The grassy ground where he had fallen felt hard and somehow distant. Jan closed his eye to the brightness of the sun and the shadows of unicorns standing above him. Darkness and fire, then, and for a while he knew nothing but that his blood was burning and he was growing weaker, very weak, like a newborn foal.

At last he began to see again, as through a haze, and hear muffled sounds; but still, there was a distance. A red mare—Jan recognized her somehow, but could not say from where. It was she, he realized, who had stood at the wood’s edge. Her coat was deep rose, the color of milkwood flowers. Her eyes, like Tek’s, were green.

Jan sensed the fear and tension in her. Her shoulder blades were tight with it, her mouth gone dry. He had entered into her somehow, as in a dream, and could feel her every sensation as if it were his own. She had left the others now and was descending into the wyverns’ dens, through the hall of sleepers, through the tunnels and turns. She moved deliberately, as if she knew the way.

Jan felt himself returning to his companions then. Tek was standing over something that lay near the cave’s entrance, shadowing it from the sun. She was trembling—strange, for the day was warm—and her teeth were clenched. Dagg returned to her with a branch of rosebuds from the grove. He and she chewed them urgently and crushed them beneath their heels. The taste upon their tongues was pungent sweet.

The red mare rejoined them. Something huge and loose and pale shimmered as it trailed on the ground behind her. She held a fold of it in her teeth: the skin of the three-headed wyvern. Upon it lay a golden bowl. Jan felt the wyrm’s blood sting the red mare’s skin, her own sweat smarting in her eyes. They were dragging the skin behind them now, all three of them. It had become very heavy for some reason. They sweated and struggled. Wyrm’s blood tasted bitter in their mouths.

Then he glimpsed himself upon the wyrmskin, lying beside the golden bowl, and realized it was he they bore through the milkwood grove. Even as they worked, he was aware of an image of himself in their minds, dying. That puzzled him. He had forgotten all about the wyvern’s sting.

The heat of his blood rose, and he wished he could be cool again. His mind seemed to be floating still, a few paces above his own body. The eyes of the dark colt below him rolled and fluttered beneath their lids. His breath came short. His limbs twitched now and again as though he dreamed.

Jan felt his awareness lifted away then, from his body, from the milkwood grove. He glimpsed the rest of the pilgrim band at the edge of the Hallow Hills, Korr arguing once more with Teki, then with others. He watched the prince turn back toward the hills, the others going on reluctantly, to wait a little distance out on the Plain.

The grasslands fanned out before him in their vastness, and Jan felt himself skimming, as from a great height, like a bird, southward toward the Summer Sea. The unicorn valley loomed suddenly before him, and he saw his mother, heavy in foal, trotting restlessly about the verges of the birthing grove. Later, he saw the unicorns in a great Circle, wailing, “He is dead, he is dead!” and dancing the funeral dance used only for those of the prince’s line.

His thoughts shifted then, altering entirely. For a moment, he became a gryphon, two gryphons, slipping into the Pan Woods under cover of cloud. Then a pan crouched two-footed among the shadows, with others of his kind. A band of ufpútlak, four-foots, was filing by—unicorns, by the scent of them. The pan fingered his fire-hardened stake. Trespassers. Then a banded pard sprang from the grass upon the Plain. A blue mare shied and kicked her in the ribs. Jan watched, merging into them, sometimes the mare and sometimes the pard.

Jan’s blood grew hotter then, writhing hot, and he felt his distant body twitch and moan. Thirst burned in him. He saw a swirl of many beasts, dust-blue herons enacting their courting rites beside the Summer Sea. He saw creatures with stiff paddles for limbs and broad, flat tails, blow-holes on their brows, and unicorns’ horns growing from their mouths.

He saw the sinuous red dragons tunneling their Smoking Hills; gryphons flocked on broken mountainsides, screaming to drive out the hated unicorns. He saw the wyvern king drowsing deep in his own chamber, guarding a flickering torch and brooding subtle, seven-stranded thoughts.

But the last beasts he saw were not wyverns, nor dragons, nor gryphons, nor pards. They stood upon two legs like goatlings, but their lower limbs were straighter and less shaggy. Among them moved many unicorns, but solid-hoofed and without horns. The two-foots bound them with cords and set them to dragging great loads on wooden discs that rolled like eyes.

He caught sight of one of the hornless ones, a red roan mare, very long-limbed and clean-moving: a young beauty. Her dark mane stood upright along her neck. Her body was draped and tangled with cords. She balked, snorting. The two-foots rushed and struck at her, shouting, dragging at the cords until she reared up screaming and flailing.

The glimpse melted away. The whole world had begun to fill his eye. He merged into forests, and the wind riffled his branches. Trees rose and died; new seedlings grew. Then he was grassland, rolling and measureless. Kites wheeled above him, circling a dead Renegade.

He was sea, suddenly—green, surging, and salt—a river of ocean that girdled the world. And then he was earth, massive and still, underlying the forests, the grasslands, even the sea. He was fire, liquid stone, moving under the earth and forcing the crack. Its heat felt like his own blood, simmering.

Then he was air, a turbulent sky, heavy with clouds that blotted the sun. Great stormcells roiled toward the upper thinness, and then, blanching cold, spilled their moisture in torrents of wind-whipped rain. A band of tiny, single-horned creatures fled before him.

Jan felt himself spinning, stretching down from the clouds. He whirled, skimming the Plain, slinging up great gouts of earth and joying in the destruction. I, too, he heard the storm thunder. I, too, am part of the dance.

Storm faded, dissipated. The sky cleared. The sun sank and stars appeared. Jan felt himself among the stars, high over the earth. And the stars were moving, all things about him in the velvety blackness moving. And someone was beside him. Though he could see nothing of it, he was aware of a presence stretching away from him on all sides. It surrounded the stars, and was within the stars, and was the stars.

“What are you?” he heard himself asking. He was not afraid. “Who are you?”

“Your guide,” the presence answered, and her voice was so familiar to him, Jan felt unexpectedly weak with relief. But he could not say from where or when he knew her.

“Where are you?” he asked. “What are you called?”

A pause in which the whole universe seemed to wait.

“You name me.” The answer came from everywhere, within him and without.

“Alma,” he breathed.

“Aye,” the presence answered. “Come. I will show you a thing.”

At her words, he felt himself buoyed farther from the world, lifted higher among the stars. The air about him thinned and vanished, but he felt it go without distress—though were it not for the venom in his blood, he would have frozen. He gazed down and saw white mist enveloping the world.

“Tell me now,” the presence said, “what do you see?”

“I see the world,” Jan told her, “bright as seafire. It is round, a swirl of colors, turning upon itself like someone dancing.”

“And?”

“And,” answered Jan, “I see the pitted moon before it, ghost-lit, dancing above the world.”

“And?” With a smooth, windless motion, they drew back even farther from the planet and its moon.