Connor: I left one out. Mabruk, Haggard’s first magician?

Peter: Mabruk is one of my very few Arabic words. It’s the Arabic counterpart of the Hebrew phrase mazel tov. It means “congratulations,” and I just thought it sounded good for a magician. Never throw a word away simply because it’s in another language. You never know when it might be useful.

Connor: Since you really weren’t plotting ahead in a clear-cut fashion, at what point did you realize that the unicorn was going to be turned into a human woman?

Peter: I’m not sure. I know I figured it out before the scene with the Red Bull’s attack, but how much before I can’t tell you. That’s one reason the book was such an incredible task, such a nightmare to write, the fact that I planned almost nothing. I was basically praying that it if I paid close enough attention, the book itself would tell me the story.

Connor: You have said that you didn’t know until quite late in the process where the unicorns were.

Peter: That’s true.

Connor: And yet when the Lady Amalthea and Schmendrick and Molly Grue come to Haggard’s barren throne room for the first time, you have Amalthea staring out at the sea; and when she answers Haggard’s demand to know what she is looking at, Haggard responds “Ah, yes, the sea is always good. There is nothing I can look at for very long, except the sea.”

Peter: I still didn’t know the unicorns were there when I wrote that scene. I was just beginning to establish the relationship between the characters, faking my way through that castle, as unsure of what I was doing as at any other moment in the book.

Connor: So when did you know where the unicorns were?

Peter: It took a long time to figure that out. The run-down house we were living in was in the Santa Cruz hills, near enough to the ocean, and when I wasn’t writing I spent a lot of time looking at landscapes‌—‌sometimes to try and get a sense of the unicorn’s forest, sometimes to just imagine the places she was traveling through. A good bit of the time I spent staring at the ocean, watching the surf coming in. During one of those beach sessions, around the point where I’d written the cat saying that the unicorns were “near and far, far and near…” I began to think “it has to be the sea; there’s no other place.” I know that I skipped the passage where the unicorns come out of the sea when I first got to it. I went on through to the end instead, and then came back and wrote the climax of the book.

Connor: When did you write the witch’s curse? Back during the Hagsgate chapter?

Peter: Yes.

Connor: So you didn’t change that.

Peter: No, that was there.

Connor: Which suggests that your subconscious was pointing you at the sea all along. Do you think there was any sneaky connection deep in your mind between the unicorns being in the surf and that moment in The Lord of the Rings when Frodo is saved at the Ford of Bruinen? The flood that sweeps away the Ringwraiths does take the form of great horses.