“Have you told your father that?” the presence interrupted.
Jan shook his head, startled. The gryphon had charmed him—he realized that now—telling him while he gazed into her eye as in a dream. He had not remembered until this moment.
The goddess said, “But if you won back the Hallow Hills before that time, the gryphons could have your Vale and welcome; there would be no need to war.” It was as if she had spoken his own thoughts back at him. “Is that what you were beginning to say?”
“My father is a great warrior,” Jan answered her. “He could rout the wyverns from the Hallow Hills. But the legend says he must have fire. The wyverns’ dens would go up in a blaze if….”
“There are many kinds of fire, Aljan.”
Jan hardly heard. “But my father knows nothing at all of fire. I am the only unicorn who knows—but I know nothing, hardly anything!”
“Then you’d best make a study of it, hadn’t you?” the presence remarked. “You’ve only a few years’ time before the gryphons fly. List, now,” his guide said suddenly. “The time grows very short. Ask me what question you will, and I will answer.”
“I…” started Jan. He could feel the vision’s end looming, and burst out with the first question that came to him. “Why do the gryphons hate us?”
“You already know the beginning of that.”
“Why do the pans speak so differently from us, then?” He struggled. Time slipped from him. His body burned.
“Again,” the goddess told him, “you may find that for yourself. Hist, be quick.”
“Then, then…” stammered Jan. He racked his thoughts for some riddle worthy of a god. “Why must we bind ourselves to the Circle of Warriors?”
“Who tells you you must? Not I. I do not make kings, or Rings of Law. Those things are yours to make, or to unmake, just as you choose.”
“Why does my mother tell me to follow my own heart, not Korr’s?”
“Ask her,” the goddess said.
“Who is the Red Mare the Renegades spoke of?”
“Ask her.”
Jan felt himself beginning to fall. He struggled desperately to remain aloft. “But why does your voice sound so familiar to me? I have never met you before in dreams.”
“Whom do I sound like?” the presence demanded, bearing him up for a moment more.
“Like Jah-lila,” said Jan, “and like Korr. Like Ses my dam and like Khraa the king. Like Tek and Dagg—Tas, Teki, Leerah….”
“Who else?”
“Like the three-headed wyvern,” Jan replied.
“Like the gryphon in the cave, like the fluting of pans, or Renegades crying, like….”
“Like?”
“Like sea, like earth shifting, like wind and like fire.”
“And?”
“Like myself,” said Jan, coming suddenly breathless to a halt. He had quit struggling. “Like me.”
“I am you,” the Mother-of-all replied, “and much, much more besides. I am everything you have ever known and that has ever been. I surround you all, and am within you, and am you. You are my kindling; I am the Fire. I am the Circle. I am the Dance. Learn to know me. Come.” A moment passed. “The time’s at hand. You must return.”
Then he felt what had been supporting him vanish. He was descending in a rush toward the bright, pale-blue world and the gray pitted moon before it. The world grew large, more varicolored. Its gray companion, within its disc, also increased. Jan felt himself falling toward the heart of the moon.
“Alma,” he cried out. There was no need. The presence had not left him. “Did you not tell me I would return to the world?”
The other nodded in his mind. “Aye. Back to the Hallow Hills and your three companions.”
The moon loomed, burning silver in the white light of the sun. Perfectly round, it seemed to lie upon the surface of the world like a lake of still, bright water.
“But Alma,” cried Jan, “the moon….”
“Nay, Jan,” the goddess told him, departing now. “The Mirror of the Moon.”
He felt a splash and heard the sound of it. Then he was aware of three unicorns: Tek, the red mare, and Dagg. They had staggered from the woods, dragging the wyvern skin. Stumbling under its weight in the midafternoon sun, they waded out into the water.
He felt the wet slosh about their knees, and the strain against their teeth and jaws. The wyrmskin on which he lay touched the surface and buoyed up. Cool liquid spilled in at the slack places, bathing him. The fire in his blood swabbed out.
He heard the angry hiss of water mingling with the wyrm’s blood on the skin, and the air was suddenly thick with acrid steam. He heard whinnies of alarm, then snorts and choking. The wyvern skin fell abruptly slack. It floated. The golden bowl slid off and sank.
He could not get his eyes open, could not see what was happening. He struggled weakly to raise his head. There was thrashing in the water nearby him: he heard gasps, and then two, three dull thuds upon the sand. The acrid air around him hung suddenly, utterly silent, until the harsh vapor invaded his senses at last. He knew nothing more.
Homecoming
Jan came again into awareness slowly. He felt himself floating, the coolness of water against one side, and the soft, sinuous membrane bearing him up. The sun on his other side was warm and drying. He opened his eyes and blinked. Raising his head with difficulty against the yielding surface of the skin, he saw he lay on the sacred pool, near shore. The sun overhead shone midafternoon.
He floundered off the floating hide and onto the white sand of the shallow bottom. His limbs no longer burned with fire. The golden bowl lay submerged, sun-gleaming, a half pace from him. He got to his feet and champed his teeth. His nose and heel were plastered with chewed milkwood buds. The taste of water in his mouth was sweet. He bent and took a long drink from the pool.
Lifting his head, he spotted the others. They lay on the bank, fallen in midstride. Jan felt his heart go cold a moment, but then he saw the rising and falling of their sides: they were alive. He waded toward them, and halted in the shallows beside the red mare.
He recognized her now. She was Jah-lila, Tek’s mother, the lone unicorn—she his father had called once, long ago, to come sing away his dreams. Jan bent and nudged her with his nose. She stirred then, snorting, and rolled to get her legs under her, but did not rise.
“Well glad I am to see you alive, prince-son,” she told him at last, then shook her head, as if groggy still. She managed a laugh. “The Mirror of the Moon is strong proof against poison.”
Her voice was very like Tek’s, but fuller and a little more deep. Jan nodded, eyeing her, feeling strange and unsurprised.
“I heard you singing on the night of Moondance,” was all he could think of to say.
The wild mare nodded. “Aye. I was singing a charm on you, little prince, to keep you from seeing me. But my power over you is all ashes now.” She sighed, still smiling, and gazed away. “No ears but yours were meant to hear that song, but I think Tek heard it, too, for she came looking for me.” Jah-lila glanced at him.
“She looked for you in the Pan Woods, too,” said Jan, “and again upon the Plain. But she never…”
The other laughed, gently. All her moves were careful and unhurried. “I did not mean for her to find me—or for you. But of course it was mostly your father I meant to…” But Jan hardly heard.
“You called out to me in the Pan Woods,” he said suddenly, “and led us away from the others to the goatling’s Ring.” The realization jarred him. “You began to bury the Renegade.”
The red mare nodded. “I did those things.”
Jan bit his breath, stopping himself. “The Serpent-cloud,” he said. “You led the storm away.”
The healer’s mate smiled. “So you saw me then, too?” She sighed, laughing. “Already you were stealing back your dreams.”