Unicorn Seasons

by Janni Lee Simner

  The unicorn kicked up its hooves. When they hit the ground again, sparks flew up from the patio. It turned from me and ran into the trees.

  I expected it to run away, to jump the fence and never return. But before it got that far it whirled and raced back toward me. Halfway to me it whirled away once more, running wildly through the trees. Flickers of flame trailed behind it, leaving gold sparks in the air where it passed. Dry leaves crackled beneath its feet. My palm still burned. Any moment I expected the leaves to catch fire and burn, too. My heart pounded hard in my chest.

  Yet I kept watching. The unicorn was the wildest, most frightening thing I’d ever seen—but also the most beautiful. Soon I realized there was a pattern to its running, one that kept it from ever taking the same path twice. It wasn’t just running. It was dancing, a fiery dance like nothing I’d ever seen before.

  The burning in my hand spread through the rest of my body, dulling to a smoldering ache as it did. Something about that ache urged me forward. I wanted, more than anything, to follow, to dance with the unicorn.

  I watched it for a few seconds more, memorizing its pattern, learning the steps of its dance.

  Then I took a deep breath and ran after it.

  As I drew close the unicorn spun to face me, blocking my path, casting gold light on the trees and grass and weeds all around us. I skidded to a halt. Heat made my shirt stick to my skin, like in the middle of a sweltering summer day. The unicorn snorted, and its steamy breath stung my cheek. It whirled away and continued running.

  I ran after it again, but again it turned to stop me. I took a step forward, but the unicorn didn’t move. It didn’t want me to join its dance.

  Tears stung at the corners of my eyes; I fiercely brushed them away. The smoldering heat inside me turned up a notch. With that heat came anger, fiercer than the ordinary anger I sometimes felt around Dad or Karen or the kids at school. Why should I have to keep from dancing just because someone else—even a unicorn—told me not to?

  If the unicorn wouldn’t let me dance with it, I decided, I’d just have to dance on my own.

  I looked at the sky. A huge, nearly-full yellow moon had risen over the trees. For a moment I stared at it, not sure how to begin. Then I chose a direction, and I ran.

  At first I felt kind of silly, running every which way with no real purpose. But then I began to find patterns of my own, directions in which I wanted to go. I ran faster. Leaves crunched beneath my feet, and I kicked them up all around me. Wind brushed my cheek, threw my hair into my face. Trees flew by, flashes of red and yellow, sometimes lit by the unicorn’s light, sometimes not.

  The hot embers within me turned to a dancing fire, urging me on, so fast I felt as if I were flying. I laughed aloud, and the sound was like timber catching flame. I looked around for the unicorn, wanting to show it that I could dance just fine without it, that I could run as fast as I wanted.

  The unicorn stood at the edge of the patio, watching me. I stopped short and stared back, meeting its fiery eyes with my own.

  For several heartbeats neither of us moved. The moon inched higher in the sky, turning from yellow to silver-white. Then the unicorn nodded, a gesture that was surprisingly serious and respectful. I had the sudden strange feeling that it approved of my running, that it had wanted me to run all along. But if that was true, why had it gotten in my way?

  Without warning, the unicorn reared back and roared again. Leaves rustled wildly around us. The unicorn’s horn flared, so bright I had to shut my eyes. Against my closed eyelids I felt a searing flash of light and heat.

  The heat faded, leaving the night cool once more. When I opened my eyes, I stood alone in the yard. The air was heavy with the chill scent of autumn—and, more faintly, the memory of fire and ash.

  “Stacey?” The voice was Karen’s, calling from the bedroom. I started slowly toward the window, not sure I was ready to talk with—or be with—anyone else yet. It was the first time I could ever remember wanting to be alone.

  Maybe for some things you had to be alone. Like to run as fast as you could, or to dance with burning fire.

  Maybe being alone was the only way to see a unicorn.

  “What are you doing out there?” Karen looked down at me as if I were crazy, as if she hadn’t climbed out the window plenty of times herself, as recently as last summer. “Couldn’t you just use the door, like normal people?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead I reached over the window sill to climb back inside. I braced a foot against the house, but slipped as I tried to scramble up. I must have been more tired than I’d thought from all that running. Karen reached out and helped pull me in, as if I were still a little kid.

  “What happened to your hand?” she asked. I glanced down. A bright red welt crossed my palm, where the unicorn’s mane had burned me.

  “Are you all right?” Karen sounded almost worried.

  I shrugged. “What do you care?” Karen had made it clear she didn’t want anything to do with me, after all.

  Karen looked puzzled. “Of course I care about you. You’re my sister.”

  “Then why don’t you want to do stuff together anymore?”

  Suddenly Karen seemed uncomfortable. “Caring and wanting to be together all the time aren’t the same thing, you know?” She stared at me, as if that should have made perfect sense. “Sometimes a person gets tired of having a shadow.”

  I thought of the unicorn, not letting me follow, but not minding, even approving, of my running on my own. All of a sudden Karen’s words did make sense, at least a little. All of a sudden, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be her shadow, anyway.

  Karen’s posters were still around us, a few of them on my wall, most of them on my bed. Quiet silvery unicorns stared at us through gentle eyes, birds and butterflies and rainbows all dancing around them.

  No, I thought, those weren’t unicorns. The golden, fiery creature outside had been a unicorn. Unicorns weren’t gentle or tame. Where had I, or Karen, or anyone else ever gotten the idea that they were?

  “You can have your posters back,” I said.

  Karen just shook her head. “I already told you I don’t want them. They’re so fake.”

  “I know they are. But they’re still your posters, not mine.” They always had been, for all that I’d helped Karen choose them, for all that I’d tried to believe in them just because she did.

  I glanced out the window. The moon was high now, the autumn leaves bright beneath it—though not as bright as they’d been by the unicorn’s light. I touched my palm. The skin was cool. The unicorn’s fire wasn’t in my hand anymore. It still burned, though, somewhere deeper inside me.

  I grinned at Karen. Then I reached for the posters above my bed.

  And I started tearing them down.

  Winter

  Windwood Rose

  Draw near, and I’ll tell you a story. It’s not a story your parents have told you, sitting on the edge of your bed long ago; if they knew it once, they’ve forgotten. And who could blame them, busy with children of their own, if they quickly lost the magic of the still, soft snow on a long winter night? Not I, and not the girl of the story.

  Her name was Miranda Windwood Rose—a fine name on paper, but another thing entirely when spoken out loud. When all three of her names were spoken at once, they turned hollow and strange, echoing through the air around them like wind through thick leaves. Sometimes the air tried to answer, whispering back in a language Miranda didn’t understand.

  For her first few years only Miranda’s parents spoke her full name, and not knowing anything else, Miranda accepted it easily enough. But on the first day of school, when her teacher read slowly, “Miranda? Miranda Windwood Rose?” things were different. The teacher hesitated at the sudden rustling whisper that filled the classroom; the other children looked nervously around. Miranda knew then that her name wasn’t the sort of name she could carry to school with her year after year. She looked down at her desk and mut
tered, “Just Randi, please.” Her teacher wrote something in her book, the whispering stopped, and that was the end of it.

  Miranda feared her parents would be angry and maybe a little hurt at her decision. But Miranda’s parents knew that names have magic in them, and that hidden names have more magic than most. They smiled when Miranda said she’d asked to be called Randi; they even followed the teacher’s lead and called her the same. They knew that her real name would still be there, waiting for her, whenever she was ready to claim it.

  So the whispering went away, at home and at school. The music, however, was harder to leave behind.

  Miranda’s father played guitar with wild, fierce, fingers; her mother sang with a low, steady voice. Miranda fell asleep each night with their music in her ears, and more often than not it shaped her dreams. Some nights she dreamed she danced to her father’s guitar in a bright yellow field, and as she danced the tall grass made way beneath her feet. Other nights she dreamed she listened to her mother’s singing beside a swift stream, and when Miranda stared at the water it swirled beneath her gaze, as if a large stone lay just beneath the surface. Still other nights she didn’t remember her dreams at all, only that so long as music ran behind them, their landscapes changed for her.

  When Miranda was very young, the music comforted her. Many nights she stayed up listening, and fell asleep in her mother’s lap or at the foot of her father’s chair. She looked forward to seeing where each night’s dreaming would take her.

  But at school the rhythm of the music jarred against the rhythms of the schoolyard, with its creaking swingsets and jump rope rhymes. Sometimes out on the black asphalt a snatch of music pulled her away, to some strange hillside in some far-off land. When she returned, the other children would be looking at her and laughing.

  “What’s wrong with you?” a boy asked once, the year that Miranda turned eight. He was an ordinary child, with pale blue eyes and the not-at-all unusual name of Robert.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Miranda said.

  “You don’t answer when people talk to you,” Robert insisted. “Or when you do answer, you stare at them funny. You have really creepy eyes, you know?”

  When Miranda went home that night she stood by the mirror for a long time, staring at her own eyes. They were black and very deep, and when she looked at them too long she got dizzy. When she looked even longer, she saw the fragments of her dreams swirling in their depths. She heard music, too, not her mother’s singing or her father’s guitar, but a new tune—like a wooden flute or a deep running stream—that somehow belonged to her alone.

  She blinked once and the dreams faded, blinked twice and they were gone. She was glad of it. She suddenly wasn’t so sure she wanted to have strange dreams or hear strange music. Somehow she knew that no odd dreams lay behind the other children’s eyes. She didn’t know whether that meant something was wrong with her or something was wrong with them, but all at once the music scared her.

  She tried to ask her parents about it. But her parents weren’t like other parents, any more than Miranda was like other children. They didn’t give the answers other parents would give.

  “What am I seeing?” she asked her father one night, as he sat by the fire and carved a small wooden box with patterns of flowers, some of which Miranda knew, others which she’d never seen. He sold his carvings sometimes, though just as often he decided to keep them once he was through.

  Her father didn’t answer out loud. Instead he set the box aside and stared at her, through eyes that were sharp and flickering blue. Then he lifted his guitar from near the hearth and played. Miranda saw fields of wildflowers, swaying even though the air around them was still; she saw distant white clouds racing across a wide sky. She forced herself back to the room, focusing on the fire and the flickering flames. Her father set down the guitar, returned to his carving, and didn’t say anything more.

  “What am I hearing?” she asked her mother one bright morning, while her mother knelt in the garden and planted spring vegetables. Her mother didn’t look at her, but as she continued planting she sang. Miranda saw the sun setting over lush, tree-filled mountains, trailing streamers of light in every color imaginable and a few others besides. She heard music, somewhere inside her, the same hollow wooden music she’d heard at the mirror.

  She turned and fled, covering her ears as she ran to her room. The music only grew louder. Her mother didn’t follow to see what was wrong. She just quietly turned back to her planting.

  Miranda lay awake most of that night, and many nights after, but though she didn’t dream, the music wouldn’t go away. It couldn’t go away, for it wasn’t really music at all; it was magic. Her parents knew this, but they never sat down on the edge of Miranda’s bed and explained it to her. They knew that magic doesn’t make more sense when you try to explain it. Magic needs to take root on its own, to grow slowly and steadily until one day the young mage suddenly says, “Oh, of course,” and wonders why she didn’t realize all along.

  At least, that’s how it worked when Miranda’s parents were children. But they had lived in a different land then, one where mages were as common as oak trees. No one had needed to talk about magic, and it wasn’t very frightening at all.

  Miranda was as scared of being strange and different as of the music in her head. She did her best to fit in; she watched the other children closely and imitated them. But someone who’s so afraid of missing a step that her eyes are always on the person in front of her is never truly graceful. Miranda grew into a quiet, tentative girl. The other children laughed less as she got older, but they never felt very comfortable around her. None of them counted her among their close friends, to write notes to in class, or talk with on the way home from school, or whisper secrets with late into the night.

  At fourteen Miranda was tall and thin, with dark hair and darker eyes that were quite beautiful if you could bear to look at them. That year her birthday fell on the last day before Christmas vacation. As she sat in one class after another, struggling to focus on her teachers and not on the music, snow started falling outside. By noon the world was blanketed in white. By two o’clock the snow was so deep that the school sent everyone home.

  Now I never said there was no magic in our world, only that there weren’t any mages. Magic here isn’t woven into people. It’s woven into the stars, strung across the sky. It’s woven into the waterfalls that flow year after steady year, wearing jagged rocks smooth. It’s woven into the snow—especially the first snow, falling on the shortest day of the year. So what happened to Miranda next didn’t happen because of her magic. It happened because of the earth’s magic, though she never knew that.

  As she walked across the schoolyard, coat drawn tight against the wind, the swaying gray branch of a bare tree caught her eye. There was music in that branch, and Miranda stopped, startled. She’d never heard the music anywhere but in her mother’s voice and her father’s playing and her own head. Then she got angry. It was the beginning of vacation, and she wanted to go home like everyone else, to fall backwards onto her bed and count the days until Christmas. She forgot, for the moment, that on short winter nights her parents played their music more loudly than usual.

  Miranda looked fiercely away, but the schoolyard was gone, the world a white field bordered only by trees. No breeze stirred the winter afternoon.

  You or I would have turned and run then, searching desperately for home, for someone to set the world back in its proper place. But Miranda was weary of being haunted by strange dreams. She stood as tall as she could, threw her head back, and opened her mouth. She meant to demand that whatever had snatched her away send her back at once and keep the music for itself. What came out was that very music, though, a deep hollow tune that echoed across the field. Miranda pressed her lips back together and looked wildly around.

  Standing in front of her—so close she didn’t know how she’d missed it, so still she didn’t know how she saw it, even then—was a silver-whit
e creature, glistening like the dew that catches the first rays of morning sun before it dissolves into day. But the sun was setting, and instead of dissolving the creature solidified, until its large silver eyes met Miranda’s dark ones.

  No horn sprang from the animal’s forehead, but you’ll have to believe me when I say it was a unicorn. I know no other word for a creature that steps so lightly on the crystal snow, not for lack of weight, but because somehow both creature and snow are bound by the same magic.

  Miranda had never seen anything so beautiful, in her dreams or out of them. She stared at the creature, not daring to breathe, afraid she’d scare it away. Then she shivered and all her breath rushed from her at once. Instead of running the unicorn let out a high silver laugh, a laugh which held the same music as the grey branch, as her mother’s singing, as her father’s guitar. At the sound of the music Miranda forgot the creature’s beauty and grew angry all over again.

  The unicorn dropped its eyes, then raised them again, looking Miranda over from her grey boots to her dark hair. “Miranda Windwood Rose,” it said, in a serious voice that didn’t match its laugh at all.

  The air grew even stiller then, as if holding its breath and waiting for the answer to some question. Very far away, Miranda heard a sound like whispering leaves.

  She pushed her hands deep into her pockets. “No,” she said. “Just Randi.”

  The unicorn stared at Miranda for a while, and Miranda dared not fidget before it. Somehow she knew the slightest movement would upset some balance that could never be set right again. The unicorn lifted one hoof and set it down; the balance was upset after all. Miranda looked to the sparkling snow.

  “Miranda Windwood Rose is a good name,” the creature said, its words brittle in the chill air. “It is a magic name.”