Birth of the Firebringer ft-1 Read online

  “But even as he was speaking, a cry went up in the south and east, from scouts flying to bring the alarm:

  “ ‘The wyverns, the wyverns—to war!’ ”

  Above the Vale, the full moon floated, serenely bright, nearing its zenith. Tek stood in perfect profile now, her voice pitched to carry; she sang out like a bell:

  “All about the gathered unicorns, the wyverns now came streaming, slithering like flood rain—many more than there had been at midsummer, many more than the unicorns were. Most of them were little things, no bigger than hatchlings. Quick as kestrels, lithe as eels, they darted about the heels of the unicorns, stinging.

  “And snaking at the head of them, Lynex shouted, ‘Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Did I not say our younglings thrive fast? Come, prit; come, pet.’

  “Then the wyrmlet that had crawled from the ear flashed to the wyvern king and twined about his neck. And seeing this, Halla rose up, shouting a war cry. Her warriors rallied. The unicorns charged. All day the fighting lasted. Many wyverns were slain, the great ones pierced through the vitals, the little ones trampled underfoot.

  “But the warriors were scattered and few. Some were yet heavy in foal or only recently delivered. Many shattered their horns against the wyverns’ breasts, for the wyrms were made with a bony plate under the skin and above the heart that could not be pierced. And those that had been stung felt a languor overtaking them, till they sank to the ground, unable to rise.”

  Jan squirmed in the dark in his place beside Dagg. He champed his teeth, hardly able to bear that Alma should grant all things in season—even defeat for the unicorns. The singer sang:

  “Slow and by little, the unicorns fell back, and the wyverns poured after them in fierce hordes until the westering sun hung like a gryphon’s eye, and the unicorns fought upon the last slope of the Hallow Hills, upon the verges of the Plain.

  “Halla cried out then, ‘Is all lost? Hoof and horn prove no match to the barbs of the wyrms. So many lie slain. Another hour and we shall all of us be dead. Is no hope left?’

  “ ‘One hope,’ answered Zod, the singer of dreams, for still he fought alongside her, protecting her flank. ‘Fly—away across the Great Grass Plain. These wyrms will gorge themselves upon our dead and theirs, and will not follow.’

  “ ‘Run?’ Halla cried, staring at him. ‘Leave the Mirror of the Moon for them to lap and paddle in?’

  “ ‘The Moon’s Mere is now bitter salt,’ the seer said, ‘and poison to them. You have said yourself, O princess, another hour’s fight will see us dead. Better for us to fly now and live, to grow many and strong again, one day to return and reclaim our land—than to die to the last here and now, giving it up to them forever.’ ”

  Jan kicked one leg in silent protest. His young heart cried out, No. Better to die, die fighting to the last, than to live with the shame. But that was foal’s talk, and he knew it, that no warrior would countenance. The healer’s daughter turned some and spoke, soft echoes shadowing her speech:

  “ ‘But how may we ever reclaim it?’ cried Halla, like one dying for grief. ‘How long must we wait?’

  “Then her companion’s eyes grew far and strange. ‘I have heard in dreams,’ so the seer said, ‘that it will not come in our lifetime. Our sons will not see it, nor our sons’ daughters. But when at last the night-dark one shall be born among the unicorns, then the Mirror of the Moon will grow sweet again, and the wyverns shall perish in fire. Our people shall call him the Firebringer: a great warrior as are you, O princess, and a seer of dreams as am I.’ ”

  “How does he know that?” muttered Jan, hardly realizing he spoke.

  “Seers know things,” whispered Dagg. “Alma tells them, and they know.”

  Tek stood now as she had at the tale’s beginning, and the moon hung above her at zenith in the sky. And it seemed to Jan, as he lay listening, that that soft songshadow, faint on the very verge of his hearing, still sounded from before him, from the far hillside, though the healer’s daughter now faced wholly away from that slope as she sang.

  “So Halla, hearing the dreamer’s words, ate at last the bitter root of defeat, bowing to the wisdom of the moon, which says that all things wax and wane, even the greatness of the unicorns. She bade her warriors escape and save themselves, flee away into the dusk while the wyverns in the foothills sat howling their glee.

  “But glancing back, Halla—the very last to leave the field—saw Lynex holding aloft in his teeth the bough of a tree all ablaze with amber flowers. Beside him upon the ground rested a golden bowl of glowing stones.

  “ ‘What, fly, will you?’ cried the wyrm king through his teeth. ‘Then let this pursue you in our stead. Never think to trouble us again, vile unicorns!’

  “Then he cast the scarlet brand upon the Plain, and where it came to earth, suddenly the stubgrass bloomed as well with wisps of light that danced and ran before the wind. Clouds of choking dust arose beneath the fury of their passing, and they left the grass behind them blackened in curling crisps.

  “Those whom the hot, darting dancers touched screamed wild in pain. Not horn nor hoof availed against them, and any who fled slow or wounded, the flames ran down like pards upon the Plain. The unicorns fled rampant then, terrified, for two whole nights and a day, till spring storms trampled out the deadly flares, and the children-of-the-moon dropped where they stood, to sleep like dead things in the rain.”

  The healer’s daughter fell silent then, and her echo fell instantly silent as well. Very like her own voice it was, only a little deeper. Jan sighed heavily, studying the ground. The story always ended the same, with the rout of the unicorns. If only…. He screwed his knees tighter into the turf. If only, if only—he knew not what. Tek made an ending to the tale:

  “I have sung you the Lay of the Unicorns, how we were cast from our lands by wyverns and wandered many seasons, south over the Plain, till at last we came upon a Vale. And here, by Alma’s grace, we have begun to grow strong again.

  “But we have never forgotten that these are not our own true lands. One day we shall regain the Hallow Hills. Each year some of us must return: quiet, careful, on dangerous Pilgrimage, to drink that drink which makes us what we are, unicorns, warriors, children-of-the-moon.

  “The sacred well, the Hallow Hills, are not yet ours again. The Firebringer is not among us yet, but he is coming. He is coming—soon.”

  Tek stood a moment on the ledge and then descended. Those in the Circle began to stir. Dagg in the moonlit dark beside Jan whispered, “She changed that last.”

  Jan was still gazing after Tek as she lay down beside her father now.

  “She didn’t just say the Firebringer was coming. She said he was coming soon.”

  Jan nodded absently, thinking of something else. “I wonder,” he murmured. “Did this valley belong to anyone before we came here?”

  Dagg eyed him with a frown. “It was empty. Everyone knows that.”

  “I wonder,” murmured Jan. “Someone told me once…it seems….”

  This valley was ours before you stole it. Ever since the day of the gryphons, those words had been in his mind. Who was it that had told him that? Every time he strove to picture the speaker, the image slipped from him. It was like a dream he had awakened from and now could not recall.

  Khraa upon the ledge had begun to speak, but Jan hardly listened, still trying to puzzle out those strange, half-remembered words: This valley was ours….

  Dagg was nudging him. “Do you think she’s a dreamer? Tek, I mean. Maybe she’s foreseen the Firebringer.”

  Jan felt his skin prickle. For a moment the thought quickened his blood: that the Firebringer might be more than just an old legend, that the prophecy might one day come to pass.

  “But do you think,” whispered Dagg, bending closer, “she could have meant Korr?”

  Jan started and stared at his friend. The feeling of exhilaration passed. The prince’s son snorted and shook his head. “Zod foretold ‘a seer of dreams.’ ”

  “Yes
, but the dreaming sight doesn’t always come early,” said Dagg. “And your father’s coat is color-of-night.”

  Jan looked away. Could that be—his sire, the Firebringer? The idea unsettled him somehow. True, Korr was black and a great warrior, the first black prince in all the history of the unicorns. But his father had no use for dreamers and their dreams. He would have no truck with them at all—except that once with Jah-lila, the healer’s mate, who lived outside the Vale.

  Jan snorted again. No, it could never be Korr. Impossible! He rolled onto his back and scrubbed himself against the soft, grass-grown dirt. His winter coat was still long and shaggy from the cold months, and he wished it would shed. Spring was early this year, and it itched.

  He shook himself then, and settled himself. Dagg beside him had closed his eyes. The gray king had quit the ledge, and all around, Jan heard other unicorns preparing for sleep. He let his breath out slowly; his eyelids drooped.

  Above him the moon, mottled and bright, fissured down its middle like a ripe eggshell. Out of it crawled a winged serpent that hung above him in the starry sky, breathing a sour breath upon him and speaking words he could not understand.

  Jan’s limbs twitched in his sleep; his nostrils flared. Breath caught and shuddered in his throat. Dagg jostled beside him in the dark. Jan rolled onto his other side and breathed more deeply then. His eyelids ceased to flutter. The snake in the heavens flew away.

  It was very late. He realized he must have slept, but he could not remember having closed his eyes. The unbroken moon, whole and undamaged, had tilted a little way down from its zenith. Jan saw a figure standing among the sleeping unicorns. It turned away, walking toward the Circle’s edge, then it sprang lightly over a sleeper and cantered noiselessly toward the far hillside. Jan felt the drumming of heels through the ground and lay wondering. By Law, no one was allowed to break the Circle until the moon was down.

  As the figure disappeared up slope into the trees, Jan realized suddenly that it seemed to be heading toward that point whence the echo had come while Tek had been singing. He frowned, shaking his head. The valley stood empty now, the Circle around him still and undisturbed.

  It’s restlessness, he told himself. I imagined it. He felt no drum of heels in the soft earth now. He shut his eyes, shivering with fatigue. And as he slipped again into that country between waking and sleep, it seemed the night air brought to him, just for a moment, a delicious odor like roses in summer. He slept deep without dreams then, till morning.

  The Pan Woods

  The trees leaned close around them as they walked, and bird cries haunted through the gloom. The air was cool, with gray jays and redwings flashing through the wells of light. As Jan watched, golden foxes slunk through the bracken. There a hare crouched, its eyes as black as river stones, beside a skeletal thicket all budded in yellow-green. Deer browsed among the shadows, raising their heads as the unicorns passed, gazing after the newcomers with great, uncurious eyes.

  The pilgrims slipped through the still Pan Woods that forested the folded hills as far as the Plain, a day’s journey to the west. They had risen at dawn, all those within the Circle, sprung up and shaken the sleep from them, while those forming the Ring around them had lain sleeping still. At a nod from the prince, the initiates had turned, lept over the sleepers, and stolen from the valley—silently, lest any left behind awaken, breaking the Circle before the pilgrims were away.

  They moved in single file now, the colts and fillies behind the prince and flanked by warriors here and there. Over the long train of backs wending before him, Jan caught glimpses of rose and black, the healer’s daughter, and sometimes white and black, her sire. Others he remembered from the battle of the gryphons, for Korr chose only the worthiest warriors to accompany the initiates over the Plain.

  The Hallow Hills lay far to northward, a half month’s running. By then the full moon that had set over the Vale a half hour gone would be dwindled to nothing. By the moon’s dark, then, while the wyverns slept, the unicorns would keep Vigil beside the sacred Mere; and at daybreak they would dip their hooves and horns and drink a single sip of its bitter waters.

  So much Jan knew of the ceremony at their journey’s end. So much and no more. He and Dagg filed on through the trees of the Pan Woods, near the tail of the line. And the morning passed. They halted near noon to lie up beside a tangle of berry brush. Splendid curtains of sun streamed into a small clearing nearby. Jan and Dagg threw themselves down upon the soft brown carpet of bracken leaf, near the clearing’s edge but out of the light, and lay there, not talking. The morning’s long walk had tired them.

  When Alma first had made the world, so the singers said, she had offered her children the gift of speech. The unicorns took it gladly, and sang their thanks to her. The gryphons took it, and the dragons, even the wyrms. But the goatling pans ran away into the woods, hiding themselves from the Mother-of-all, refusing her gift. And for that, the unicorns despised them.

  Jan and Dagg had even seen one once, a pan—a small, cowardly thing. The previous summer they had stolen high upon the slopes, looking for red rueberries to roll in so that, returning to their companions below, they might game them into believing they had been sprung upon by bobtailed hillcats.

  But unexpectedly, they had come upon a strange beast: round-headed, flat-faced, and horned like a goat. Its hairless chest was broad and shallow, with a bluish hide, its forelimbs fingered like birds’ feet, and the hind limbs shaggy brown with cloven heels. A slight figure, it would have stood only shoulder high to Korr.

  It had been crouching when they had come upon it, plucking ripe berries from the ruebush with the long toes of its forelegs; but it had sprung up and dashed away when it saw them, upon its hind limbs alone, like a wingless bird. He and Dagg had chased it, but it had disappeared over the hillcrest and down into the Pan Woods quick as cunning. What an odd, ungainly looking creature. Ugly as old bones.

  Remembering, Jan smiled with the easy arrogance of unicorns and nibbled the young buds from the briar beside him. It was Alma’s frown upon the goatlings that made them so. Only her favored ones, the moon’s children, walked truly in beauty. He swatted at a deerfly that lighted on his rump. The shoots of the bush tasted tender and green.

  The handful of warriors stood guard about the dozing initiates, or moved silently among the trees, scouting for pans. Jan watched them idly, and presently he heard a strange sound far in the distance, drawn out and windy, like the whooping of herons. It died down after a few moments, then began again, nearer. And as he listened, it seemed to Jan he could discern a pattern in the cries, calling and replying to one another through the trees.

  Dagg was just turning to him, drawing breath to speak, when all at once Jan cut him off with a hiss. He nodded. Teki and another warrior had emerged from the trees a dozen paces from them and stood conferring with the prince.

  “Something’s afoot,” murmured Jan, feeling his blood quickening. “Maybe they’ve spotted pans.”

  All morning since they had left the Vale, he had been half hoping they might stumble upon the pans. They were not colts anymore, after all. They had nothing to fear. Indeed, it would be a fine game, putting a few of those timid little blueskins to flight. The Woods had been so quiet, the morning so monotonous, with only bird cries for distraction. Boredom nibbled at Jan with tiny, needle teeth.

  “It is pans,” whispered Dagg. “It must be.”

  The two warriors had broken off from Korr now and were whistling the initiates to be up and off. Jan sprang to his feet and shook himself, laughing with Dagg at the prospect of diversion. The file forming behind Teki was already trotting away into the trees.

  “Step brisk,” Jan heard Korr calling, “and less noise.”

  Jan champed his tongue and hurried into line. Dagg behind him was doing the same. Since the day of the gryphons, Jan had kept his vow, following the prince’s word always, at once, without questions. His father’s goodwill was too precious, had come too dearly bought to part wit
h now. Jan swallowed his high spirits and stepped brisk.

  The gloom of the Pan Woods enfolded them. Behind them, Korr was bringing up the rear of the train. Jan pricked his ears, scanning the trees. Nothing. The Woods were empty, still. He lifted his head, catching the scent of trees and earth, of shady air. No whiff of pans—not yet. But it hardly mattered; they could not be far.

  He wrinkled his nose, trotting, feeling the waves of anticipation in him rise. A sense of reckless abandon seethed in him. They were warriors, dangerous and fierce, and on their way into a skirmish. Ears pricked, nostrils wide, his eyes scanning ahead, Jan listened to the crying of herons falling away into the distance behind.

  They kept at a jogtrot into the middle afternoon. The whooping voices of the herons had long since faded. Jan snorted, frowning. His anticipation waned; his limbs felt sore. Korr had trotted toward the fore of the line a half hour gone. Now, as Tek strayed near, Jan could bear it no more.

  “Hist, Tek,” he whispered, and the young mare turned. “When will we come upon the pans?”

  She blinked. “Never, Alma be kind, and if we go carefully.”

  Jan shook his head, not understanding. Dagg had come up alongside him now. “But,” he started, “wasn’t it because of pans that we broke camp so suddenly?”

  Tek glanced at him. “Aye. But no fear, they’re well behind us now.”

  Jan snorted, and astonishment went through him like a barb. “We’ve been going away from them?”

  A smile sparked the young mare’s eye. “What, did you think we’d sprung up to go seek them?” She broke into low laughter then. “By Alma’s Beard, princeling. I never yet met a colt who could so not let trouble lie, but always must be up and hunting it.”