ever confront. We have accomplished what we were born to do, the two of us. I thank you for your death.”
And on that last word, the griffin had him. It was the eagle, lunging up at him, dragging the dead lion half along. King Lír stepped back, swinging the sword fast enough to take off the griffin’s head, but the griffin was faster. The dreadful beak caught him at the waist, shearing through his armor the way an axe would smash through pie crust. There was blood, and worse; she could not have said if the king were dead or alive. Sooz thought the griffin was going to bite him in two.
Schmendrick could do nothing, since he had promised Lír that he would not intervene by magic. Sooz was not a magician, though, and she had not promised anyone anything. The griffin did not see her coming. She had a big rock in her left hand and a dead branch in her right, and the griffin looked up fast when the rock hit it on the side of the neck. It didn’t like that, but it was too busy with King Lír to bother with her. She threw the branch as far as she could, and as soon as the griffin looked away she made a big sprawling dive for the hilt of the king’s sword. She knew she could lift it because she had buckled it on him, but she couldn’t get it free; he was lying on it and was too heavy. She kept pulling on the sword, while Molly kept pulling on her, and the griffin lifted her up and threw her on top of the king, his cold armor so cold against her cheek it was as if his armor had died with him.
Griffins do not speak, as dragons can (but only to heros, Lír had told her). But as the griffin looked into her eyes, it was as if it was telling her that although it would die, it had killed them all, and it would pick their bones before the ravens had his. The people would remember it, and what it did, when there was no one left who would remember her name. So it had won. And there was nothing but that beak and that burning gullet opening over her.
And then there was. Sooz thought it was a white cloud, only traveling so low and so fast that it smashed the griffin off King Lír and and away from Sooz and sent her tumbling into Molly’s arms at the same time. Molly held her tight, and it wasn’t until she wriggled her head free that she saw what had come to them.
They didn’t look anything like horses; Sooz didn’t know how people got that idea. Schmendrick was on his knees, with his eyes closed and his lips moving, as though he was singing. Molly kept whispering, “Amalthea…Amalthea…,” not to Sooz, not to anybody. The unicorn was facing the griffin across the king’s body, dancing with its front hooves, and with its head up. Then it put its head down.
Dying or not, the griffin put up a furious fight. It wasn’t a bit fair, though, and Sooz did not feel sorry for the griffin. With its last strength the griffin flung itself on the unicorn, trying to rake its back and bite down on its neck as it had with the king, but the unicorn reared up, flung the griffin to the ground, whirled and drove its horn straight into the eagle heart.
Schmendrick and Molly raced to King Lír. He was still alive, barely. He did not know them, but he knew Sooz. As he looked past her he saw the unicorn, and his face was suddenly young and happy and wonderful. All you could see in the unicorn’s dark eyes was King Lír. Sooz moved aside so she could get to him, but when she turned back he was gone. She was nine, almost ten; she knew when people were gone.
The unicorn stood over King Lír’s body for a long time. Sooz went off the sit beside Malka, and Molly went with her. Schmendrick stayed by the body of the king, quietly talking to the unicorn. Sooz couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she could tell he was asking for something, a favor. Unicorns can’t talk, either, but after a while it turned its head and looked at him. Schmendrick walked away.
Sooz and Molly talked about Malka, each trying to comfort the other. Sooz did not notice the unicorn until the horn came slanting over her shoulder. The horn touched Malka, just where Sooz had been stroking her, and Malka opened her eyes. It took her a while to understand she was alive, and it took Sooz longer. She only started crying when Malka licked her face.
When Malka saw the unicorn she did a funny thing. She stared at it for a moment, then made a bow or curtsy, in a dog way. The unicorn nosed at her, very gently. It looked at Sooz for the first time; or maybe Sooz looked at it for the first time. What the unicorn’s eyes did was to free her from the griffin’s eyes. The unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world that Sooz was never going to see, and it didn’t matter any more because she had seen it and it was beautiful.
None of them saw the unicorn go. Sooz heard Schmendrick tell Molly: “A dog. I nearly killed myself singing her to Lír, calling her as no other has ever called a unicorn—and she brings back, not him, but the dog. And here I’d always thought she had no sense of humor.”
But Molly told him it was because she loved him, too. That was why she let him go.
Sooz worried that she would never see them again, any more than she would see the king. But again Molly had an answer. She gave Sooz a tune to whistle on her seventeenth birthday, and assured her that someone would come to her. Maybe it would be the greatest magician in the world, or maybe just an old lady with a soft spot for impudent children. Maybe even a unicorn. Because beautiful things will always want to see her again, and will be listening for her. Someone will come.
They took her home, on their way to taking the king to his long home, and Molly reminded her to wait until she is seventeen. Sooz practices the music in her head every day, and even dreams it some nights, but she never whistles it aloud. She talks to Malka about their adventure, because she has to talk to someone. Promises her that on that special day in the special place she has already picked out, Malka will be there with her.
Sooz hopes it is them. A unicorn is very nice, but they are her friends. She wants to feel Molly holding her again, and hear the stories Molly didn’t have time to tell her. She wants to hear Schmendrick singing the old song again:
“Soozli, Soozli,
speaking loozli,
you disturb my oozli-goozli.
Soozli, Soozli,
would you choozli
to become my squoozli-squoozli?”
She could wait.
In “Two Hearts” Beagle gives his readers what they want, more about Schmendrick and Molly and Lír, and especially more about the unicorn. He also gives them a reiteration of some of his most important themes from the earlier work. But the writer of “Two Hearts” is almost forty years older than the writer of The Last Unicorn, and it would be strange indeed if he still saw the world the same way. Indeed, we see that Schmendrick and Molly no longer epitomize what they stated explicitly in The Last Unicorn: that we are what people think us, and we become what we pretend to be. There is no more need for pretense. In “Two Hearts” people do what they must, being who they are. The difference is significant.
It is also significant that the two hearts of the title is a pun in Beagle’s inimitable style. On one level, the two hearts are those of the griffin, the heart of a lion and the heart of an eagle. But to the reader the two hearts are those of Schmendrick and Molly Grue, beating together over the years.
Beagle’s sense of humor is not so overpowering in “Two Hearts.” There is the occasional pun, the occasional snide look back to the earlier text, and the iterated ironic song. But the main purpose here is nostalgia; the reader wants to know whatever happened to Schmendrick and Molly and Lír and the unicorn. And a secondary purpose is looking forward; Beagle sets up his sequel. On her seventeenth birthday, Sooz will whistle Molly’s tune, and someone will come. No doubt the ensuing adventure will include Schmendrick and Molly, and probably the successor to King Lír. The unicorn will figure into the climax, as she did in “Two Hearts.” And I wouldn’t bet against Sooz
