Title: The King is in his Counting House
Fandom: Sherlock/The Last Unicorn
Rating: PG13
Length: 2554
Content notes: Mention of minor character's death
Author notes: For fan_flashworks Mythology challenge.
Summary: Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever.




They’d been in the castle for a week before Prince John finally came to Sherlock.   Their lovemaking was neither tender nor surprising, but the prince had the satisfaction of hearing the magician call out a single sharp word before his voice broke and his body arched. A rain of oranges fell from the ceiling. One of them grew legs and scuttled away. Later, sated and warm, John said, “My father asked me to dance for him, once, when I was a child. There was no music, so I sang a lullaby and did the fandango. He didn’t know the song, he said, and left me standing on my head. Don’t worry, you’re not the worst magician we’ve ever had.”

It was true. One terrible winter a spell had gone wrong and it was squirrel for dinner every night until spring. King Haggard hadn’t complained, but John had started eating mushrooms out of the ground and roasting fish where he caught them. It was that or the stew of tiny bones caught together in grey liquid the cook served up every night.

The magician looked lofty. “I’m not worried. Before Mabruk you had Fembril, and before Fembril, that dolt Setna.” He sniffed. “Frogs in bubbles and bees made of rain. Amateurs.”

The prince refrained from pointing out that Sherlock himself could barely juggle a handful of rabbits without poking himself in the eye. It wasn’t that kind of moment.

-

The men-at-arms were throwing stones into the sea. It was blowing hard, and the turrets shivered and trembled. Sooty shearwaters hung in the air, thinking the men were throwing bread. They dipped and rose in the gale, calling nomenclature, nomenclature, every time a pebble disappointed them.

The castle shook for a second and the sea went dark. Somewhere under them, the red bull was turning over in his sleep.  The Lady Amalthea stood in the doorway to the tower. Her pale hair tipped into the wind and swirled about her, tangling in the ribbons that hung off her satin robe.

The men bowed low. “My lady,” said one. “Your highness,” said another. She looked out onto the sea and the white waves surged under her gaze. “Perhaps one day,” she said, “perhaps not. I hardly know my own breath anymore. I came to find something that was lost and though I search for it daily, if I found it I doubt I would know it. Who can say where my heart will come to rest?”

“Where green leaves carpet the earth,” breathed the third, still bent low.

“I’d cross the young prince out, for starters,” said the fourth, who constantly lost at poker.

-

“Your mother was an oyster-shucker and your father was a liar,” Sherlock said to John one night, drawing his fingers down the scar on the prince’s arm. “Here’s where she had you on her lap and the knife slipped. It’s grown over time but the shape and depth of the wound is unmistakeable. Maybe she lost her thumbs to the job, maybe not.”

“And my father?” asked John, busy with his hands.

“He gave you up to the king, not your mother. No woman who used a knife for a living and still wanted her child close enough to touch would give him up. Incidentally, what you’re doing with your thumbs right now is positively inspired. And nothing less than a lie about your death would convince her not to search for you. Did I say inspired? I meant unqualified genius. Oh.”

John smiled and did it again, slower this time.

-

The months rolled on. The prince brought the Lady Amalthea dragon heads and gryphon hearts and, once, the tongue of a minotaur fashioned into a bookmark. He did it partly for her skin, which was like milk in moonlight, and partly out of a dull sense of duty. He could have loved her, but he kept seeing mice turn into doorknobs out of the corner of his eye, and how the magician’s arms caught the light as he cartwheeled across the throne room.

She was still beautiful to look at, though her beauty was changing and rooting itself more solidly to things he understood: the hearth, the warmth of stone after the sun had stood more than a day in the sky, a spoon dipped in honey.

She clung to Molly, stayed by her side like a pale shadow. Their heads were often together, bent over potatoes or books or just their hands, entwined on the table. It was as if the Lady Amalthea’s light had spilled over into Molly Grue, whose brown hair had unknotted under Amalthea’s gaze , and whose eyes, the prince noted with some surprise, were green.

“Unicorn, unicorn,” the cat purred, winding around the prince’s legs like a rash.

“Yes yes,” said the prince, irritably, “where’s Sherlock?”

-

He found the magician hopping on one leg, dodging knives that shot out of the ceiling. The king was nowhere to be seen.

“You’re alone,” John pointed out, “and you could have killed the king.”

“It’s all illusion,” panted Sherlock, still hopping. “The knives are made of chocolate, and I hold the kingdom record for the thousand-yard one-legged sprint. I’m in training.”

“The Lady Amalthea is a unicorn,” said John, narrowly avoiding a knife. Sherlock really was a terrible magician, but you never knew with magicians. “And if I know my mythology right, and if I understand quests – which I do – you’re shirking your duty to help her with her destiny.”

“I’m looking for the path to the bull,” said Sherlock. “Her quest ends there and I daresay it will be the end of us all. Her place in the story grows every day and soon she’ll be so woven into it that to take her out will mean unravelling everything that has ever been. Or everything that is to come. Unicorns change time, or they control clocks. The legends aren’t clear.”

“You’re a very unreliable detective,” said John, frowning.

Sherlock flushed. “This castle is nothing but rumour and hearsay. It laughs every time I try magic. It cries every time I ask questions. I’ve figured out the skull belongs to Haggard’s dead wife, and the clock has chimed every hour since the start of time. I know when the last king decided to repaper the library, and why. But try and find something as simple as a staircase and you end up with your head in a paper bag trying not to hyperventilate.”

“I know of a staircase,” John offered, and then cursed himself for a fool.

“Oh,” said Sherlock, looking oddly hurt. “Well, then.”

-

The Lady Amalthea led them down the stairwell and into a tunnel, the magician behind her, followed by Molly and Prince John at the back. It was dark and smelt strange, like a combination of damp fur and mint leaves, and the stone under their hands dripped with wet. But she shone ahead of them, a pearly light that showed them brief moments of the space they were in: rock walls laced with threads of opal, blue flowers heartbreaking in their hopefulness, and here and there, a squashed nest made of sand.

They walked the tunnel in silence, cave water dripping on their heads, and their breath steaming around them. She stopped, and they moved around her to see that they were in a cavern, the ceiling high and arched.

The air was darker for there being more of it. It suddenly grew darker still, like the sky before dawn. Amalthea cried out and the prince leaped forward. A corner of the cavern started to pulse like a beating heart, like the distant flash of far-off gunfire. The red bull had come.

-

He stamped and blew out threads of rusty air. He shook his head like he was chasing away a gnat and Sherlock understood he was trying to see past Amalthea’s human body.

She drooped and leaned on the prince. Sherlock felt something bitter begin in his mouth.

Molly clutched at him, her face whiter than Amalthea’s. “She’s part of the story now,” she whispered, “the prince and the princess against the terror that scourges the land. They’ll defeat him together, and pass into history. You and I, we’re bones for soup. Help them, or come away, but don’t stand there fainting for love of him.”

Sherlock shook her hand off. The bitter on his tongue was stronger. He thought it might be a spell.

The prince looked back at him. He was holding Amalthea the way you might hold an armful of baby crocodiles: gently, but gingerly. “Help her,” he said, “by the grace of whatever magic you have in you. If she disappears all our dreams go with her and we’ll never know the difference between sleep and waking again. Help her.” His eyes were dark and troubled.

The bull pawed at the ground. He had recognised her at last. There would be no going back, and going forward meant death for any or all of them. Sherlock spat the taste out of his mouth. It hung in the air for a second. The cavern glowed like a new day. The bull roared and Sherlock pushed them all down another tunnel.

“Run,” he panted. “The spell was to change stalactites into gunpowder. The bull hates daylight. I’m afraid I’ve changed the geology of the area forever. Run!”

They fled down the tunnel, and the bull was behind them, but far enough behind that they gained rapidly on the speck of light they could see in the distance. It grew larger and Sherlock saw the tunnel opened out onto the beach. His heart sank. The bull would run them to ground in seconds in the open. But there was no going back and there was nowhere else to run to. The sound of the sea concentrated itself in the tunnel until it was like a man beating his chest with an iron fist.

They tumbled out onto the midnight sand. The moon was out, but Amalthea glowed brighter than it. They kept running. The Bull was almost at the tunnel’s mouth now, and he glowed red and hot, like a coal in the side of the cliff.

Amalthea stopped, suddenly. She stared at the castle in front of her. High up on a parapet, limned by moonlight and alight with a fierce joy, Haggard was shaking his fists at the sky. “The last!” he screamed, “I knew you were the last!”

Amalthea turned to Sherlock. Her voice was calm and old as thought. There was nothing new about her anymore, and yet, Sherlock thought, all of this was new. If love was new, which it always was.

“The bull is Haggard’s,” she said, “he lives by Haggard’s wishes and Haggard’s dreams. I bear him no ill-will, no more than I would a dog trained by terror.”

He nodded and reached into the magic and it took a split second before he found what he was looking for. He cast his eyes around him and found a piece of driftwood. It was long and oddly shaped and not at all what he needed.

The red bull thundered towards them.  Prince John leaped into its path, waving his sword like a poorly timed joke. The bull came at him, crimson, blazing, a thousand times stronger and utterly blind. There was a sound like a fire going out, a muted scream from somewhere, and then the bull kept coming, and Sherlock could dimly see the prince behind him, his body at an odd angle to his head.

A roar started in his ears, and magic bled out of his eyes.

“Olovar,” he said, waving his hands over the wood. “Ashkenu, Impeguo, Vladivostok,” and the wood twisted and protested and then buckled to his will.

The Lady Amalthea grabbed the crossbow out of his hands, swung around, and fired almost without looking. The bolt flew straight and true and the old man on the parapet had a second to clutch at his chest before the light in his eyes went out and he plunged into the sea. The bull stopped and his fire went out. The sky split into tiny shards and reformed, and then the bull ceased to be, and all that was left was the sand he had melted into glass in his wake, and the broken body of the prince on the ground.

-

He wasn’t dead, though he was so near to it that Sherlock could smell it on him. He sat down next to the poor, twisted thing, and Molly Grue sat next to him. He had no power to change this, nothing he could touch inside him and draw out to save John. He tried, anyway, and found only grief, raw and chewed to the bone.

The Lady Amalthea waited by the water’s edge.

Out they came, in tens, in hundreds, smelling like horses and moving like light. She stood among them and not one of them stopped by her. They were maddened by rage, by freedom, by their proximity to dry grass. They streamed past her, and the air was rich with the power and grace and beauty of all the unicorns that have ever existed in this world.

When the last of them had passed, she took a deep breath and turned to them. She felt like less than she had been, and more than she ever could be again. There was a little magic left in her, though, and she carried it to the prince. Her hand was as cold as his when she touched it, but warm next to Sherlock’s, who was quivering like a leaf.

“They are gone,” she murmured, passing her hands over the prince’s body, “into the past and the future. I was the last and now I am the first. I’m grateful for that, in a way. I would have missed the soup.” When she put her hands down they could all see there was nothing of the unicorn left in her. But she was still beautiful, and her skin was still like milk in moonlight. Molly Grue cried, “oh I’m glad, I’m glad,” and the Lady Amalthea leaned over and kissed her a long time, holding onto her soft brown hair and smoothing her hand over her green eyes.

The prince pinkened and stirred. Sherlock made a choked sound and chafed his hand. John sat up and rubbed his eyes. He looked with wonder, not at the Lady Amalthea, but at the magician. “I felt father die. It’s all right,” he said, looking away for a second, “I always knew the sea would get him in the end. I know you had help, but whatever you did was extraordinary. Just know that.”

“I’m not much of a magician,” said Sherlock, stiffly, because now it was over, he actually was. He was probably the second most powerful magician in the world now, saving the one Russian grand master, and even he would only last for another year or so. But a magician had a duty to sell himself short, even to his beloved.

“We’ll make you a consultant. You can pick and choose your work,” said Prince John, and drew him in for a kiss that went on long after the moon had set and the castle had crumbled into the sea.