“I can’t do that.”
“You’ll learn in the next hundred years or so.”
“And you aren’t sorry?”
“Not for a moment. I haven’t regretted any of my loves. Least of all the one that hurt the most.”
“Will you tell me who he was?”
“Someday, my dear.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
If there were not a sequel to The Forest of Forever called Day of the Minotaur, in which Eunostos is reunited with his children, I would never have concluded this book with such unrelieved gloom. Unhappy endings are sometimes demanded by the Muse, but unnecessary unhappy ones are anathema to her—and to me. I would probably have burned up Kora all the same; I never forgave her, the foolish girl, for rejecting Eunostos in favor of Aeacus. But I would certainly have allowed Eunostos to smuggle Icarus back to the forest.
However, there is a sequel. Zoe’s dream, even to the “great bird,” was truly prophetic—and Eunostos, who reaches high, gets more than half of what he wants.
I should add that for reasons known only to my Muse, the sequel was written before The Forest of Forever, which as Bob Roehm and Alexis Gilliland (those two fine fanzine editors) suggested, might therefore be called a prequel; and there are discrepancies between the two books, for which I apologize and which I will correct if there is ever a second edition of Day of the Minotaur.
I refuse to apologize for writing a second book about the same characters, though I know the enormous risk of disappointing those who liked the first. Really, though, I had no choice. Eunostos came to me in a dream and said, “You didn’t tell everything the first time. You didn’t tell enough about Zoe.”
Who am I to quarrel with a Minotaur?
ALSO BY THOMAS BURNETT SWANN
Cry Silver Bells
The Day of the Minotaur
The Forest of Forever
The Goat Without Horns
Green Phoenix
How Are the Mighty Fallen
Lady of the Bees
The Minikins of Yam
Moondust
The Not-World
Queens Walk in the Dusk
Silent Wings: The Best of Thomas Burnett Swann
The Tournament of Thorns
The Weirwoods
Will-o’-the-Wisp
Wolfwinter