My brothers gone and consumed, Dapplegrim was far from through with me. He forced me to melt all the pots and tools and bits of iron in my family house down and beat them into shoes for him. He showed me where my brothers had buried my parents’ wealth, their gold and silver, and with these I fashioned him a gold saddle and bridle that glittered from afar. And then he knelt before me and compelled me to mount him, and off we rode.
He thundered straight to the same castle in which I had served the last few years of my life, following the road without hesitation as if he had ridden it all his life. His shoes spat stones high into the air as we rode, and his saddle and bridle and coat, too, glistened and glowed in the sunlight.
When we reached the castle the king was standing at the gate, his advisors huddled around him. They watched the approach of myself and Dapplegrim as we sped toward them like a ball of liquid fire.
Said the king once we had arrived, “Never in my life have I seen such a thing.”
And then Dapplegrim turned his long neck and looked at me with one fierce eye, and I felt myself leaking away again. Before I knew it I had told the king I had returned to his service and asked him for his best stable and sweet hay and oats for my steed. The king, perhaps himself transfixed by Dapplegrim’s other eye, bowed his head and agreed.
I returned to my duties. At the appointed hour I lit the king’s candle and carried it after him. At the appointed hour I extinguished it. It was all just the same as it had ever been, and yet it was different, too. For whereas before the king had seemed to look right through me, to consider me as he might a knife or a chair, now he noticed me and even regarded me thoughtfully.
“Tell me,” he said one day. “Where did you come by such a steed?”
“He is my inheritance, sire,” I said.
“All of it?” he asked.
“He has become,” I reluctantly admitted, “all of it.”
“And what do you suppose such a horse might be capable of?” he asked.
What indeed? Knowing not what to respond, heart sinking, I shook my head. “I do not know,” I said.
“My advisors tell me,” he said, “that a steed such as yours and a rider such as you are just the sort to rescue my daughter,” he said.
I stammered something out. To be honest, the princess had been absent before I arrived at the castle and I had all but forgotten about her.
“You have my leave to go, and you shall marry her if you succeed,” he said, already turning away. “But if you do not return in three days with my daughter, you shall be put to death.”
Dapplegrim! I thought. Dapplegrim! For I knew it was not the king’s advisors who were to blame but my own accursed horse, my only inheritance, who in growing strong had left countless bodies in his wake. And would, by the end, I was sure, leave countless more, perhaps my own among them.
I drew my sword and went to the stables, prepared to kill the animal. But as I entered he looked up quick and stared me down with blood-flecked eyes, and I became as meek as a newborn lamb. I sheathed my sword and took up the currying brush and rubbed his mirror-like coat even sleeker than it had been before. And as I did so, he was there within my mind itself, his hooves leaving bloody tracks across my brain. And when I had finished brushing him, I had grown calm and determined and knew exactly what I must do.
And so Dapplegrim and I rode out of the king’s palace, a cloud of dust rising dark behind us. I loosed the reins and let the animal direct himself, and he rode swiftly over hill and dale, skirting the edge of a thick forest, moving, ever moving.
There came to be, in the distance, veiled in haze, a large squat shape which in the end resolved into a strange, steep-sided mountain. It was toward this we rode, and at last we were there.
Dapplegrim looked the mountain up and down, and then, snorting and pawing the ground, he rushed it.
But the wall of rock was as steep as the side of a house and smooth as a sheet of glass. Dapplegrim rode best he could and made it a good way up, but then his forelegs slipped and he tumbled down, and I along with him. How it was that neither of us was killed I must ascribe to the same dark power that had led to the horse becoming the monster he now was.
And so, I thought, Dapplegrim has failed, and for this I shall lose my head.
But barely did I have time to catch my breath when Dapplegrim was snorting and pawing the ground, and made his second charge.
And this time he made it farther and might even have made it all the way to the top had not one foreleg slipped and sent us hurtling and tumbling down. Failed again, I thought, but Dapplegrim would not have it so. In a moment he was up and pawing the ground and snorting, and then he charged forward, his hooves spitting rocks high in the air. And this time he did not slip but gained the top. There he stove in the head of the troll with his hooves while I threw the princess over the pommel of the golden saddle, and down we rode again.
My story should have ended there. I had done as I had been instructed. I had rescued the king’s daughter and should by rights have had her hand in marriage. Happily ever after, as they say. By rights it should have gone thus, were lords as honest and just as they expect their servants to be. But by the time, on the evening of the third day, Dapplegrim and I had returned with the king’s daughter, Dapplegrim choosing to carry us all directly into the throne room, the king had had ample time to think. He had time to reconsider a promise rashly made to a mere servant and, with the help of his advisors, had begun to wriggle free of it.
For as I returned and laid before the king the promise he had made me of his daughter’s hand, I found he had grown cunning and deceitful.
“You have misunderstood me,” he claimed. “For how could I give my only daughter to a servant unless he were to prove himself more than a servant?”
But what is this? I wondered. How is this not what Dapplegrim and I have just done by rescuing her where all others have failed?
But the king, fed his lines by his advisors and set upon repeating them as he had learned them, paid little attention to the expression on my face.
There were, he told me, three tasks to accomplish. I must first make the sun shine in his darkened palace despite the mountain blocking the way. As if that were not enough, I must find his daughter a steed as good as Dapplegrim for our wedding day. Third — but I had already stopped listening by this time, and would be hard- pressed to repeat what the third task was to be.
Then, when he was finished, the king leaned back and looked up at me, a satisfied expression smeared upon his face.
I nodded and thanked him for his indulgence, and then began to turn away. And it was just then that Dapplegrim caught my eye, and I was transfixed.
In retrospect, I am not surprised how things turned out. Indeed, each and every one of our yearly reunions upon the hillside should have suggested to me how things would end. For there was Dapplegrim galloping through my skull and a strange red haze overwhelming my vision. And before I knew it, I had drawn my sword and lopped free the head of my king. And then, as, screaming and whinnying, they tried to flee, the heads of his twelve advisors. And finally, for good measure, that of his beloved daughter.
It was not long after this that I myself became king, for the people were afraid to do otherwise. I have done my best to serve justly and flatter myself to think that more often than not I have done so. When I have not, it is less my own fault than that of the dapple-gray horse, huge and monstrous, who, when he fixes his eyes upon me and calls for blood and pain, I find I still cannot refuse.
So why have I told you, you who would serve me, this? Why does the mad king at whose feet you throw yourself and beg for a place bare his soul to you thus? Is it, you worry, that he has no intention of giving you anything?
No, you shall have a place if, after having listened to me, you still do so desire. But you must know it is not
