The Last Unicorn

It serves you right, she told herself. You know better than to expect a butterfly to know your name. All they know are songs and poetry, and anything else they hear. They mean well, but they can’t keep things straight. And why should they? They die so soon.

Gliding close to the unicorn, she peered down at her for a long time, and then said, “Well. Well, bless my old husk of a heart. And here I thought I’d seen the last of them.” […]

“If he knew,” she said and she showed her pebbly teeth as she smiled. “But I don’t think I’ll tell him.”

“Fear nothing,” he began grandly. “For all my air of mystery, I have a feeling heart…Schmendrick is with you. Do nothing till you hear from me!” His voice drifted to the unicorn, so faint and lonely that she was not sure whether she actually heard it.

“Do you think I chose this meager magic, sprung of stupidity, because I never knew the true witchery? I play tricks with dogs and monkeys because I cannot touch the grass, but I know the difference. And now you ask me to give up the sight of you, the presence of your power.”

“There is much misjudgment in the world. Now I knew you for a unicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or a clod, or a betrayer, and so must I be if you see me so. The magic on you is only magic […], but the enchantment of error you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes.”

The moon was gone, but to the magician’s eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness. He followed her, never once looking back.

“No,” she said, answering his eyes. “I can never regret.”

He was silent, crouched by the road in the rain, drawing his soaked cloak close around his body until he looked like a broken black umbrella. […] “I can sorrow,” she offered gently, “but it’s not the same thing.”

“She guards me better than I do myself. I am generous and easy; to the point of extravagance, perhaps. […] It is only natural that Molly should become suspicious, pinched, dour, prematurely old, even a touch tyrannical. […] But she’s a good heart, a good heart.”

“Do as you will,” he whispered to the magic. “Do as you will.”

It sighed through him, beginning somewhere secret—in his shoulder blade, perhaps, or in the marrow of his shinbone. His heart filled and tautened like a sail, and something moved more surely in his body than he ever had. It spoke with his voice, commanding.

Then she saw the unicorn. She neither moved nor spoke, but her tawny eyes were suddenly big with tears. For a long moment, she did not move; then each fist seized a handful of her hem, and she warped her knees into a kind of trembling crouch. […]

“Where have you been?” she cried. “Damn you, where have you been?”

The unicorn was weary of human beings. Watching her companions as they slept, seeing the shadows of their dreams scurry over their faces, she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names. Then she would run until morning to ease the ache.

The Hagsgate faces tried not to move, but they did move. Drinn said carefully, “We never see the Bull, and we never speak of him. Nothing that concerns him can be any business of ours. As for unicorns, there are none. There never were.”

The unicorn was there as a star is suddenly there, moving a little way ahead of them, a sail in the dark. Molly said, “If Lír is the hero, what is she?”

“That’s different. Haggard and Lír and Drinn and you and I—we are in a fairy tale, and must go where it goes. But she is real. She is real.” Schmendrick yawned and hiccupped and shivered all at once.

Suddenly the Bull was facing her, as though he had been lifted like a chess piece, swooped through the air, and set down again to bar her way. He did not charge immediately, and she did not run. He had been huge when she first fled him, but in the pursuit he had grown so vast that she could not imagine all of him. […] [T]he unicorn realized that the Red Bull was blind.

“What have you done to me?” she cried. “I will die here!” She tore at the smooth body, and blood followed her fingers. “I will die here! I will die!” Yet there was no fear in her face, though it ramped in her voice, in her hands and feet, in the white hair that fell down over her new body. Her face remained quiet and untroubled.

“I don’t think I could ever see her closely,” the sentinel replied, “however close she came.” His own voice was hushed and regretful, echoing with lost chances. “She has a newness,” he said. “Everything is for the first time.”

“There is nothing that I can look at for very long, except the sea.” Yet he stared at the Lady Amalthea’s face for a long time, his own face giving back none of her light—as Prince Lír’s had—but taking it in and keeping it somewhere. […]

Suddenly he shouted, “What is the matter with your eyes? They are full of green leaves, crowded with trees and streams and small animals. Where am I?”

“But when she looked at it, suddenly it became a sad, battered mess of scales and horns, gristly tongue, bloody eyes. I felt like some country butcher who had brought his lass a nice chunk of fresh meat as a token of his love. And then she looked at me, and I was sorry I had killed the thing. Sorry for killing a dragon!”

“No, he does not want my thoughts,” she said softly. “He wants me, as much as the Red Bull did, and with no more understanding. But he frightens me even more than the Red Bull, because he has a kind heart. No, I will never speak a promising word to him.”

“No more,” he said desperately. […] It was not her dream that chilled him, but that she did not weep as she told it. As a hero, he understood weeping women and knew how to make them stop crying—generally you killed something—but her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining.

“I like to watch them. They fill me with joy.” The childish voice was all but singing. “I am sure it is joy. The first time I felt it, I thought I was going to die. There were two of them in the early morning shadows. One was drinking from a stream, and the other was resting her head on his back. I thought I was going to die. I said to the Red Bull, ‘I must have that.’”

“Everything dies,” she said, still to Prince Lír. “It is good that everything dies. I want to die when you die. Do not let him enchant me, do not let him make me immortal. I am no unicorn, no magical creature. I am human, and I love you.”

“My lady,” he said, “I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. […] But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. […] The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”

For all that her quest had ended joyously, there was a weariness in the way she held herself, and a sadness in her beauty that Molly had never seen. It suddenly seemed to her that the unicorn’s sorrow was not for Lír but for the lost girl who could not be brought back; for the Lady Amalthea, who might have lived happily ever after with the prince. The unicorn bowed her head, and her horn glanced across Lír’s chin as clumsily as a first kiss.

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.”