
EThere is nothing more democratic than zombies! Everyone knows unicorns are all-white or rainbow-colored. Long live the workers!Īlso, your global list of genetic experiments gone wrong (deer with the head of a lion? Talk about top heavy!) prove nothing about unicorn variation. You’re just saying unicorns are stuck-up snobs. And in “The Highest Justice,” a unicorn takes an even more direct interest in a royal family. The heraldic unicorn shows up on coats of arms, including the Royal Arms of Scotland and England. The Chinese qilin presaged the death of Emperors.

Garth Nix’s “The Highest Justice” draws on the association between unicorns and kings. Somehow the power of the unicorn caused the story itself to switch sides. In fact, such is the mysterious draw of the unicorn that originally the story that follows was meant to be a zombie story. The legends describe it as elusive and beautiful, fierce and strange. No matter the origin, the unicorn is usually thought to be a solitary creature whose very body possesses the power to heal. And there’s the medieval European unicorn, with the beard of a goat and cloven hooves. There’s the kirin in Japan, with a deerlike body, a single horn, and a head like a lion or wolf.

From a unicorn in Persia, described in the fourth century as having a long white horn tipped in crimson, to the German unicorn whose single horn broke into branches like a stag, to the fierce Indian unicorn, black-horned and too dangerous to be taken alive.

Holly: Legends of unicorns occur all over the world throughout recorded history.
