Unicorns? Get Real!

Gortle.”
    Gortle blinked and thought that his mistress knew him too well. “Well, you can always hope, dear. What’s life without hope?” He paused, smiled, and then whipped out a lanyard. “Or without rope.”
    “Where’d you get this, Gortle?”
    “I made it for you. Had a feeling you wouldn’t be up to doing one yourself.”
    “You’re too good to me,” Gundersnap said, taking the lanyard. She looked at her friend, who now sat next to her sharing the large velvet cushion. The flames of the campfire cast bright shadows across his whiskered face. “Did you always hope, Gortle?”
    “Hope for what?”
    “Hoped when you were young? Did you hope to grow taller, to not be a dwarf?”
    “Of course I did. Don’t know a dwarf who hasn’t hoped for that.” He chuckled softly and looked up at the starry sky.
    “But then when you didn’t grow, did you stop hoping?”
    Gortle’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “Stopped hoping for what I couldn’t be, but tried to hope for what I could be.”
    “And what was that?”
    “A decent man with some learning. No one in my family had ever read a book. That to me is a lot worse than being short. That’s how I got my job in your mum’s court. I was the librarian. I could scramble up all those bookshelves good as any monkey, except I read.” He laughed.
    “So why aren’t you still doing that? Why are you just used for tumbling and all that vile silly stuff?”
    “Your mum got Arthur.”
    “Arthur the Giant?”
    “Yes, she had wanted him for court entertainment, but he was not very entertaining.”
    “I can believe that!” Gundersnap said. There was never a man with a more doleful face than Arthur.
    “But he was tall and could reach for those books. So I became the entertainment.”
    “But that’s so sad. You loved working in the library.”
    “Hey, I can still read, can’t I? Just have Arthur fetch the books for me now.” He paused and then gasped, “Look, a shooting star!”
    “I see it!” Gundersnap exclaimed.
    “That means good luck.”
    “I need it.” Then she thought, Or Menschmik needs it!
    “All right, Princesses.” Frankie had put aside her guitar and ambled to where the princesses sat at the campfire. “We always set out a watch on roundup to look for the gleam of the unicorns. You can split up into twos and take two-hour shifts until dawn. Anyone spots a gleam, come immediately—that’s boute mooey in Chantillip, and how do you say ‘immediately’ in Slobo, Gundersnap?” There was a long pause. Gortle nudged her. “Gundersnap! You paying attention?”
    “Oh, sorry, Frankie.”
    “How do you say ‘get me immediately’ in Slobo?”
    “Garschmicht,” Gundersnap replied.
    “ Garschmicht ,” Frankie repeated. “Oh! I like that Slobo talk. It’s a language you can really bite into—like a good hunk of meat.”
    Princess Gundersnap and Princess Alicia agreed to take the shift from two in the morning until dawn.
    “Oh, I hope we spot something.” Alicia yawned as she and Gundersnap took their posts. “And do you think it’s true—this rumor that boys from Camp Burning Shield might be out here somewhere looking for a herd too?”
    “Alicia, it’s unicorns we’re after, not boys. Besides, the boys have no luck with them. Frankie says they can’t ride them at all.”
    “Might be fun to see them try,” Alicia said.
    “Ya ya,” Gundersnap replied in a distracted voice. “Alicia,” she said. “You know how my mudder does not believe in unicorns.”
    “As you have said many a time.”
    “I’ve been wondering. Do you think that the reason the stitches got all messed up and the tapestry didn’t work is because Mudder does not believe in unicorns?”
    Alicia looked straight at her friend. “Princess Gundersnap, it is what you believe that counts, not what your mother believes. Do you believe in unicorns?”
    “Well, yes, I mean, I think so. Why would we be on roundup if they don’t exist?”
    “But do you really believe in them and their magic?”
    “Frankie didn’t really say anything about their magic. Well, the faction stuff sounds sort of like magic.”
    “Does she have to say it for you to believe in it?”
    Gundersnap furrowed her brow. She turned to Alicia again. “Can magic be practical?”
    “Practical?” Alicia sighed. This was so like Gundersnap. “I don’t know, but even if it isn’t, what does it matter?”
    Gundersnap had no answer to that. And what was magic, anyhow? Gundersnap suddenly