As they emerged from the stream, the band slowed to a walk. Jan guessed the watercourse must have marked some boundary. The pans were a scattered people, divided and weak. They ran in little herds called tribes that fought for territory. His father’s band must have crossed now into another tribe’s demesne.
They walked in silence through the budding Woods. The sun, unseen, sank lower in the branch-woven sky, and the gnats subsided as the air began to cool. The shadows grew long. Jan tried to imagine a race that would make war upon its own kind, and could not. His own people were single, of the Circle. The unicorns were one.
The Woods around them had grown very still. Jan came out of his reverie and lifted his head as he realized he had not heard a bird’s cry in a quarter of an hour. He scented the air, and an odor came to him, goatlike and salty. He had smelled it only once before. Ahead, two warriors stood halted in their tracks, staring off into the trees.
“Dagg….” Jan started.
But the splinter of falling wood cut him short. A dead cedar toppled groaning across their path. Its tangled roots, still clotted with earth, were stubby, as though they had been bitten through. Initiates whinnied, scattering in confusion. Something struck Jan on the shoulder.
He felt another sting against his fetlock—stones. The air was thick suddenly with flying stones. A sound like the voices of herons again filled the Woods, and pans poured from behind the trees. Some held what looked like rams’ horns to their mouths, their cheeks puffed. The long, wavering cries were coming from the horns. Jan stared. He had never seen such a thing before.
“Don’t scatter,” Korr was thundering now above the commotion of horns. “Keep close—we’ll soon outrun them. Follow the healer!”
Jan saw Teki rearing, his hide a flash of white and black. He whinnied sharply, then wheeled and charged the fallen cedar. Others flew to follow him. The goatlings, taken by surprise, fell back as the healer cleared the tree and was away.
Dagg bolted then, shouldering past Jan. The pans had ceased their standing volley and begun to charge. Jan rose, ready to strike at them, but Korr sprang to send him after Dagg with sharp nips and a curt command. Only then did Jan realize he and Dagg had stood staring when they should have been flying. The others were all over the tree and gone.
Jan heard a cry from Dagg, wheeled to see a goatling springing from behind a tree. She wrapped her forelimbs about Dagg’s neck. He reared, writhing and thrashing, then kicked at another one rushing his flank. Jan yelled, charging, heard the prince’s war cry behind him and the thunder of Korr’s heels. Blue-bodied goatlings scattered for their lives.
Dagg freed himself and fled for the cedar, soaring over at a bound. Gathering his legs, Jan sprang after. Pans were standing on the other side. Some brandished pieces of pointed wood, strangely blackened and sharp as tusks. Dagg reared again, striking wildly at them. Jan cast about desperately for some sign of the band.
He could not spot them. They had vanished. The Woods stood so close and tangled here they could have been but twenty paces off and he would not have seen them. The clamor of horns deafened him. He could not think, and Korr was still behind them on the other side of the tree.
Jan slashed at a goatling that lunged at him, and suddenly caught sight of something in the gloom—a unicorn. It reared among the trees not ten paces from them, crying, “Follow!” and sprang away. Jan bit Dagg on the shoulder and shouted, “This way!”
He plunged after the other unicorn through a maze of shadows and trees, and heard the sound of Dagg’s heels coming behind. Dense thickets closed about them. Jan caught only glimpses of their rescuer, could not even tell the color of the one who ran before. He had no idea who it was.
The land beneath his hooves fell suddenly away, and Jan stumbled into a gully between two hills. He realized he had lost sight of the one ahead of them then, and panic gripped him. He sprinted down the dry gravel wash. Dagg behind him was shouting something, but Jan ignored him, ignored everything, galloping harder. The others could not be far ahead.
“Jan!” Dagg behind him was crying. “Jan, stop. Stand!” All at once, his friend charged past him, veering across his path.
Jan ducked, trying to dodge, but the twisting river course was narrow. He plunged to a halt. “Dagg, we’ll lose them!” he cried.
Dagg shook his head, nearly winded, blowing hard. “Wrong way,” he gasped. “We’ve run wrong. Can’t you hear them? They’re behind.”
Jan stopped shouldering, staring at him, then lifted his head and listened. Above the pounding of blood in his throat and the harshness of his own breathing, of Dagg’s, he caught sound—far in the distance, just for a moment—of the whinny of unicorns in flight and the loonlike sounding of the horns.
“But how…?” Jan wheeled, beside himself, still panting. His limbs twitched with fatigue. “I was following….” The faint, far sounds were fading now into the utter stillness of the Woods.
Dagg shook his head. “Come, haste. We’ll have to go back.” He started past Jan.
“No. Hold,” cried Jan suddenly. “We mustn’t. The pans are between us and them now.”
Dagg halted in midstep. They stood looking at each other. Above them, the sky was the color of rueberry stains, and the Woods all around had grown dusky, the silence deep. Jan shook his head and tried to think. His blood had quieted at last; his breathing stilled, and so, too, the sense of panic that had gripped him. He turned and climbed the sandy bank of the wash.
“We’ll go west,” he said. “The Plain lies that way, and it can’t be far.”
He glanced back over one shoulder at Dagg. His friend sidled, uncertain, gazing at the dark Woods before them with wide, nervous eyes. Jan turned at once and began shouldering his way through the undergrowth that bordered the wash, giving the other no time to reply. Dagg had to follow to keep him in sight.
“Let’s be off, then,” Jan told him. “The sun’s low.”
Lost
They came upon a glade just as the Woods grew too dim for them to make their way. Pans had been there, a great many of them, but the scent was old. Another scent lingered in the air as well—pungent, like cedar, and somehow dry. Jan had never met that odor before. He and Dagg emerged into the open. The sky above was purpling. Dagg turned to him.
“What now?”
“We wait,” Jan told him. “The moon should be up soon. Once it gets high enough, it’ll cast good light.”
Dagg fell silent. They gazed about them. In the last moments of twilight, Jan studied the glade. Something about it struck him as strange; he could not quite get his teeth on it. Then he had it. The glade was round. The trees bordering the open space made a perfect Ring, and all the ground cover had been cleared from the interior. He and Dagg stood on brown, bare soil.
In the middle of the clearing lay a Circle of stone. A grayish powder lay in little heaps within, along with a few leafless twigs, oddly blackened. It was from these that the pungent aroma arose. Jan approached the Circle of stones. He stepped inside.
The dust felt soft beneath his heels, incredibly fine. The branches, puzzlingly brittle, crunched and compressed as he stepped on them. Dagg set one hoof inside the Ring as Jan bent to sniff the powdery gray stuff, savoring its acrid, aromatic scent. Dagg fidgeted suddenly and stepped back outside the stones.
“What’s wrong?” Jan asked him.
“Don’t stand there,” Dagg told him. “It’s hot.”
Jan lifted his head and realized that his friend spoke true. The dust was warm beneath his hooves. But the heat felt good against the night air’s chill. “I wonder what makes it so?”