He spoke three angled words and snapped his fingers. The cage disappeared. The unicorn found herself standing in a grove of trees‌—‌orange and lemon, pear and pomegranate, almond and acacia‌—‌with soft spring earth under her feet, and the sky growing over her. Her heart turned light as smoke, and she gathered up the strength of her body for a great bound into the sweet night. But she let the leap drift out of her, untaken, for she knew, although she could not see them, that the bars were still there. She was too old not to know.

“I’m sorry,” Schmendrick said, somewhere in the dark. “I would have liked it to be that spell that freed you.”

Now he sang something cold and low, and the strange trees blew away like dandelion down. “This is a surer spell,” he said. “The bars are now as brittle as old cheese, which I crumble and scatter, so.” Then he gasped and snatched his hands away. Each long finger was dripping blood.

“I must have gotten the accent wrong,” he said hoarsely. He hid his hands in his cloak and tried to make his voice light. “It comes and goes.”

A scratching of flinty phrases this time, and Schmendrick’s bloody hands flickering across the sky. Something gray and grinning, something like a bear, but bigger than a bear, something that chuckled muddily, came limping from somewhere, eager to crack the cage like a nut and pick out bits of the unicorn’s flesh with its claws. Schmendrick ordered it back into the night, but it wouldn’t go.

The unicorn backed into a corner and lowered her head; but the harpy stirred softly in her cage, ringing, and the gray shape turned what must have been its head and saw her. It made a foggy, globbering sound of terror, and was gone.

The magician cursed and shivered. He said, “I called him up one other time, long ago. I couldn’t handle him then either. Now we owe our lives to the harpy, and she may yet come to call for them before the sun rises.” He stood silent, twisting his wounded fingers, waiting for the unicorn to speak. “I’ll try once more,” he said finally. “Shall I try once more?”

The unicorn thought that she could still see the night boiling where the gray thing had been. “Yes,” she said.

Schmendrick took a deep breath, spat three times, and spoke words that sounded like bells ringing under the sea. He scattered a handful of powder over the spittle, and smiled triumphantly as it puffed up in a single silent flash of green. When the light had faded, he said three more words. They were like the noise bees might make buzzing on the moon.

The cage began to grow smaller. The unicorn could not see the bars moving, but each time Schmendrick said, “Ah, no!” she had less room in which to stand. Already she could not turn around. The bars were drawing in, pitiless as the tide or the morning, and they would shear through her until they surrounded her heart, which they would keep a prisoner forever. She had not cried out when the creature Schmendrick had summoned came, grinning, toward her, but now she made a sound. It was small and despairing, but not yet yielding.