'Luna, we're going into danger,' he said, as gently as he could. 'We don — '
'I know!' said the unicorn, stamping one hoof impatiently in the dead leaves. 'I aweady know that! I'm coming wif you!'
Siegfried's mouth opened and closed several times without being able to get a word out. This was going to be dangerous...and Luna was such a delicate little thing. She would probably be more hindrance than help, but how to tell her to go without crushing her? Leopold said it for him.
'Uh, pardon, unicorn — '
'Luna,' said the unicorn.
Leopold flushed, and tried to find the same words that Siegfried had been unable to muster. 'Luna then — you don't — I mean, it's very sweet that you want to help, but I don't know how you could — we're going to be fi — '
It seemed that being interrupted was the order of the day. Leopold's words stuck in his throat, as Luna reared up, lashed the air a fraction of an inch from his left ear with her fore hooves, pivoted before he could wince away, sent her rear hooves flying through the air a hairbreadth above his right shoulder and pivoted a second time to drive her horn deep into the trunk of a tree just under his right arm. She wrenched it loose with a splintering and creaking of wood, then stood back from him, lashing her tail triumphantly.
It was Leopold's turn to stare with his eyes gone round and his mouth open, and Siegfried was in almost as much shock.
Siegfried cleared his throat carefully.
But Luna wasn't done yet. Still swishing her tail, she trotted down to the little pond they had all been drinking from. She knelt beside it and dipped her horn in the water.
Something like softened lightning laced across the surface of the pond as the tip of her horn touched the water. When she stood up, the water, which had been a little murky and green with algae, was now crystal clear.
'Dwink fwom that,' she said imperiously.
Without hesitation, Siegfried, the horses and the bear all did. Leopold waited a moment, then, when Luna's eye flashed angrily at his hesitation, he gulped and joined them.
The moment that the first sweet drop slipped down Siegfried's throat, he started to feel energized. By the time he had finished drinking his fill, all his energy had been restored, and more energy heaped atop that. He had never felt so good in his life. Looking at the others, he could see that they felt the same.
'I will do that each time we stop,' Luna said with a toss of her horn. 'I can heal you. I can make you feel good. I can fight! You can't do wifout me.'
'You are right, Luna.' Siegfried caressed her neck, and her eyes softened with infatuation. 'We need you. But it's very dangerous — '
'I know,' she said again. 'I know. You think I don't but I do! Wosamund is in the hands of the Huntsman. He has murdered many of my bwovvers and was twying to murder me. I am coming because I wove you. I am coming because Wosamund needs us. But I am also coming for me. For my own weason.' Her eyes flashed silver. 'I am coming for wevenge.'
Somehow, even with her lisp, she did not sound ridiculous anymore.
Chapter 20
The second-floor room of the sorcerer's stone tower was, for the moment, still. As Rosa had guessed, Desmond was what Godmother Lily had called a 'ritualist.' He probably didn't have more than a few simple things memorized, and he managed all of his magic by repeating, with painful exactitude, what he had written out in his 'grimoire,' or spell-book. Everything in this tower room — at least, everything that she could actually see — had been carefully positioned. There was a long, waist-high cabinet behind him; on it were a candlestick and his sword, which he had spent some time positioning.
He had taken various things from the drawers with each spell, and put them back when he was done. To her right was the hole in the floor that gave access to the staircase. To her far right was another cabinet with another candlestick. To her left, the same. Circles had been inlaid in the stone of the floor, and symbols inlaid inside the circles. As he had worked, he had walked around her, chanted, burned various incenses and done things behind her that, from the sounds that she had heard, she was rather glad she hadn't been able to see. He had almost certainly killed several small animals after torturing them. It all turned her stomach. At least she had found out all this before he had won the contest. She was almost certain that he would, indeed, have won. If he hadn't done so legitimately, he'd have found a way....
Then again, this was probably the way that he had found.
Bah.
And it was obvious that he could not see magic as she could — or sense it in any other way, except when the spells were completed and he got the results he was looking for, or when the spells themselves caused effects that anyone could see. If he had been able to, he would have known by now how much she was interfering.
'You returned sooner than I expected, sire,' the Huntsman said, as Desmond paused between spells. The Huntsman might well have been thought handsome by some, if it had not been for the coldness of his expression. Facially, he could have been Desmond's relative.
Perhaps he was. It would not be the first time that a bastard son had ended up as the legitimate son's right hand.
Rosa could tell that Desmond was between spells, because the woven bands of sinister murky-yellow magic around her were — well, finished off was the best way she could describe it. The ends were precisely tucked in and the whole looked neat and complete. Desmond really was a patient and thorough sorcerer. He had pronounced each syllable of the spell exactly, had been painstaking with his diagrams and had taken his time over it.
He was not, however, as observant a sorcerer as he was patient, or he would have noticed that she was not as bound as she should have been. No sooner had he finished the work, than she began unpicking it, having paid careful attention to where those ends were tucked in. The necklace of unicorn hair kept the things from affecting her, and once she started unpicking them, well they might just as well have not been there. The magic wasn't that
