“But what if it prove that I am no harper?
That I lied for your love most monstrously?”
“Why, then I’ll teach you to play and sing,
For I dearly love a good harp,” said she.

—The End—

Two Hearts

Introduction

Three years after the fact my head is still spinning: there is a sequel to The Last Unicorn. More specifically, there is a true coda to The Last Unicorn‌—‌a really good one‌—‌and I get to be the lucky sod who talked Peter S. Beagle into writing it. As unexpected twists of fate go, this one’s pretty wild.

Now if only I’d done it on purpose, instead of by accident.

When I met Peter in 2001 it was shocking to learn how badly he had been injured over the decades by a toxic combination of corporate malfeasance, inept representation, and personal naiveté. Having been a raging fan of his work since I was 14 years old, this was not acceptable to me, and so a partnership was born. (I’m a creative type too, but either through osmosis or genetics I acquired a knack for business from my cement salesman father. Comes in handy.)

One of the many projects Peter and I spun up together was an unabridged audiobook of The Last Unicorn. Late in the spring of 2004 the recording was nearly complete, so I decided to mention it on a promotional postcard that would go out to everyone attending that year’s Mythic Journeys conference. This is when my subconscious struck, adding a sentence to the effect that the first run would include a “new story set in the world of Peter’s classic novel.”

Of course, that’s not the sort of thing you can commit someone to without permission. So I called Peter to ask.

His reaction was blunt. “For 36 years people have been asking me to write a sequel to The Last Unicorn, and for 36 years I’ve been saying no. There will never be a sequel. Never. That book was one of a kind. I said everything I had to say in it, and since there’s nothing else to say I’m not going back. Anyway, I’m not that person anymore. No sequels!”

“You will note,” I replied calmly, “that I mentioned nothing about a sequel. ‘Set in the world of,’ it says. That book had a big landscape, full of other places and possibilities. And hey, I don’t care if you don’t use any of the characters from the first book at all!”

His one-syllable reply would most accurately be transcribed as “Grrurmmupph!” (Give or take one u or m.) And that was the end of the conversation.

Less than a month later, without fanfare or warning, he handed me an untitled manuscript. “Here,” he said. “I did what you asked. But I don’t know if the bloody thing is any good.”

A few pages in I realized that he had not followed my instructions. In fact, he’d ignored them entirely. This wasn’t a story “set in the world” of The Last Unicorn. Not at all. Here in my hands was the coda the novel had never had. All the old characters were back, but in a fashion I could never have foreseen.