The Scouts of Halla were across the rift. As they reached the far side, Jan realized with a start that the hills were gentler here. Beyond, he saw, lay the waterless Salt Waste. Wind blew in the direction of the Waste, pursuing the sprinting unicorns. Cinderfall grew heavier, the ground’s trembling more ferocious. Had Oro’s band not surged forward precisely when they did, Jan saw, they would never have managed to cross. Brightness infused the ashfall. Some of the cinders glowed. Some were not cinders at all, he grasped, but droplets of dragonsflood.
A bright fountain spewed from a rift in the ruin of the fallen peak’s broken base. Beneath welled a molted tongue of red that spilled slowly to the shallow depression’s floor. Once the fiery flood had wound across, all passage would be blocked, at least until it cooled. How long would that take, Jan wondered—days? Weeks? The Scouts of Halla fled on toward the Salt Waste across the foothills of Dragonsholm. Their heels raised a cloud which mingled with the falling ash.
20.
Battle
Summer. The suddenness of transition startled him. One moment Jan had seemed to be wheeling over the snow-capped Smoking Hills, air obscured by clouds of dust and smoke. The next, he found himself leagues upon leagues away, the wide, green Plain rolling beneath, a clear cloudless dawn sky above, the Hallow Hills before.
Unicorns of the Vale lay in the tall grass, gazing toward their unreclaimed homeland. Tek, flanked by Ryhenna and Dagg, couched at the crest of the rise. Jah-lila, Teki, and Ses waited close behind. The rest of the band reclined below them, well hidden. No colts lounged among the band, no ancient elders or suckling mares. Warriors only made up the great warhost, nostrils flaring to scent the breeze, ears swiveling to catch every sound. Thick haze hung low in the sky far to the east, its source beyond horizon’s edge. It tainted the sunrise orange-red, a fiery light bathing the Hallow Hills. The dappled warrior beside Tek shifted.
“No sign of him,” he muttered. “Where is he? He set out an
hour since.”
“Grant him time,” Ryhenna soothed in the strange, lilting cadence of her former tribe, the daya. “Dawn breaketh only now.”
The pied mare turned, called softly. “What is that haze in the east? Can you tell?”
Below her, the red mare lifted her head. “Naught that will affect us here. It comes of the Smoking Hills.”
“A blood-bright dawn,” Teki the healer beside her murmured. “Will the weather hold?”
“Aye,” the red mare told him. “It will.”
“Blood-stained but beautiful,” the pale mare, Ses, beside them whispered. “Its red light illumines the hills. So they appeared on the eve of my initiation, years ago.”
“When thou sawest thy vision of the Firebringer?” Ryhenna inquired.
Ses nodded, wistful. “And other things.”
Tek turned back to the Hallow Hills, glowing crimson in the dawnlight still. “Where is Jan?” she barely breathed. “Why has he not returned?”
A shrill cry fell from above, piercing as a kite’s. The pied mare started, felt the warhost behind her stir. Her gaze darted skyward. A moment later, his shadow passed over her, and she was able to glimpse Illishar, his hue so well matched to the green sky he had approached unseen. Circling, he began to descend.
“At last!” Tek heard Dagg exclaim. “Once the wingcat reports, we can devise our best means of attack.”
The wyverns lay concealed, hidden behind boulders and rocky outcroppings. The ravine formed a box canyon, its banks gentle at first, but whoever ventured its narrow passage found the sides soon steepened to precarious slopes. The wyverns often drove game here: deer and boar, bands of antelope that had strayed from the Plain. No game drives now since the first of the year. Instead, they had waited, king’s loyalists ever on watch for unicorns, those thrice-cursed skulkers of the Vale who never failed to steal into the Hills sometime during the spring.
“What a ruin,” the first of two wyverns sheltering behind a single boulder hissed. “This dawn marks summer’s first day, and where are the unicorns? They never came.”
“Nor will they,” its companion muttered, smaller than the first, and more slenderly made. “They died out or gave up or lost their way. The sum is, they come here no more.”
“Precisely,” the first wyvern muttered. “We’ve frittered all spring on this fruitless task, when we might have been coursing young fawns and cracking their bones.”
This larger wyvern was of a bluer cast than the more slender one. Its tail was longer, the sting upon it more wickedly barbed. A rudimentary second head was budding from one shoulder, no more than an offshoot, its features still indistinct, mouth sealed shut, the bulbous, bruise-dark lids of its nascent eyes not yet open. It writhed fretfully against the thicker stalk of the bluish wyvern’s primary neck. With one blunt, badger-like claw, the ice-blue wyrm petted it, humming.
“This ravine makes a fair enough game-trap,” the slimmer, more pearl-colored wyrm was saying. A summer hopper flicked through the air. With a snap, it downed the long-legged thing. “I’ve run down onc and springer here, even a Plainscalf once.”
Its two-headed companion nodded impatiently. “As have we all. But now we must let game pass unmolested, lest we spook any phantom unicorns that might wander near.”
“The king has lost his wits,” the pearl-colored wyvern murmured, sniffing the grass in search of other hoppers. “Ever since the queen was slain.”
“There was a wyvern,” the elder wyrm exclaimed. Its rudimentary nob slumbered now against its collarbone. It scratched its main pate’s gill ruff with one knife-nailed badger claw. “She’d have thrown the king down and taken his place, had the unicorns not finished her.”
A scarlet earthworm wove through the grass. The bluish wyvern stabbed after it, but missed. Its companion studied a yellow butterfly fluttering about its head.
“Then we’d have fire still,” it answered. “She’d have shared it among us again. It was only the king’s edict—and his fear—that forbade each of us keeping our own fire, as we used to do. All those winters lazing beside a burning brand! That’s what made us strong. It’s lack of warmth caused all those stingless prits to hatch.”
The yellow butterfly fluttered near. The pearlescent wyvern clapped its jaws, but the next instant spat, shook its head and pawed its muzzle to dislodge the clinging yellow wings. “Uch! It tastes of saltclay and sulfur.”
Its companion chuckled. “No doubt. What you say of fire is true as well. Now that the king’s let his own brand die, our last flame is gone. Unless we find another source, no more stinging wyrms will hatch of our broods. Mark me.”
“The stingless ones,” the pearly wyrm added. “You heard they fled? Aye, across the Plain. Six days ago.”
Its bluish companion turned. “Fled? I thought they were in hiding.”
“Nay,” the slender wyvern assured it. “Yet not one stinging loyalist was sent in pursuit—lest we miss the unicorns! Time enough to track peaceseekers once we’ve dealt with His Majesty’s unicorns—what is this sudden fascination? He says he sees them in his dreams. Says he feels them watching him.”
“Unicorns,” the bluish wyvern scoffed, glancing at the ravine’s grass-covered slopes dotted with boulders and slabs of exposed stone. “We’ll never see another…”
“Hist!” his companion snapped, suddenly alert. The pearl-colored wyvern’s gaze was fixed downslope. The larger wyrm heard grunts and whiffs of surprise from fellows massed behind other boulders on both their own and the facing slopes. Only those hiding lower on the near hillside were visible to the bluish wyvern. They, too, had become instantly attentive. Alongside, the pearl-colored wyvern breathed a single word: “Unicorns!”