The Unicorn's Riddle

One evening, a boy named Elian was walking home through the Moon-lit Glades, where the grass shone soft silver under the moon and the flowers only ever opened their petals after dark. He had stayed far too long at his grandmother's cottage, and now the light was gone and he needed to cross the wide glade quickly to reach the path that led home. But there, standing right in the very middle of the glade, glowing a soft and steady white in the moonlight, was a unicorn.

Elian had heard of the glade's unicorn. Everyone in the village had. She let no traveller pass across her glade unless they could answer her riddle — and her riddles, everyone said, were so hard and so deep that even the cleverest scholars in all the land, men and women with heads full of books, had turned back at last, scratching their heads and muttering, unable to find the answer.

Elian's heart sank right down into his boots. He was not a clever scholar. He was just an ordinary boy, and not even a very good one at that — he was slow at his sums, he mixed up his letters, and in lessons he nearly always chose the wrong answer, while the other children giggled behind their hands. "I'll never in a hundred years solve a unicorn's riddle," he thought miserably. "I'm simply not clever enough. I'll be stuck here at the edge of this glade all night long."

The unicorn turned her deep, dark, calm eyes upon him, and when she spoke her voice was like a silver bell rung far away. "To cross my glade and go home," she said, "you must first answer me this. What is it that grows greater the more of it you give away, that costs nothing at all to hold, and yet is worth more than every last piece of gold in all of Landorya?"

Elian's stomach twisted itself into an anxious knot. He screwed up his face and tried as hard as he could to think of a clever answer, the sort a scholar might give. Was it treasure? No — no, treasure only shrinks when you give it away, so that couldn't be right. Was it knowledge, perhaps? Maybe... but somehow that didn't feel quite right either. He thought and he strained and he furrowed his brow, and the harder he reached and grasped for a clever answer, the further and further away the answer seemed to slip from him, like a fish darting away in a stream.

So at last, tired and defeated, Elian simply stopped trying to be clever at all. And in the quiet of giving up, he found himself thinking instead about his grandmother, and about why he had stayed so very late at her cottage in the first place. He had stayed because she was old, and often lonely, and he had wanted more than anything for her to feel loved and remembered and not forgotten. And when he had hugged her tight at the door and said goodnight, he had not felt for one single moment as though he had less of anything at all. Quite the opposite. He had felt, walking out into the night, as though somehow he had more.

"I don't know the clever answer," Elian said at last, honestly, looking up at the unicorn. "I'm not good at riddles. But I think... I think maybe it might be love. Because when you give your love away to someone, you don't end up with less of it. You end up with more. And it doesn't cost a single coin to give — but it's worth more than anything in the whole world."

The unicorn was quiet for a long, long moment. And then, very slowly, she lowered her long spiral horn and bowed her shining silver head low before him.

"That," she said softly, "is the answer. The true and only answer. And do you know how many great and famous scholars have stood exactly where you are standing and failed to give it? They come to me with their long clever words and their great important ideas, and they hunt everywhere for the answer — everywhere in all the wide world except the one small place where it has always quietly lived." And she reached out and touched the very tip of her horn, ever so gently, to the middle of Elian's chest, right over his beating heart. "Here. The wisest answers of all were never once in your head, young one. They were always, always here."

Elian felt a warmth go spreading right through him, warmer and brighter than any gold star or word of praise he had ever, ever been given in a lesson. "But I'm not clever," he said quietly. "Truly, I'm not. I get everything wrong at school."

"Ah, but there is far more than one kind of clever in this world," said the unicorn, and her deep eyes were very kind. "Some people are clever with numbers, and some are clever with words, and those are fine and useful things to be. But you, child, are clever with your heart — and that is the rarest and most precious cleverness of them all. For the heart knows things, deep and true things, that the head can never, ever learn."

And with that she stepped gracefully aside, and the tall silver grass parted before him, and the path home lay open and clear, lit gently and kindly all along its length by the moon.

Elian walked the rest of the way home through the softly glowing glade, and he did not feel the least bit ordinary anymore. And the very next day at his lessons, he still chose a wrong answer or two, and the other children still giggled. But somehow it did not sting the way it always used to. Because now he carried a unicorn's secret, tucked warm and safe against his heart: that being clever with numbers is a very fine thing to be — but that being kind, and honest, and true is a kind of cleverness all its own, one that no lesson can ever teach you, and that no one in the whole world can ever take away.