His father started on another hoof. Jan had to shrink past him along the wall. He saw his mother glance at him, then felt a few strokes of her rough, dry tongue against his neck, pressing out the damp. He hadn’t dared to shake off yet, and now his mother’s gentle tolerance was suddenly more than he could bear. He broke from her, from Korr, and clattered away from both of them, deeper into the cave.

Around the bend at the back of the hollow, a little pool of earthwater lay, still as stone, reflecting the dim light rounding the corner. Pale toadstools and lichens scattered the walls and shore, casting faint illuminations. Jan threw himself down on the pebbly bank and lay there wet and miserable. Staring at nothing, he listened to the voices of his sire and dam.

“If that were all,” his father’s deep voice said, “if that were all, I might let it pass. But Ses, the colt has no sense. He and Dagg weren’t on the ridge just to watch the storm.”

Jan heard a sigh. “More games?”

Silence a moment. Korr must have nodded. “They were baiting the lookout, drawing her away with gryphon cries. What am I to do with him? That’s willful trespass….”

“Be patient with him,” the prince’s mate was saying. Then, softer, “He was born under a dark moon.”

Jan dropped his head to the bank and felt his heart clench shut like teeth. He wished she wouldn’t defend him—he wished there weren’t the need. There was the sound of someone shifting. Jan imagined his mother lying down beside her mate, helping to sponge the rest of the moisture from his coat.

“He’s moody, high-spirited.”

“Unruly,” the prince returned. “ A hothead.”

“Like you.”

“Love, he’s not a colt anymore!” Jan flinched at the force of his father’s anger.

“He is until you let him join the initiates.” His mother’s sudden vehemence surprised him. “How often has he begged you to let him go on Pilgrimage?”

Jan heard his father’s snort. “How can I, now? Do you think he’d make a warrior? He’s nearly half-grown, and still he acts like a spoiled weanling. That wildness…” Jan hardly caught the last. What had his father said: “frightens me”? No, he could not have heard it right.

“Just let him prove himself,” his mother murmured. “More than anything, he wants to prove himself.”

Their voices grew softer, dropping into quiet unintelligibility beneath the drumming of the rain. Jan stretched his forelegs in front of him, laying his head along their length. Born under a dark moon. Dark moon, she’d said. He stared off into the darkness, with its wan lichenlight, brooding.

He must have dozed, for the next thing he knew was that the grotto had grown a little lighter, and the sound of the rain had stopped. He lifted his head from his knees, blinking and feeling stiff from sleep. He had dreamed something—he was aware of that, but could not remember what. He never remembered his dreams. Jan plucked a pale toadstool from the shore and ground its musty, woody flesh across his teeth, trying to remember. From the light reaching him around the bend, he guessed it must be midafternoon.

The dream had been something about the Water, or something in the water. Something swimming in the lichenlight, like a longfish, or an eel. Had it stood up before him, the white thing in the water? Swaying and flickering like…like…he could not say what. The image faded from him even as he strained for it. But he remembered he had shuddered, squirming as he looked at it, unable to turn away. And it had spoken his truename: Aljan, dark moon.

When he had been very young, scarcely weaned, he had begun to have such dreams: dreams of snakes and stinging worms that woke him struggling, screaming night after night, till others of the herd began to mutter that the prince’s son must be accursed. Korr, in desperation, had sent for the healers mate, Tek’s mother, Jah-lila, to come and steal away Jan’s dreams.

He had been so little then, it had been so long ago, and he had not seen the wild mare since. She rarely ever came into the Vale, and then always secretly, silently, like a shadow barely glimpsed; and she was gone again in an hour, about whatever business a magicker’s business might be, of which she never spoke. He remembered only dimly that time she had come to him, while his parents had stood back silent, troubled, out of the way. Dark rose in color, Jah-lila had knelt, lying down beside him gazing into and through him with her black-green eyes.

“Ho, little hotblood,” she had murmured. “Such a fighter, such a dreamer! Eat this now, and breathe in this. Sleep…dreamless…sleep.”

She had given him bitter herbs to eat and chewed sweet herbs herself, breathed upon him and let him breathe her breath. He had slept then, at once, deep and restfully. And since that time he had never been able to remember his dreams.

Jan finished the last of the woody toadstool and sipped from the dark cave pool beside him. The water was cool, tasteless. He watched the ripples widen and still. When the surface grew eye-smooth again, the lichens reflected there like a scatter of rose and pale blue stars. From the outer chamber, he heard his mother murmuring, as she had used to do for him, a lullaby to her unborn foal:

Jan felt himself just slipping into sleep again. He clicked his teeth, stifling a yawn, when all at once something caught his eye. He blinked. The surface of the cave pool beside him was dancing. The images of the lichens trembled there. Sounds like something scraping, then sliding reached his ears. The pebbles beneath him shifted and seethed. There came a sudden rumbling roar in which the whole cave shuddered. Chips of stone from the ceiling fell. Dust rose in the air like winter fog.

He heard his mother whinnying, his father snorting, choking on dust. Jan scrambled to his legs and dashed into the forepart of the grotto. A great rock shard from overhead smashed to the floor barely a pace from him. He shied and, as he did so, glimpsed Ses dodging out the cave’s entrance into the light.

He sprang to follow, then stopped himself in a sudden panic. Where was Korr? Jan wheeled, casting about him through the dimness, through the dark, crying his father’s name. Then he heard the prince’s deep voice, “Go on!” and felt Korr’s massive frame shouldering him through the cave mouth into the outside air.

Jan plunged through a rain of earth. Stones, some large as skulls, crashed with the rest. The rock ledge ahead was nearly buried. He saw his mother moving heavily down the muddy, sliding slope to solid ground on the valley floor below.

Jan felt a great concussion and wheeled to see Korr shying from a boulder’s path. It smashed to fragments. Jan felt a splinter dig into the flesh of his thigh. He stumbled, the soft earth sliding beneath his hooves. Muddy soil and pebbles pelted him as he struggled to rise—then his father’s teeth closed over the nape of his neck, half dragging, half hauling him out of the muck.

Jan’s legs gave beneath him as he reached the valley floor. The pain in his injured leg was fierce. Ses was standing well back, out of the path of the slide, and he was aware, dimly, of other unicorns dashing from their caves, crying out in consternation, galloping toward them over meadow and slope. Jan tore his gaze back to the grotto.

He saw the last of the rain-softened earth cascading down the slope, the broken stone and fragments of the great, smashed boulder…and then, above that, a flash of green, dusty blue, and gold. Two gryphons, a mated pair, perched on an outcropping above the cave. With an uprooted sapling, they levered root and soil, sending it surging down the hillside.