“You don’t believe me,” laughed Tek. “Well enough. Were I you, I, too, would doubt. I will let Jah-lila convince you when she returns. But I tell you now that learning of my mate’s imminent return has sustained me this last moon and some. I can scarcely wait to show him our union’s fruit, which will surprise even him, I think.”

Dagg blinked. “Fruit…?” he started, stopped. “But—”

Again Tek laughed. “I bore my young at equinox. Can you not see I am no longer in foal? And such young! Such miraculous progeny as never before seen among the unicorns—Jan will be delighted, as I hope you will be, and indeed all the herd. I must return to the Vale with my prince’s get as soon as may be, that we may greet my mate at his homecoming.”

Tek spoke quietly, yet with unmistakable excitement. Snorting, the dappled warrior shook his head. Wild dreams of reunion with her perished mate and young obviously comforted the mad mare, he thought desperately. The very notion made his skin crawl. He had always believed in facing the truth head-on, even if truth were a shrieking gryphon. Jan was dead, and Tek had obviously miscarried long before term. Sighing, his companion shook herself, seemingly from sheer joy.

“You will see,” she told him gently. “As soon as Sismoomnat and Pitipak return, you will behold my prince’s get.”

“Sismoo– Piti—” Dagg stumbled over the unfamiliar names. “Who…?”

“My sisters,” Tek replied, so that Dagg could only stare anew. Sisters? He had never heard the pied mare speak of sisters—yet even in Jah-lila’s self-imposed exile, he knew, Teki had not forsworn the Red Mare: neither healer nor magicker had ever taken another mate.

“Ah,” the pied mare said suddenly, pricking her ears. “I hear them.”

Dagg turned his head toward the cave’s entryway. He heard a strange fluting and twittering mixed with hisses and grunts. The sound sent slivers of ice along his ribs as a salty rankness filled his nose. He smelled pans! That was pan-chatter he heard! Tek continued to lounge at ease. Was her madness so deep she did not realize their danger?

His limbs tensed, preparing to vault him to his heels just as a slight, upright figure ducked through the grotto’s egress and called a greeting to Tek. The pied mare whistled back the same phrase. The pan child—for it was a child, only a small thing, not nearly full grown—was followed by other figures, one of which was two-footed like herself.

For a moment, Dagg lay frozen, staring at the pans—and then his eyes turned in even greater astonishment to what had followed these goatlings through the entryway, stepping on delicate hooves as docilely as deer. What dream was this? Dagg could do little more than gape. He had never seen such a thing. What stood before him in the entryway beside the pans could only be Tek’s progeny, given form perhaps by the Red Mare’s sorcery, or by Teki’s miraculous herb? Born under the dark moon of equinox—touched by Alma surely, but in blessing or curse?

“Behold,” Tek proudly bade, rising to nuzzle her young. “Behold what Jan and I have made: my prince’s get, heir to the leadership of the unicorns.”

Jan trotted eastward along the silvery strand, the direction he and Ryhenna had been traveling since their rescuers, the unicorns-of-the-sea, had set them ashore many days ago. It had been hard going at first. In the beginning, he and the coppery mare had done far more grazing than traveling, plucking every green shoot and bud they could set teeth upon. Soon enough their pace picked up as his companion’s flanks hardened, her wind improved, and Jan’s own bruised ribs healed.

Ryhenna grew bolder by the day. Skittish at first, she had started at everything: crabs scuttling across the sand, diving sea gulls, beachrunners nimbly skirting the incoming waves. Her years imprisoned in the City of Fire had robbed her of all knowledge of the world outside. Now she took it in with the wonder and eagerness of a filly.

Yet despite her innocence, her youth, Jan reminded himself, she was no filly, but a young mare just coming into flower. A beauty, too. Her odd, coppery pelt flashed in the sunlight, so unlike the hue of any unicorn. Her exotic, upright mane—badly singed at equinox—had since regrown. Now it once more bristled the slim, elegant rise of her neck.

Early on, Jan had managed to chew through the chin strap of her water-logged halter and tug it free. His own, fashioned of silvery skystuff, proved impossible to remove without the nimble digits of two-foots to unfasten its closure. The dark unicorn could only snort and shake his head in frustration while the hard, linked loops clapped at his cheeks and muzzle, chafing him.

Though the spring days warmed, nights along the windswept beach remained bitingly chill. Most evenings he and the coppery mare managed to gather a stack of grey driftwood dry enough for Jan to set alight with a spark made by striking the tip of his horn against one heel and large enough to smolder the night through once the flames died down. He and Ryhenna rarely needed to seek shelter in the scrub beyond the dunes.

Ryhenna asked him constantly for tales of the Vale, her appetite insatiable. Jan told her the old lays, the history of his people: how, four hundred summers past, treacherous wyverns had driven the unicorns from their rightful home, the Hallow Hills, far to the north across the Plains. He told her how the princess Halla and her weary band of refugees had first stumbled across the deserted Vale and claimed it for their new home in exile only to be attacked each spring by marauding gryphons: savage predators with great wings of green or blue.

He did not speak of the rest of the legend, of Alma’s Firebringer, prophesied to deliver the unicorns from exile by restoring to them their ancestral lands and driving the hated wyverns out. Questions! His heart was full of questions still. The voice of the goddess had been silent since equinox—yet he could harbor no doubts now it was her own divine spark which burned in him.

He found himself sometimes dreaming of the City of Fire, of its two-footed sorcerers and their mysteries. Yet each day they fell farther behind him. More often he dreamed of what lay ahead: the Vale and all his kith, especially Tek. Memory of their joy on the night of courting more than a half year gone and of the pledge that they had shared made each day he remained parted from her an agony.

Memory, too, of the confused and disordered dreams Jah-lila had managed to send him in the City—of Korr’s madness, the herd’s starvation, and the pied mare’s flight—filled him with unease. How much of their message did he—dared he—understand? No such visions came to him during his and Ryhenna’s trek homeward along the silvery shore.

Three half-moons to the day after equinox, Jan noted a change in the beach along which he and the coppery mare trotted. The pale, ash-colored sand began gradually to mix with particles of yellow amber. Barely enough at first to warm the cool silver into dove, before long the shade had strayed into dun, and then to deep, true gold. Jan tossed his head, whinnying, his pace accelerating to a flying canter. Startled, Ryhenna kicked into a run beside him.

“What is it?” she cried.

Alongside them the waves had changed from grey to green. Jan laughed, tossing his head.

“The sand, Ryhenna. It’s gold!”

His companion half shied, shaking her mane. “Then, truth, the Singing Cliffs cannot be far! How I have longed to see the groves where thou and thy fellows danced court, the spot where ye were set upon by gryphons, and the beachhead where thou wert swept away….”

She whickered in delight, spurred, pulled ahead of him. “I scarce can wait. O Moonbrow, let us run!”

Laughing, Jan sprinted to close the gap. He nipped at the coppery mare’s flank. She kicked playfully, veered into the foaming surf to cast up spray after spray of shining droplets, then charged back onto the ribbon of golden beach again. Jan pounded after, heart racing, drew even and crowded her back toward the waves.