“I’m not a baby,” I said. “I understand. What will happen when I do whistle it?”

Molly smiled at me. She said, “Someone will come to you. Maybe the greatest magician in the world, maybe only an old lady with a soft spot for valiant, impudent children.” She cupped my cheek in her hand. “And just maybe even a unicorn. Because beautiful things will always want to see you again, Sooz, and be listening for you. Take an old lady’s word for it. Someone will come.”

They put King Lír on his own horse, and I rode with Schmendrick, and they came all the way home with me, right to the door, to tell my mother and father that the griffin was dead, and that I had helped, and you should have seen Wilfrid’s face when they said that! Then they both hugged me, and Molly said in my ear, “Remember‌—‌not till you’re seventeen!” and they rode away, taking the king back to his castle to be buried among his own folk. And I had a cup of cold milk and went out with Malka and my father to pen the flock for the night.

So that’s what happened to me. I practice the music Molly taught me in my head, all the time, I even dream it some nights, but I don’t ever whistle it aloud. I talk to Malka about our adventure, because I have to talk to someone. And I promise her that when the time comes she’ll be there with me, in the special place I’ve already picked out. She’ll be an old dog lady then, of course, but it doesn’t matter. Someone will come to us both.

I hope it’s them, those two. A unicorn is very nice, but they’re my friends. I want to feel Molly holding me again, and hear the stories she didn’t have time to tell me, and I want to hear Schmendrick singing that silly song:

Soozli, Soozli,
speaking loozli,
you disturb my oozli-goozli.
Soozli, Soozli,
would you choozli
to become my squoozli-squoozli…?

I can wait.

A Conversation With Peter S. Beagle

Connor Cochran: When The Last Unicorn came out in 1968, it was your third published book. I’d like to put it in context by starting earlier than that, so let’s go back to your first novel, A Fine and Private Place.

Peter S. Beagle: I always think of that as my “state of grace” book. When I look at it now, I see a lot of things that are wrong with it technically, and I see mistakes I’d never make today…and yet, somehow, I got away with it.

Connor: I know that you wrote A Fine and Private Place in college, when you were only 19 years old, and that you sold it to the Viking Press when you were 20. I know that when copies first landed in bookstores you were off spending a year in Europe, following graduation from the University of Pittsburgh. But what happened after the book was published and you came home to New York?