The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle

The unicorn followed them, moving so warily that not even the horses knew she was near. The sight of men filled her with an old, slow, strange mixture of tenderness and terror. She never let one see her if she could help it, but she liked to watch them ride by and hear them talking.

Pay no mind to young girls, for they never become anything more than silly old women.

“Men knew that the only way to hunt me was to make the chase so wondrous that I would come near to see it.

“Death takes what man would keep,” said the butterfly, “and leaves what man would lose.

“Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.”

“Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”

“It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is,” he said. “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 and will vanish as soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.

“You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.”

When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be.”

The magician’s face almost got away, but he caught it and began to smile very slowly, as though his mouth had turned to iron. He bent it into the proper shape in time, but it was an iron smile.

I know less than I have heard, for I have heard too many tales and each argues with another.

The magic knows what it wants to do,

But I never know what it knows. Not at the right time, anyway. I’d write it a letter, if I knew where it lived.

“And we don’t steal from the rich and give to the poor,” Dick Fancy hurried on. “We steal from the poor because they can’t fight back—most of them—and the rich take from us because they could wipe us out in a day. We don’t rob the fat, greedy Mayor on the highway; we pay him tribute every month to leave us alone.

Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl.

love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal,

Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?”

The universe lies to our senses, and they lie to us, and how can we ourselves be anything but liars?

Yet none but one of Hagsgate town May bring the castle swirling down.

we might not become poor again, but we would no longer grow steadily richer, and that would be just as bad.

There’s this much of comfort, friend Schmendrick. For once, I don’t see how you can possibly make things any worse than they already are,”

I have always been sorry that I have never pleased you; but now, when I look at her I am sorry that I have never pleased myself.

My, you’re a determined fellow! I always say perseverance is nine-tenths of any art—not that it’s much help to be nine-tenths an artist, of course.

“Any woman can weep without tears,” she answered over her shoulder, “and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that’s riddle enough.”

“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.”

“When you are old, anything that does not disturb you is a comfort.

“If she had touched me,” he said very softly, “I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me, but I could not let her. No cat will. We let human beings caress us because it is pleasant enough and calms them—but not her. The price is more than a cat can pay.”

A cat can appreciate valiant absurdity.”

I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.”

It is said that love makes men swift and women slow.

Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever.