Dagg turned hurriedly to follow her. Jan heard him sighing with relief. But the prince’s son had to force himself to go. He wanted to stand watching forever under the moon and the stars. He fell in slowly behind Dagg and the healer’s daughter. They skirted the glade. Then without a backward glance, Tek struck out into the dark. Jan sighed, following her. He caught a last glimpse of the pans in their Ring through the trees. A handful of them had begun once more to dance.
“They danced,” said Jan, after a time.
Tek looked at him. “The pans? I saw none dancing, young prince.”
“Before you came,” he answered, “and just now, as we left. They were beautiful.”
He stopped short, saying it—for only now as he spoke did he realize that it was so. There had been a strange grace in those upright, two-footed forms, a litheness in those odd forelimbs unlike any grace a unicorn could ever have. Jan saw Dagg eyeing him over the back of the healer’s daughter.
“Pans?” he cried. “Those twisted little haunts fell on us this day, without cause.”
“We’re in their land without their leave,” answered Jan, but so softly he was speaking to himself. That thought, too, was new—it had just come to him. Dagg paid no heed. Jan saw him screwing shut his eyes.
“They’re like hillcats. They clutched our manes and tried to pull us down….” Jan saw him shudder.
“Peace,” murmured Tek.
Jan turned to her. “Was it you,” he asked her, “who led us off? You’ve been ahead of us all this time?”
The young mare looked at him. “Led you off? I only came upon you a few moments gone, out scouting for stragglers.”
“There was another then,” Jan told her. “I heard…I saw….”
The healer’s daughter laughed, but gently. “Thought you heard or saw, perhaps? Come, it’s easy to imagine haunts and followers in a dark wood at night.”
Jan shook his head; he had not meant that at all—but they had reached the others now. Jan spotted them through the trees ahead, in a glade almost at the wood’s edge. He saw the moon shining white upon the Plain not twenty paces farther on. Korr stood with Teki across the open space. The prince shifted impatiently, staring back toward the Woods. He seemed to be attending to the healer’s words with only half an ear.
Jan followed Tek and Dagg past the sentries into the glade. Spotting them, the prince broke off from Teki and came forward. Those not standing guard had already lain down among the bracken. Korr nodded Dagg away to join the others. Jan halted and gazed at the dark figure standing before him.
“Struck off to delve the Pan Woods on your own?” the prince said curtly. He stood against the moon, a black shadow against its light. Jan could not see his face. “Did you not hear my order to keep together?”
His father’s rebuke felt like the slash of hooves. Jan flinched. “We lost sight of the others,” he started.
“Dawdling when I told you to fly.” Jan dropped his head. “We ran wrong,” he mumbled, picking at the turf with one forehoof. “But we knew if we went westward we’d reach the Plain.”
He heard his father sigh. “Well, I suppose that was clever enough,” he conceded at last. “If only you were half so clever at staying clear of trouble as you seem to be at finding it.” He snorted again. “Heed what I tell you in future,” he added. “ And stay with the band. Now find you forage, and rest. The Plain is harder going than the Woods.”
Korr turned away then, lashing his tail, though there were no flies now, only night millers and moths. Jan gazed after the prince as he went to stand staring out over the moonlit Plain. His heart felt hollow, filled with an ache too keen to bear. He had lost his father’s praise.
“You are a silent one for thought,” Tek said to him. With a start, he realized the healer’s daughter had not left his side. He said the first thing that came into his head.
“I…was thinking of the pans.” And saying so, he did think of them. The memory of their beauty eased his heart a little. He turned to her. Her eyes were clear, green stones lit by moonlight. “Was it fire?”
She shook her head, clearly puzzled. “ A huddle of pans under the moon was all I saw.”
“But…,” he started. Then he felt sleep catching at his mane and had to swallow a yawn.
“Enough,” the young mare said. “The moon’s halfway up into the sky. Time enough for talk tomorrow, on the Plain. Good rest.”
She bowed to him, going to seek her place among the sentries. Jan bowed in return and, finding where Dagg had lain, he lay down beside him. His limbs felt loose and empty with fatigue. His thoughts were growing woolly, slow. Even the sting of his father’s ire was numbing. Nothing seemed to matter now but sleep.
He closed his eyes, images flaring before his inner gaze like flame. By morning, he could not recall, but that night he dreamed of goatlings dancing under the bright egg of the moon.
The Plain
When Alma made the world, she made the heart of the world first, which was fire, and then the air above the world, and then the sea that girdles the world, and lastly the land. Woods, mountains, and valleys she made, each where each was fitting. But most of the land she shaped into the Plain—not level, but rolling, a vast expanse of gentle rises and wrinkles and rolls.
Korr kept them moving all day their first day upon Alma’s back, loping in long easy strides where the ground was smooth or downsloping, checking to a trot where it steepened or grew rough. The moon, huge and yellow, floated beside them on the horizon’s edge in the hour after dawn before it set.
They lay up at noon for an hour’s rest in a shallow hollow between two rills. Jan threw himself down beside Dagg, panting. His muscles ached and trembled as they cooled. Then before he had even half caught his breath it seemed, they were off again.
Just before dusk, Korr brought them to a halt. Jan’s legs folded under him, his eyelids sliding shut of their own accord. He was asleep before he knew. Later, Dagg roused him, and in the dark after sundown they tasted their first grass since they had left the Vale—tender, green, and marvelously sweet.
The land remained hilly as they moved northward. The Pan Woods and the Gryphon Mountains beyond dwindled in the distance, becoming a dark line on the horizon behind them, then vanished at last. Jan felt his muscles hardening, his flanks growing leaner and his stride rangier as each day rolled on.
It was their third morning out of the Woods. The dew was still thick upon the grass, the sun in the east barely risen over the flat rim of the world. Jan’s limbs, still stiff from sleep, were beginning to limber. The band had not yet broken camp.
“Well,” Jan was saying as his long, slim horn clattered against Dagg’s, “what do you think?”
Dagg parried him.
“Keep your guard up,” he heard Tek saying.
Jan countered Dagg’s sudden thrust and threw him off. They reared together, shoulder-wrestling for a moment.
“Think of what?” Dagg asked him, struggling.
“About the Firebringer,” Jan panted, shifting his weight. “That he’ll be the color-of-night, and a great warrior….”
He braced himself and Dagg slipped from him. The two of them rolled, then scrabbled to their feet and fenced a little, tentatively.
“More force, Jan,” he heard Tek telling him. “You foot as though this were a dance.”
But it was, in a way, he thought as Dagg and he dodged, paused, parried, measured, each advancing and giving ground by turns. But he kept his tongue. Dagg was lunging at him.
“The Firebringer? But that’s history. Zod the singer saw him.”
Jan fended his friend’s slow, hard jabs with a half-dozen light taps.
“More force!” called Tek.
Jan parried harder. “But only in a dream.”
“A seer’s dream.”