The first day was fine: blue and clear. He could not remember when he had last seen blue sky; he stared up till he was dizzy and had to cling to the pony’s mane. Little soft airs moved round him, brushing his face and hands, toying as if in disbelief with the heavy, fraying edges of his winter cloak. When he made camp that evening, he was as near to being happy as he had been in the months since the letter had come. He was warm; he knew where he was; he would see his daughters soon. He thought of his secret work waiting for him and smiled; maybe sometime this year he would be ready to satisfy Jcweltongue’s curiosity. ... He wondered drowsily how many knots the sawyer and carter and wheelwright had got their accounting into in the last few months. He would sort them out soon enough. He fell asleep dreaming pleasantly of long straight columns of figures.
But the clouds rolled up while he slept, and the temperature began ominously to drop. When he woke, he found the pony lying beside him, her warm back against his, and there were snowflakes falling.
He saddled up, frightened, and turned the pony’s nose to the road. But the flakes grew thicker and thicker, and the wind rose and howled round them, and soon the pony was going where she chose, because he no longer had any idea where they were and could not see the track for the drifting snow.
But the pony toiled on, showing no sign of wanting to stop; the old man was glad enough to hold on to the pommel and let her go, for he knew that to halt would be to freeze to death. He grew wearier and wearier and slumped lower and lower; once or twice he woke up just before he fell off. The pony’s steps were growing slower. Soon he would have to get off and lead her....
The snow stopped and the pony’s hoofs struck bare ground at the same moment.’She stopped, and he looked up in amazement, snow sluicing off his shoulders and back. They had come out of the woods into a clearing. The merchant, dazed with exhaustion and astonishment, at first could not make out what he was looking at. It was not merely that no snow was falling here now, no snow had fallen; the ground before him was green with grass. Immediately around them was a vast formal garden, laid out in low box ma/.es, dotted by small round pools with classical statues rising from their centres. The box looked freshly clipped, the pools quiet and untroubled by ice, and the paths were recently raked. This stretched as far as his tired eyes could see on cither hand. Beyond the garden before him, at the end of a straight drive surfaced with small twinkling white pebbles, was the most magnificent palace he had ever seen, even in his days as the wealthiest merchant of the wealthiest city in the country.
The palace was perhaps only three storeys high, but each storey was twice the height of those in an ordinary house; the windows were as tall and wide as carriage-house gates. The facade was impressively handsome but forbiddingly plain, the heavy square pediments of the ranks of windows emphasising a glowering look, and all was made of a grey-white stone which glittered slightly, like the pebbles in the drive, and which made the building hard to look at for very long. It seemed to shimmer slightly, like an elaborate mirage.
The merchant blinked, but the garden and the palace remained. He looked down at himself. The snow was melting on his sleeves and along the pony’s mane. He looked up. The sky overhead was iron grey, but he could not tell if it was twilight or cioud cover that made it so. But no snow fell from it. He was afraid to turn round; would he see wintry woods again. The blizzard that might have killed them? If this was a mirage, he wished to believe it was real till it was too late.... May kind fate preserve me, he thought. If it is not a mirage, this must be the dwelling of the greatest sorcerer that has ever lived. But where are his guardian beasts? His messenger spirits? Everything was wrapped in the deepest silence and stillness, deep as the snowbound stillness that follows a blizzard. When his pony bowed her head and blew, the sound unnerved him.
The merchant dismounted stiffly, took his pony’s rein, and walked forward. His numbed face began to hurt, for the air here was warm. He stripped off his sodden gloves and loosened his cloak. The pony had come out of the blizzard and into this—this place at the head of the drive, as if she had been following a clear path. Perhaps she had. Their feet crunched on the pebbles; the sound was notliing like the squeak of feet on fresh-fallen snow.
The huge arched portico over the doorway into the palace was lit with hundreds of candles. There was not even so much wind as to make the candle flames flicker.
He stopped on the threshold, but only for a moment; he was too tired, and too precariously balanced between fear of what lay behind them and fear of what lay before, to risk any decision. His feel, had decided for him; let them have their way. He took the pony through the archway too, partly for company, partly because he would not leave her behind after all they had been through together. She balked, briefly, when her hoofs touched carpeting, but she did not wish to be left alone either, so she crowded up close behind the merchant and pushed her face into his back.
They walked down a long corridor together; the old merchant was simply following the line of lit candles. He saw great dark doorways on cilher side of him, but he had no urge to explore. The way they went was full of light, and he went on hopefully, though he would not have wanted to say precisely for what. He and his pony both needed sleep and food as well as shelter, but it seemed ridiculous that they should be wandering through an enchanted palace looking for these things.
He looked back once over his shoulder. Their passage was leaving no muddy footprints, no dark damp patches of melted snow. He did not look back again, He knew they were caught up in some great magic, but this little reminder of it was almost more frightening than the fact of the palace itself. They walked here without trace; it was as if they were invisible, insubstantial, as if they were ghosts.... He tried to rally himself: Think of the row in an ordinarily grand house if one such as I, and leading a dirty, shaggy pony as well!, should be found indoors, and uninvited! Think of the cries of outrage, the rush of servants with their buckets of soapy water to scrub the carpet—think of the disdainful footmen hustling us back to the door!
He remembered the passionate strength he had had in the first weeks following his wife’s death, when he had forbidden any magic or any practitioners of magic in his house ever again. It was the only absolute law he could ever remember making. He would have laughed, now, had he the strength, at what seemed to him suddenly the wild wastefulness of his younger self. For the truth was that he had no wish now to spurn what appeared to be offered to him. He was grateful to have his life, to be granted the hope that he might, after all, see his daughters again.