“Like Jah-lila,” said Jan, “and like Korr. Like Ses my dam and like Khraa the king. Like Tek and Dagg—Tas, Teki, Leerah….”

“Who else?”

“Like the three-headed wyvern,” Jan replied.

“Like the gryphon in the cave, like the fluting of pans, or Renegades crying, like….”

“Like?”

“Like sea, like earth shifting, like wind and like fire.”

“And?”

“Like myself,” said Jan, coming suddenly breathless to a halt. He had quit struggling. “Like me.”

“I am you,” the Mother-of-all replied, “and much, much more besides. I am everything you have ever known and that has ever been. I surround you all, and am within you, and am you. You are my kindling; I am the Fire. I am the Circle. I am the Dance. Learn to know me. Come.” A moment passed. “The time’s at hand. You must return.”

Then he felt what had been supporting him vanish. He was descending in a rush toward the bright, pale-blue world and the gray pitted moon before it. The world grew large, more varicolored. Its gray companion, within its disc, also increased. Jan felt himself falling toward the heart of the moon.

“Alma,” he cried out. There was no need. The presence had not left him. “Did you not tell me I would return to the world?”

The other nodded in his mind. “Aye. Back to the Hallow Hills and your three companions.”

The moon loomed, burning silver in the white light of the sun. Perfectly round, it seemed to lie upon the surface of the world like a lake of still, bright water.

“But Alma,” cried Jan, “the moon….”

“Nay, Jan,” the goddess told him, departing now. “The Mirror of the Moon.”

He felt a splash and heard the sound of it. Then he was aware of three unicorns: Tek, the red mare, and Dagg. They had staggered from the woods, dragging the wyvern skin. Stumbling under its weight in the midafternoon sun, they waded out into the water.

He felt the wet slosh about their knees, and the strain against their teeth and jaws. The wyrmskin on which he lay touched the surface and buoyed up. Cool liquid spilled in at the slack places, bathing him. The fire in his blood swabbed out.

He heard the angry hiss of water mingling with the wyrm’s blood on the skin, and the air was suddenly thick with acrid steam. He heard whinnies of alarm, then snorts and choking. The wyvern skin fell abruptly slack. It floated. The golden bowl slid off and sank.

He could not get his eyes open, could not see what was happening. He struggled weakly to raise his head. There was thrashing in the water nearby him: he heard gasps, and then two, three dull thuds upon the sand. The acrid air around him hung suddenly, utterly silent, until the harsh vapor invaded his senses at last. He knew nothing more.

Jan came again into awareness slowly. He felt himself floating, the coolness of water against one side, and the soft, sinuous membrane bearing him up. The sun on his other side was warm and drying. He opened his eyes and blinked. Raising his head with difficulty against the yielding surface of the skin, he saw he lay on the sacred pool, near shore. The sun overhead shone midafternoon.

He floundered off the floating hide and onto the white sand of the shallow bottom. His limbs no longer burned with fire. The golden bowl lay submerged, sun-gleaming, a half pace from him. He got to his feet and champed his teeth. His nose and heel were plastered with chewed milkwood buds. The taste of water in his mouth was sweet. He bent and took a long drink from the pool.

Lifting his head, he spotted the others. They lay on the bank, fallen in midstride. Jan felt his heart go cold a moment, but then he saw the rising and falling of their sides: they were alive. He waded toward them, and halted in the shallows beside the red mare.

He recognized her now. She was Jah-lila, Tek’s mother, the lone unicorn—she his father had called once, long ago, to come sing away his dreams. Jan bent and nudged her with his nose. She stirred then, snorting, and rolled to get her legs under her, but did not rise.

“Well glad I am to see you alive, prince-son,” she told him at last, then shook her head, as if groggy still. She managed a laugh. “The Mirror of the Moon is strong proof against poison.”

Her voice was very like Tek’s, but fuller and a little more deep. Jan nodded, eyeing her, feeling strange and unsurprised.

“I heard you singing on the night of Moondance,” was all he could think of to say.

The wild mare nodded. “Aye. I was singing a charm on you, little prince, to keep you from seeing me. But my power over you is all ashes now.” She sighed, still smiling, and gazed away. “No ears but yours were meant to hear that song, but I think Tek heard it, too, for she came looking for me.” Jah-lila glanced at him.

“She looked for you in the Pan Woods, too,” said Jan, “and again upon the Plain. But she never…”

The other laughed, gently. All her moves were careful and unhurried. “I did not mean for her to find me—or for you. But of course it was mostly your father I meant to…” But Jan hardly heard.

“You called out to me in the Pan Woods,” he said suddenly, “and led us away from the others to the goatling’s Ring.” The realization jarred him. “You began to bury the Renegade.”

The red mare nodded. “I did those things.”

Jan bit his breath, stopping himself. “The Serpent-cloud,” he said. “You led the storm away.”

The healer’s mate smiled. “So you saw me then, too?” She sighed, laughing. “Already you were stealing back your dreams.”

A little silence then.

“Why did you come?” he asked, at last.

“On account of you,” Tek’s mother said, Studying him now. The green in her eyes was very dark. “I meant to stand unseen among the milkwood at Vigil and sing back to you what I had taken once, at your father’s bidding—for none may behold his fate upon the Mirror who cannot dream.”

She shook her head.

“I told your father that, when first I sang you, that you must have back your dreaming sight before you got your beard. But he did not wish it, argued against it. He is very much afraid of dreams, ever since, a very long time past, a wyvern tried to speak to him in one.”

Jan felt his skin prickling.

The red mare said, “He did not send word to me, as I had bidden him, when you were to go on Pilgrimage. Your mother did that.”

Jan gazed at nothing, striving desperately to remember what the wyvern had said: I tried to reach your father once…when Korr was young and not yet prince…tried to send him a dream to ruin him, send him running wild Renegade across the Plain…. The red mare gazed back at Jan, her quiet tone gone rueful now.

“But I could not be with you on this night just past. I had to run a long way across the Plain with that storm in my teeth before it blew itself to nothing. It has taken me all this time returning.”

Jan shook his head. His mind was full. He could not take in any more. “You could have given me back my dreams in the Vale, at Moondance.”

Lying with folded legs beside the water there, I shook my head. “No. I took your dreams by the dark of the moon, and so by the dark must they return.”

Would he understand that? I hoped so. The ways of magic are limited, and strange. Then I told him a little more of the truth, speaking slowly, that he might follow me.

“But there is another reason I held back. On a night many years past before ever you were born, prince-son, when first I felt the weight of a horn upon my brow and my body becoming a unicorn’s, I stood beside this Mere, beholding a dream. It told me I must one day return to the Hallow Hills, and deliver a unicorn safe out of a wyvern’s belly.”

I stood up then, shaking the sand and damp from me, unsure how much of what I had said he had been able to grasp. The young prince continued to stare at me, and for the first time he seemed to realize how my black mane stood up in a brush along my neck and that my tail fell full and silky as a mane. No beard grew silken on my chin, no feathery fringe about my heels. He saw my hooves then, which are round and single as the day I was foaled, for all that a horn now sprouts on my brow.