into the light and halted.
Childheart blinked several times, fluttering his eyelids, as if striving, in his disbelief, to simply wipe away hallucinations. But the blinking only gathered clarity to his sight, and the unicorn was now beginning to believe that what he saw was actually there. The meadow of tall grasses immediately in front him spread far and wide, all the way to thick groves of giant trees on the opposite side of the vast fields. Oaks, poplars, chestnuts, and elms stretched all along the lower edge of the horizon. Scattered throughout the fields were towering clumps of wild flowers: daisies and daffodils; black-eyed Susan’s; and Queen Anne’s lace. The continuous forest of trees stretched one hundred eighty degrees along the meadow’s distant edge, beginning at the mountainside to his left and ending well into the distance to the right, likely many miles from end to end. Above and ahead the sky was a bright blue—as blue as any sky he could recall there ever existing above the Forest of Lament, even in the days of joy.
Above and behind him, and out of sight beyond the mountain tops, but evidenced by the light that illuminated everything in front, was the sun, long absent from the recent history of nearly all of Bairnmoor north of The Mountains spanning several hundred years or more. But here it was—at last—wherever here was! Stunned to the point of near numbness, Childheart lay down in the grass—softer than any grass on which he had lain for centuries—and ceased all thought, feeling that sort of entitlement following long and hard labor, as well as gratitude at sacrifice’s end, that enabled him to simply live in the moment of what had been gifted to him, leaving for a later moment—temptingly, a much later moment—the consideration of what to do next.
Gazing out into the fields, his head resting on his front legs, Childheart noticed for the first time what was barely visible above the woods on the other side of the vast meadow. Camouflaged in the trees, as if sprouting from the forest canopy itself, was an expansive castle compound, its high walls with towering turrets stretching wide along the upper edge of the horizon. Behind the walls, the castle proper—a multitude of levels and sizes of structures—soared majestically into the air like a skyline of geometrically-shaped mountaintops.
The three exterior walls of the sprawling compound visible above the trees were each a mile long and connected together at wide angles, suggesting the existence of numerous such outside walls and a castle grounds far larger than the one the Queen had occupied at the time of her death. Childheart gave a start, instantly raising his head and looking all about, unconcerned that unseen observers might spot him. For at that moment it occurred to him: was this not a place of beauty? Was the sun not shining? Were these not trees, green with life? Were there not flowers blooming? Was the grass not lush and the air balmy? And was he not far outside his own forest, well beyond The Mountains, and far removed from the place of battle?
And was not even the desolateness of The Northern Reaches, he continued thinking, now many miles behind him? What was this place, he wondered, if not a place where goodness ruled, and so a place where the Good must already have prevailed, quite apart from his own assistance? Must the Queen not already have been released, and occupying this part of Bairnmoor? And would not Elli—and so also Beatríz—be here, and alive and well, having been the necessary instruments of the Queen’s restoration?
Was this not evidence of the restoration of life, and so also a manifestation of the restoration of the Queen’s Kingdom of love and childnessness that the poem had prophesied would come to pass? Was this not, as Butterfly had promised and assured him would be the case, the revealing of the Good to him—the Good revealed to him, made possible by both his leaving and his waiting, one entailed in the other? Indeed, Childheart thought, there was even a substantialness to the grasses not felt before in Bairnmoor, or at least not felt for a very long time, and a perception he had of the living things all about him that suggested the kind of life that would finally endure, without end!
Childheart awoke from his reverie—and perhaps some sleep—to see that the low, tree-obscured sun was casting lengthening shadows, and was soon to set in what he deduced to be the western sky far to his right, behind the hills. Eager to see the Queen, to see his friends, and to be a part of the celebration of life with all of the Queen’s subjects, Childheart sprang up and bolted across the meadow on his way to the forest, and to the castle above and beyond.
As Childheart was slowing to enter the woods, he was suddenly puzzled by the absence of creature life anywhere about. He stopped at the edge of the meadow beneath the spreading boughs of a giant chestnut tree, and cast his eyes all about in search of any sort of life apart from the plants. Then he froze where he stood, shivering, but not from the evening air turning cold. Childheart reached his head toward the ground, hesitated, and then bit off the top of a tuft of grass, almost immediately spitting it out. He then reached for a chestnut leaf above him, needing to stand on his hind legs to secure one in his mouth. With uncharacteristic effort Childheart pulled at the leaf until it snapped from the branch; this, too, he blew from his mouth.
Both the grass and leaf had been fashioned from treated skins of some sort, or from materials produced by dark arts, and he suspected that the trunks of the trees were no less artificial. He raised a front leg and brought it down hard against the trunk of the chestnut tree, causing it to clang and reverberate like a tin drum. He glanced rapidly up toward the setting sun, and noticed, just before it dipped fully behind the hills, that it appeared to be more like the light of sun-like fire than of the sun itself, and that it seemed to be shining behind a glass that magnified its light and heat.
The sky was no longer blue, but only because its color, unchanged, was simply obscured by the evening dusk. Stars began to appear, but Childheart knew for certain, without knowing precisely why or how, that, like all the other manifestations of this “natural world,” they, too, were not real. The only thing that was real, he was now convinced, was the castle, and simultaneous with that realization, Childheart darted back into the meadow and galloped at full tilt away from the castle and back toward the tunnel opening he had emerged from only hours earlier. The “sun” was soon gone, with not even the pale light of a lingering sunset to guide his way, and the emerging stars being only back-lighted holes in a fabricated canopy painted blue, he could no longer see the tunnel opening, and so had no idea to which side of the passageway he was deviating. Once at the face of the mountain he would not know which way to go, left or right, to locate the escape route.
Not even a quarter of the way back into the meadow, however, something far more distressing caught Childheart’s attention. Closing in on him fast from both left and right, but not yet even visible, Childheart heard the thunder of what had to be hundreds of enemy troops, including the strident howling of Wolfmen, the screeching of Thrashers, the battle horns of Rumblards, and the thin yelps from lipless Unpersons.
Understanding that an ambush was underway, Childheart pulled up hard, pivoted in a whirl, and sped back toward the trees. He knew it was entirely possible that he was rushing headlong from the teeth of danger and into its mouth, but Childheart also knew he had no chance of reaching the mountain tunnel before being overtaken—and at least the woods would provide some potential for evasion. Hope was now a dashed dream; only a yearning for what remained of his life to mean something, to matter in some way, for the meaning of others, for the mattering of others—if any others remained—drove him toward the trees.
With the enemy within seconds of falling on him, Childheart reached the woods; on hearing sounds coming from just inside the grove of trees, however, he dug in his hooves and, still in a gallop, spun to his left, darting between the enemy forces to that side of their pursuit and the trees to his right. Along the outside edge of the forest he sped, hoping to gain enough distance to once more dive unseen into the trees and there hide until the enemy had passed by him. Perhaps then he could make another dash for the mountain and locate the tunnel before the hostile forces had again located him.
But soon Childheart learned the futility of that hope. Out from the trees just ahead another regiment of the enemy rushed to meet him. Childheart halted violently and sprang back into the trees. Immediately he was assaulted by
