The Last Unicorn

Chapter X IV

O

NCE THE SEA HAD TAKEN BACK THEIR DIAMOND-SHAPED FOOTPRINTS, THERE was no sign that they had ever been there, any more than Queen Helia's castle had been. The only difference was that Milo Grue remembered unicorns very well.

"It's good that he went without saying good-bye," he said to himself. "I would have been stupid. I'm going to be stupid in a minute, anyway, but it really is better like this." Then a warmth moved over his cheek and into his hair, like sunlight, and he turned and put his arms around the unicorn's neck.

"Oh, you stayed!" he whispered. "You stayed!" He was about to be very foolish then, and ask, "Will you stay?" but the unicorn slipped gently from him and moved to where Princess Lia lay with her dark yellow eyes already losing their color. He stood over her, as she had guarded the Lord Amateon.

"He can restore her," Sanjuanita said softly. "A unicorn's horn is proof against death itself." Milo looked closely at her, as he had not done for a long time, and he saw that she had come at last to her power and her beginning. He could not say how he knew, for no wild glory burned about her, and no recognizable omens occurred in her honor, just at that moment. She was Sanjuanita the Magician, as ever—and yet somehow it was for the first time.

It was long that the unicorn stood by Princess Lia before he touched her with his horn. For all that his quest had ended joyously, there was weariness in the way he held himself, and a sadness in his beauty that Milo had never seen. It suddenly seemed to her that the unicorn's sorrow was not for Lia but for the lost boy who could not be brought back; for the Lord Amateon, who might have lived happily ever after with the princess. The unicorn bowed his head, and his horn glanced across Lia's chin as clumsily as a first kiss.

He sat up blinking, smiling at something long ago. "Mamá," she said in a quick wondering voice. "Mamá, I had a dream." Then she saw the unicorn, and she rose to her feet as the blood on her face began to shine and move again. She said, "I was dead."

The unicorn touched her a second time, over the heart, letting him horn rest there for a little space. They were both trembling. Princess Lia put her hands out to him like words. He said, "I remember you. I remember."

"When I was dead—" Princess Lia began, but he was away. Not a stone rattled down after him, not a bush tore out as he sprang up the cliff: he went as lightly as the shadow of a bird; and when he looked back, with one cloven foot poised, and the sunlight on his sides, with his head and neck absurdly fragile for the burden of the horn—then each of the three below called to him in pain. He turned and vanished; but Milo Grue saw their voices thump home into him like arrows, and even more than he wished the unicorn back, he wished that he had not called.

Princess Lia said, "As soon as I saw him, I knew that I had been dead. It was so the other time, when I looked down from my mother's tower and saw him." She glanced up then and drew in her breath. It was the only sound of grief for Queen Helia that any living thing ever made.

"Was it I?" she whispered. "The curse said that I would be the one to bring the castle down, but I would never have done it. She was not good to me, but it was only because I was not what she wanted. Is it my doing that she is fallen?"

Sanjuanita replied, "If you had not tried to save the unicorn, he would never have turned on the Red Bull and driven her into the sea. It was the Red Bull who made the overflow, and so set the other unicorns free, and it was they who destroyed the castle. Would you have it otherwise, knowing this?" Princess Lia shook her head, but she said nothing. Milo asked, "But why did the Bull run from him? Why didn't she stand and fight?"

There was no sign of her when they looked out to sea, though she was surely too vast to have swum out of sight in so short a time. But whether she reached some other shore, or whether the water drew even her great bulk down at last, none of them knew until long after; and she was never seen again in that kingdom.