“Yes, little mud-prince, no more your father’s heir. That, too, has been my doing, in a way. Your hasty temper hardly needs much prodding, but I have teased it when I willed.”

He stared at her, and felt again all at once that wild hotheadedness coiled inside him like a snake.

“Oh, yes, Aljan. I have been watching you for a very long time. Did you think I would not keep one trick in the back of my teeth in case all my others against your father failed?”

She had raised her central head again, and turned it slightly, eyeing him. Beneath that malevolent gaze, Jan felt his resistance vanishing. The two flanking heads chuttered and hissed.

“Do you not remember all the dreams that I have sent you?”

And the memories came then, unclouded, unimpeded at last, and terrifying: a longfish swimming in the water, a winged serpent that hatched out of the moon, salamanders that burst bright into flame—and a dozen others such as he had had before the coming of Jah-lila. But now the passage of time and the white wyrm’s words, her burning smoke and Jan’s own efforts to recall had at last swept all the wild mare’s protections away.

The wyvern’s eyes blazed into his.

“Dreams, Aljan, to wean you away from the unicorns and win you to my cause, though you did not until this moment know it. The length of your life I have prepared for your coming. And now, at last, at long last, my unicorn, you are here.”

Jan forced himself to speak, forced his lips and teeth and tongue to move, for he felt paralyzed, exactly as he had in the gryphon’s cave, as he had in the first moments of the pans’ attack. He knew even now that he must fight, fight the urge to surrender to her spells. He could not take his eyes from the white wyrm before him.

“What do you want of me?” he managed.

“Ah,” the wyvern said, and her other heads echoed, “Ah.” She smiled. All three of her faces smiled. “I know your heart, Aljan the dark moon. And in your heart you are a trickster. Not so?”

He found himself nodding, just barely nodding before he was even aware, and he realized, dimly, he must already have slipped a little under her spell. She settled herself.

“Well, so am I a trickster, a plotter….”

“A betrayer,” added Jan—magicker, liar, dreamstalker–forcing himself desperately to speak, act, think of his own volition, not hers.

“Yes. I tried to reach your father once, before your birth, Aljan, when Korr was young and not yet prince, and I had perceived only the vaguest of forebodings among the stars.”

The wyvern’s gaze turned inward now, her necks, her tail knotting and unknotting.

“I tried to send him a dream to ruin him, send him running wild Renegade across the Plain, that this hero-to-be might never come and trouble my people with war; but I could not reach him. His mind was closed to me, safe within your Ring of Law.”

Her eyes came back to Jan, a hunter’s eyes.

“Your father is no dreamer, Aljan. And so for years I was frustrated, uncertain whether this young black prince was to be our starspoken enemy. And I was unable to strike at him, either, even when his yearly Pilgrimage brought him so close.”

Her eyes flashed and her three jaws snapped. Jan shivered.

“For the winters here have been freezing chill these last ten years, spring’s warmth not in till long after equinox. And though each time he has come I have been awake, here below, I dared not leave my fire untended, nor could I rouse my people from their winter sleep.”

Again that flash of eyes, that triple snap.

“But then….” Her tone was silken, and suddenly the scent of woodsmoke in the air seemed sharper, the room closer, the light dimmer and the white wyrm herself even paler and more opalescent. “Then I saw, not many seasons past, a mare in labor under a dark moon: the prince’s mate. And I knew this prince would have a son….”

“ A dreamer born,” the third head hissed.

The second laughed. “One whose mind was not closed to me.”

“One who would not keep himself safe within the Ring of Law.”

She slithered toward him suddenly, rearing up, her cut-jewel eyes measuring him and all her heads weaving upon their slender stalks. Jan stumbled back. The rays of the light well glided over him and glanced in his eyes.

“I want you to play another trick, Aljan. For me—a little trick. Only that.”

Jan stared at her. Her shimmer dazzled him. “What manner…of trick?” The words seemed to drag from his teeth, so slowly. The effort of speech had become almost pain. His thoughts had blurred, and her voices seemed to wash over him in waves. He listened, only half understanding what she said.

“Our king is old, Aljan, and has no heirs. No need, he says, for he will live another hundred years at least. But I am not content. Lynex lets our people languish. Too much sleep has made them slothful. The poison in their tails is weaker….”

“Some…” the second head broke in. The wyvern shifted on her spot. “Some even hatch with no stings on their tails at all—blunt tips, nothing!”

Her central head champed its teeth, the little one muttering. “Such freaks would have been eaten at birth when I was young. But the king grows lax. A weak people are easier for him to manage in his age. Well.”

Once more she shifted.

“I would make my people great again. I would share fire among all the dens as when first we came here. The wyverns must breed in winter as we once did, and the weak be eaten, if our line is to regain its vigor. Now only the piddling summer eggs hatch, and no fruit comes of an autumn tryst….”

“But only because of the cold,” the second head hissed. “With fire, I could….” She broke off. “Ah, but the king will not listen to me.”

“I want you to return to your father, Aljan,” the white wyrm said suddenly. Her eyes had come back from their distance now. The central head spoke. “Explain your absence somehow. Tell them you have seen a marvel, our dens deserted, or all the wyverns dead of plague. Tell them anything, but make them follow.”

Jan watched her, helpless now to move or speak. He wanted to run, turn away, shake his head in flat refusal, but his body would not obey. And he was outcast. Outcast. He could never go back. She laughed softly.

“It is our king’s custom to be first out of the dens in spring, to go hunting and bring back the season’s first catch: red meat for his people upon their awakening. But how if I were to seize that right? The people love me, support me. They would proclaim me his heir. Then he must listen.”

Again her eyes found him.

“You must lead your people away from the poison pool, Aljan. My people still fear that place—superstitious fools! Lead your father and his band into the canyon below the cliff. It is a dead end, with sides too steep for your kind to scale.”

She preened herself a moment, fretfully.

“I, meanwhile, will rouse my people. They sleep lightly this year, with the spring come in so early and so mild.” She laughed, all three heads shaking, their sliding notes hollow and strange. “To kill the black prince of the unicorns and outstrip my own king in a single stroke. Will that not be, little trickster after my own heart, the finest game of all?”

Jan stared at her across the well of sunlight. Firelight played over the minute scales of her delicately tinted skin. They flaked off along her underside as she slid along the floor. It must be these, he found himself thinking suddenly, irrelevantly, packed down and hardened for centuries, that formed the crystalline surface of the tunnel floors.

His captor grew impatient for his reply. She spat, “Surely you can feel no loyalty to them, pompous unicorns, the very ones that cast you out?”

The truth in her words mocked at him. No, he was not like other unicorns, could not keep to the old ways, to Halla’s Circle, though his father’s pride and the love of Alma depended on it. The white wyrm coiled about her bed of stones, looking at him, laughing at him with her three pairs of cut-jewel eyes.