"A horse," he muttered. "A white mare."

Mommy Fortuna looked at him for a long time. "You're a fool too, magician," she snickered at last, "but a worse fool than Rukh, and a more dangerous one. He lies only out of greed, but you lie out of fear. Or could it be kindness?" The man said nothing, and Mommy Fortuna laughed by herself.

"All right," she said. "It's a white mare. I want her for the Carnival. The ninth cage is empty."

"I'll need rope," Rukh said. He was about to turn away, but the old woman stopped him.

"The only rope that could hold her," she told him, "would be the cord with which the old gods bound the Fenris-wolf. That one was made of fishes' breath, bird spittle, a woman's beard, the miaowing of a cat, the sinews of a bear, and one thing more. I remember – mountain roots. Having none of these elements, nor dwarfs to weave them for us, we'll have to do the best we can with iron bars. I'll put a sleep on her, thus," and Mommy Fortuna's hands knitted the night air while she grumbled a few unpleasant words in her throat. There was a smell of lightning about the unicorn when the old woman had finished her spell.

"Now cage her," she said to the two men. "She'll sleep till sunrise, whatever racket you make – unless, in your accustomed stupidity, you touch her with your hands. Take the ninth cage to pieces and build it around her, but beware! The hand that so much as brushes her mane turns instantly to the donkey's hoof it deserves to be." Again she gazed mockingly at the tall, thin man. "Your little tricks would be even harder for you than they already are, wizard," she said, wheezing. "Get to work. These's not much dark left."

When she was well out of earshot, sliding back into the shadow of her wagon as though she had just come out to mark the hour, the man named Rukh spat and said curiously, "Now I wonder what's worrying the old squid. What would it matter if we touched the beast?"