, when I looked down from my father’s tower and saw her.” He glanced up then and drew in his breath. It was the only sound of grief for King Haggard that any living thing ever made.

“Was it I?” he whispered. “The curse said that I would be the one to bring the castle down, but I would never have done it. He was not good to me, but it was only because I was not what he wanted. Is it my doing that he is fallen?”

Schmendrick replied, “If you had not tried to save the unicorn, she would never have turned on the Red Bull and driven him into the sea. It was the Red Bull who made the overflow, and so set the other unicorns free, and it was they who destroyed the castle. Would you have it otherwise, knowing this?”

Prince Lír shook his head, but he said nothing. Molly asked, “But why did the Bull run from her? Why didn’t he stand and fight?”

There was no sign of him when they looked out to sea, though he was surely too vast to have swum out of sight in so short a time. But whether he reached some other shore, or whether the water drew even his great bulk down at last, none of them knew until long after; and he was never seen again in that kingdom.

“The Red Bull never fights,” Schmendrick said. “He conquers, but he never fights.”

He turned to Prince Lír and put a hand on his shoulder. “Now you are the king,” he said. He touched Molly as well, said something that was more of a whistle than a word, and the three of them floated up the air like milkweed plumes to the top of the cliff. Molly was not frightened. The magic lifted her as gently as though she were a note of music and it were singing her. She could feel that it was never very far from being wild and dangerous, but she was sorry when it set her down.

No stone of the castle remained, nor any scar; the earth was not even a shade paler where it had stood. Four young men in rusty, ragged armor wandered gaping through the vanished corridors, and turned around and around in the absence that had been the great hall. When they saw Lír, Molly, and Schmendrick, they came running toward them, laughing. They fell on their knees before Lír and cried out together, “Your majesty! Long live King Lír!”

Lír blushed, and actually tried to pull them to their feet. “Never mind that,” he mumbled, “never mind that. Who are you?” He peered in amazement from one face to the next. “I know you‌—‌I do know you‌—‌but how can it be?”

“It is true, Your Majesty,” the first of the young men said happily. “We are indeed King Haggard’s men-at-arms‌—‌the same who served him for so many cold and weary years. We fled the castle after you disappeared into the clock, for the Red Bull was roaring, and all the towers were trembling, and we were afraid. We knew that the old curse must be coming home at last.”