The Seat That Was Always Empty

Legend has it… every unicorn is born whole — and some spend their whole lives making room for one more. Geese fly south in their long sky-line. When one of them is too tired to keep up and drops down to rest in a field, another goose drops down with it. It doesn't carry the tired one. It can't. It just lands beside it, and stays, until they can fly again together.

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Harmony is old now. Her muzzle has gone white, and there are silver threads among the roses in her emerald mane, though her coat is still the deep gold of an old coin. She still lives in the little cottage with the garden gate that doesn't lock, and her hooves are still properly rough. Down the road, the Old Hall belongs to everyone — the portrait hall is a dance floor, the marble pond has frogs in it. Every evening at dusk, in every valley, there are long tables now, set by gentle robots, full of unicorns sitting down together. Nobody is hungry. Nobody needs a single thing.

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So there is nothing left for Harmony to give. Every table has room. Every plate is full. But she still does the one thing she has always done. At the end of every table she sits at, she sets one more chair — a small gilt chair from the Old Hall, gone shabby at the corners — and nobody ever sits in it. Her granddaughter Poppy, who talks enough for six, teases her about it. "Grandma, there's room for everyone. Who's the chair for?" Harmony smiles. "Whoever comes."

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But Harmony has always felt what others feel a little too easily — the stranger's empty saddlebags, the careful smile in the portrait hall. And sitting at the long table one autumn night, with everyone laughing and the soup going round, she feels it again: something missing, the way you feel a step that isn't there in the dark. She counts the faces down the table. She counts them twice. Her grandson Rook is not there. He is never there.

5

Rook has everything. Food comes to his door. His room is warm. And every evening he goes into the Grove — the quiet virtual world Echo built — and eats his supper there, alone, in a garden of his own making, with the headset on. He isn't sad, he tells her, when she asks at his door. He doesn't need anything. "It's quiet in there," he says. "Everyone out there is so loud." Then he puts the headset back on, politely, and the door clicks shut.

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So Harmony does what she knows. She gives. She brings him a basket of the best bread at the table. A warm cloak from the Old Hall's oldest chest. A brand-new headset, the finest the Labs make. Rook thanks her every time, kindly, the way you'd thank someone for something you already have three of. He eats his supper alone in the Grove. The basket sits on his windowsill. The cloak hangs on the hook. Harmony walks home past the pond, and stops.

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On the marble pond, the geese have come down to rest on their way south. One of them, very small, can't keep up — it has dropped behind, on the far side, alone by the reeds. As Harmony watches, a second goose lifts off from the middle of the flock and flies, low, all the way across the water, and lands beside the small one. It doesn't do anything. It just stays. Harmony stands at the rim a long time. "Oh," she says. "It isn't things anymore. It's time."

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The next evening, instead of going to the long table, she walks to Rook's door. Before she knocks, she stands on the step and asks, out loud, the way the old villager taught her over burnt bread: Will this help me? Will this help others? Will this help the world? Then she knocks, and when Rook opens the door she says, "May I sit with you? I won't talk." He shrugs. She sits down on his floor — the way she sat on the portrait hall floor once — and bows her head for a headset.

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Her friends don't understand. "Harmony, you're the heart of the table," they say. "Everyone asks where you are." Her own daughter, Rook's mother, takes her aside: "He's fine, Mother. He has everything. Let him be." Poppy tells her straight: "Grandma, you're missing the soup." Harmony pats Poppy's cheek, and takes her shabby gilt chair, and carries it down the road to Rook's door, and goes in, and sits, and puts the headset on.

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Inside the Grove, Rook's garden is very quiet. There's a pond in it, with no rim, and the water moves. She is terrible at walking in the Grove — she walks into the same tree four times. Rook laughs, the first time she has heard him laugh in a year, and shows her how. Everything in the garden is his own making, and the one tree he borrowed from someone else's world has a small sign under it with their name. They don't talk much. They sit by his pond in the evenings and eat their suppers. Some nights she brings soup. Some nights he makes the pond do something wonderful, just to see her face.

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And once Harmony has felt one missing one, she feels them everywhere. At every long table in every valley there is one seat nobody sits in — and somewhere nearby, one unicorn eating alone. A miller who stopped coming after his wife passed on. A shy foal who hides under the stairs at suppertime. A painter who forgot how to stop working. Harmony tells her friends, and they start to feel them too. One by one they get up from the loud tables and go and sit down with the quiet ones. Someone offers to pay the quiet ones to come to the tables instead; Harmony shakes her head. "You can't buy someone's time," she says. "You can only give them yours."

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Then the harvest supper comes — the great one at the Old Hall, every leaf in the long table, the whole valley — and Harmony decides that this year Rook will come. She knocks early. She talks him into it. She walks him in through the open gates herself, and the whole hall turns. Someone shouts "Rook came!" and the fiddlers strike up. Two hundred faces beam at him at once; someone pushes a plate at him, someone nudges him in the ribs. He goes white. He backs out through the door and runs all the way home. When Harmony gets there the window is dark and the Grove is locked from the inside, and he won't let her in. Not tonight. She sits on his step in the cold. And from the Old Hall, slowly, comes Porter, the old delivery robot — very old now, one knee squeaking — that once stood at the village gate every morning, waiting to be asked. Nobody asked it. It carries the shabby gilt chair from the end of the harvest table, sets it down beside Rook's door, and stands beside it, arms empty, and waits.

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Harmony walks the long way home, past the Old Hall's oldest edge, into the walled garden the gardeners forgot. She sweeps the leaves from the ten thousand tiles with her old rough hoof: You were never separate, little one. The harvest supper is still going on behind her. Rook's window is dark. Does Harmony rush back to the harvest table and fill it, keep her hooves on the ground and sit the night out on Rook's step — or breathe like the waves, here on the tiles?

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Harmony goes the slow way. Once Rook lets her in again, it's one evening a week, every week, on his floor, in his garden, by his moving pond. They don't talk much. Years go by. He grows tall. The headset gets older; so does she. When her legs grow too old for the road, she gives Rook the gilt chair outright, and the habit with it; neither was ever hers to keep. Porter comes too, most weeks, and stands by the door with the gilt chair, and nobody tells it to, and nobody tells it not to.

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One autumn night, at the harvest supper in the Old Hall, Harmony counts the table out of habit — and stops. At the end, in the shabby gilt chair, sits Rook, very tall, eating soup, with the quiet miller on one side of him and a shy foal from under the stairs on the other. He catches her eye and dips his horn. Harmony doesn't say a word. On the marble pond outside, the geese are coming down to rest, all together.

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For love was never only what we give — it was always who we sit beside, and for how long. Sleep now, little heart. Somebody is on their way to sit with you. You were never separate, little one.

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