He answered her, saying gently, “I don’t know much about enchantments, except how to break them. But I know that even the very greatest wizards are powerless against two who keep to each other‌—‌and this one is only poor Schmendrick, after all. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid of anything. Whatever you have been, you are mine now. I can hold you.”

She turned to look at the magician at last, and even through the darkness he could feel the terror in her eyes. “No,” she said. “No, we are not strong enough. He will change me, and whatever happens after that, you and I will lose each other. I will not love you when I am a unicorn, and you will love me only because you cannot help it. I will be more beautiful than anything in the world, and live forever.”

Schmendrick began to speak, but the sound of his voice made her cower like a candle flame. “I will not have it. I will not have it so.” She was looking back and forth from the prince to the magician, holding her voice together like the edges of a wound. She said, “If there is left a single moment of love when he changes me, you will know it, for I will let the Red Bull drive me into the sea with the others. Then at least I will be near you.”

“There’s no need for all that.” Schmendrick spoke lightly, making himself laugh. “I doubt I could turn you back if you wished it. Nikos himself never could turn a human being into unicorn‌—‌and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact. Let it end here then, let the quest end. Is the world any the worse for losing the unicorns, and would it be any better if they were running free again? One good woman more in the world is worth every single unicorn gone. Let it end. Marry the prince and live happily ever after.”

The passageway seemed to be growing lighter, and Schmendrick imagined the Red Bull stealing toward them, grotesquely cautious, setting his hooves down as primly as a heron. The thin glimmer of Molly Grue’s cheekbone went out as she turned her face away. “Yes,” said the Lady Amalthea. “That is my wish.”

But at the same moment, Prince Lír said, “No.”

The word escaped him as suddenly as a sneeze, emerging in a questioning squeak‌—‌the voice of a silly young man mortally embarrassed by a rich and terrible gift. “No,” he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king’s voice: not Haggard, but a king whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give.

“My lady,” he said, “I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch’s door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. 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. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”