The crescent had stalled coalescing into the wedge needed to drive the wyrmking’s hoard apart. Tek whistled the rallying cry again, again, but the exhausted unicorns were faltering. Before them, Lynex, three times the size of any other wyvern on the field, hooted his glee.
“Smash them, crush them!” his largest head shouted.
“Rip them, rend them,” the two middle-sized pates flanking the main one cried.
“Snap them, slash them, bite and devour them,” three of the smaller maws ranted, while the littlest nob gabbled and hissed: “Smash, rend, slash, devour!”
The wyverns were breaking through. Tek saw the line waver in two places. Ses leapt toward one of the weakening points, spurring on comrades with her whistles and cries. Ryhenna sprang to join her. On the opposite side of the pied mare, Teki and Jah-lila forged toward the other spot at which the warhost’s ranks were in imminent danger of giving way. Too slowly. Defenders crumpled beneath the wyverns’ teeth and claws. The crescent was staving in. Tek felt her own heart quail. The healer and the red mare would never reach the breach in time.
“Dagg, go!” she shouted, giving her shoulder-friend a slap on the rump with the flat of her horn.
The dappled warrior sprinted toward the buckling formation’s edge, shouldering his way across the fray, whistling encouragement to those who still lived and desperately fought on. Tek returned to the struggle before her. She dared not follow Dagg’s progress even a moment more. His absence and Ryhenna’s created a gap in the ranks around her. She leapt forward to fill the breach.
The seven-headed wyvern king towered above her, his immense bodyguards writhing. They bore down on Tek like a mountain falling. Illishar swooped, dived, trying to strike at the wyrmking’s heads, but his double-headed bodyguards battered the gryphon tercel off. The pied mare found herself unable to hold her ground. Notwithstanding her furious charges, she was being driven back, step by step. How many more before she found herself against the cliff? Her folk around her, she knew, found themselves in the same case: hemmed in, incapable of breaking free.
“To war! To war!”
The cry rang out from behind the wyverns whom they faced. Faint at first, it strengthened suddenly as the wind turned and carried the resonant war chant to the pied mare’s ears full force. Unicorns. Unmistakably a warcry of unicorns. Beyond the wyrmhoard, a raising of dust and a thunder of heels. The words grew nearer and louder yet.
“We be the Scouts of Halla! In the Firebrand’s name we come. Aljan-with-the-Moon-upon-his-Brow has summoned us to your aid, Queen Tek. Wyzásukitán hastened us from the Smoking Hills. The wyverns! The wyverns! To war!”
A flood of unicorns crested the wyvern shelves. Smaller than the common run, all were dark roans, deep blues and greys, brick-red dapples, brindles of tarnished gold, their leader a young stallion of frosted maroon. The pied mare could only gape as the shaggy strangers stampeded down the limestone slopes like a cascade of maddened hill goats. Tek wasted not one moment of the wyverns’ panic. As the white wyrms spun, shrieking, she whistled: “Forward! Strike hard, warriors of the Ring!”
Around her she saw, felt, heard her own folk plunge ahead with renewed vigor, rushing to meet these unknown allies who called her queen and claimed to come from Jan. The wyverns, caught between two closing pincers of unicorns, screamed in terror, their ranks disintegrating.
“A trap!” the deserters shrilled.
“Stand your ground, you bloodless fools,” shouted the wyrmking’s central head. “We outnumber them still!”
In full rout, scattering for their lives, his troops ignored the command. The Vale’s warhost, rumps no longer against the cliff, joined the newcomers in pursuing and skewering as many as they could. Few wyrms managed to clamber back into their caves, for the rush of newcomers had swept them downslope, away from their dens’ entryways. For the first time since the arrival of Lynex, Tek began to feel—not just hope, but truly feel—that the unicorns might carry the day.
22.
Upstart
Lell galloped across the Hallow Hills through the late afternoon light. Signs of battle lay everywhere. Strewn upon the summer grass, in the meadows and little stands of trees, upon the grassy, broken slopes and beside the streams, lay carcasses of the slain. Mostly wyvern, the half-grown filly noted with relief. Her folk were prevailing, then—or had been earlier. Sun hung low over the western horizon, its light a warm, golden amber, not yet deepened to crimson. She would have to hurry. Lell turned her eyes from the slain and galloped on.
She had left the oasis where suckling mares, weanlings too young to be initiated, the old and the infirm had remained in the Plainsdwellers’ charge, there to await news of the battle’s outcome. But Lell had not waited. Five years old, she was of age to join the warriors. Had a pilgrimage been made this year, she would have been initiated. But Jan had not returned and the herd been deep in plans for war. The harsh winter of three seasons past had slain every other filly and foal her own age. The herd would brook no pilgrimage of one.
What, then, the prince’s sister fumed, was she to do—wait till she was a doddering mare and the sucklings at last grown old enough to join the Ring? She refused to wait! Jan would never have allowed such a travesty—and in his absence, she would not permit the most glorious battle of her people’s history to pass her by. Besides, she reminded herself smugly, the twins had said she must go. They had come upon her as she had been preparing in secret to slip away. She had feared at first they meant to stay her, report her to Calydor, sound the alarm.
They had done no such thing, only said they had come to aid her, knew where the sentries stood and what path was best to avoid their eyes. They said they had come to tell her Calydor was occupied elsewhere and that now was the ideal time to slip away. He would not miss her for hours, perhaps until morning, if she went straightaway. Then they told her the route to the Hallow Hills, as glibly as though they had fared it themselves.
“But we have fared it,” Aiony had told her, though Lell had breathed not a word of her thoughts aloud.
“Night past,” Dhattar continued, “we followed the path of past pilgrims in dreams.”
Lell had long since abandoned hope of grasping the twins’ meaning when they spoke of their dreams. Instead, she had accepted their aid gratefully, tucking the course they described away into memory honed by Illishar, like the rhyme and meter of a lay. This is what Jan would have wanted me to do, she found herself thinking, a bit uncertainly—and then with more confidence, at least, this is what Jan himself would have done were he in my case.
And the way had not proved so very hard to follow, after all. She fared only half a day behind the warriors. They had departed the previous afternoon, she the following morning. Grass trampled and earth turned by their passing remained for Lell to follow. She pushed relentlessly, resting but briefly before pressing on.
Where was Jan? The thought beat at her unceasingly as she ran. Why had he not returned? She felt as though she must make up for his absence somehow, must go in his stead. None of the others could be relied upon, the twins cautioned, not even Calydor. Though a seer, he had not dreamed what they had dreamed. He would not believe them, they feared. And telling him would spoil Lell’s chance to go. Tek would need her, they insisted, no other. She must kindle fire. She must join the fray before sunset, must fly like the wind with the heart of a pard. She must not yield.
Lell set her thoughts aside as she came to a rocky rise. White limestone and black earth marked a difficult trail. From somewhere beyond, the amber filly heard, the din of battle rose. Her limbs trembled. She had run since dawn. It was not fear, she told herself, and began to climb.