Petal

Legend has it… every unicorn is born whole — fully awake, fully loved, and connected to everything alive. The sea goes out and comes back, twice a day. The sun lifts a little of it away. The wind carries that up the coast, past the last town anyone has a name for, and into the fog over the Long Falls. And on a white beach at the end of the river, one small pink unicorn is letting go of a feather, to see how far it goes.

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Petal is one of these special unicorns, and lives with a loving old guardian unicorn in a salt house at the end of the beach, where the river ends. She is as pink as the inside of a shell. Every boat on this shore is patched with rags, and every boat leaks. Her guardian's hooves ache before every storm, so nobody here ever needs a forecast. In the corner stands Buoy: a humanoid tide robot, round and yellow, with two short legs, two thick mitten hands, and one round orange eye-light. It reads the tide out loud every morning, whether anyone is listening or not. Every night, the lamp on the beach post stays on.

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Every morning, Petal and her guardian walk the tide line to the salt pans. "Where does the river come from?" Petal asks. "Up," says her guardian. "Past the dunes, past the salt flats, over the Long Falls." "And then?" Her guardian flicks an ear. "Fog. Nobody has ever come back down to say." She stops to smell the wind. "But I'll tell you this. That sea gives a little of itself to the sky every single day, and it has never once run out. So somebody's sending it back." Petal looks at the river for a long time.

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That winter, Petal builds the smallest balloon anyone on the shore has ever seen, no bigger than a pumpkin, every seam stitched with thread she waxed herself. Under it, in a shell, she ties a note in her roundest print: WHO IS THERE? On the first warm morning she carries it up the dune, to where the sea wind begins to climb. She lets go. It turns once, like a seed that has made up its mind. Then it goes up, and the fog takes it. Petal stands there until her hooves are cold, and goes home, and starts another one.

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All spring she sends one balloon every new moon. Nothing comes back. Of course nothing comes back; the wind only blows one way. Then one still morning at the end of summer, something bumps against the beach post at the river mouth. It's a boat no bigger than a loaf of bread, sealed tight with something golden that smells like nothing on this shore. Inside, rolled in wax paper, is a note. It says: WHO IS THERE? The marks around the words aren't hoofprints. They're scratches, three in a row. Petal puts her nose to the golden seam and breathes in. Forest. She has never seen a forest.

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Petal reads it to her guardian, twice. Then she writes back on the next balloon, and draws herself underneath: PETAL. I AM A UNICORN. I READ THE TIDE. WHO ARE YOU? By the first snow a little boat comes down the river, with a drawing in it: four legs, two wings, and two short horns. ROSIN. I AM A DRAGON. WHY DO YOU HAVE ONE HORN? Petal laughs so hard she sits down in a salt pan. WHY DO YOU HAVE TWO? she writes. So it begins: balloons going up, boats coming down, a letter each way every moon.

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Petal keeps the letters in a shell box, and reads them to Buoy, who holds the lamp. Rosin lives where the river begins, under a wall of blue ice that saves up the whole winter's snow. One day Petal writes about the old days, when her guardian was small and the tide pools ran orange every spring, and nobody here ever knew why. The next boat is a long time coming. It says: It was us. The orange was our mine. I am sorry. What do you need? Petal reads it three times. All her life, upstream was just the word for where the trouble came from. She takes a fresh label and sticks it on the box: UPSTREAM HAS A NAME.

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The Naysayers neigh and neigh. They gather at the fence rail while Petal waxes her thread. "There's nothing past the fog." "Grow up and get a real job." "A boat from nowhere, and she thinks she has a friend." Petal sets the needle down and says the three questions out loud, the way every foal does before a hard thing: Will this hurt or help myself? Will this hurt or help others? Will this hurt or help the world? Then she writes it in her plainest print: It runs clear now. Thank you for stopping. We have salt, and wind, and not one tree. She looks at the loudest Naysayer, a gray mare with a torn ear. "Did you ever go and see?" Petal asks. The mare's ears go back. She doesn't answer. She doesn't neigh again that day.

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The next boat is heavier. The letter says: We have pine and pitch, and every jar in our valley is thirsty for salt. Petal sits down on a salt sack. Nothing a unicorn builds is ever sold, so she doesn't write a price. She writes on a slate: ONE SACK OF SALT, GIVEN FIRST. WHATEVER COMES BACK, COMES BACK. Only a sack can't ride a balloon. She walks the foot of the falls with Buoy for nine days, and there, under the moss, she finds an old stair, cut in the rock, going up into the fog. She never climbs it without a rope, and Buoy on the other end.

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The first sack goes up the old stair on Buoy's back, one step at a time, with Petal roped behind it. Halfway up the fog thins, and there's a meadow on a shelf of the cliff, full of flowers nobody has a name for. And standing in it is somebody just as pink as she is, with two small wings and two short horns. An old robot the color of wet rope stands behind her with a barrel on its shoulder. "You're small," says Petal. "You're pink," says Rosin. They stare. Then they both start laughing and can't stop. "You wrote first." "No, you wrote first." It takes them till supper to work it out: the first two letters passed each other in the fog.

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Word spreads. By spring there's a sack every week, pitch on every boat on the shore, and two more waiting on her slate. A shadow falls across the slate. A Legendary Unicorn — star-flecked, golden-winged — steps carefully around the salt pans and kneels to sniff a barrel of pitch. "My teacher had a friend who breathed fire," she says. "She walked out of the sea to meet her." Petal's heart thuds like a hoof on a wooden bridge. "What did she say?" The Legendary Unicorn smiles. "She told me to breathe. I didn't listen for years. Some builders grow on what a shore can spare. Some grow on something sweeter. Come — I'll show you where builders like us grow."

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The Legendary Unicorn teaches Petal about a secret place called Venture Valley, where special unicorns eat enormous amounts of a sweet and delicious food, called Venture Capital, to become legendary. She breaks off a piece — honey and lightning — and keeps it just out of reach. "It makes ideas grow tall very fast," she says. "Only roots make them stand." A letter in every sky, the Valley says. Ten thousand balloons by spring. So Petal builds them, and eats the sweet food faster than the roots can grow. Forty stitchers give her their whole winter. A good balloon wants a calm day and a test flight. She gives them neither. On the first night, all ten thousand go up at once, into a wind that's turning. Over the mountain every seam lets go. Ten thousand balloons come down on the ice in one night. No boat comes. Not that week, not that month. Ten thousand balloons gone, forty stitchers' winter gone, and the sweet food gone. The shell box has gone in the sea with the last of the cloth. Buoy wades out on its last bit of battery, bobbing, up to its eye-light, and comes back with the box, and holds it out to her. Petal doesn't take it. Buoy stands there dripping, its light fading, until she does.

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Buoy turns, and its round light blinks up the old stair — once, twice — until Petal follows. Up through the spray, behind the Long Falls, into a hollow in the rock — and stops. The hollow is breathing. Cold air sighs in past her ears… and out again, slow as sleep. On the wall, worn soft by a thousand years of spray, two lines are cut side by side. One was cut by a hoof: Breathe in slow as the wave that climbs. One was cut by something sharp: Breathe in slow as the bellows fill. The sky is empty behind her. And all that spring the tide comes in black, mile after mile of it, smelling of burned forest, and she doesn't know why. Does Petal rush up the mountain and start picking up every scrap right now, keep all four hooves on the ground and see to the ones she owes first — or breathe with the cave?

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Petal carries the dream home instead: long mornings on the beach, the tide going out, no hurry at all. She gives back what she can of the sweet food, a little every month, with a letter saying thank you, and no more. She thanks all forty stitchers door to door, and makes good every day they gave her, before she buys so much as a needle. Buoy follows her from the pans to the post all morning, not helping, just there. Then she stitches one more little balloon, the smallest since the first, and puts one line in it: I am coming up with a basket. Is that all right?

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She finds Rosin up on the ice, already picking, with a basket of her own, and her claws black with pitch from a beach she means to scrub next. "I thought you'd never write again," says Rosin. They start at the same rock. A yard a day, and nobody counts. Neighbors come up the old stair to help and stay to learn; every scrap of cloth goes down to be stitched again, and every string goes into a net. The gray mare with the torn ear comes last, asks her first question in twenty years, and stays. It takes three summers. One evening the ice is clean from end to end, and Petal reads the last letter to her guardian. "Well?" her guardian says. "Where does the river come from?" "From Rosin," says Petal.

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…and one day, every balloon they send will connect — and every sea on every map will turn out to be one water, going around. Sleep now, little friend. The river at your door was somebody's snow. Buoy is reading the tide. Breathe in slow as the bellows fill.

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