No foreseeings. No destiny. Jan felt his chest tightening until he thought his ribs would fold. His eyelids were stinging, but he refused to blink. His breath had grown ragged. He understood. He had broken from the Ring in the Pan Woods, on the first day of their journey. He had almost forgotten that. Alma had not.

He had consorted with Renegades, buried a Renegade. The Serpent-cloud had been a warning. He should have heeded it, confessed to Korr. If only Tek—but it was too late now. He was unworthy, not fit to be the prince’s son, no better than a Renegade himself. The Mother-of-all had cursed him, showed him no fate upon the pool because no destiny could lie before him among the children-of-the-moon.

All around him he heard the pilgrims’ voices: gasps of wonder from the initiates, sighs and murmurs as their mentors once again beheld their fates. Jan’s nostrils flared. He had been holding his breath. Swiftly and without a word, he broke from the Circle and fled silently away into the trees.

Not then, but only much later—after the pilgrims had finished their beholdings and spoken their oath of fealty to the prince, heard more of Teki’s lays, sharpened their hooves and horns and dipped them in the Mere, then chanted and danced to declare themselves half-grown, warriors—only then, about midmorning, did the unicorns discover one of their band was not among them.

The heady scent of the milkwood, which they had been breathing all night, had lulled them, and the languor which always follows visioning had made them slow. Dagg and Tek stared at one another and shook their heads like beasts amazed that they had not noticed him gone before. No one had seen him slip away, nor could tracks be found, for the sand of the bank was all tossed and trampled from the dance.

Korr ordered the clifftop combed, but leaves had already fallen to cover Jan’s tracks. They searched and called the long hours before noon, but found no trace. Then, as they met back at the pool at midday, the whole band, Teki took the prince aside and argued with him.

The healer said, hark to the hour. By custom the band should have been back on the Plain by now. Nor might they tarry, for the pilgrims must be returned to the Vale by full moon’s time, as was the Law.

And Korr, half wild, said trample the custom and the Law.

And the healer said, was the prince gone mad? Could he not feel the sun, hot as a gryphon’s eye overhead? Spring came in apace this year, the grove was nearly in bloom; and it had always been held, for generations on end, that the wyverns awoke when the milkwood flowers. Who knew whether all this stirring and calling had not already wakened them?

And Korr, in a passion, answered him, let the wyverns all perish.

Then Teki said no word, but only nodded over one shoulder toward the initiates, so that Korr might take note of how huddled they stood, scanning the wood, how their skin twitched and their eyes rolled, and they started at nothing. It was the age-old terror of the wyverns, kept alive by the singers for four hundred years, that set them quailing so. Even the prince, despite his thunder, felt it.

Then the healer said, they are frightened, my prince. They fear your son has been stolen by the wyrms and that if we linger, we too shall meet the same. I fear it. Jan is a clever colt, and if he has but wandered off, lost in dreams, then surely he will find his way back to the Plain. But if he has been taken, then he is already lost, and our remaining cannot save him.

And at that, Korr bit down his anger and his fear, and bowed his head. Then he whistled the band into line once more, and they began to depart. But it was a semblance only, this seeming surrender by the prince. He meant but to see them safely to the Plain and then return, for he had vowed to himself, secretly, that he would not leave the Hallow Hills without his son.

But what no one had noticed—not he, not Teki, nor any other of the band—as they began their slow descent down the precarious cliff face, then filed at last out of sight beyond the canyon’s bend, was that two of their number still searched among the milkwood trees, never having returned to the Mirror of the Moon.

No one guessed that Tek and Dagg had glanced into each others’ eyes, each swearing silently to the other to find their friend despite the hour, despite the prince, despite the fear of wyverns that crawled in their breasts. Wise fear. Rash fools, they had no inkling of the prince’s plan, nor had he any notion that a half-grown colt and so young a mare would dare anything so heedless or so brave.

Jan wandered through the milkwood trees. The scent of honey thickened the air. The buds upon the boughs had swelled. More leaves had fallen. He noted it all without interest. He had only a vague plan, to remain hidden in the grove till afternoon when the others would be long gone. At nightfall he would make his way back to the Plain.

He told himself he would become a Renegade. There was grass in plenty upon the Plain, and safety in his long legs if he kept his ears pricked for pards. In winter he could rove southward to the warm Summer Sea, in summer strive eastward or west to places and parts no unicorn had ever seen.

But such thoughts were no comfort to him, for he would be alone, with not even Dagg to share in the game. Always before when he had stepped outside the Ring, it had been but for a moment, an hour. And each time he had been able to return, either nipped and jaded if he had been caught, or flushed with secret triumph if the game had worked. But there would be no returning this time, for Alma had not made him like other unicorns. He saw that now.

Time passed. The sky overhead lightened past dawn into daybreak. He hurried deeper into the trees, fearing lest someone should follow him, try to force him to return. And then he came aware, presently, of another scent edging in among the honey of bursting buds and the subtle resin of bark and leaves. It was faint but pungent, like fir cones, like bitter herbs. He sniffed, trying to locate it, but the odor vanished.

Jan halted, frowning. It seemed he had smelled such a scent somewhere before—not quite the same, but similar. Somewhere. He raised his muzzle and wandered through the trees, until after a time he caught a whiff of it again. This time it held, and he followed it.

The stretch of the grove was greater than he had imagined, tending to downslope, with odd cracks here and there in the earth and little caves tunneling down. There were more of them the farther he went, and the pungent scent had grown stronger now. From several of the crannies, he noticed mist rising. It hung in the boughs of the milkwood trees.

And then he remembered the breath of fire. He and Dagg had seen it, scented it rising into the night sky in the Pan Woods, while the blue-bodied goatlings piped and danced. He halted before a crevice and leaned over, but he could see nothing past the first length of shaft. Bits of gray soil clung to the pitted stone.

But the strange mist, oddly warm and dry, made his eyes smart and his throat feel dusty. So he drew away. And then he knew nothing for a little time. He had no memory of walking; it was as if someone or something familiar bore him along without his knowing.

The next thing he was aware of was that he stood before a cave. It tunneled gradually downward into the hillside, disappearing around the bend. Wisps of scented smoke trailed upward along the ceiling like a slow, misty stream. Jan, peering into the cave’s dimness, breathing its earthy air, entered its coolness as in a dream.

Pale limerock walls reflected the daylight streaming in behind. The floor looked worn, as though smoothed by water, its surface rosy crystalline, or green, or amethyst. The color changed as Jan entered deeper, as the angle of the light striking his eye altered. The floor seemed duller, somehow, softer than stone. It clicked like the substance of horn beneath his heels.