THE LAST UNICORN

Lнr blushed, and actually tried to pull them to their feet. "Never mind that," he mumbled, "never mind that. Who are you?" He peered in amazement from one face to the next. "I know you – I do know you – but how can it be?"

"It is true, Your Majesty," the first of the young men said happily. "We are indeed King Haggard's men-at-arms – the same who served him for so many cold and weary years. We fled the castle after you disappeared into the clock, for the Red Bull was roaring, and all the towers were trembling, and we were afraid. We knew that the old curse must be coming home at last."

"A great wave took the castle," said a second man-at-arms, "exactly as the witch, foretold. I saw it go spilling down the cliff as slowly as snow, and why we did not go with it, I ca

"The wave parted to go around us," another man said, "as I never saw any wave do. It was strange water, like the ghost of a wave, boiling with a rainbow light, and for a moment it seemed to me -" He rubbed his eyes and shrugged, and smiled helplessly. "I don't know. It was like a dream."

"But what has happened to you all?" Lнr demanded. "You were old men when I was born, and now you are younger than I am. What miracle is this?"

The three who had spoken giggled and looked embarrassed, but the fourth man replied, "It is the miracle of meaning what we said. Once we told the Lady Amalthea that we would grow young again if she wished it so, and we must have been telling the truth. Where is she? We will go to her aid if it means facing the Red Bull himself."

King Lнr said, "She is gone. Find my horse and saddle him. Find my horse." His voice was harsh and hungry, and the men-at-arms scrambled to obey their new lord.

But Schmendrick, standing behind him, said quietly, "Your Majesty, it may not be. You must not follow her."

The king turned, and he looked like Haggard. "Magician, she is mine!" He paused, and then went on in a gentler tone, close to pleading. "She has twice raised me up from death, and what will I be without her but dead for a third time?" He took Schmendrick by the wrists with a grip strong enough to powder bones, but the magician did not move. Lнr said, "I am not King Haggard. I have no wish to capture her, but only to spend my life following after her – miles, leagues, even years behind – never seeing her, perhaps, but content. It is my right. A hero is entitled to his happy ending, when it comes at last."

But Schmendrick answered, "This is not the end, either for you or for her. You are the king of a wasted land where there has never been any king but fear. Your true task has just begun, and you may not know in your life if you have succeeded in it, but only if you fail. As for her, she is a story with no ending, happy or sad. She can never belong to anything mortal enough to want her."

Most strangely then, he put his arms around the young king and held him so for a time. "Yet be content, my lord," he said in a low voice. "No man has ever had more of her grace than you, and no other will ever be blessed by her remembrance. You have loved her and served her – be content, and be king."

"But that is not what I want!" Lнr cried. The magician answered not a word, but only looked at him. Blue eyes stared back into green; a face grown lean and lordly into one neither so handsome nor so bold. The king began to squint and blink, as though he were gazing at the sun, and it was not long before he lowered his eyes and muttered, "So be it. I will stay and rule alone over a wretched people in a land I hate. But I will have no more joy of my rule than poor Haggard ever had."

A small autumn cat with a crooked ear stalked out of some secret fold in the air and yawned at Molly. She caught him up against her face, and he tangled his paws in her hair. Schmendrick smiled, and said to the king, "We must leave you now. Will you come with us and see us in friendship to the edge of your domain? There is much between here and there that is worth your study – and I can promise you that there will be some sign of unicorns."

Then King Lнr shouted for his horse again, and his men searched for it and found it; but there were none for Schmendrick and Molly. Yet when they came back with the king's horse, they turned at his amazed stare and saw two more horses trailing docilely behind them: one black and one brown, and both already saddled and bridled. Schmendrick took the black for himself, and gave the brown horse to Molly.

She was afraid of them at first. "Are they yours?" she asked him. "Did you make them? Can you do that now – just make things?" The king's whisper echoed her wonder.

"I found them," the magician answered. "But what I mean by finding is not what you mean. Ask me no more." He lifted her into the saddle, and then leaped up himself.

So the three of them rode away, and the men-at-arms followed on foot. No one looked back, for there was nothing to see. But King Lнr said once, without turning, "It is strange to have grown to manhood in a place, and then to have it gone, and everything changed – and suddenly to be king. Was none of it real at all? Am I real, then?" Schmendrick made no reply.

King Lнr wished to go swiftly, but Schmendrick held them to a leisurely pace and a roundabout road. When the king fretted for speed, he was admonished to consider his walking men – though they, marvelously, never tired for all the length of the journey. But Molly soon understood that the magician was delaying in order to make Lнr gaze long and closely at his realm. And to her own surprise, she discovered that the land was worth the look.

For, very slowly, spring was coming to the barren country that had been Haggard's. A stranger would not have noticed the change, but Molly could see that the withered earth was brightening with a gree

"Unicorns have passed here," she whispered to the magician. "Is that the cause, or is it Haggard's fall and the Red Bull's going? What is it, what is happening?"

"Everything," he answered her, "everything, all at once. It is not one springtime, but fifty; and not one or two great terrors flown away, but a thousand small shadows lifted from the land. Wait and see."

Speaking for Lнr's ear, he added, "Nor is this the first spring that ever has been in this country. It was a good land long ago, and it wants little but a true king to be so again. See how it softens before you."

King Lнr said nothing, but his eyes roved left and right as he rode, and he could not but observe the ripening. Even the valley of Hagsgate, of evil memory, was stirring with all ma

But when they came to Hagsgate, deep in the afternoon, a strange and savage sight awaited them. The plowed fields were woefully torn and ravaged, while the rich orchards and vineyards had been stamped down, leaving no grove or arbor standing. It was such shattering ruin as the Bull himself might have wrought; but it seemed to Molly Grue as though fifty years' worth of foiled griefs had struck Hagsgate all at once, just as that many springtimes were at last warming the rest of the land. The trampled earth looked oddly ashen in the late light.

King Lнr said quietly, "What is this?"