A little silence then.
“Why did you come?” he asked, at last.
“On account of you,” Tek’s mother said, Studying him now. The green in her eyes was very dark. “I meant to stand unseen among the milkwood at Vigil and sing back to you what I had taken once, at your father’s bidding—for none may behold his fate upon the Mirror who cannot dream.”
She shook her head.
“I told your father that, when first I sang you, that you must have back your dreaming sight before you got your beard. But he did not wish it, argued against it. He is very much afraid of dreams, ever since, a very long time past, a wyvern tried to speak to him in one.”
Jan felt his skin prickling.
The red mare said, “He did not send word to me, as I had bidden him, when you were to go on Pilgrimage. Your mother did that.”
Jan gazed at nothing, striving desperately to remember what the wyvern had said: I tried to reach your father once…when Korr was young and not yet prince…tried to send him a dream to ruin him, send him running wild Renegade across the Plain…. The red mare gazed back at Jan, her quiet tone gone rueful now.
“But I could not be with you on this night just past. I had to run a long way across the Plain with that storm in my teeth before it blew itself to nothing. It has taken me all this time returning.”
Jan shook his head. His mind was full. He could not take in any more. “You could have given me back my dreams in the Vale, at Moondance.”
Lying with folded legs beside the water there, I shook my head. “No. I took your dreams by the dark of the moon, and so by the dark must they return.”
Would he understand that? I hoped so. The ways of magic are limited, and strange. Then I told him a little more of the truth, speaking slowly, that he might follow me.
“But there is another reason I held back. On a night many years past before ever you were born, prince-son, when first I felt the weight of a horn upon my brow and my body becoming a unicorn’s, I stood beside this Mere, beholding a dream. It told me I must one day return to the Hallow Hills, and deliver a unicorn safe out of a wyvern’s belly.”
I stood up then, shaking the sand and damp from me, unsure how much of what I had said he had been able to grasp. The young prince continued to stare at me, and for the first time he seemed to realize how my black mane stood up in a brush along my neck and that my tail fell full and silky as a mane. No beard grew silken on my chin, no feathery fringe about my heels. He saw my hooves then, which are round and single as the day I was foaled, for all that a horn now sprouts on my brow.
For I was not born among the unicorns. In that, the Renegades were right. I come from a place far to the western south, beyond the shallows of the Summer Sea. But I fled away in time, and found the unicorns in their Vale. Their beauty, when first I saw them, was so great I ached to join them. But I held back, sick with longing, for I was not like them—until I learned of a sacred well across the Plain that makes the unicorns what they are, and a young prince told me the way.
But that is another tale.
“What are you?” whispered the prince’s son, falling back a pace to gaze on my beardless chin and single hooves.
I tossed my head. What could I tell him? He wanted it all in a word, and I myself only barely understood what it was I had been, and was now, and was yet becoming. Still, I tried to answer him.
“I am the midwife,” I told him, “who stands between the womb of Alma and the world. I do not make, but I help what has been made to be born.”
Did that make sense to him? I studied his face, but what he made of my words I could not tell. I tried again.
“I am a dreamer, and a little of a magicker. There is a race of two-footed creatures, Aljan, great movers and builders. They keep many burden-beasts to haul and carry for them.” I could not quite keep the bitterness out of my voice as I said the last. “I was such a bearer once, until I came away.”
Then the young prince surprised me. “I saw you,” he told me, soft, and did not draw away from me, as others do. “I saw you among the two-foots in my vision.” And I knew then, for him to have seen that, he must be a far-dreaming seer indeed. He looked at me. “But your coat was another color, then. It was roan.”
I smiled a little. “The blossoms of the milkwood which I ate made my coat this color, and the bitter waters of the Mere gave me a horn.”
“So you are the Red Mare the Renegades spoke of,” Jan answered quietly. “They said my father helped you somehow.”
I nodded, remembering. “He was very like you then—wild, hotheaded, and proud, though not so clever or far-seeing by half. Though it was against all custom, he told me the way to the unicorn’s Mere and, in doing so, broke the Ring of Law and opened himself to a wyvern’s spells. I kept them at bay, barely.”
The young prince stood, not seeing me, looking inward then. I told him, “And afterward, I sang much of that memory out of your father’s mind, just as I once sang away your dreams. One day perhaps I will give it back to him—if he will have it back. He is not a seer, Jan, and has no understanding of magic and dreams.”
The other’s dark eyes pierced me then, urgent and fire bright. “Give me the tale,” he whispered. “I must know. Sing me the tale.”
“I will give you the tale,” I replied, turning away. “But not just now. Another time.”
The prince’s son said nothing then, watching me.
“Are you not cold, little prince, with your coat still full of water?” I asked him. Behind me I could hear Tek beginning to stir. “Shake off,” I said, turning to rouse her. “The afternoon grows late.”
Jan shook himself. He was cold. The water from his coat showered onto Dagg, who stirred and at last got groggily to his feet. I roused my daughter. She stood up, draggled and chilled, and shook herself. Jan came near us, and though from time to time I caught his eyes darting guardedly at me, full of questions—a thousand questions—he seemed willing to curb them, for now.
“Drink,” he told us, bending again to the pool himself. “The water’s sweet.”
“Sweet?” I heard my daughter say as she waded out into the Mere. “I tasted it this dawn. It’s bitter salt.”
Jan shook his head, gazing at her again as he had gazed at her for the first time in the milkwood grove, with new eyes. “Sweet now. Taste it.”
When first I had sipped of the Moon’s Mere, years ago, it made me ill. Then I could stomach no more than a half-dozen swallows before I began to shiver and sweat, and stagger a little in my walking, so strange had been the taste, so mineral. But now as I bent my head with the others to drink, the water was cool and without taint. It washed the bitter taste of the wyrm’s blood from my mouth.
Jan felt his strength beginning to return. He no longer felt hollow, famished, though he had not eaten in more than a day. The water alone seemed to satisfy him. The rosebuds plastered to his nose and heel had long since sluiced away. His fetlock still felt sore from the wyvern’s sting, his brow tender from the firebowl’s burning. But even those aches were beginning to fade. His forelock fell thickly into his eyes.
“It is,” Dagg was saying, raising his mouth from the water. “It is sweet.”
I heard a little noise behind us suddenly and turned, glimpsed something drawing near through the milkwood trees. Then the prince of the unicorns emerged from the grove. I and two of the others started. I had not been expecting him. Only Jan seemed unsurprised.
His father stood a moment, open-mouthed, and stared at us, seeming almost more astonished to see me than he was to see his son. But it was Jan and the others he spoke to in the end, ignoring me as though I were some haunt or dream.
“What game is this?” he snorted, stamping his hooves as he always did whenever he was baffled or made uneasy. “Where have you been, the three of you? Traipsing these groves at some colts’ play while your elders and companions ran themselves to rags hunting you.”