Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [11]
He almost heard the magic reply in agreement. It was as if there were something just on the edge of hearing that said, But of course! The Fool is the Luck of the Land!
And the magic stopped looming over him like a wave about to break, and flowed off to make all things in Led Belarus as bucolic as an illumination in a manuscript.
Meanwhile the unicorns sighed and gazed at him with undisguised longing, their eyes growing moist and soulful as he played. He suppressed a chuckle; it didn’t do to laugh when you were playing a flute. It would have been nice if he could have turned their passions toward a more appropriate species, but he knew better than to charge the magic with that task. He was no mage, and anything subtle would almost certainly backfire on him.
Now there was one more thing he had to do. With the last of the magic waiting to be released, the tone of his song grew dark. The unicorns shivered, and even the golden sunlight dimmed a little.
In his way, he was not only the Luck of the Land, he was its protector.
Demons, and monsters, and night-walking vampires, all things that would harm my land and my people, hear now my music and flee from this Kingdom—
Again, the simplest of commands, and one with no ambiguity. Whatever was evil was ordered to run to the other side of the borders. When he was not riding about the Kingdom to apply the Luck and the magic to specific problems, he did this as often as twice a week, never going more than a month before having to come to this pool to discharge built-up magic. He’d been doing this roughly since he was twelve. No one had taught him, it had just all felt right. He really wished with all his heart he could have had some more guidance on this but the truth was, magicians never came here since he’d begun discharging the built-up power on his own.
Sometimes he wondered if maybe he was driving all magicians away, not just the ones with bad intentions.
Ah well, that was unlikely, since this actually didn’t drive all evil things away, just the weakest, the easiest to influence. For others…well, others needed to be dealt with directly.
He sensed the last of the power go; it was like being clutched in a fist and suddenly sensing the fist relax.
He ended the tune, and the unicorns sighed in unison.
Then surged back around him. “Prince Sasha, Prince Sasha, would you—” Nudging and cajoling, they begged for his attention. And soft-hearted as he was, he just couldn’t tell them no.
Well, he wouldn’t be leaving here any time soon. With a rueful sigh, he pushed one of them aside and made his way to a tiny hut built just outside that circle of golden light, a hut so artfully hidden that even he, who had built it, had a hard time spotting it.
He went inside and came out with a pair of currying brushes and a comb, and as soon as they saw these implements, the unicorns gasped with happiness. Whether they were familiar to this spot or strangers, they all seemed to understand, by some kind of arcane migration of thought, what lengths he would go to in order to make them happy.
He spent the rest of the afternoon brushing and combing them, carefully saving out the mane and tail hairs. Unicorn hair wasn’t quite as valuable as dragon’s blood, but it was potent, and there was a demand for it.
The unicorns themselves were in ecstasy.
“Stay with us!” they pleaded, when he was done. “We scarcely see you anymore,” added the one that seemed to be the leader this time. “You used to be here much more often than you are now.”
He didn’t bother telling her that he was here in their glade far more in the past several months than they thought. Unicorns weren’t good at counting. Or at telling time, either. And their memories weren’t very reliable, sadly enough. Now that he came to think of it, they were rather like dogs—good-natured, overly affectionate, not very bright dogs. The ones whose conversation mostly consisted of “Hey! Hey! Hey!”
“I’ll stay, but only if one of you go fetch my provisions,