Ses set her teeth. “Should we tell the others?”
“Not until your son returns.”
The prince’s dam opened her eyes. “Should we announce Korr’s death?”
Again, the red wych shook her head. “The elders would only declare Jan king. Let us wait. When he returns, he will bring that news with all the rest.”
Ses blinked hard. “It will tear the herd apart.”
“The herd is stronger than you think,” Jah-lila answered, “and primed for change. Your son has seen to that. It was why he had to be their prince, though he can never now become their king.”
The pale mare snorted. “Jan’s never wanted to be king.” Her gaze wandered. “And Lell growing up so reckless wild… All this time you and I have kept our peace. Both held our tongues, praying for Korr to speak, save himself, be healed.”
“Can you doubt that had you opened your heart, spoken freely to him, he would have cast you out, and Jan, and your youngest never have been born?”
Ses shook her head and whispered bitterly, “No doubt. But forebearing has been hard. So very hard.”
Gently, Jah-lila shouldered against her, as much for her own comfort as to lend the other strength. “Never forget that Tek, Jan, and Lell all have their part to play in winning the Hallow Hills.”
The red mare stood silent. Above, Lell and the twins were almost out of sight. Below, Tek had reached the other three. The pale mare’s sigh was painful, deep.
“He was not so cruel in his youth,” she said. “He was magnificent, magnanimous. It was only later, when bitterness consumed him that I could bear him no more. When he grew so cold toward Jan, so heartless of Lell. Before that, for many years, I loved him well.”
Jah-lila nodded. “As did I. It is all lost now. Undone by a serpent’s sting.” Her heart ached. Resolutely, she turned her thoughts ahead. “Let us mourn and ready ourselves,” she murmured to Ses. “The end of all is soon to be, and your young Jan-with-the-Moon-upon-his-Brow must lead us there.”
12.
World’s End
Dawn woke him, its greyness paling the air with the first light he had seen in an eternity. Heavy-headed, half-sleeping still, Jan watched the sun emerge from dark caverns housing the netherpath. The fiery stallion leapt onto the steep incline of the starpath, his radiance blazing around him in a burning sphere. Full tilt, he galloped up the endless bowed and rocky path of stars.
The dream passed. Jan found himself lying on a rocky promontory. Sun’s featureless disc, inflamed by dawn, floated at eye-level dead ahead. No horizon lay before him, only sky above and mist below. Disoriented, Jan stared. The flat, limitless Salt Waste had vanished, along with its sweltering heat. A cold tang to the air told him he was now much higher.
Sky ahead shone white where the sun burned, paling the stars, but overhead was darkly, intensely blue, almost evening’s shade. The trickle of breeze felt thin, the air oddly bodiless. Jan found himself breathing deeply, despite lack of exertion. Below and before him lay nothing but cloud. The narrow promontory on which he lay jutted out into the empty air.
The rock itself was barren black, of a sort he had not seen before. Fused and burned, it appeared as though it had once been thickly liquid, like oozing pitch, then hardened. It felt heavy, utterly solid beneath him, like the substance of skycinders. It echoed faintly, subtly amplifying a low, gentle rustling behind him. Jan realized he had heard it all night as he slept.
Turning his head, the dark unicorn saw the jut on which he lay sloped steeply down to a broad ledge adjoining a sheer cliff face. The ledge narrowed and curved around the cliff on either side. Jan could not see where it led. Down the escarpment’s face from above streamed a curtain of water, the stone’s featureless blackness visible beneath the swiftly moving glaze.
Reaching the spacious ledge, the transparent fall fanned out, rippling and murmuring, before spilling in wafts of pale spray to the white clouds below. The sheet of water drenching the ledge was less than hoof deep. Jan realized he had felt its coolness against his heels the night before, seen the stars reflected there, slipping over the rim into emptiness below.
Understanding gripped him then that one step farther, or to either side, would have taken him, too, over the edge. He lay on the promontory, breathless, staring at the colorless flow of water washing the cliff. The darkness behind its gleam seemed not solid but empty, holding nothing, not even stars. A pulsebeat or a millennium later, Tek’s likeness formed itself before him.
Mottled like the moon she stood, sad seeming, poised as though watching for something beyond her sight. Longing rose in him, and then a tide of nausea. He remembered Korr’s words. They clung to him. Salt welled in his throat, choking him. Tek’s filmy image rippled in the evermoving glints and shadows of the dark waterfall.
She is my mate! The silent cry rang through his mind. She cannot be my sister! His heart knotted. He felt as though it might burst. The herd will cast me out. And her… His belly lurched. The sky above wheeled. Cold tremors shook him. What will become of our young?
For a moment, Tek’s image seemed to look straight into him. Brow furrowed, ears up-pricked, she appeared to be listening. Jan flinched and turned away. Shaky with hunger and thirst and the thin air’s chill, he gathered his limbs, managed to rise. Despair enveloped him. Before him plunged the abyss.
He stared at the mist swirling far, far below, caught glimpses of dark ridges, all blanketed with the same. When had the Salt Waste given way? He had no idea, no notion how he had come here. It was as though he had stepped from the earth, walked among stars, then crossed back into the world here, among the clouds.
He stood swaying. His shifting weight dislodged a stone. Silently, it plummeted. He found himself thinking, How effortless, simply to fall…
The clang of hooves roused him. Distinct but distant, they moved at a walk: half a dozen sets, coming from below and around the bend of the broad, wet ledge. The dark unicorn turned, careful, suddenly, of the perilous drop-off. On the black escarpment before him, Tek’s image had disappeared. Only darkness loomed behind the falling water.
Above the murmur of the waterfall, sound carried undistorted. Underlying the hooves’ faint, rhythmic tramp, the young stallion detected a thrum of voices. The hard, black rock hummed with the sound, vibrating ever so slightly. Jan felt the sensation as a whisper in his bones. The hoofbeats neared, climbing toward his level, and the voices clarified. He distinguished words, a chant: