“Are you hale?” he heard Tek asking them. Her voice was low. The chamber was very still, save for the slither of the wyrm.

“Hale enough,” Jan murmured. The sweet flush of power had faded from him.

Tek snorted. There was blood on her neck and shoulders where the wyvern had cuffed her. “We heard your voice coming up from the ground, and the white wyrm baiting you,” she said. “We followed it down.”

“Aye,” said Jan, “I know it,” for he did know. He had seen it in the fire: companions searching for him, aboveground, below. Tek glanced at him keenly, surprised. He turned to Dagg then, as he realized his friend had been eyeing him as well.

“Why did you slip away?” Dagg asked. “Was it a spell she put on you?”

“Yes—no,” said Jan. How to explain it? He himself scarcely understood. It had been half her spell, and half something within himself.

Dagg’s eyes had grown more puzzled still. “If it wasn’t,” he whispered, “if it wasn’t that….” He glanced at Tek uncertainly, then back to Jan. “You’d only to ask me, and I’d have gone, too.”

Jan felt his throat tighten suddenly. He drew breath to speak, but Tek cut him off.

“Hist, come,” she said. “ Another time. Let’s be gone from here. The others must be halfway out of the hills by now, and who knows whether our noise may have wakened the wyrms?”

Jan felt his blood quicken then. She had given Dagg’s shoulder a nip to turn him, and then sprung after him herself. Jan followed. Beside the wall the dead wyrm lay twitching, its long necks and tail knotting and unknotting.

“Mind the stings,” he heard Tek murmur. “They’re poison still.”

Dagg gained the hall, disappearing through the natural doorway, then Tek. But just as Jan reached the threshold, he glanced back into the darkened chamber, at the white sunray and the trampled eggs, at the drowned altar and the writhing wyrm.

And he felt a prick in his left hind heel—a nettle sting, no more. And looking down, he saw the longest, middle point of the wyvern’s tail just grazing his fetlock. He stared at it, uncomprehending. The white wyrm shuddered and at last was still.

Jan’s legs had carried him through the doorway’s arch and out into the hall before he was aware—not a half pace behind the others. He could hear them just ahead, but his gaze was fixed over one shoulder at the chamber, a hollow of darkness behind.

The stinging in his fetlock had begun to burn. Then panic surged in him, and disbelief. The wyrm was dead—how could she strike? How could a dead wrym’s sting be poison still? Perhaps—perhaps Tek had been mistaken, and there was nothing to fear. But it was useless, trying to game himself. For he had begun to feel, unmistakably, the warmth of poison spreading upward from the wound.

They galloped up the curving corridor. Light wells cast wan illuminations in the gloom. The crystal resin underfoot muffled the clatter of their hooves. Jan’s heel felt hot and weak, the smoke of rosehips in his blood balmy and cool. The corridor stretched on before him, and he realized they had already passed the sloping side alley down which he had come. Tek and Dagg must have found their way in by another path.

Jan found himself hard-pressed to keep abreast of Tek. Their pace made it impossible for him to limp. Hot pain crept upward into his thigh muscle. The cooling smoke in his blood seemed to mingle with the venom, easing it a little. Jan shook his head and tried desperately not to think of it. There was nothing to be done for it now.

The pathway over which they ran had leveled some. Fewer light wells illumined the gloom. Dagg’s form was a paleness in the dimness ahead. The fire had reached Jan’s hip joint now. Each stride was agony. All around them was stillness and the dark. The harshness of their breath, the muffled tatting of their hooves only deepened the quiet.

Jan champed his teeth, too weak now to keep up with Tek. He fell back, his nostrils straining. His breath was coming very short. The venom burned slowly along his back toward the shoulder blades. His back legs were stumbling. Up ahead, Dagg came abruptly to a halt. Tek did the same. They moved forward cautiously then, heads lifted, nostrils wide. Jan stumbled after them.

They entered a great hall, with archways to many side chambers opening along the far walls to left and right, but few light wells pierced the high, dim ceiling. Their footfalls echoed in the vast, deserted dark. Jan felt the immense weight of earth pressing down from above, and his skin tremored and twitched. After a moment, he realized the subtle smell of rotting flowers had grown much stronger here. His eyes grew more accustomed to the gloom.

And he saw the wyverns then, vague glimpses through the dark doorways opening into the hall. They lay in heaps, dozing, sharing their warmth. Coiled into weird shapes, pale pearl in color, they barely seemed to breathe. The hall rustled with their soft sighing. Jan felt the poison in his breast dripping against his heart, working down his forelimbs, inching up his neck.

He stumbled into Tek and gasped in surprise. She shushed him. They had entered a narrow exit tunnel. The floor here rose, veering, the slope growing steep. Jan stumbled again, the sound of it loud in his own ears. Leaning against Tek, he staggered upward along the rising tunnel.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Jan heaved himself over another shallow ripple in the floor and struggled on. He saw Dagg glancing back.

“I’ve been stung,” Jan panted, looking at neither of them. The panic had left him, and the disbelief. He felt only despair. “The wyvern stung me on the heel.”

He heard Dagg’s quick drawn breath, felt Tek’s teeth closing over the nape of his neck. His knees were giving way.

“Dagg, help me,” he heard Tek hissing through a mouthful of his mane.

The two of them supported him between their shoulders, kept him from leaning, sinking. Jan sagged, but still he fought to gather his legs and make them obey. The poison had reached his head. His thoughts were made of water now, shifting and spangling. He could not keep his head up, gazed dully at the ground. His eyes felt glazed.

The tunnel canted upward, up, tipping crazily. More and more light poured into the passage. It hurt his eyes; he had to squint. He heard Tek and Dagg laboring to breathe, felt their sides pressing against his own. The tunnel’s entrance passed overhead. He felt a sudden rush of light and air—it seemed to beat about him like wings. They were outside, and the daylight was blinding.

He felt Tek beside him shying suddenly, and felt her sharp hiss of surprise. Dagg sidled, whickering. Jan dragged his head up and peered through the blaze before him. The sky was a vault of blue flame all around. The edge of the milkwood grove twenty paces distant looked smoky and cool.

A figure stood before them at the wood’s edge, looking shadow-colored against the bright glare of the sky. Very graceful and long of limb—Jan knew this unicorn. It was…it was…the poison eating up his mind had burned the name away.

The figure was coming toward him now. He wanted to go to it, but his limbs were made of shifting earth, of wind, and refused to bear his weight. He realized he was falling, slowly, and could not feel the ground beneath him, so that even as he came to rest upon his side, it felt as though he were falling still. The blood in his body danced with heat, and he gazed with one eye at the fire-white sun, floating above him on a blue lake of sky.