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Only then could he be free of the emptiness that made him want to possess a unicorn.
    Jamie trembled as the waves of emptiness and sorrow continued to wash through him. But at last he was nearly done. Still swaying from the effort, he whispered to the man: “Go back. Go back and find your name. And then—go
home.”
    That was when the sword fell, slicing through his neck.
    It didn’t matter, really, though he felt sorry for his “uncle,” who began to weep, and sorrier still for the soldier who had done the deed. He knew it would be a decade or so before the man could sleep without mind-twisting nightmares of the day he had killed a unicorn.
    But for Jamie himself, the change made no difference. Because he still was what he had always been, what he always would be, what a unicorn had simply been an appropriate shape to hold. He was a being of power and light.
    He shook with delight as he realized that he had named himself at last.
    He turned to the wizard, and was amazed. No longer hampered by mere eyes, he could see that the same thing was true for his enemy—as it was for the girl, as it was for the soldiers.
    They were
all
beings of power and light.
    The terrible thing was, they didn’t know it.
    Suddenly he understood. This was the secret, the unnamed thing his father had been trying to remember: that we are all beings of power and light. And all the pain, all the sorrow—it all came from not knowing this simple truth.
    Why?
wondered Jamie.
Why don’t any of us know how beautiful we really are?
    And then even that question became unimportant, because his father had come to take him home, and suddenly he wasn’t just a unicorn, but was all unicorns, was part of every wise and daring being that had worn that shape and that name, every unicorn that had ever lived, or ever would live. And he felt himself stretch to fill the sky, as the stars came tumbling into his body, stars at his knees and at his hooves, at his shoulder and his tail, and most of all a shimmer of stars that lined the length of his horn, a horn that stretched across the sky, pointing out, for anyone who cared to look, the way to go home.

With His Head Tucked Underneath His Arm
    Fifteen kings ruled the continent of Losfar, and each one hated the others. Old, fat, and foolish, they thought nothing of sending the children of their subjects off on war after war after war, so that the best and the bravest were gone to dust before they ever really lived.
    The young men left behind fell into two groups: those who escaped the wars for reasons of the body—the weak, the crippled, the maimed—and those who avoided the wars for reasons of the mind; those too frightened, too smart, or simply too loving to be caught in the trap the kings laid for them.
    This last category was smallest of all, and a dangerous one to be in. Questioning the wars outright was against the law, and standing up to declare they were wrong was a quick route to the dungeons that lay beneath the palace. So it was only through deceit that those who opposed the wars could escape going off to kill people they had never met, and had nothing against.
    One such was a cobbler’s son named Brion, who had avoided the wars by walking on a crutch and pretending that he was crippled. Yet he chafed under the role he played, for he was not the sort to live a lie.
    â€œWhy do I have to pretend?” he would ask his friend Mikel, an older man who was one of the few who knew his secret. “Why must I lie, when I am right, and they are wrong?”
    But Mikel had no answer. And since much as Brion hated the lie, he hated even more the idea of killing some stranger for the sake of a war he did not believe in, he continued to pretend.
    Â 
    One afternoon when Brion was limping through the marketplace on his crutch, he saw an officer of the king’s army beating a woman because she had fallen in his path. The sight angered him so much that without