The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle

  The unicorn said, “That is true. You are a man, and men can do nothing that makes any difference.” But her voice was strangely slow and burdened. She asked, “Which will you choose?”

  The magician laughed for a third time. “Oh, it will be the kind magic, undoubtedly, because you would like it more. I do not think that I will ever see you again, but I will try to do what would please you if you knew. And you‌—‌where will you be for the rest of my life? I thought you would have gone home to your forest by now.”

  She turned a little away from him, and the sudden starlight of her shoulders made all his talk of magic taste like sand in his throat. Moths and midges and other night insects too small to be anything in particular came and danced slowly around her bright horn, and this did not make her appear foolish, but them most wise and lovely as they celebrated her. Molly’s cat rubbed in and out between her forefeet.

  “The others have gone,” she said. “They are scattered to the woods they came from, no two together, and men will not catch sight of them much more easily than if they were still in the sea. I will go back to my forest too, but I do not know if I will live contentedly there, or anywhere. I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.”

  Schmendrick hid his face like a child, though he was a great magician. “I am sorry, I am sorry,” he mumbled into his wrist. “I have done you evil, as Nikos did to the other unicorn, with the same good will, and I can no more undo it than he could. Mommy Fortuna and King Haggard and the Red Bull together were kinder to you than I.”

  But she answered him gently, saying, “My people are in the world again. No sorrow will live in me as long as that joy‌—‌save one, and I thank you for that, too. Farewell, good magician. I will try to go home.”

  She made no sound when she left him, but he was awake, and the crook-eared cat was miaowing lonesomely. Turning his head, he saw the moonlight trembling in the open eyes of King Lír and Molly Grue. The three of them lay awake till morning, and nobody said a word.

  At dawn, King Lír rose up and saddled his horse. Before he mounted, he said to Schmendrick and Molly, “I would like it if you came to see me one day.” They assured him that they would, but still he lingered with them, twisting the dangling reins about his fingers.

  “I dreamed about her last night,” he said.

  Molly cried, “So did I!” and Schmendrick opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

  King Lír said hoarsely, “By our friendship, I beg you‌—‌tell me what she said to you.” His hands gripped one hand each of theirs, and his clutch was cold and painful.

  Schmendrick gave him a weak smile. “My lord, I so rarely remember my dreams. It seems to me that we spoke solemnly of silly things, as one does‌—‌grave nonsense, empty and evanescent—” The king let go of his hand and turned his half-mad gaze on Molly Grue.

  “I’ll never tell,” she said, a little frightened, but flushing oddly. “I remember, but I’ll never tell anyone, if I die for it‌—‌not even you, my lord.” She was not looking at him as she spoke, but at Schmendrick.

  King Lír let her hand fall as well, and he swung himself into the saddle so fiercely that his horse reared up across the sunrise, bugling like a stag. But Lír kept his seat and glared down at Molly and Schmendrick with a face so grim and scored and sunken that he might well have been king as long as Haggard before him.

  “She said nothing to me,” he whispered. “Do you understand? She said nothing to me, nothing at all.”

  Then his face softened, as even King Haggard’s face had gone a little gentle when he watched the unicorns in the sea. For that moment he was again the young prince who had liked to sit with Molly in the scullery. He said, “She looked at me. In my dream, she looked at me and never spoke.”

  He rode away without good-by, and they watched after him until the hills hid him: a straight, sad horseman, going home to be king. Molly said at last, “Oh, the poor man. Poor Lír.”

  “He has not fared so badly,” the magician answered. “Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.” But his voice was a little doubtful, and he laid his arm softly around Molly’s shoulders. “It cannot be an ill fortune to have loved a unicorn,” he said. “Surely it must be the dearest luck of all, though the hardest earned.”

  By and by, he put her as far from him as his fingers’ ends and asked her, “Now will you tell me what it was she said to you?” But Molly Grue only laughed and shook her head till her hair came down, and she was more beautiful than the Lady Amalthea. The magician said, “Very well. Then I’ll find the unicorn again, and perhaps she will tell me.” And he turned calmly to whistle up their steeds.

  She said no word while he saddled his horse, but when he began on her own she put her hand on his arm. “Do you think‌—‌do you truly hope that we may find her? There was something I forgot to say.”

  Schmendrick looked at her over his shoulder. The morning sunlight made his eyes seem gay as grass; but now and then, when he stooped into the horse’s shadow, there stirred a deeper greenness in his gaze‌—‌the green of pine needles that has a faint, cool bitterness about it. He said, “I fear it, for her sake. It would mean that she too is a wanderer now, and that is a fate for human beings, not for unicorns. But I hope, of course I hope.” Then he smiled at Molly and took her hand in his. “Anyway, since you and I must choose one road to follow, out of the many that run to the same place in the end, it might as well be a road that a unicorn has taken. We may never see her, but we will always know where she has been. Come, then. Come with me.”

  So they began their new journey, which took them in its time in and out of most of the folds of the sweet, wicked, wrinkled world, and so at last to their own strange and wonderful destiny. But that was all later, and first, not ten minutes out of Lír’s kingdom, they met a maiden who came hurrying toward them on foot. Her dress was torn and smirched, but the richness of its making was still plain to see, and though her hair was tumbled and brambled, her arms scratched, and her fair face dirty, there was no mistaking her for anyone but a princess in woeful distress. Schmendrick lighted down to support her, and she clutched him with both hands as though he were a grapefruit hull.

  “A rescue!” she cried to him, “a rescue, au secours! An ye be a man of mettle and sympathy, aid me now. I hight the Princess Alison Jocelyn, daughter to good King Giles, and him foully murdered by his brother, the bloody Duke Wulf, who hath ta’en my three brothers, the Princes Corin, Colin, and Calvin, and cast them into a fell prison as hostages that I will wed with his fat son, the Lord Dudley, but I bribed the sentinel and sopped the dogs—”

  But Schmendrick the Magician raised his hand, and she fell silent, staring up at him in wonder out of wide lilac eyes. “Fair princess,” he said gravely to her, “the man you want just went that way,” and he pointed back toward the land they had so lately quitted. “Take my horse, and you will be up with him while your shadow is still behind you.”

  He cupped his hands for the Princess Alison Jocelyn, and she climbed wearily and in some bewilderment to the saddle. Schmendrick turned the horse, saying, “You will surely overtake him with ease, for he will be riding slowly. He is a good man, and a hero greater than any cause is worth. I send all my princesses to him. His name is Lír.”

  Then he slapped the horse on the rump and sent it off the way King Lír had gone; and then he laughed for so long that he was too weak to get up behind Molly and had to walk beside her horse for a while. When he caught his breath again, he began to sing, and she joined with him. And this is what they sang as they went away together, out of this story and into another:

  “I am no king, and I am no lord,

  And I am no soldier-at-arms,” said he.

  “I’m none but a har
per, and a very poor harper,

  That am come hither to wed with ye.”

  “If you were a lord, you should be my lord,

  And the same if you were a thief,” said she.

  “And if you are a harper, you shall be my harper,

  For it makes no matter to me, to me,

  For it makes no matter to me.”

  “But what if it prove that I am no harper?

  That I lied for your love most monstrously?”

  “Why, then I’ll teach you to play and sing,

  For I dearly love a good harp,” said she.

  —The End—

  Two Hearts

  Introduction

  Three years after the fact my head is still spinning: there is a sequel to The Last Unicorn. More specifically, there is a true coda to The Last Unicorn‌—‌a really good one‌—‌and I get to be the lucky sod who talked Peter S. Beagle into writing it. As unexpected twists of fate go, this one’s pretty wild.

  Now if only I’d done it on purpose, instead of by accident.

  When I met Peter in 2001 it was shocking to learn how badly he had been injured over the decades by a toxic combination of corporate malfeasance, inept representation, and personal naiveté. Having been a raging fan of his work since I was 14 years old, this was not acceptable to me, and so a partnership was born. (I’m a creative type too, but either through osmosis or genetics I acquired a knack for business from my cement salesman father. Comes in handy.)

  One of the many projects Peter and I spun up together was an unabridged audiobook of The Last Unicorn. Late in the spring of 2004 the recording was nearly complete, so I decided to mention it on a promotional postcard that would go out to everyone attending that year’s Mythic Journeys conference. This is when my subconscious struck, adding a sentence to the effect that the first run would include a “new story set in the world of Peter’s classic novel.”

  Of course, that’s not the sort of thing you can commit someone to without permission. So I called Peter to ask.

  His reaction was blunt. “For 36 years people have been asking me to write a sequel to The Last Unicorn, and for 36 years I’ve been saying no. There will never be a sequel. Never. That book was one of a kind. I said everything I had to say in it, and since there’s nothing else to say I’m not going back. Anyway, I’m not that person anymore. No sequels!”

  “You will note,” I replied calmly, “that I mentioned nothing about a sequel. ‘Set in the world of,’ it says. That book had a big landscape, full of other places and possibilities. And hey, I don’t care if you don’t use any of the characters from the first book at all!”

  His one-syllable reply would most accurately be transcribed as “Grrurmmupph!” (Give or take one u or m.) And that was the end of the conversation.

  Less than a month later, without fanfare or warning, he handed me an untitled manuscript. “Here,” he said. “I did what you asked. But I don’t know if the bloody thing is any good.”

  A few pages in I realized that he had not followed my instructions. In fact, he’d ignored them entirely. This wasn’t a story “set in the world” of The Last Unicorn. Not at all. Here in my hands was the coda the novel had never had. All the old characters were back, but in a fashion I could never have foreseen.

  After I finished it and stopped crying‌—‌in that order, because I’d started tearing up somewhere in the middle and the damn waterworks took a while to stop‌—‌I pointed out to Peter that the new character he’d introduced, Sooz, was too interesting to abandon…and that if he gave in and wrote her novel it would definitely be the full sequel book that he’d sworn he would never do.

  The sheepish look on his face was priceless. “I know. I can already see how it starts. Guess I’ll have to, now.”

  I am not alone in loving “Two Hearts.” The Hugo and Nebula Awards it won prove that. But I don’t really think it was born out of my pushy phone call, much as I’d love the credit. I think it was growing inside Peter the whole time, like a perfect wine aging in the dark of a carefully sealed cask: an apparently effortless creation at least 40 years in the making.

  —Connor Cochran

  San Francisco, California

  May 2007

  In memory of Rebecca Soyer Beagle.

  Born: Borisogelbsk, Ukraine, 25 December 1905.

  Died: Oakland, California, 24 June 2006.

  She knew how to love.

  Two Hearts

  My brother Wilfrid keeps saying it’s not fair that it should all have happened to me. Me being a girl, and a baby, and too stupid to lace up my own sandals properly. But I think it’s fair. I think everything happened exactly the way it should have done. Except for the sad parts, and maybe those too.

  I’m Sooz, and I am nine years old. Ten next month, on the anniversary of the day the griffin came. Wilfrid says it was because of me, that the griffin heard that the ugliest baby in the world had just been born, and it was going to eat me, but I was too ugly, even for a griffin. So it nested in the Midwood (we call it that, but its real name is the Midnight Wood, because of the darkness under the trees), and stayed to eat our sheep and our goats. Griffins do that if they like a place.

  But it didn’t ever eat children, not until this year.

  I only saw it once‌—‌I mean, once before—‌rising up above the trees one night, like a second moon. Only there wasn’t a moon, then. There was nothing in the whole world but the griffin, golden feathers all blazing on its lion’s body and eagle’s wings, with its great front claws like teeth, and that monstrous beak that looked so huge for its head… Wilfrid says I screamed for three days, but he’s lying, and I didn’t hide in the root cellar like he says either, I slept in the barn those two nights, with our dog Malka. Because I knew Malka wouldn’t let anything get me.

  I mean my parents wouldn’t have, either, not if they could have stopped it. It’s just that Malka is the biggest, fiercest dog in the whole village, and she’s not afraid of anything. And after the griffin took Jehane, the blacksmith’s little girl, you couldn’t help seeing how frightened my father was, running back and forth with the other men, trying to organize some sort of patrol, so people could always tell when the griffin was coming. I know he was frightened for me and my mother, and doing everything he could to protect us, but it didn’t make me feel any safer, and Malka did.

  But nobody knew what to do, anyway. Not my father, nobody. It was bad enough when the griffin was only taking the sheep, because almost everyone here sells wool or cheese or sheepskin things to make a living. But once it took Jehane, early last spring, that changed everything. We sent messengers to the king‌—‌three of them‌—‌and each time the king sent someone back to us with them. The first time, it was one knight, all by himself. His name was Douros, and he gave me an apple. He rode away into the Midwood, singing, to look for the griffin, and we never saw him again.

  The second time‌—‌after the griffin took Louli, the boy who worked for the miller‌—‌the king sent five knights together. One of them did come back, but he died before he could tell anyone what happened.

  The third time an entire squadron came. That’s what my father said, anyway. I don’t know how many soldiers there are in a squadron, but it was a lot, and they were all over the village for two days, pitching their tents everywhere, stabling their horses in every barn, and boasting in the tavern how they’d soon take care of that griffin for us poor peasants. They had musicians playing when they marched into the Midwood‌—‌I remember that, and I remember when the music stopped, and the sounds we heard afterward.

  After that, the village didn’t send to the king anymore. We didn’t want more of his men to die, and besides they weren’t any help. So from then on all the children were hurried indoors when the sun went down, and the griffin woke from its day’s rest to hunt again. We couldn’t play together, or run errands or watch the flocks for our parents, or even sleep near open windows, for fear of the griffin. There was nothing for me to do but read books I alr
eady knew by heart, and complain to my mother and father, who were too tired from watching after Wilfrid and me to bother with us. They were guarding the other children too, turn and turn about with the other families‌—‌and our sheep, and our goats‌—‌so they were always tired, as well as frightened, and we were all angry with each other most of the time. It was the same for everybody.

  And then the griffin took Felicitas.

  Felicitas couldn’t talk, but she was my best friend, always, since we were little. I always understood what she wanted to say, and she understood me, better than anyone, and we played in a special way that I won’t ever play with anyone else. Her family thought she was a waste of food, because no boy would marry a dumb girl, so they let her eat with us most of the time. Wilfrid used to make fun of the whispery quack that was the one sound she could make, but I hit him with a rock, and after that he didn’t do it anymore.

  I didn’t see it happen, but I still see it in my head. She knew not to go out, but she was always just so happy coming to us in the evening. And nobody at her house would have noticed her being gone. None of them ever noticed Felicitas.

  The day I learned Felicitas was gone, that was the day I set off to see the king myself.

  Well, the same night, actually‌—‌because there wasn’t any chance of getting away from my house or the village in daylight. I don’t know what I’d have done, really, except that my Uncle Ambrose was carting a load of sheepskins to market in Hagsgate, and you have to start long before sunup to be there by the time the market opens. Uncle Ambrose is my best uncle, but I knew I couldn’t ask him to take me to the king‌—‌he’d have gone straight to my mother instead, and told her to give me sulphur and molasses and put me to bed with a mustard plaster. He gives his horse sulphur and molasses, even.