“I think you are my friend,” she said. “Will you help me?”

“If not you, no one,” the magician answered. “You are my last chance.”

One by one, the sad beasts of the Midnight Carnival came whimpering, sneezing, and shuddering awake. One had been dreaming of rocks and bugs and tender leaves; another of bounding through high, hot grass; a third of mud and blood. And one had dreamed of a hand scratching the lonely place behind its ears. Only the harpy had not slept, and now she sat staring into the sun without blinking. Schmendrick said, “If she frees herself first, we are lost.”

They heard Rukh’s voice nearby‌—‌that voice always sounded nearby‌—‌calling, “Schmendrick! Hey, Schmendrick, I got it! It’s a coffeepot, right?” The magician began to move slowly away. “Tonight,” he murmured to the unicorn. “Trust me till dawn.” And was gone with a flap and a scramble, seeming as before to leave part of himself behind. Rukh loped by the cage a moment later, all deadly economy. Hidden in her black wagon, Mommy Fortuna grumbled Elli’s song to herself.

Here is there, and high is low;
All may be undone.
What is true, no two men know—
What is gone is gone.

Soon a new catch of spectators began to come sauntering up to see the show. Rukh called them in, crying, “Creatures of night!” like an iron parrot, and Schmendrick stood on a box and did tricks. The unicorn watched him with great interest and a growing uncertainty, not of his heart but of his craft. He made an entire sow out of a sow’s ear; turned a sermon into a stone, a glass of water into a handful of water, a five of spades into a twelve of spades, and a rabbit into a goldfish that drowned. Each time he conjured up confusion, he glanced quickly at the unicorn with eyes that said, “Oh, but you know what I really did.” Once he changed a dead rose into a seed. The unicorn liked that, even though it did turn out to be a radish seed.

The show began again. Once more Rukh led the crowd from one of Mommy Fortuna’s poor fables to another. The dragon blazed, Cerberus howled for Hell to come and help him, and the satyr tempted women until they wept. They squinted and pointed at the manticore’s yellow tusks and swollen sting; grew still at the thought of the Midgard Serpent; and wondered at Arachne’s new web, which was like a fisherman’s net with the dripping moon in it. Each of them took it for a real web, but only the spider believed that it held the real moon.

This time, Rukh did not tell the story of King Phineus and the Argonauts; indeed, he hurried his sightseers past the harpy’s cage as quickly as he could, gabbling only her name and the meaning of it. The harpy smiled. Nobody saw her smile except the unicorn, and she wished that she had chanced to be looking somewhere else at the time.