Of course, it was the Nutcracker who smashed the nut Krakatuk to smithereens and so liberated again the beauty of Princess Pirlipat which had been confined in the vengeful prison of Krakatuk whose walls were stronger than stone. However, this did not solve the problem, but simply added on another layer of enmity to what was already a many tiered cake of misery and hatred, ambition and hurt vanity. So, wherever there were mice and toys, a Nutcracker and a Seven-Headed, Seven-Crowned Mouse King, the battle was joined again, over and over again, as if it were something new and wonderful and necessary rather than just the retelling and redoing of an old and horrible story, one that need not have been in the first place.

Clutching her white rabbit to her chest, Elise came down the stairs in the house in the midst of the snow in the Old Okanogan in the silence of the spell of her own heart, not knowing what would greet her as she opened the door into the living room where the old toy cabinet was set. Imagine her surprise when she pulled back the knob of the door and saw the toys streaming down out of the cabinet to take up their battle ranks against an array of mice that came marching armed to their mouse whiskers across the very same wooden floor where the snow leopard had leapt and the white rabbit had danced its jig just a few hours ago. There was hubbub and confusion everywhere. A battle was being joined in dreadful earnest.

Elise feared for the Nutcrackers, especially the one that Druid Meyer had given her just a year ago and with which she was still more than a little bit in love. She knew her brother Eric loved his Hussars, all the regiments of his toy soldiers, all their gleaming finery and weaponry. She knew that he loved the promise and prospects of conquest. Being a devoted sister, she loved, or tried to love, what he loved, but sometimes she could not help but wonder what sort of creature he was, this brother of hers who could be both so kind and so cruel. It was not that she was never angry herself, but rather that she seemed to have a different kind of memory that made it impossible for her to forget her love when she was angry. She could never give herself as purely and completely to anything as Eric could. This often made her feel inferior.

Watching the battle that suddenly and surprisingly surged there before her eyes, Elise found herself favoring one side over the other deep in that December night. Yet, something in her heart revolted against the ferocity of it all, so that even her own favoring of the one side, of the Nutcracker and the toy soldiers, frightened her. She felt a certain troubled compassion for all who fought and fell that gave her pause.

Might she not just as well have been born a mouse as a little girl? How great was the difference between one creature and another? Was there not a thread that bound all of life together? As she stood and watched the battle, fascinated in spite of herself, Elise heard the wind pick up outside of the house and wondered if perhaps now it was sweeping the sky clean so that the stars would once more be visible.

It so happened that a predecessor of Druid Meyer, perhaps even one named Drosselmeir, for all his genius, for all his frenzied devotion to his task, for all his uncanny mechanical wizardry, had overlooked just a few teeth on a certain brass gear that moved a pedestal on which was located a creature of white porcelain very near the rear right corner of the top shelf of the toy cabinet. These teeth failed to engage at a crucial moment. The pedestal would not turn. So, at the moment when the trumpets called and the terrible battle began, this creature of white porcelain was left staring back into the corner of the toy cabinet at a small exquisitely worked web of spider's silk from which hung suspended three small chains of dust.

But what a stirring into life this lone white Unicorn felt. Simply by accident he was faced away from the battle. He felt his lids blink. He felt his lids quicken. He looked at the spider's web he had seen so many times before with new appreciation. What a wonder it was that any creature was clever enough to spin so! He felt his hooves intolerably caught under him. He tossed his golden horn up and down three, then four, then six, then nine, then twelve times. As he did so, he blew seven quick snorts through his nostrils. He felt his flanks melt from glazed clay into flesh. He felt himself come free, as light and swift as he had ever been.

It had been so much too long that he had been in the toy cabinet.

How he longed for fresh air and fields and mountain meadows and wind and the light of the stars! How he longed for vast expanses of open beach and the song of the surf and the moonbeams under his hooves! How he longed for the company of butterflies and hummingbirds, of frogs and violets! As no doubt you already know, Unicorns are shy and elusive, gentle creatures that exist between shadows and silver, come and go in the flickers of firelight and frost. Nothing could be more foreign to their natures than war, that most peculiar and noisily and horribly sociable of all human and mouse activities.

The Unicorn went to the edge of the shelf and looked out upon the battle, which raged all about him and interested him not at all. In a twinkling of his eyes, he calculated that a single leap, no problem at all for a Unicorn such as he was, would take him from the toy cabinet, right past the flank of the battle. As he jumped through the air, he saw the Nutcracker and even caught sight of the Seven-Headed Seven-Crowned Mouse King. No one took the least interest in him, anymore than two boys intent on pummeling each other will notice a rainbow that flickers momentarily in the sky.

When the Unicorn landed, he slid just a little bit, because the floor was slippery and he was not accustomed to it. Being a graceful creature as he was, he easily righted himself. He was free and, just momentarily, at a loss.

An army is a vast and awkward creature. This mouse army was no exception. It had marched for days and days, for weeks and weeks to take up its present positions. It had pitched camp and struck camp and pitched camp and struck camp. It had built roads and bridges and made ruts and filled ruts. It had done all these things until monotony and drudgery became a kind of comfort.

It had shivered in the wind and scurried in the rain and moved even more quietly than usual as snow muffled the stubble of last year's grain in fields already harvested. There was no fat on this march. Yet, even though most of the mice in that scurrying, worrying, shivering mass that was the army neither knew clearly where they were going, nor exactly why, there was great excitement, great eagerness, great anticipation in their ranks. Nor did any mouse stop to reflect that excitement, eagerness and anticipation are disguises that fear likes to put on so that he can move freely about among us.

A fight was coming. There were many rumors afoot about what the fight was actually about. It had to do with avenging some great wrong that had been done to the mice long ago and far away. Then their circumstances had been much different. There was fat, often and much. They were more respected then. They lived in warmer quarters then and rubbed shoulders with royalty, to whom they were actually related and from whom they had descended. No one now in the world liked to acknowledge that, treating it instead as just another example of mouse vanity. This added insult to injury.

The battle that would offer comfort and redress for both was close at hand. There would be not only fat but renewed respect for mice after this battle. Such were the kinds of thoughts and tatters of thoughts that whizzed about in the ranks of the mouse army. But the truth was that each mouse marched because the mouse next also marched, that the excitement and the eagerness were a contagion that passed from twitching whisker to scurrying paw, from quick tail to sensitive nose.

One particular mouse marched with special eagerness for reasons all her very own. Already in her young life she had won fame in the mouse community for her exploits as an acrobat. Other mice might run down the clock when it struck one, but she had done triple and quadruple flips off the swinging pendula of even grandfather clocks. She was quite fearless. She looked on a new clock only as a new challenge. She had brought new standards of excellence and daring to mouse acrobatics.

Even great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather clocks did not intimidate her. There was talk among the mice of issuing a commemorative stamp with her picture on it. She was a source of wonder and amazement to all the mice, but particularly to young girl mice her who admired her daring and saw in her a model for their own desires to change their places in mouse families and in mouse society more generally.

This particular mouse marched now in the ranks of the army with a special eagerness because she had a secret. She was disguised as a male mouse. If just a bit slight of stature, she had no difficulty keeping up and doing her part in the heavy labors that were demanded of her. In fact, she was aware that the march was generally easier for her than for many of her fellows, who were not in such superb condition as she was. She kept her thoughts to herself and did her best to master the particular style of banter and camaraderie that army life demanded. She had to keep herself from doing backwards flips, even though she missed them, the way they turned the world upside down and then right side up again all in an instant.

To be a good acrobat requires a quickness of will that borders on ferocity, because you must put all of you into the motion. Then there is no turning back, only coming through to the other end. This lightning will our young mouse certainly possessed. She could make a decision quickly and put all of herself into carrying it out. So much was this second nature with her, that she was not even particularly aware that there was anything unusual about this. She did remember her mother cooing over and over again, in that way that mouse mothers will do, "How can I have given birth to such a creature as this? How can it have come to pass?" The tone was loving and approving, so this young mouse cherished that part and did not worry herself over her mother's bafflement.

When the great battle was just being joined, this young mouse in disguise found herself at the rear of a column of elite mouse soldiers just on the point of throwing themselves into the strife. There was noise and commotion all about her. Pellets flew and smoke rose. There was a din like none other she had ever heard. In the midst of a cloud of smoke, she saw the Seven-Headed, Seven-Crowned Mouse King himself. A trumpet sounded. Those all about her began to move forth, squeaking at the top of their mouse lungs. She was poised to move forward as well. She opened her mouth to squeak.

But then something odd and unexpected happened. She looked at the Mouse King and wondered why he had to have seven heads. Wasn't one enough? Was it how many heads you had that counted or what you had in them, anyway? Even though she had been raised to be in awe of him, she found him suddenly greedy. All those teeth, all those beady eyes keeping a lookout in all different directions, as if he could never bear to trust anyone.

She even felt sorry for him. She could not imagine what sort of arrangement of pillows could possibly do to keep him comfortable at night. Suppose all those mouths starting talking at once. What a din that would be! And how did he go about getting along with himself, all seven of his own selves? That might really be a mess. Maybe he had to go to war just in order to distract himself.

These thoughts came all at once in a jumble, but they were not what really did it. They were instead a buzzing around the edges. What was at the center though was her sudden awareness of what was missing. Going into battle wasn't at all like acrobatics.

There was no sense of freedom, no privacy, no sense of shape and flow. The march had been long, disorganized and irritating, but through it all she had been patient, expecting something else at its end. Only instead there was noisy confusion, wild shouts, air that did not smell good.

She had been expecting herself to go forward. She had been counting on it. Instead, with the same poise and certainty that she found herself applying to her most difficult acrobatic feats, she found herself going backwards. She was not in a panic. Her mind was suddenly clear, as if a fresh breeze had blown through it.

It was not a matter simply of being afraid. Many of the things she had done had carried plenty of danger. Other mouse acrobats had suffered terrible injuries.

If this was war, then, disguise or no disguise, it was not for her. So she went steadily and calmly to the rear, with such an air of self-command that she aroused no suspicion. The way she carried herself proclaimed that whatever errand she was on was an important one, not to be trifled with. Those who saw her assumed she must be going about a mission she had gotten from the highest levels of command.

It took her a while to pass through the ranks of the army. Finally, she came to an open vista of lacquered floor. When she did, she saw in front of her a creature unlike any she had ever seen before. He was white and slender with a golden horn protruding from his forehead. His beauty made her draw in her breath. Its intake established a silence very different from the noise of the battle. As she looked at him, it seemed to her not only that he was beautiful, but that his features showed the most moving and perplexing mixture of vitality and sorrow, joy and loneliness.

Since he had one horn and such a remarkable one at that, she decided he must be a Unicorn. She had always thought Unicorns were imaginary, if not extinct. Yet now here she was in the presence of a real live one. On this strange day, nothing was turning out to be as she had expected.

"Hello," she said to the Unicorn, "I'm very pleased to meet you."
"Hello," replied the Unicorn. "I'm glad to meet you, too."

The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them.

"You're beautiful. Do you know that?" she asked.
"Thank you," said the Unicorn. "I don't imagine that I look any different than any other quite ordinary Unicorn. But I do like compliments. I have been standing in the corner of the toy cabinet so long that I had quite forgotten what they sounded like."
"I'm so glad you got out," said the mouse.
"I am, too," replied the Unicorn. "Only now that I'm out, I'm not quite sure what to do."
"Nor am I," said the mouse. "But I wonder if you would mind if I rode you, just a little bit, just to see what it was like. I've never met a Unicorn before, let alone ridden one. I do hope it's all right. I'm not very heavy and I can sit very lightly..."

It was the acrobat in her who spoke. Otherwise she would have been much too shy.

"No," said the Unicorn, with a snorty laugh, "I'd like that. I've never had a mouse on my back before. You look like a very graceful little creature."