Page 38 of Legends of Sorcery
“Actually, that’s kind of brilliant. So, if the water is powerful enough to keep them away, then maybe…”
“It’s strong enough to break the dark magic!” they finished in unison.
“Look, if we’re going to try this, you can’t get your hopes up,” Arion told her. “I’m serious. Zallon and I have tried dozens of antidotes and each time it’s easy to hold onto the hope that this is it. This one will work. It hurts when it doesn’t. I don’t want you getting hurt.”
She smiled warmly and reached for his hand. “You didn’t laugh at my idea and you’re willing to give it a try. It can’t hurt, right? That means a lot to me, Arion. I’m a big girl. I can handle the disappointment if it doesn’t work. I can’t handle the ‘what ifs’ if we don’t even try.”
“Well, what are we waiting for then? Let’s do this?”
“Right now?” she asked.
“Yeah, why not?”
“Have you even stopped to think how we’re going to do this?”
He shrugged. “If we can’t get the unicorns to the falls, then we have to bring the falls to the unicorns.”
She snorted, very unladylike. “How exactly are we going to do that?”
He winked at her and motioned for her to follow him. “You’ll see.”
Valaria had to practically jog to keep up with his long stride. She noticed he seemed surer of himself and less clumsy lately. She was huffing and trying to catch her breath when he finally slowed as they walked into the royal stables. Confused she watched as he dug around in the storage closet producing four pails.
“What are those for?” she asked.
“Uh, water?”
“You really think it’ll be that simple?” She laughed.
“Well, there’s only one way to find out. I mean often the simplest, most obvious choice is the correct one.”
“We’ll see,” she said skeptically as they each grabbed two buckets and headed for the falls.
Once again, the place was void of all unicorns.
“They’re still not here,” Arion observed.
“It’s kind of creepy without them, isn’t it?”
“A little,” he admitted.
They quickly filled their buckets from the water pooling around the falls.
“Now what?” Valaria asked.
“Now we find ourselves a unicorn.”
“You don’t want to go back to the stables and test it out on Callia?”
Arion shook his head. “If we’re wrong, that will just make it harder.”
“But if we’re right?”
He paused and looked at her. “If we are and it backfires like you say it did when my hands caught on fire? I don’t want Callia to be the test dummy for that. I couldn’t stand it if I knowingly harmed her from something like this.”
Valaria set down one of her buckets and reached out to squeeze his arm. “It’s okay. I don’t want to see her hurt either. We’ll find another unicorn. One without a name to test on. Just in case.”
Once they were away from the falls, that wasn’t hard to find. The beautiful creature barely moved in acknowledgement as they approached and positioned themselves over him.
