“I don’t know!”

He had no inkling what he intended to do. He had lived all his life believing himself to be prince, only to discover the office belonged to Tek. He had no right to rule. Tek deserved the truth. Deserved her birthright. The love he bore her was so great he felt his heart might burst. Yet how was Alma’s prophecy ever to be fulfilled if he renounced his leadership?

But deep within his inmost soul, he knew that none of those considerations really mattered. What appalled him most was that in revealing Tek’s parentage, he must lose her. Despite vows sworn by the Summer Sea, no matter how unbreakable in Alma’s eyes, regardless the fruit of that innocent pledge, how could such a union be allowed to stand? What joy to rejoin the herd if nevermore might he claim Tek as his mate? That their bond, meant to last a lifetime, must now end was what he truly could not face.

“I don’t know,” he told Wyzásukitán, his voice a ghost. The great dragon was bending down again. Her huge head came to rest on the chamber floor before him.

“Then gaze once more into my brow,” she replied, “and find your answer there.”

The dark water drew him, shot through with images. He moved toward it, unable to resist. Below, he saw the dark, rilled expanse of the Smoking Hills, their cinder-black tors thrust up like antler tines. Snow dusted the peaks and the deep crags which never saw the sun. Slopes sheered away into dragon’s breath. Valleys opened below. Jan could not understand how he himself had breached these barrier cliffs. No egress seemed possible for any wight devoid of wings.

He heard their chant before he saw them, strung out single file like an endless line of roan-colored ants. They moved in unison, hooves all falling at the same time, till the black stone rang with the beat of their song:

The chant rolled on and on, each step bringing the winding train of unicorns closer to the impassable ridges. Jan distinguished Oro at the head of the lengthy queue, which seemed to consist solely of brawny half-growns and warriors in their prime. The dark prince of the Vale recognized them instantly as a warhost. But where did they intend to go? Surely they could not mean to join Tek’s host trekking across the Plain, for how could they hope to escape the Smoking Hills?

Yet as he watched, something caught his eye. Oro and the others moved almost as in trance, impervious to cold. Though their movements were measured, their expressions remained alert. No somnolent marchers, these. Was it only their singleness of purpose which made them appear invulnerable? Higher they climbed and higher, more shaggy goats than unicorns. Steadily, unhesitatingly, they scaled nearly vertical steeps and descended precipitous slopes. Jan marveled at their tirelessness, traversing the sheer paths in their snaking file hundreds of unicorns long.

Even so, he surmised, they were approaching a spot where they could proceed no farther. Oro and the front of the line had already reached it: a flat plateau falling away into a deep canyon, overlooked by a tall pinnacle. For the unicorns now assembling on the plateau, no means existed to move forward. The drop into the adjacent vale was sheer. No way to skirt the rift, for it was hemmed by unscalable scarps, the tallest a conical peak poised at one end of the canyon. Its sharp yet massive point rose above the others like a thick, curved horn.

How did the Scouts mean to cross, Jan wondered? When all had assembled, Oro stood near plateau’s edge, his back to the steep, unbridgeable valley. Jan could not make out his words, though the others all listened attentively. They stood in perfect stillness, so utter as to seem preternatural. Not one so much as stamped a hoof for warmth. Oro turned to gaze at the rift before them, then at the pointed peak rising to one side. Jan noted the cone’s asymmetry, the side facing the valley undercut, so that the pinnacle seemed to hang above it, tons upon tons of incredibly hard, black rock.

A faint tremor shook the ground. Jan felt its thrum even in the air. The mountains seemed to mutter almost imperceptibly, then subside. Oro and the others drew back from the plateau’s edge. Another tremor, more forceful this time. Echoes and sharp reports as of a great cracking and straining rebounded from the far side of the valley. Oro’s band crowded tightly together in the center of the plateau. Again, the tremor stilled. Silence then, save for the cracks and groans, as though the fabric of some immeasurably vast tree, twisted by wind, were slowly, ever so slowly, breaking apart.

None of the warriors upon the plateau whinnied in fear. None cavaled. They all watched, Jan realized, eyes fixed on the tall peak leaning above the valley. Jan stared at the peak. It was vibrating. Slightly at first, then more and more insistently, it created a shudder in the air. The shudder grew, like a wind slowly building, until it buffeted but made no sound. The groaning started again, so low it was nearly below Jan’s range, a deep, thunderous keening like nothing he had heard before.

The next tremor, when it came, was so sudden, so violent, even Jan, floating bodiless above, flinched. The black, snow-covered cone tore from its base, plunging down into the deep crevasse with a concussion that seemed to rock the world. A gout of smoke or steam shot up from the base of the shattered peak, which appeared to be hollow. A hail of cinders and dust rained from the sky.

The valley swallowed the peak and ceased to be as the fallen mountain filled the rift from edge to edge. Thundering rubble continued to quake there, shifting and seething. The broken peak’s conical base, which had not fallen, now rumbled and broke apart. Explosive blasts of earth and smoke. Jan glimpsed something moving in the heart of the disintegrating base, a huge shining thing, reddish in color, crawling or flowing along like a slow river, or the side of some immensely vast creature in motion under the earth, a creature that had lain dormant so long it had grown larger than its original tunnel, a creature shifting in sleep, or walking and stretching sleepily before moving off in search of more spacious dens.

Oro and the Scouts of Halla were in motion, too. As soon as the first force of the blast had passed and the rubble now filling the former valley settled, every unicorn waiting upon the plateau sprang forward. They dashed headlong across the quaking new stretch in a sweeping charge while smoking grey cinders pelted out of the sky, covering them with a dusting of grey.

The Scouts of Halla were across the rift. As they reached the far side, Jan realized with a start that the hills were gentler here. Beyond, he saw, lay the waterless Salt Waste. Wind blew in the direction of the Waste, pursuing the sprinting unicorns. Cinderfall grew heavier, the ground’s trembling more ferocious. Had Oro’s band not surged forward precisely when they did, Jan saw, they would never have managed to cross. Brightness infused the ashfall. Some of the cinders glowed. Some were not cinders at all, he grasped, but droplets of dragonsflood.

A bright fountain spewed from a rift in the ruin of the fallen peak’s broken base. Beneath welled a molted tongue of red that spilled slowly to the shallow depression’s floor. Once the fiery flood had wound across, all passage would be blocked, at least until it cooled. How long would that take, Jan wondered—days? Weeks? The Scouts of Halla fled on toward the Salt Waste across the foothills of Dragonsholm. Their heels raised a cloud which mingled with the falling ash.