Oddest of All

by Bruce Coville

  As the decades passed, his hair became silver as well. Even in age he was beautiful, though in a strange and distant way, and everywhere he went at least one maiden would try to follow when he left. To stop her, he would sing a song so laced with loss and longing that she would sit by the side of the road and weep, unable to move. Then he would go forward alone.

  Finally one maiden, bolder or more sly than others, followed him at a greater distance. He didn’t realize she had done so until late at night, when he woke to find her on the opposite side of his dying campfire, staring at him with more curiosity than love, which he found refreshing.

  “Why do you never stay in one place?” she asked.

  The wind sang gently through the tops of the pine trees. The stars blazed in an ebony sky. And Nils’s heart nearly burst with the question.

  “I’m looking for something,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You would be a dangerous man to love.”

  “You could not pick anyone worse.”

  “My name is Ivy Morris, and I will walk for a while with you.”

  Despite his efforts to turn her away, the girl traveled with Nils for a year and a day. When he sang the song that had stopped the others in their tracks—which he did more than once—she continued walking, tears streaming down her face, murmuring, “I understand, for I am a wanderer, too.”

  Finally Nils wrote a new song, just for her. He called it “Song of the Wanderer,” and it spoke of both their lives:

  Across the gently rolling hills

  Beyond high mountain peaks

  Along the shores of distant seas

  There’s something my heart seeks

  But there’s no peace in wandering

  The road’s not made for rest

  And footsore fools will never know

  What home might suit them best

  Ivy thanked him for the song.

  The next day she was gone.

  To the south, the world was changing as the age of machines crept on, transforming the earth in more ways than the people who were building and making and inventing could begin to understand. But in the northern forest Nils continued his wandering, spending less and less time in the villages and more time on the mountainsides, trailing the splashing streams, sitting on high promontories, singing only to the wind and the eagles.

  And then one night, standing on a high hill and looking down at a crystal stream, Nils saw at last the thing he desired, the thing he had sought all these years, the thing he had longed for without knowing what it was he longed for, the thing his family had wronged so badly, so long ago.

  He saw a unicorn.

  Nils stood as if frozen while he watched it drink from the clear, cold water. Its coat glowed like white fire in the moonlight. Its creamy mane was like the froth on the waves of the northern sea where he had swum with his mermaid love, and its horn was a spiraled lance that seemed carved from the jewels of the earth. The sight of the creature filled him with such terrible longing that he could not speak.

  When the unicorn turned from the stream he followed it, much as the girl named Ivy had followed him, though at a greater distance. He did not want it to know he was there. Not yet. Not yet.

  It was not hard for Nils to trail the creature, for his heart was so tied to it that even when it was beyond the edge of his vision he could sense it. But Nils was not the only one stalking the unicorn. One afternoon as he came over a ridge and saw, as he knew he would, the unicorn in the green valley below, he saw something else, too. Something that filled him with cold terror.

  It was a Hunter. Not just a man out hunting for his family. This was one of his own family, a man like his father who had but one mission in life—to find and slay the unicorns.

  That was bad enough. Even worse, he had already captured this unicorn. It was an old story, one that Nils knew well. In the clearing stood a maiden. The unicorn had come to her, as a unicorn always will to a maiden in the woods, and she had slipped a golden bridle over his head, putting him in her power. Now she held him while the Hunter approached, spear in hand, ready to strike the final blow.

  Nils was too far away to stay the Hunter’s hand.

  So he did the only thing he could, the only thing he knew.

  He sang.

  Taking his harp from his back, he sang the saddest song he knew, using every trick he had learned from goblin, from dragon, from mermaid, every bit of skill he had gathered in the decades since he first touched the harp.

  The Hunter hesitated. His hands began to tremble.

  Nils started forward, singing more softly now, intimately, caressing the Hunter’s heart with the pain that had clutched his own for all these years, crafting his song like an arrow to pierce the other, and pouring into its notes all he knew of loss and longing.

  The Hunter turned and stared at Nils in wonder. Then he dropped his spear, fell to his knees, and began to sob, releasing a flood of sorrow that had been locked in his heart from the first time his father had beaten him.

  Nils walked past the sobbing Hunter, past the terrified girl.

  “I have been seeking you for a long time,” he said as he slipped the golden bridle from the unicorn’s head.

  The silver-eyed creature did not answer, but knelt in a clear invitation. Nils climbed on its back, and they fled through the forest, leaving Hunter and maiden far behind. When they were many miles away the unicorn stopped and Nils slid to the ground.

  The unicorn turned to him, and Nils, who would have done anything for the beast, suffered anything for it, did not move at all when it stepped toward him, pointed its horn directly at his chest, and pierced the flesh above his heart.

  Nils was sure he was about to die. To his astonishment, what happened instead was that the unicorn was able to speak to him.

  To his sorrow, its voice was filled with horror.

  “Something has happened to you,” it said. “You’ve been touched by something, changed by something. You have—I don’t know what this means—you have a bit of unicorn in you.”

  Nils’s shame was so great, his first thought was to turn and run. But he could not leave the presence of the unicorn.

  Nor could he stay silent.

  So he told the story of what had happened when he was young, and his father had slain the unicorn. As he spoke he began to weep, something he had not done since he was four years old. He wept even more when the unicorn wept, too—and still harder when it placed its horn across his shoulder and murmured, “Whatever forgiveness you need, I grant.”

  In the storm of weeping that followed, Nils shed all the tears that had been locked inside since the moment he had swallowed the unicorn’s flesh, tears for himself, for his mother, even for his father: tears of guilt, tears of rage, tears of loss.

  He wept until there was no more silver in his eyes, and they were once again as they had been when he was a boy, as blue as the northern skies. And where each tear fell a flower grew, a little white flower that grows to this day in the northern hills, and which herb women call Heart’s Ease.

  When at last he was done with weeping, the unicorn, whose name was Cloudmane, and who was the first female unicorn ever to act as Guardian of Memory, said, “Pluck a hair from my tail.”

  Nils blinked. “Why would you want me to do that?”

  She nudged him playfully and said, “Because your harp is in need of a string.”

  So Nils did as she said. The silver hair was gossamer thin, but stronger than steel, and when he had used it to string his harp, he ran his fingers over it and heard at last the sound he had been waiting so many years to hear. Then he wept once more, this time for joy.

  Nils traveled with Cloudmane for three years. In that time she taught him the songs of the unicorns, which are the songs of the Air, and his heart was at peace.

  When Cloudmane had taught him the last of the songs she knew, Nils bid her good-bye. Then he climbed to the top of a mountain, where he sat hims
elf down and, looking out at the world, sang and sang, until at last he could sing no more.

  A Note from the Author

  THIS BEING my third solo collection, I suppose I can no longer claim to find the short story an unnatural form. Even though my brain generally seems to think in novel-sized ideas, I actually like the discipline required for a short story, which forces me to do more with less. The odd result is that I end up doing what I think is some of my best writing this way.

  For those who care about such things, here are a few notes on where this batch came from.

  I originally wrote the opening story, “In Our Own Hands,” as a booklet for adult literacy training. (My hometown, Syracuse, is one of the epicenters of adult literacy, having been headquarters for both Laubach Literacy and Literacy Volunteers of America, which eventually merged into ProLiteracy Worldwide.) Later I rewrote it for Bruce Coville’s Alien Visitors. I’ve rewritten it yet again for this collection, and I think it has now found its final shape. I know the unresolved ending bothers some people, but to me that’s the point of this kind of story. (And, of course, you have to tip your hat to Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger” whenever you try something like this.)

  “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” came about because my friend James Howe was putting together an anthology called 13—a collection of stories and poems about that joyful, excruciating first year of being a teenager, when so much is in uproar and turmoil. It may seem odd to have a story that is neither science fiction, nor fantasy, nor horror in this collection, but heck, what could be more horrifying than being thirteen? (Joke! Joke!) To write it I had to look back on my own thirteenth year, and while I didn’t fall off a stage—that particular humiliation waited until I was in my forties—more of this is based on real life than I care to detail.

  “In the Frog King’s Court” was also written at the request of a friend, in this case the wonderful Nancy Springer, who was putting together a collection of frog stories to be shamelessly called Ribbiting Tales. My brain being what it is, a story about a werefrog was almost inevitable. The title plays off a story called “The Court of the Summer King” that Jennifer Roberson wrote for The Unicorn Treasury, one of my own anthologies. The difference is that Jennifer’s story was lovely and profound, while this one is mostly goofy. But I really enjoyed doing it.

  In the 1990s I edited a series of twelve anthologies for Scholastic that I refer to as Bruce Coville’s Books of [Whatever]. (For “Whatever” you can fill in “Monsters,” “Ghosts,” “Spine Tinglers,” and so on.) Before we go on, I’d like to say that while no one who knows me would deny I have a vast and sometimes appalling ego, I’m not so vainglorious to have come up with that title structure myself. It was the publisher’s fault.

  Anyway, two of these stories were written for those anthologies. Both were inspired, at least in part, by my daughter, Cara, who is the model for Nina (“Nine”) Tanleven, the main character in “The Ghost Let Go.” Nine’s pal, Chris, was based on Cara’s best friend, and her dad, Henry, is loosely based on, um, me. Nine and Chris appear in three novels. Chronologically, this story takes place between The Ghost Wore Gray and The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed.

  The seed for “The Thing in Auntie Alma’s Pond” came from a conversation Cara and I had when we were out walking one night. As we strolled past some dark water, she mentioned to me that she had always been terrified of the little pond where the kids used to swim when we visited her “Auntie Wilma.” I got to thinking about that pond when it was time to write my story for Spine Tinglers. This is what came out.

  I wrote “The Hardest, Kindest Gift” for my anthology Half-Human. The idea for the book, as is probably obvious, was to collect stories about half-humans: centaurs, mermaids, fauns, and so on. For my own story I turned to one of the more obscure of the half-humans, but one I found particularly haunting because of the longing and sense of tragedy that attaches to her. The text that appears here is considerably expanded from the first printed version.

  The three remaining stories—“The Mask of Eamonn Tiyado,” “Herbert Hutchison in the Underworld,” and “The Boy with Silver Eyes”—make their print debut in these pages.

  The first and third of these were written to perform with the Syracuse Symphony, something that is one of the great joys of my life. That “Eamonn Tiyado” was done for a concert we performed around Halloween should be no surprise. The music came from Liadov, Debussy, Holst, and Stravinsky. (The story’s title is a hideous pun. In case it went right by you—as well it should have!—I’ll give you a hint: The source is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known stories.) For “The Boy with Silver Eyes” the music came mostly from the great Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. The story itself is connected to the world of the Unicorn Chronicles.

  Finally we have “Herbert Hutchison in the Underworld,” which is like the dark twin of “The Box,” the story that opened the first of these collections, Oddly Enough. This one started to take shape in my head in what I call the “twilight time”—that time between sleep and full wakefulness.

  A final note: All of the previously published stories have been revised, sometimes quite extensively, for these pages. For guidance in this process, I have to thank my editor, Allyn Johnston, and her erstwhile assistant, Beth Jacobsen, as well as my writing pal, Tamora Pierce.

  When I was starting out, I loved to write but found revising painful. Now I find the initial writing hard but love the chance to revise.

  Just another of life’s ongoing oddities.

  But I think that’s my favorite thing about being alive.

  It’s just so odd!

  About the Author

  BRUCE COVILLE is the author of over 100 books for children and young adults, including the international bestseller My Teacher Is an Alien, the Unicorn Chronicles series, and the much-beloved Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher. His work has appeared in a dozen languages and won children’s choice awards in a dozen states.

  Before becoming a full time writer Bruce was a teacher, a toymaker, a magazine editor, a gravedigger, and a cookware salesman. He is also the creator of Full Cast Audio, an audiobook company devoted to producing full cast, unabridged recordings of material for family listening and has produced over a hundred audiobooks, directing and/or acting in most of them.

  Bruce lives in Syracuse, New York, with his wife, illustrator and author Katherine Coville.

  Visit his website at www.brucecoville.com.