Nine Goblins(5)

She bent down, snuffled at the tiny creature, tapped it delicately with her foot-long horn as if to test it, and then began licking at its damp white hide. The bedraggled foal lifted its muzzle and made a faint squeaky snort of protest.

Even to someone who didn’t much care for unicorns, at another time, this scene would be pure magic, a reaffirmation of everything good and noble in the world. But there was gunk from the hind end of a unicorn plastered clear up the side of his face, delicate hoof prints turning purple across his ribcage, and he felt about a thousand years old.

He got painfully to his feet—his knees had moved through the on-fire stage and now felt as if tiny wolverines were chewing under the kneecaps—and staggered outside to the pump. He tried to grab the pump handle, and for an awful minute his hand wouldn’t close on it.

Well, no surprise there. His right arm, which had been the one inside the unicorn, was red and white and bruising magnificently where contractions had smacked his bicep repeatedly against the mare’s pelvic bones, and there was unicorn crap and amniotic fluid and bits of straw all over him.

Sings-to-Trees slumped against the pump handle, moaned, and managed to grab it with his left hand. By dropping most of his weight on it, with all the grace of a sack of potatoes, he got enough water out to sluice the worst of the muck from him. It was icy cold, but he didn’t really care.

There was soap somewhere. He found it. It didn’t lather very well, but he made at least a symbolic effort before giving up.

He ducked his head back in the barn and glanced over at the mother and child, who were arranged in a beautifully domestic scene, as tranquil as the dawn. White hide glowed in the muted lamplight of the barn. You’d never know she’d spent hours in labor. That was unicorns for you.

Pausing only to make sure that the afterbirth had passed with no difficulties—he considered patting the foal, but the mare, ingrate that she was, stamped a hoof at him and lowered her horn warningly—Sings-to-Trees limped out of the barn.

The moon glared down like a bar of soap in a bucket of cold sky. The path up to the house was packed earth, washed blue and black in the moonlight, and approximately a thousand miles long. Several ages of the earth passed while he toiled up to the house, punctuated by the bright jangle of pain from his knees.

A coyote with one eye and a ragged ear was stretched out across the porch rug. When the elf was close enough, it lifted its head, pricked up the good ear, and came down to meet him. A cold nose touched his hand, and the tail made a careless motion that was certainly not a wag—Fleabane had a certain amount of dignity, despite his name—but might conceivably be mistaken for one. Sings-to-Trees wound a cold hand in the coarse hair behind the coyote’s ears and rubbed affectionately. They walked the last few yards up to the house together, and then Fleabane flopped back down on the rug and Sings-to-Trees went inside.

There were animals to be fed yet—a bat hanging upside down in the closet who was thankfully past needing ground mealworms shoved down its throat, an orphaned raccoon who was just starting on solid foods and needed warm milk with a little bread, and of course the gargoyle. He dumped a handful of dried mealworms on the closet floor, heard a grumpy chitter in response, and left the bat to its own devices.

There was cold chicken left, and he divided it up carefully, a quarter for a sandwich, and three quarters for the gargoyle. He built up the fire, and set milk to warm by the hearth. The warmth was wonderful, if painful on his cold hands. He started to sink down into the rug in front of the fireplace, caught himself, and lurched to his feet. He didn’t dare stop moving. If he sat down to rest, he wasn’t going to get back up in a hurry.

The back door opened with a wooden groan. He took three steps forward, turned and hucked the battered remains of the chicken onto the roof.

A stony chuckling came down to him, followed by the crunch of chicken bones. Satisfied, Sings-to-Trees went back inside to feed the raccoon.

He must have made tea at some point, because when he woke up, there was a stone cold mug of it next to his elbow and a half-eaten sandwich sliding off his knee. The raccoon cub was asleep on his lap, in the wreckage of what had been a saucer full of bread soaked in warm milk. Perhaps it was just as well he hadn’t bothered with a shirt.

It looked like most of the milk had gone into the raccoon, anyway, and his sandwich had a distinctly gnawed look. Some days that was all you could ask for.

Sings-to-Trees gave up even pretending he was awake. He put the raccoon to bed, toweled off the remnants of both their dinners as best he could, and limped to the bedroom. He had just enough energy to remove his shoes, and then sleep crept up and hit him.