“The keepers provide for our every need,” Ryhenna was saying. “They feed, house, and protect us….”

“Choose your mates for you,” the dark unicorn muttered. “Trap you with walls, bind you to carts. Beat, brand, and geld you…”

“Nay! Not us, Moonbrow,” Ryhenna protested. “Only commoners suffer so, and what do they matter? We sacred daya never haul or carry.”

With an effort, Tai-shan turned to study her. She seemed perfectly in earnest, her amber eyes upon him clear and troubled. Behind her, her fellows milled whickering in their stalls, ears pricked. The dark unicorn staggered. The daïcha’s followers eyed him keenly.

“How then, Ryhenna, if you do no work,” Tai-shan mumbled, his lips sluggish, tongue unaccountably thick, “do the sacred daya…serve their masters?” He had trouble completing the thought. “What do you…give the two-foots, in return for your keep?”

He grew dizzy. His vision blurred. Ryhenna seemed no more than a chestnut shadow. His legs collapsed under him, settling him heavily to the soft straw bedding of his stall. The depth of his abrupt fatigue astonished him. The bittersweet mash lay in his belly, weighty as a stone. The daïcha’s followers murmured gloomily. Soft, puzzled cries came from Ryhenna’s sisters. The coppery mare leaned toward him over the gate of his stall.

“We give up our lives for our keepers, Moonbrow.” Her words were the last he heard before darkness muffled all. “We die for them.”

Morning was half gone, bitterly cold, the sky above grey overcast. Not a breath of wind stirred. Not a feather of snow fell. The blizzard had blown itself out hours ago. Tek floundered through chest-high drifts. Wild, rolling hills beyond the Vale surrounded her. She had lost track of Dagg sometime the night before. Her limbs, no longer weightless, swung woodenly. The unborn in her belly lay motionless, still as the frozen air.

Keep going! she told herself, half rearing to shoulder through the next great swell of snow.

She must find her mother, Jah-lila, the Red Mare, soon, or she was lost. Wolves had been trailing her since daybreak. At first, the ghostleaf singing in her blood, she had easily outrun them. Now, the herb long spent, she staggered, hooves dense as meteorstone, near the end of her strength. Her pursuers’ cries floated eerily above the rolling meadow: eager yips interspersed with long, trailing notes. They were nearer now, much nearer than before. Trees marked a canyon many paces ahead of her. The pied mare struggled toward it.

Casting over one shoulder, Tek glimpsed the first of the pack. A second and then a third burst from the scrub into open meadow behind. They bounded through the deep snow, joyous harks rising into wails. Frantically, Tek hurled herself against the drifts, fighting toward the forested cliffside, but her strength was gone. She stumbled, dragged herself up, collapsed again. She realized she would never reach the trees.

A figure burst from the canyon ahead of her: a deep cherry color as brilliant as mallow-flower against the trackless snow. Too large for a wolf, the red figure plunged toward her, black mane flying, traversing the meadow with a will. Dazed, staring, the pied mare strayed to a stop.

“Keep coming!” the other cried.

Tek plowed on toward the tree-sheltered canyon. The other unicorn charged past her, straight at the wolves. Tek swung around, astonished.

“Go!” the other ordered.

The pied mare plunged on. The wolves behind were howling, in full cry now. Did the Red Mare mean to meet them all? Pausing as she reached the shelter of the cliffs, Tek saw her dam pitch to a halt beside a pile of drifted snow. Twin branches rose from it, stark and leafless against the whiteness of the field. Half a dozen similar mounds clustered nearby. Tek herself had wandered through the midst of them only moments before. Furiously, the Red Mare began to dig.

Tek stared, baffled. The coming wolves bayed. Every few moments, the Red Mare lifted her gaze to gauge the distance between herself and the closing pack. All at once, Tek realized that what the other excavated was not a snowdrift at all but the carcass of a great deer, twin antlers rising like leafless branches from the snow. Others of his kind lay all around—a whole herd stranded, frozen. They could not have lain winterkilled long. The last flurries of the dying blizzard had barely covered them.

The Red Mare scraped and pawed at the snowbound stag. The wolves were very near. Jah-lila leapt away just as the leading three reached her. Snapping and snarling, two fell upon the carcass. Only the foremost bothered to pursue the dark red unicorn even a few strides. Jah-lila pivoted and lunged, horn aimed. The wolf dodged, turning, loped back to the carcass as the last of her packmates arrived. They fell ravenously upon it, tearing the half-frozen flesh to pieces, which they fought over.

Thus would they have done to me, given the chance, the pied mare thought, heart beating like a bird inside her ribs. Or the king’s wolves.

Her dam plunged toward her across the meadow. Drawing even with Tek at the canyon’s mouth, she tossed her head, motioning the younger mare to follow.

“Ho, daughter! Well met,” she cried. “Come. My grotto lies not far above. Sooth, what a canny filly I bore, to recall the way home after all these years!”

Limbs tottering, Tek fell in behind Jah-lila, already climbing the steep hillside through the dark and barren trees.

The cave was deliciously warm. The narrow entryway turned back upon itself, kept out the wind and snow. Sunlight, too, faltered—but the grotto was not dark, for the upper walls and ceiling of the interior were covered with tier upon tier of fan shaped lichens and mushrooms. They glowed in luminous blues and reds, soft yellows, pale mauves—here and there a faint, brassy green. They emitted warmth as well as light. Shivering, Tek stared. She had forgotten the ghostlight of her mother’s grotto.

A huge heap of fragrant, dried grass occupied half the cave. The pied mare blinked, dumbstruck. How had such a vast store found its way here? The most any unicorn might carry was a mouthful at a time. Surely the grotto contained enough fodder for a dozen unicorns to feast the winter through without ever needing to venture outside for forage. How had Jah-lila acquired it all?

Exhausted, Tek shook her head. More than a day and a night had passed since she had last known food or sleep. She heard Jah-lila stamping in the entryway, shaking the snow from her pelt. A moment later, the Red Mare rounded the turn. In smaller alcoves adjoining the grotto’s grass-filled main chamber other provender lay: bark and berries, spruce boughs, roots, seedpods, and nuts. Their tang made the pied mare’s knotted stomach burn. “Lie down, my child,” her dam bade her.

Tek’s legs buckled like shafts of old, dead wood. Her cold-locked muscles ached in the musty warmth of the cave. She had forgotten to shake off in the entryway, felt the snow on her beginning to melt. Lying down beside her, her dam passed a warm, rough tongue over Tek’s shaggy coat, stroking her dry.

The pied mare closed her eyes. Her mother had changed little in the years since Tek had last seen her—coat still a brilliant mallow red such as no other unicorn possessed. Much about her mother set her apart, the healer’s daughter mused. Jah-lila’s black mane stood upright along her neck instead of falling silky to one side. Long, silken strands sprouted the whole length of her tail, not just at the end. Hers were a beardless chin, untasseled ears, and fetlocks unfringed with feathery down.

But most of all, Jah-lila’s black hooves set her apart. They were oddly round: solid and uncloven, not like Tek’s own split hooves—not like the divided hooves of other unicorns. It was those hooves Tek remembered best from her fillyhood. She had never realized how unique they were until she had followed her mother to the Vale and first seen the cloven heels and bearded chins, tasseled ears, fly-whisk tails, and fringed fetlocks of others of the herd.