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The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
Generation after generation, wolves and rabbits alike, they hunted and loved and had children and died, and as the unicorn did none of these things, she never grew tired of watching them.
Unicorns are not meant to make choices.
“Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.”
Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.
By the sorrow and loss and sweetness in their faces she knew that they recognized her, and she accepted their hunger as her homage.
“You deserve the services of a great wizard,” he said to the unicorn, “but I’m afraid you’ll have to be glad of the aid of a second-rate pickpocket.
I’ll stuff you with misery till it comes out of your eyes. I’ll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep. I’ll turn you into a bad poet with dreams.
“You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.”
One evening, they stopped in a plump, comfortable town where even the beggars had double chins and the mice waddled.
Schmendrick had never heard of Captain Cully before that very evening, but he had a good grounding in Anglo-Saxon folklore and knew the type.
“I mean, you can’t leave epic events to the people. They get everything wrong.”
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.
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.
“Is that the going rate these days? Dinner and wine the price of a poisoned prince? You’ll have to do better than that, friend Drinn. I wouldn’t do in a chimney sweep for such a fee.”
Drinn treats his money so well that it cannot bear to be parted from him. Most touching relationship you ever saw.
A master magician has not made me happy. I will see what an incompetent one can do.
“I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.”
Yet her eyes are as stupid as his—as any eyes that never saw unicorns, never saw anything but themselves in a glass.
The master wizards were great listeners, and they devised ways to charm all things of the world, living and dead, into talking to them.
Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. 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.
As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn’t say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.
“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.”
