Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold! by Terry Brooks Page B

“Knight? What knight?” he demanded quickly.
    “The knight—the one on the medallion!”
    “You saw the knight on the medallion, Ben Holiday?”
    Ben hesitated, surprised at the other’s sharp interest. “I saw him in the forest, after the black thing came at me. He appeared in front of me and rode at the black thing. I was caught between them, but the knight’s horse side-swiped me and knocked me from the trail. The next thing I knew I was sitting here in this meadow.”
    Questor Thews frowned thoughtfully. “Yes, the horse knocking you from the pathway would account for your appearance here rather than at your appointed destination …” He trailed off, then came slowly forward, bending close to look into Ben’s eyes. “You might have imagined the knight, High Lord. You might have only thought to see him. Were you to think back on it, you might see something entirely different.”
    Ben flushed. “Were I to think back on it, I would see exactly the same thing exactly.” He kept his gaze steady. “I would see the knight on the medallion.”
    There was a long moment of silence. Then Questor Thews stepped back again, one hand rubbing at his ear thoughtfully. “Well,” he said. “Well, indeed.” He looked surprised. More than that, he looked pleased. He pursed his lips once again, shifted his weight from one foot to the other and hunched his shoulders. “Well,” he said a third time.
    Then the look was gone as quickly as it had come. “We really do have to start walking now, High Lord,” he said quickly. “The day is getting on and it would be best if we were to reach the castle before nightfall. Come along, please. It is a good distance off.”
    He shambled down through the meadow, a tall, ragtag, slightly stooped figure, his robes dragging through the grasses. Ben watched dumbly for a moment, glanced hastily about, then hitched up the duffel over one shoulder and followed reluctantly after.
    They passed from the high meadow and began their descent toward the distant bowl of the valley. The valley stretchedaway below them, a patchwork quilt of farmlands, meadows, forests, lakes and rivers, and swatches of marsh and desert. Mountains ringed the valley tightly, forested and dark, awash in a sea of deep mist that strung its trailers down into the valley and cast its shadow over everything.
    Ben Holiday’s mind raced. He kept trying to fit what he was seeing into his mental picture of the Blue Ridge. But none of it worked. His eyes wandered across the slopes they were descending, seeing orchard groves, seeking out familiar fruit trees, finding apple, cherry, peach, and plum, but a dozen other fruits as well, many of a color and size completely unfamiliar to him. Grasses were varied shades of green, but also crimson, lavender and turquoise. Scattered through the whole of the strange collection of vegetation were large clumps of trees that vaguely resembled half-grown pin oaks except that they were colored trunk to leaf a brilliant blue.
    None of it looked anything at all like the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia or the mountains of any other part of the United States that he had ever heard about.
    Even the cast of the day was strange. The mist lent a shadowed look to the whole of the valley, and it reflected in the color tones of the earth. Everything seemed to have developed a somewhat wintry look—though the air was warm like a midsummer’s day and the sun shone down through the clouds in the sky.
    Ben savored cautiously the look, smell, and feel of the land, and he discovered in doing so that he could almost believe that Landover was exactly what Questor Thews had said that it was—another world completely.
    He mulled this prospect over in his mind as he kept pace with his guide. This was no small concession that he was being asked to make. Every shred of logic and every bit of common sense that he could muster in his lawyer’s mind argued that Landover was some sort of trick, that fairy worlds were