Peter: Fortuna is an old name out of mythology. She was the Roman goddess of fortune, the personification of luck. There’s also a mythical character named Fortunatus who had a purse that was always full of gold coins, no matter how many were taken out. He came to a bad end, as I recall. And Mommy just struck me as a funny, anachronistic name for a witch. She’s probably more of a 20th-century character than anyone else in the book because all that really matters to her is success in show business terms. Mommy Fortuna wants to be famous, which she has never managed, and she knows why she’s never managed it‌—‌she’s not very good. As she says, “trudging through the universe, hauling my homemade horrors, do you think that was my dream when I was young and evil?” Everybody has dreams, even sloppy witches. As for where Rukh’s name came from, I can’t honestly say, except that it’s the Indian word that Kipling used to describe India’s thick jungle in the first story featuring Mowgli. It had a nice guttural sound which stayed with me and seemed to fit the character. I did try to give him some individuality: he’s never liked Schmendrick and he’s joyous at the chance to officially get his hands on his throat, but that’s about it. He was just needed, and he’s got some of the better passages, short as his tenure is.

Connor: Rukh is also one of the variant spellings for roc, the giant bird out of Persian mythology that could supposedly lift an elephant with a single claw. That’s an ironic connection, given what happens to Rukh when the harpy gets loose. And a little amusing as well, since Roc is the American imprint that publishes The Last Unicorn. What about Schmendrick?

Peter: Long before I went back to The Last Unicorn, I used to tell bedtime stories to the children. For my older daughter I made up the adventures of Schmendrick, the world’s worst magician. There were two meanings to his name. It was a parody of the comic strip character Mandrake the Magician, of course, but it was also a word from Yiddish. In that language a schmendrick is somebody out of his depth, the boy sent to do a man’s job, someone who has expanded to the limits of his incapacity. Which was terribly appropriate given Schmendrick’s eternal boyhood at the point we meet him in the story. I tended to get hung up in those days‌—‌on a word, a line, a paragraph‌—‌and I got stuck for nearly a month at the Midnight Carnival. I knew that the unicorn had to meet someone important, but I had no idea who it should be. For weeks. Then Schmendrick walked into the book and I did my usual “moron, idiot, the answer was staring you right in the face all this time, of course!” I seemed to know Schmendrick well, with his mixture of compassion, frustration, and envy, and his desperate fear that he’d be condemned to be immortal by never reaching his real power.