Unicorn U, page 32
part #3 of Tim Desmond Series
They pulled the tarp back all the way and fastened it so that we could all see her. Framed by the white draperies, Fluffy lay composed, legs tucked to one side, head resting on her shoulder. The broken, blackened stub of her horn was an obscenity. Jadwiga stood behind her, face impassive, but Yang sprawled over her flank, howling the injustice of her death.
“Oh my.” Lord Palamon pressed a hand to his lips. He mounted the stage, the Seeley with him, and all knelt before the corpse. “Oh dear. The horn, I see. Well, that’s what did it. Oh yes, no question there. I speak from experience in these matters. AH magic gone when it broke, and magic’s what keeps these creatures alive. So dashed few sources of enchantment strong enough to equal the vital power of a unicorn’s horn, which is why we hear of so few cures for this condition. Pity. I suppose there was no way to replace—”
Whose idea was it at last? I think I remember T’ing whispering it to me, but I also believe there was Neil’s hand picking me up by the scruff of the neck, and Yang catching on right away—for once in his afterlife—and shoving me at the bier, and the Feidelsteins saying that if my powers were not enough they’d add their own, and Ben promising me the best corned beef sandwich I’d ever eat if it worked, and Mom and Faustus just looking at me, all that hope and all that faith in their eyes.
“Here.” Jadwiga’s ghostly hand steadied me as I knelt. She touched the shining crystal of the wand. “How many hearts this holds,” she said.
How many hearts . . . I set the power of them all against the unicorn’s bare brow.
Light. Magic. Love. Life.
Crystal bonded to bone. The veil of poison lifted from her skin. The cloying pink faded from her mane and tail. The too-sweet curves and pudgy bulges of her body melted into a shape of so much grace that I thought my heart would stop beating before it could comprehend it all.
She opened her golden eyes.
EPILOGUE
The storm had left the trees of McCosh Walk sheathed in ice, hung with a queen’s ransom of diamonds. Looking ahead, I wondered if Princeton in springtime would have anything to rival this sight. T’ing and I strolled beneath the crystal archway, holding hands. Winter break would soon be over and she would have to go back to Vassar, which was where Mrs. Kaplan thought she was now. It wouldn’t take her any time at all to get from here to there. As a parting gift, Eleziane had given her leave to use the web-paths of the Fey one last time.
She must have read my mind. “It’s hard to believe they’ve gone,” she said, kicking up a few sparkling chips of snow.
“Yeah, I know.” I could still feel Master Runyon’s sturdy handshake, and Teleri’s farewell kiss tingling on my cheek. I touched it, but my fingers only found the thin line of scar-tissue left after Aesclepius had healed the cut made by the Midgard Serpent’s scale. He’d had to work fast, to keep ahead of Fluffy. As soon as we hit Hades, the unicorn went on a healing binge. There were no more chubby cherubs or winsome-till-you-puke satyrs. The crystal horn had brought them back to their true shape and nature.
After that, of course, there was no further reason for them to stay. The Bright Realm beckoned, their true home. We all expected them to leave.
We didn’t expect them to take all the others along.
T’ing sighed. “What’re you thinking about?” I asked.
“Oh, just feeling sorry for Neil. He did love Eleziane.” She squeezed my hand more tightly.
“It couldn’t have worked out forever. He’d age, she wouldn’t.” It was hard, speaking reasonably about a matter of love. “He’ll get over it.” Neil’s face floated on the bitterly cold air before me, wearing the same look of naked loss as when Eleziane had stepped out of his arms that final time and through the gateway. “He’ll get over it,” I repeated, trying to convince myself.
“Uh-huh.” We walked on.
“That’s the Woodrow Wilson School over there,” I said, hoping that if I could play the campus tour-guide, we wouldn’t have to think about all that had been taken from us. “It’s famous for, uh, international studies and stuff. Better understanding between different nations, different peoples—”
“I’d like to see them try to understand him,” T’ing said, laughing wickedly. Then, more softly: “I hope he’s happy.” I knew who she meant.
“You hope that Yang is happy in the Bright Realm?” I sucked in a long draught of icy breath. “Better you should hope that there’s still a Bright Realm left standing when he’s through. He’s probably made a name for himself over there already: Yang, Terror of Smaller Dragons! Yang, Inflictor of Nervous Prostration Upon More Skittish Griffins! Yang—!”
“I miss him,” T’ing said.
“Me, too.”
We didn’t talk for some time after that. The Woodrow Wilson school wasn’t the fascinating bulwark of conversation I’d thought it would be. We paused in front of it briefly, then turned and walked back the way we’d come, under the frost-decked trees.
“Was it our fault?” T’ing asked the question that had been preying on my mind. “Did we drive them away, all the sprites and spirits, even the monsters too? We did it once before—not us personally, but you know what I mean—the Leeside exile to hold them because this is America and there’s no room for magic here. ” She dug her chin deeper into the plush collar of her winter coat. “Even the heroes are gone.”
Why should they stay? Mom called from Brooklyn to tell me that there was a video-rental store where Feidelstein’s Kosher Delicatessen had been. She discovered it when she went to order the cold cut platters for the wedding reception next month. The Back Room was closed for good, the warriors of legend gone the same way as the kobolds and the giants, the phoukas and the grogans, the menehune and the elves. The welcoming lands of the Bright Realm had relieved the Guardians of all further need to guard. Mr. and Mrs. Feidelstein had moved down to Miami for good, and Ben Kipnis was running a gourmet food shop on the Upper West Side where he was trying to perfect the low-fat, low-cholesterol, high-fiber, vitamin-enriched pastrami sandwich.
I stopped and put my arms around T’ing. “Yes, they’re gone,”
I said. “We’ve got to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and feeling guilty for something we may or may not have done to make this happen. They’re happy, now; happier than they could ever be in this world. Let’s just try being glad for them, and let them go.” “I am glad,” T’ing replied. The tears in her eyes were quickly blinked back. She sniffled.
“Give her a tissue, idiot.” A velvet muzzle brushed my ear. “Do I have to think of everything for you?”
“Fluffy!” T’ing and I both shrieked the unicorn’s name aloud for joy and flung ourselves on her neck.
“Hey! Take it easy, would you?” Her hooves clattered over the pavement as she backed up under our assault, but she sounded pleased. We pummeled her with questions about our Leeside friends who had crossed over into her domain, hardly waiting for one answer before we launched the next barrage of questions.
“Whoa, hold on there, get a grip!” Fluffy tossed her head. “If I give you the lowdown on everyone you know over there, you’ll both freeze your tails off in this weather before I’m half done.” “We’re sorry,” T’ing said, braiding a few strands of the unicorn’s flossy mane. In Fluffy’s true state it was not sugary pink, but radiant as a star. “It’s just—well, these are people we care about. We’ll never forget them, or what all of us shared. It’s hard to let go and pretend they never were. We miss them.”
Fluffy’s golden eyes softened. “They miss you, too, dear,” she said. “And they want to know when you’ll visit.”
“Visit?”
“Us?”
“The Bright Realm?”
“Impossible!”
“How?”
“Let’s go!”
“When?”
“Now!”
“Quiet!” Fluffy’s shout knocked loose a sprinkling of ice crystals from the branches. Blowing hard, she hunched her shoulders a few times and said, “Powers That Be, what a racket! No wonder I hate traveling with children. So, you want to visit now, did you say? Very well. Come.”
I laid my hand on her mane. “Where?”
“Why, there, of course.” Her crystal horn caught sunlight from the ice-bound trees and tossed it back as she gestured up the shimmering walkway. “Can’t you see it? There’s the door, plain as plain. I used it myself to come through, so I suppose it will do for you.”
And so we walked through an archway of light trapped in ice, frozen in crystal, until we saw the portal she meant, and through it glimpsed the Bright Realm’s beauties. It was a gap in the air no bigger than a human heart. Sense and sanity told me we could never fit through it. It was, in fact, the smallest of holes.
But sometimes the smallest of holes is just big enough if you believe.
Esther Friesner, Unicorn U
