“I beg you forbear our latecoming,” the young maroon continued. “Rockfall day past delayed our climb. Then, just as my fellows and I reached Streaming Ledge hard by the veiled ingress to the netherpath, we met a stranger on the brink of dawn.”
Again the echoing murmur, curious, even excited now. The ranks ranging the vast hall’s edge shifted and stirred. This time Jan could not distinguish words, but once more he sensed, blended amongst the others, strangely timbred voices which were not of his own kind.
“By me he stands,” Oro announced, his timing and cadence clearly that of a singer, “an outlander called Firebrand, with the moon-marked brow. He comes from beyond, over Saltland and Plain, bearing news of lost Halla, our sovereign princess, and the wretched wyverns who wrested from her the Hallow Hills.”
The uproar that greeted these words was deafening: shouts of surprise, exclamations, disbelief, calls for Oro to explain. Jan flattened his ears, overwhelmed by the rolling waves of sound. Beside him, the young maroon stood calmly, undismayed—perhaps even a little pleased—by the upheaval his news had occasioned. An instant later, the tumult vanished as voices infinitely fuller and stronger than any unicorn’s spoke, extinguishing all other clamor.
“Welcome,” the first of these new, resonant voices said, and others echoed it. “Welcome. Welcome…”
The words seemed to come from all directions. Casting his gaze, the dark unicorn strove to locate their source.
“Welcome to Dragonsholm, Firebrand.” A fourth voice spoke. Others chorused, “Firebrand. Firebrand…”
Their pure, even tones filled the hall like the calling of oncs or the belling of hounds, richly pleasurable to harken. Jan felt no fear of these unseen speakers, wherever they might be. All were female, he sensed. The timbre of their voices, so much more powerful than those of his own folk, somehow told him so. He sensed, too, that regardless of how near they sounded, in reality they lay many leagues distant, the black rock carrying their words to him and his to them.
“Hail, red dragons,” he answered, “holders of the Smoking Hills, hosts to the Scouts of Halla, my people’s long-lost kin.”
Around him, the hushed unicorns stirred, ears up-pricked, listening. Oro stood no longer at his side, Jan realized. He glimpsed him just joining the edge of the crowd. The prince of the Vale stood alone by the great crystalline boulder with the pool in its crown.
“You are called Firebrand,” a dragon voice said.
Another, speaking just on the heels of the first, asked, “ Are you the one?”
“The one of whom the Scouts have spoken,” still another voice continued, “destined to lead them back to their Hallow Hills?”
“You have traveled far,” still others added. “You must be weary.”
“I am Aljan,” the dark unicorn answered, and indeed, he felt nearly mazed with weariness, unsure how many hours or days he had gone without water and food. “My folk call me Firebringer, and Moonbrow.” But not prince. He would not tell them the folk of the Vale called him prince. “It is they I mean to lead in retaking the Hallow Hills. As for the Scouts of Halla, I cannot say.”
“Tell us this tale,” the dragon voices responded.
“The tale of you.”
“The tale of your journey.”
“All season lies before us.”
“It must be a wondrous tale.”
Jan felt his knees growing weak. The dark room spun. He heard murmurs of concern from those in the shadows, saw Oro start toward him.
“But sip first,” the voices of dragons invited. The maroon stallion halted, hesitated. The dragons lilted on.
“Sip.”
“Sip of the queen’s pool beside you.”
Turning, Jan tried to focus on the natural basin of water in the huge white boulder’s crown. Oddly, though its surface lay perfectly still, it seemed to bend and shift somehow, as though currents beneath its surface created eddies. As he bent to drink, the depression’s shallow bottom appeared to recede from him. He caught glimpses of comets and suns, of unicorns hurtling across a field of stars—or was it a starlit Plain?
Jan shook his head. He closed his eyes, sure that fatigue was causing him to dream. His mouth touched the water, and he was surprised to find it warm, not cool. As the water filled his mouth, the fantastic notion came to him that he was drinking stars. He swallowed once. The pleasantly tepid fluid seemed slightly thicker than water, its taste mildly acerbic, yet at the same time like balm. He had prepared to draw in long drafts, but strangely, after the first sip, he felt entirely satisfied.
He had been speaking, he knew, for a very long time. Jan felt wholly detached, free of hunger, thirst, and fatigue. Time seemed suspended. The sea of figures before him shifted and changed, Oro’s the only one he was able to distinguish with certainty. His own voice, filling the vast, dimly lit chamber, sounded unlike himself, like the voice of another, a singer’s cant from the one with whom he had traveled upon the Plain, the one with the star-flung coat. What had been his name? Summer Stars.
The dark unicorn had no idea how long he had spoken, telling the unseen dragons and the shadowy Scouts before him everything about his people’s history, how lying wyrms had defeated Halla four hundred summers gone, driven her and her small surviving band from the Hallow Hills. How they had come upon the Vale after long wanderings and taken refuge, there to grow strong and numerous again, in preparation for recapturing the Hallow Hills.
He spoke of his own life, how he had been reared by the king of the unicorns and, in his youth, faced a wyvern queen in her den. His hooves now struck sparks, his horn, hardened by wyvern sorcery, grown keen and hard enough to pierce even the toughest wyvern bone. He had dwelt half a year with two-footed firekeepers, learning the secret of their flame. His folk all hailed him Firebringer. Forging alliances with gryphons and pans, he had made his herd proof against wyvern stings. This coming spring, they would leave the Vale and march into wyvern-held Hallow Hills to retake them in Alma’s name.
He spoke of the king of the Vale run mad and of pursuing him across the Plain. He spoke of his mate, pied Tek the warrior mare, a singer, wondrously fair, firstborn child to the late king who, serpent-stung to death upon the Waste, left the Vale in his daughter’s charge. Queen of the unicorns she reigned, though she did not yet know it. Mother to twin heirs, a filly and foal. The only thing he did not reveal was his own parentage, never naming himself Son-of-Korr or prince. Despite his oddly calm, loosened-tongued state, he could not bring himself even now to face the horror spat at him by dying Korr, that he and his mate shared a single sire.
The voices of dragons spoke no more. The Scouts of Halla listened rapt. When he spoke of Tek, they cheered. Jan had no awareness of the passage of time, speaking on as in a dream. Neither night nor day penetrated the depths of Queen Mélintélinas’s Hall. Figures among the crowd came and went as he spoke. He felt no need for food or drink or sleep. At times, he realized, he had ceased to speak, and the Scouts of Halla spoke, or sang, or chanted their own history: the journey of their four ancestors over the Plain, across the Salt Waste to the Smoking Hills.
Here, from Queen Mélintélinas, they had learned the wyverns’ secret past: that wyrms had stolen dragonsfire, seeking to seize these dark steeps for their own, only to be driven off at last by the red firedrakes who once had sheltered them. The wyrms had wandered then, surviving the Salt Waste and the wide grass Plain until they slithered into the Hallow Hills and lied their way into a truce with the unicorns who dwelt there—all the while planning to betray them and seize their lands as once they had striven to seize the red dragons’.