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Despite this, I read the introduction, and it was oddly comforting to me. I’d been taught that fantasy was low-class, a waste of time. But Peter spoke in glowing terms of Tolkien and Middle Earth, saying, “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.”
A story might come from a book, but the story doesn’t live there. The story lives in you. And that version of the story is different than any other version in the world because of what you bring. Because of what you think and feel. That’s unique. It’s rare and wonderful.
The long road hurried to nowhere and had no end. It ran through villages and small towns, flat country and mountains, stony barrens and meadows springing out of stones, but it belonged to none of these, and it never rested anywhere.
Gorgeous prose here
Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.
“Barbed wire,” he gasped. “You pile of stones, you waste, you desolation, 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. I’ll set all your toenails growing inward. You mess with me.”
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.
In fact, 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.
“They sing a ballad of you in my country,” he began. “I forget just how it goes—” Captain Cully spun like a cat ambushing its own tail. “Which one?” he demanded.
The sky was still black, but it was a watery darkness through which Schmendrick could see the violet dawn swimming.
Molly’s own face closed like a castle against him, trundling out the guns and slings and caldrons of boiling lead.
The land had grown leaner day by day as they traveled on, and the faces of the folk they met had grown bitter with the brown grass; but to the unicorn’s eyes Molly was becoming a softer country, full of pools and caves, where old flowers came burning out of the ground.
So they journeyed together, following the fleeing darkness into a wind that tasted like nails. The rind of the country cracked, and the flesh of it peeled back into gullies and ravines or shriveled into scabby hills.
“I would like to leave you with this last thought,” he told them. “The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart. Good night.”
It’s a great relief to find out about Prince Lír. I’ve been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man.”
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.”
King Haggard’s castle was stalking in the sky, a blind black bird that fished the valley by night. Molly could hear the breathing of its wings.
The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.
“I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful—more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world.
His voice rustled in his helmet like small, clawed feet.
His own voice was hushed and regretful, echoing with lost chances.
The Lady Amalthea did not answer him. King Haggard swung around to face Schmendrick and Molly. His scimitar smile laid its cold edge along their throats. “Who is she?” he demanded.
A season in King Haggard’s chill domain had not dimmed or darkened her. Rather, the winter had sharpened her beauty until it invaded the beholder like a barbed arrow that could not be withdrawn.
“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.”
“It’s really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space—that’s the way life was meant to be. You’re supposed to be too late for some things. Don’t worry about it.”
“When I was alive, I believed—as you do—that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said ‘one o’clock’ as though I could see it, and ‘Monday’ as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year’s Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls.”
Prince Lír marveled suspiciously, which is an awkward thing to manage.
“I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling. I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you. Also to find some way of starting a conversation.”
