Glancing back over his shoulder once—he realized then how much his shoulders hurt at the slightest move—Jan saw Tek coming carefully, three-footed, down the slope, flanked by Tas and Dagg. Up slope, he caught sight of Leerah and the rest of the warriors lifting the dead formel onto their shoulders to bear up the hillside and cast over the cliff.
The Lay of the Unicorns
Each month the unicorns gathered at dusk to dance in a Circle under the full, dusky moon. They were the only race they knew of that did so. For when Alma made the world, she fashioned all the other creatures first, out of earth, wind, water, and air—then invited them to dance. But the pans turned wordless away from her, and the gryphons flew to find mountains to nest in, and the red dragons burrowed deep into the Smoking Hills, and the wyverns laughed.
So Alma created the unicorns after her own shape: sleek-bodied and long-limbed for swift running, wild-hearted and hot-blooded to make them brave warriors. Then she took from the cycling moon some of its shining stuff to fashion their hooves and horns and make them dancers. So the last-born and best-beloved of Alma called themselves also the moon’s children, and each month danced the ringdance under the round, rising moon.
Equinox fell on the night of the full moon that spring. Jan stretched out beneath its pale, smoke light falling from among a river of stars. The ground beneath him was springy soft and thawing with the year. His shaggy winter coat, not yet begun to shed, kept out the coolness. He stretched his limbs among the fine shoots of new grass that threaded amid the old.
Lifting his head from his knees, he gazed at the other unicorns assembled in the wide, rough Circle on the valley floor. Some were standing lazily, three-footed, regaining their breath. Others bowed their heads to nibble the new grass. Murmurs of talk and nickers of laughter drifted on the still night air. The moon had risen a quarter of the way toward its zenith, and the dancing was over now.
Jan lay inside the Circle with the other initiates. He gave Dagg beside him a nudge with his hind heel, murmuring, “Wake,” for on the low rise jutting near them at the Circle’s heart, Khraa the king had gotten to his feet. The tales were about to start.
Jan’s grandsire was old and did not seem it. Strong-built like his heir, but leaner, Khraa stood upon the ledge, pale gray as cloudcover, with a coal-dark mane and hooves. He was the king, and would have ruled the unicorns in a time of peace. Even now he retained his place as high justice, head of all ceremonies save those of battle, and would rule as regent during the coming absence of his son.
But Korr the prince led the unicorns now, for the children-of-the-moon were at war, and had been at war for four hundred years.
“O unicorns,” cried Khraa the king, “here we stand under the rising moon, midwiving in the birth of the new year with our dances and our songs. The dancing, it is done, and the singing is to come. On the morrow’s morn, our young fillies, our young colts will slip away unseen upon their Pilgrimage through the dark Pan Woods, over the Great Grass Plain, and across the crumbling shelfland of the sleeping wyverns—let them not wake—until they come upon the Mirror of the Moon, our sacred well, there to perform their rite of passage.”
The gray king paused, drawing breath. All the unicorns had lain down now. Night stretched dark and bright around them. Jan listened to the king.
“The time has come,” he said, “for singing the Lay of the Unicorns, which tells of the beginning of this war and how our race was driven from its territories by treachery and forced to abandon the Moon’s Mere—long, it was a long time past. Singer, come forth! Let the story be sung.”
Khraa slipped silently from the ledge then and lay down beside his mate. Jan spotted the healer lying within the Circle. Even by moonlight he could make out the great black patches patterning the other’s white coat, the dark spot encircling each eye so they stood out huge and seemed never to blink. But the one who rose from the grass at the king’s nod was not Teki, but another lying beside him.
“Who is it?” whispered Dagg.
The young mare mounted the rise, her black and rose coloring pale ghostly under the moon. Jan hardly recognized her at first. It had been nearly a half-month since the battle of the gryphons—his shoulders were healed—and he had not seen Tek, save in far glimpses, since then. He had not realized before this that the healer’s daughter was a singer of tales.
“Hail,” she cried out, her voice low, harsh-sweet, “I’ll sing you a tale of when Halla was princess of the unicorns, and a rare princess was she. This was while her father Jared was yet alive and king, and in the time when queen or king still ruled the unicorns.
“And this was long after the great Serpent-clouds had scoured the Plain. And this was some after the war with the haunts had been fought and won. And this was just after the spring fevers had carried off Halla’s first mate, and her two younglings, a twin filly and foal—but before she had taken Zod the singer to husband as her second mate, while the unicorns still lived in the Hallow Hills by the sacred well, in and around the milkwood groves that now are called the Wyvern Wood. Because of the things I shall tell of in this tale. Because of the coming of the wyrms.”
“What’s milkwood?” murmured Jan to himself. He had never wondered it before.
“Hist,” Dagg told him. “I want to hear.”
Tek changed her stance a little on the rocky platform, facing now a slightly different quarter of the Circle.
“It was summer, midsummer, the solstice,” she sang, “and winter a long time gone. But winter touched the hearts of the unicorns still, for the herd was shrunk and saddened at the death of so many fine warriors and weanlings, the young with the old, from a spring plague that year, the princess’s own nurselings among them. Zod the singer was just coming into the full glory of his voice, and aging Jared, Halla’s father, was king.
“Then Halla, dawn-colored like fire, stood beside the moon’s pool, sad in contemplation, asking Alma why That One had seen fit to steal away the flower of the unicorns.”
Jan felt another wondering. “What’s fire?” he said aloud.
“I don’t know,” hissed Dagg. “It comes from lightning, or maybe the sun.”
Tek had paused a moment in her song.
“Hot,” murmured Jan, “so the ballads say. It dances and darts.” He had heard of fire every now and again, in story and song. Fire dwelled in dragons’ mouths. This or that hero was color-of-fire. But Jan had never seen any, and no unicorn he knew had ever seen any. “What is it, I wonder. Is it alive?”
“Be still now,” Dagg insisted. “I want to listen.”
Above them on the rise, under the moon, Tek had changed her stance again, turned just a little. Such was the singing of the unicorns. Jan knew that by the time the tale was done, she would have turned full Circle and taken in the whole Ring of listeners.
“Halla the princess stood at the wellside, when of a sudden she glimpsed movement across the water, some creature emerging from the green, cool woods bordering the Mere. It was a pale thing, like a great snake or a salamander, and came sliding out of the forest, lean and wrinkled as a dying toad. Watching, she saw it dip its long neck to the water to drink.
“ ‘Stop,’ Halla cried, before its narrow snout could touch the surface and disturb the stillness of that hallowed pool.
“The creature looked up across the water with its clear, uncolored eyes. It seemed unable to see her well.
“ ‘This is a sacred place,’ Halla informed it. ‘Only we, the children-of-the-moon, may drink here.’