Two figures stood on the summit of Glastonbury Tor. Beside them the tower of the ancient church pointed like a finger at the threatening sky, where clouds loomed and promised rain. From a distance they looked like a couple, but closer to it could be seen that one was a girl, slightly built and with shoulder-length brown hair that was being blown round her face by the swirling wind. She absent-mindedly pushed it aside as she peered out through the gloom at Glastonbury town that lay set out below. Her companion was shorter than her, but surprisingly he was not a boy but an adult, with black hair and a dark lined face that made him look as if he was perpetually scowling.

            Closer still, there was a clear sense that neither was what they seemed. There was an aura about them, a presence, which made the other visitors to the tor keep several yards away, not deliberately but instinctively. The girl was somehow bright, and it was difficult to look at her directly, as it might be difficult to look at the sun even if it is behind a cloud. In her stance there was something that suggested more a wild creature than an ordinary human girl. Her companion, too, was unusual. The impression that came from him was of solidity, of stability, as if his feet didn’t rest on the ground but somehow rooted themselves into the earth, so that he could no more be moved than a pillar of stone. His height too gave the clue that he was something other than human. Those who knew of such things would recognise him as a dwarf.

            Beside him, the girl stirred.

            ‘They’re not here, Ieuan,’ she said. There was a trace of disappointment in her voice, but also resignation, as if she had expected no more.

            ‘But they have been, Melody,’ he replied, looking as she did towards the town below them.

            She swung her eyes to look out at the fields on either side. Even with the low clouds and poor visibility, the tor commanded a view across the flat landscape for miles in each direction.

            ‘Long ago. I can sense them still, but they haven’t visited these parts for centuries, perhaps not since the days of Arthur’s Tomb.’

            Ieuan snorted. ‘That nonsense? The supposed tomb of King Arthur himself, down in the abbey? When all the legends say that Arthur didn’t die, but sleeps in Avalon while all the world awaits his return?’

            Melody half smiled. ‘Nonsense, maybe, but it was enough to draw half the world here in the Middle Ages. There was power here, the power of the Church. But you’re right. If a dragon landed here, it would be on the tor, not on the site of some imagined burial.’

            That much was obvious. The tor, a conical sandstone hill rising like a tower nearly 200 metres above the flat plain around it, offered a perch like no other. Dragons – if there were dragons – would find it an ideal vantage point, as Melody and Ieuan did. The site had been sacred, or magical, for thousands of years, and shrines and churches had been built and re-built on the summit. All that was left now was a single tower. Ieuan slapped the stone with the palm of his hand. ‘This isn’t the original.’

            ‘No. According to the sign the previous one was destroyed by an earthquake, back in the 13th century.’

            Ieuan laughed. ‘An earthquake? Here? This doesn’t feel like earthquake country.’ He stamped his foot on the ground to emphasise its solidity.

            Melody smiled too. ‘No. it doesn’t sound likely. Unless a dragon landed here. And I think one did.’

            ‘We’re agreed on that. But not since, you’re saying?’

            ‘No. We’ve come in the wrong direction. We followed the track from London, but I told you then that there was more than one. We could have gone due west, but I wanted to come here, to see if the old legends of Glastonbury are true, that this is a place where dragons might be seen.’

            ‘And it is, evidently. Only not now. So what do we do next?’

            Melody turned northward. ‘We head to the other track.’

            ‘Do we need to go back to London to start again?

            ‘No. If we go north from here we can pick it up. I’ll sense when we cross it. And we can follow it – to Wales. Before we go, I want to look at Arthur’s Tomb. There won’t be anything there, but I want to see what all the fuss is about.’

            ‘Fair enough. Lead the way.’

            They followed the path down the western slope of the Tor, and in a few minutes had entered the town and found the ruins of the abbey. There was almost nothing left of the church, but in the centre of the nave was a simple rectangle of grass marked out with stones, and in front of it a square sign with the inscription:

            ‘Site of King Arthur’s Tomb. In the year 1191 the bodies of King Arthur and his Queen were said to have been found on the south side of the Lady Chapel. On 19th April 1278 their remains were removed in the presence of King Edward I and Queen Eleanor to a black marble tomb on this site. This tomb survived until the dissolution of the abbey in 1539.’

            ‘The tomb of King Arthur himself,’ said Melody. ‘They must have made a fortune out of it in the Middle Ages, even if they invented the whole story. Look for the remains of Arthur and Guinevere, dig up a few bones and claim you’ve found them. It’s hardly difficult to find bones in a graveyard. The wonder is that people believed them so readily.’

            ‘People believe what they want to believe, you know that,’ said Ieuan. ‘Besides, they had plenty of “evidence”. There’s the Tor, a weird outcrop of rock in the middle of a flat plain. It must have been sacred since people first ever came here. And there were legends about it, even that it was the Isle of Avalon, and Arthur slept beneath it, awaiting his return.’

            ‘In which case they couldn’t find his grave, could they?’

            ‘True, but the monks were Christians. They couldn’t allow the idea that Arthur wasn’t dead, but only sleeping, the Once and Future King. That made him sound too much like Christ. They had to insist he died like everyone else. They could still exploit the legend, though.’

            ‘What happened in the end?’

            ‘The usual. The abbey was destroyed in the Reformation, in 1539 like the sign says, and the monks forced out. People started to believe other things, and Arthur faded further and further into the mists of legend.’

            ‘Not for all of us,’ said a new voice, behind them. Startled, they swivelled round to find that a woman had entered the ruins silently and was standing a few feet away, staring at them intently.

            ‘Well I never,’ she continued. ‘I never expected to see the day. A Delver, and a … and you, My Lady.’ To their astonishment she dropped a knee and did a curtsey, as if Melody was a queen.

            It was Ieuan who spoke first. ‘How do you know what I am? Nobody calls us Delvers here.’

            The woman smiled, a soft radiance lighting her features as she did so. Her neat grey hair was drawn back round her face into a bun, and she was dressed in a long grey cloak that half covered her brown blouse and skirt. Round her neck was a chain with a metal pentacle at the end.

            ‘A Delver,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘A true dwarf, one of the Dwarfish race. I’ve never met one, but I’ve read about them. And your aura is so clear. A deep brown, shading almost to black. The colours of the earth, the colours of the mines that you love so much. It’s all as the books say. I couldn’t be mistaken. And you, My Lady,’ she went on, turning her attention and her smile to Melody, ‘you are something I never dared dream of. The aura so strong! White, gleaming to gold, as if a flake of the sun had drifted down to Earth and walked among us, almost too bright to look at. Welcome, Lady, welcome.’

            Melody couldn’t help smiling back. Wherever she and Ieuan went they were used to being ignored, used to people stepping aside or round them and pretending they weren’t there. This was the first person they’d met since they’d left London who looked at them directly. The woman not only saw them, she saw more than their physical shape. She could see the faint ‘aura’ or emanation that some said surrounded every living creature, and took its colour from their natures. People like her were called ‘sensitives’. Or an older, name, thought Melody, putting two and two together.

            ‘Are you a witch?’ she asked suddenly.

            The woman’s smile broadened yet further. ‘Indeed I am. Freydis at your service. I had power once, as a child, but that’s all gone now as it goes from every adult. As it will go even from you, over time. But we keep what we can alive, studying the texts and making little potions that, if they are not quite magical, sometimes act that way. And I can still see auras, see what people are. Or in your case, more than a person.’

            ‘What can you see?’ asked Melody, intrigued.

            Freydis looked at her for some time without replying, as if measuring her, or perhaps trying to see past Melody’s ‘aura’ to what truly lay behind.

            ‘White and gold,’ she said, half to herself. ‘A glimmering, a shimmering, constantly moving and yet so still, so still. Faërie,’ she said at last and with satisfaction. ‘You have been to Faërie, haven’t you?’

            ‘Yes,’ said Melody simply.

            ‘I knew it! And returned, I see, though how you did that I can’t imagine. And how it changed you nobody can imagine. Even so, there’s something beyond that, something wonderful that I can sense, but I don’t understand. That’s the whiteness, and a depth that never ends.’

            Melody looked at her, saw the joy in the woman’s eyes, and made a decision. ‘I met a unicorn.’

            The woman clapped her hands together and gave a cry of happiness. ‘O wonder! Are there such things? Truly? All the others we know about, the Delvers and the Feys and the Tall Ones, but unicorns? Ah, all my days I’ve believed in unicorns, but never known they could be true. It’s hard to believe in what may not exist to be believed. You have made my life complete, Lady. I may never see a unicorn itself, but I have seen you, and that will take me to my grave in peace. Now, My Lady, how may I serve you?’ And she curtsied once more.

            Melody went over and took the woman’s hand, helping her to rise back to her full height. ‘There’s no need to curtsey to me. I’m just a girl who’s seen a unicorn.’

            ‘Oh no, My Lady. You are a girl, perhaps, although how old you are I guess none could ever tell, since you have been in Faërie where Time works in strange ways, they say. You are not only a girl, though. You have seen a unicorn, and have been changed by that, into something rich and strange.’

            ‘I didn’t just see the unicorn,’ said Melody. ‘It touched me with its horn.’

            ‘Ah,’ said Freydis, ‘then I am twice blessed. I have touched the hand of one who has been touched by a unicorn.’ She let go of Melody’s hands and looked into her eyes, her face radiant and beautiful with joy. ‘May I know your name, Lady?’

            ‘I’m Melody.’

            ‘Such a beautiful name, and so fitting. You are like a song sung by the morning. Now, tell me why you’re here. What do you seek?’

            Melody made the same great decision as before, the decision to trust a stranger with her closest secrets.

            ‘We’re seeking a dragon.’

            Freydis laughed, a single barking noise as she threw her head back and stared into the sky. ‘Ond fyrenne dracan waeron gesene on tham lifte fleogende.’ She looked down at Melody. ‘That’s Old English, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. “And fiery dragons were seen flying on the wind.” It was the year 793, and the Vikings raided Lindisfarne. People saw all sorts of portents, but the dragons were the ones they remembered. As far as I know that’s the last time dragons were definitely seen, at least enough to be officially recorded.’

            ‘Were there really dragons there?’ put in Ieuan. ‘Wouldn’t people just believe that terrible things were happening all round them?’

            Freydis looked at him levelly. ‘It was the official chronicle, kept by the monks. They were Christians, they didn’t make stuff up. They recorded what actually happened. There were dragons sure enough.’

            ‘But not since?’

            ‘Not in official documents, no. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been any, though. There are folk tales and legends, all dismissed as nonsense, but there must have been a reason. No smoke without a fire, they say. Or perhaps, no smoke without a dragon. Perhaps the world hasn’t been wicked enough for the world to need dragons again. But now your Lady, this Melody, has seen a unicorn. Mightn’t she see a dragon too?’

            ‘I have,’ said Melody. That silenced Freydis, who stood and stared at her in awe.

            ‘Well I never,’ she said finally. ‘Wonders, as they say, never cease. A unicorn, and a dragon, all in one day, in my lifetime. I wonder what it all means. You saw a dragon? It didn’t touch you?’

            ‘No, but it spoke to me.’

            ‘Spoke to you? Oh, Lady, be wary. Your aura, your whiteness and your gold, even that might not protect you from a dragon.’

            ‘True indeed. I know that. Yet the dragon didn’t eat me, so that’s something. It told me to follow it, and that’s what I’m doing. It said in the west, so I came along the track here, to Glastonbury Tor, but there’s no dragon here. I must seek elsewhere. West of London, perhaps far west.’

            Freydis nodded, thinking. ‘Yes, that would make sense. The Far West, that would mean Wales, the land of dragons. Their home, it’s said. I would make for Llyn y Fan Fach.’

            Melody smiled. ‘More Old English?’

            ‘No. Welsh. It means “lake of the small hill”. There’s an old legend about it, and it’s west of London. Start there.’

            ‘Thank you. We will.’

            ‘No, thank you, Lady, for making my life complete.’