Quickly, Teki sketched the events of the previous hour. Dagg’s eyes grew wide.

“How fierce is the storm?” the healer asked.

Dagg shook his head. “A true blizzard. The drifts will be deep before the night is done.”

“Good.” At a startled look from the dappled warrior, the healer added, “Tracks will be obscured and pursuit much hampered. You must be off, daughter, for I see the herb has begun its work.”

Tek shook herself, sweating, unable to stand still. The heat in the cave oppressed her. She longed to be out in the battering wind, to cool herself by rolling in snow. The unborn young within her stirred and struggled. Her eyes felt glassy. Her mind seemed unable to hold any single thought for more than an instant before it buzzed away like a gnat.

“What ails her?” said Dagg.

Both he and her father seemed to be moving with maddening slowness. Still standing within the cave, she felt as though she were hurtling at a headlong run. Teki gave a reluctant sigh.

“I have given her swift-running.”

“Ghostleaf!” Dagg exclaimed, giving the herb its more common name. The dappled warrior stared at Tek in dismay. The pied mare glared back at him. She felt skittish and resentful without real cause. The eyes of Teki and his acolytes distracted her. She wanted only to run, to lose herself in endless, heatless flight. “But where is she to go?” asked Dagg.

“To her dam, Jah-lila,” Teki replied. “Tek must seek out the Red Mare in the southeast hills beyond the Vale. Not even I know exactly where she dwells….”

Tek scarcely listened, scarcely able. Already, in her mind, she bounded effortlessly through wind and drifts in the semidarkness of snow-lit night toward the far southeast tip of the Vale and the wild hills beyond. She had spent all her nursling days there at the Red Mare’s side until, weaned, she had followed Jah-lila on the long trek to the Vale. Why had her mother done it? Why cast her away into the healer’s care?

Reared within the great valley’s sheltering slopes, Tek had never returned to the southeast hills since that distant time: herdmembers were forbidden to traverse the Vale’s boundaries on their own. Now she eyed the cave’s egress impatiently, chafing to be gone, eager to once more run breakneck over the southeastern hills, free of kings and Rings of Law.

“Then how will she ever find the Red Mare?” Dagg was asking the healer.

Teki shook his head, his movements troubled, stiff. His acolytes milled nervously. Again, the healer sighed. “She may not. In such storm, anything may befall.” Dagg stood speechless. The pied stallion glanced at Tek. “But she must try. You, Dagg, I would ask to accompany her—though I will give you none of the running herb. I doubt you will be able to pace her far, but I beg you to stay with her as long as you can.”

“Of course!” snorted Dagg, wheeling. “Come, Tek. We must lose no time.”

The healer leaned to nuzzle the young mare he had reared long years with brusque, awkward affection. She fidgeted away: the herb made her chary of any touch. Sadly, Teki gazed after her with ghostly, black-encircled eyes.

“All rests now upon the shoulders of the goddess.”

“Hist!” cried the foal standing lookout. “I see figures, but whether the king’s or others, I cannot tell.”

“Off with you!” Teki exclaimed. “At once! If the Companion who attacked Tek survives, I will doubtless be summoned to attend him. Out into the storm quickly, daughter—Dagg. Go now, and you will not be seen.”

Tek bolted through the cave’s entryway into the cool, stormy night. Snow lay deep; the wind gusted fiercely—yet neither seemed to impede her. She sprang up the Vale’s icy hillside easily. Glimpsed only dimly through the falling snow, figures converged on Teki’s cave below. Dagg had already fallen behind, panting with the exertion of the climb. How slow he was! Tek bit back a wild laugh. Giddy pleasure at her own miraculous strength surged through her. Let the king’s wolves think the pied wych vanished without trace in a storm of her own conjuring.

Suddenly she was among the trees, the lower slopes of the valley lost from view. Her breath steamed; her heart sprinted. She wondered how long before the effect of the herb wore off. Morning, Teki had said. Was she to run all night, then, without tiring? Without feeling the cold? The prospect thrilled her. So must mighty Alma have felt prancing across heaven, tossing her mane and digging immortal hooves into the turf of the world, casting up mountains with every step.

Tek sped on through the snowy scrub and trees, skimming the hillcrest rimming the Vale, heading south and east. She heard Dagg crashing through the underbrush in back of her, plowing gamely through knee-deep snow to catch her up. She wondered how long she must endure his floundering escort, poor mortal, as he battled wind and slope, snow and the cold to exhaust him self in her wake.

I am the Mare of the World, she thought: she who ran dusk to dawn, besting the sun in his race for horizon’s edge, to become the moon that rules the night and wards all unicorns….

Laughing, the pied mare galloped on through the frigid, stormy night, lost in godlike velocity, dream motion, preternatural speed.

The dark unicorn twitched, shuddered in sleep, the dream unfolding before him as real as real. He beheld a pied mare bounding through wind-whipped snow, her pace hurtling, effortless. Breath spurted from her nostrils in jets of white cloud. A dappled companion plunged determinedly along her snow-filled tracks, his own gait staggering with exhaustion, ribs heaving in ragged gasps. He ran with a limp in one foreleg, as though the pain of some old injury, long healed, now recurred to plague him. He fell farther behind the pied mare at every step.

The dreaming stallion shifted, striving to move closer to the scene before him. He recognized this pair somehow, despite the distance and the dark, though whence he knew them or who they were—friends, foes—he could not say. Above them, a narrow gorge loomed, threading a path through the high, icy slopes of the great valley through which they fled. A howling pursued them, though whether of wolves or the gale the dreamer failed to discern.

Abruptly, the dappled runner lost his footing, struggled to rise, and went down again. He vanished from view in the whirling, blinding snow. Wild-eyed, the pied mare climbed on, sparing not a backward glance. The slender canyon before her was already so deep in drifts as to be nearly impassable: another hour would see it snowed under till spring. The pied mare pulled farther ahead now, where the dreaming stallion could not follow. Stormy darkness swallowed her as she disappeared into the pass.

Tai-shan woke with a start. He lay deep in soft hay. The wooden walls of his stall within the chon’s stable surrounded him. Firelight flickered, casting shadows. It must be evening, he realized groggily. His throat throbbed, burning. The muscles felt bruised. He swallowed painfully, remembering the strangling vines with which the purple-plumed minions of the chon had trapped him that morning in the square. Gasping, he struggled to roll to his knees, get his legs under him.

“Tai-shan!”

The daïcha’s soft voice brought him full awake. She knelt beside him in the hay, caressing his cheek and neck.

“Tash. Homat. Bithitet nau.” No. Stop. Calm yourself. He was amazed by how much of what she said he was now able to understand. “Himay.” Stay still.

She murmured on, other phrases he could not follow. With a square of white falseskin dipped in herb-scented liquid, she gently sponged the raw, oozing chafe marks encircling his neck. As the cool, pungent scent filled his nostrils, the dark unicorn felt the tightness in his throat begin to ease. Gratefully, he breathed deep. Still crooning, the lady dabbed the crusting scabs with tingling oil.