Two Hearts
short fiction 2005 The Last Unicorn
Record
| First published | 2005 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status | |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781892391360 |
Synopsis
Two Hearts is a novelette that revisits the world of The Last Unicorn years after that story's events. It follows Sooz, a young girl from a small village that is being terrorized by a griffin, its attacks having escalated from livestock to children. Determined to save her community, Sooz sets out on a journey to seek help from the king, and along the way she crosses paths with Schmendrick the magician and Molly Grue, familiar faces from the earlier tale. When the group reaches the castle, they find King Lír aged and forgetful, but reminding him of his past, and of the unicorn he once loved, rekindles his sense of duty. The story follows the unlikely group as they travel back to Sooz's village to face the threat together, with Sooz growing attached to the elderly king even as he insists on doing what a warrior must.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Last Unicorn
- Series: not part of a registered series (standalone work within its universe)
- Author: Peter S. Beagle
Awards (verified)
- Hugo Award (Best Novelette), 2006: won; Confirmed via thehugoawards.org's own history page.
- Nebula Award (Best Novelette), 2006: won; Confirmed via SFWA's own Nebula database.
Notes
- A novelette-length coda reuniting King Lir, Schmendrick, Molly Grue, and the unicorn Amalthea, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Oct/Nov 2005); later reprinted in The Way Home (2023). Kept Expanded rather than Core -- a short-fiction coda decades after the novel, not part of its original continuous text, the same non-Core treatment given to interstitial/coda short fiction elsewhere in this database (e.g. ACOTAR's A Court of Frost and Starlight).
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within The Last Unicorn (standalone work): position 2 of 3: previous The Last Unicorn (1968) · next The Way Home: Two Novellas from the World of The Last Unicorn (2023)
Sources
← The Last Unicorn dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.