Birth of the Firebringer

by Meredith Ann Pierce

  Dagg was just turning to him, drawing breath to speak, when all at once Jan cut him off with a hiss. He nodded. Teki and another warrior had emerged from the trees a dozen paces from them and stood conferring with the prince.

  “Something’s afoot,” murmured Jan, feeling his blood quickening. “Maybe they’ve spotted pans.”

  All morning since they had left the Vale, he had been half hoping they might stumble upon the pans. They were not colts anymore, after all. They had nothing to fear. Indeed, it would be a fine game, putting a few of those timid little blue-skins to flight. The Woods had been so quiet, the morning so monotonous, with only bird cries for distraction. Boredom nibbled at Jan with tiny, needle teeth.

  “It is pans,” whispered Dagg. “It must be.”

  The two warriors had broken off from Korr now and were whistling the initiates to be up and off. Jan sprang to his feet and shook himself, laughing with Dagg at the prospect of diversion. The file forming behind Teki was already trotting away into the trees.

  “Step brisk,” Jan heard Korr calling, “and less noise.”

  Jan champed his tongue and hurried into line. Dagg behind him was doing the same. Since the day of the gryphons, Jan had kept his vow, following the prince’s word always, at once, without questions. His father’s goodwill was too precious, had come too dearly bought to part with now. Jan swallowed his high spirits and stepped brisk.

  The gloom of the Pan Woods enfolded them. Behind them, Korr was bringing up the rear of the train. Jan pricked his ears, scanning the trees. Nothing. The Woods were empty, still. He lifted his head, catching the scent of trees and earth, of shady air. No whiff of pans—not yet. But it hardly mattered; they could not be far.

  He wrinkled his nose, trotting, feeling the waves of anticipation in him rise. A sense of reckless abandon seethed in him. They were warriors, dangerous and fierce, and on their way into a skirmish. Ears pricked, nostrils wide, his eyes scanning ahead, Jan listened to the crying of herons falling away into the distance behind.

  They kept at a jogtrot into the middle afternoon. The whooping voices of the herons had long since faded. Jan snorted, frowning. His anticipation waned; his limbs felt sore. Korr had trotted toward the fore of the line a half hour gone. Now, as Tek strayed near, Jan could bear it no more.

  “Hist, Tek,” he whispered, and the young mare turned. “When will we come upon the pans?”

  She blinked. “Never, Alma be kind, and if we go carefully.” Jan shook his head, not understanding. Dagg had come up alongside him now. “But,” he started, “wasn’t it because of pans that we broke camp so suddenly?”

  Tek glanced at him. “Aye. But no fear, they’re well behind us now.”

  Jan snorted, and astonishment went through him like a barb. “We’ve been going away from them?”

  A smile sparked the young mare’s eye. “What, did you think we’d sprung up to go seek them?” She broke into low laughter then. “By Alma’s Beard, princeling. I never yet met a colt who could so not let trouble lie, but always must be up and hunting it.”

  Jan felt his ears burning. He wanted to bite something. He wanted to kick. “Trouble?” he cried. “They’re only pans. . . .”

  “Hark you,” said Tek then, and her tone had lost its laughter suddenly, become that of a warrior to a foal. “We are not eaters of flesh like the gryphons, nor lovers of death like the wyrms. Nor do we bloody our hooves and our horns save at need.”

  She eyed him hard a moment more, then broke off and loped toward the head of the line. They had come to a stream. Jan kept his tongue and snatched a drink as they waded across. Fiercely cold, the water ran like ice along his ribs. He lashed furiously at the swarm of tiny waterwings that settled to sip his sweat.

  His blood was burning still. Tek’s mocking had made him feel like a fool. He was only grateful Korr had not overheard. How could he ever hope to become prince among the unicorns if he could not even remember the simplest rule of Law—one he had been hearing since birth? Warriors were sworn not to battle without cause. His flash of anger cooling now, Jan’s whole frame drooped in despair.

  As they emerged from the stream, the band slowed to a walk. Jan guessed the watercourse must have marked some boundary. The pans were a scattered people, divided and weak. They ran in little herds called tribes that fought for territory. His father’s band must have crossed now into another tribe’s demesne.

  They walked in silence through the budding Woods. The sun, unseen, sank lower in the branch-woven sky, and the gnats subsided as the air began to cool. The shadows grew long. Jan tried to imagine a race that would make war upon its own kind, and could not. His own people were single, of the Circle. The unicorns were one.

  The Woods around them had grown very still. Jan came out of his revery and lifted his head as he realized he had not heard a bird’s cry in a quarter of an hour. He scented the air, and an odor came to him, goatlike and salty. He had smelled it only once before. Ahead, two warriors stood halted in their tracks, staring off into the trees.

  “Dagg . . . .” Jan started.

  But the splinter of falling wood cut him short. A dead cedar toppled groaning across their path. Its tangled roots, still clotted with earth, were stubby, as though they had been bitten through. Initiates whinnied, scattering in confusion. Something struck Jan on the shoulder.

  He felt another sting against his fetlock—stones. The air was thick suddenly with flying stones. A sound like the voices of herons again filled the Woods, and pans poured from behind the trees. Some held what looked like rams’ horns to their mouths, their cheeks puffed. The long, wavering cries were coming from the horns. Jan stared. He had never seen such a thing before.

  “Don’t scatter,” Korr was thundering now above the commotion of horns. “Keep close—we’ll soon outrun them. Follow the healer!”

  Jan saw Teki rearing, his hide a flash of white and black. He whinnied sharply, then wheeled and charged the fallen cedar. Others flew to follow him. The goatlings, taken by surprise, fell back as the healer cleared the tree and was away.

  Dagg bolted then, shouldering past Jan. The pans had ceased their standing volley and begun to charge. Jan rose, ready to strike at them, but Korr sprang to send him after Dagg with sharp nips and a curt command. Only then did Jan realize he and Dagg had stood staring when they should have been flying. The others were all over the tree and gone.

  Jan heard a cry from Dagg, wheeled to see a goatling springing from behind a tree. She wrapped her forelimbs about Dagg’s neck. He reared, writhing and thrashing, then kicked at another one rushing his flank. Jan yelled, charging, heard the prince’s war cry behind him and the thunder of Korr’s heels. Blue-bodied goatlings scattered for their lives.

  Dagg freed himself and fled for the cedar, soaring over at a bound. Gathering his legs, Jan sprang after. Pans were standing on the other side. Some brandished pieces of pointed wood, strangely blackened and sharp as tusks. Dagg reared again, striking wildly at them. Jan cast about desperately for some sign of the band.

  He could not spot them. They had vanished. The Woods stood so close and tangled here they could have been but twenty paces off and he would not have seen them. The clamor of horns deafened him. He could not think, and Korr was still behind them on the other side of the tree.

  Jan slashed at a goatling that lunged at him, and suddenly caught sight of something in the gloom—a unicorn. It reared among the trees not ten paces from them, crying, “Follow!” and sprang away. Jan bit Dagg on the shoulder and shouted, “This way!”

  He plunged after the other unicorn through a maze of shadows and trees, and heard the sound of Dagg’s heels coming behind. Dense thickets closed about them. Jan caught only glimpses of their rescuer, could not even tell the color of the one who ran before. He had no idea who it was.

  The land beneath his hooves fell suddenly away, and Jan stumbled into a gully between two hills. He realized he had lost sight of the one ahead of them then, and panic gripped him. He sprinted down the dr
y gravel wash. Dagg behind him was shouting something, but Jan ignored him, ignored everything, galloping harder. The others could not be far ahead.

  “Jan!” Dagg behind him was crying. “Jan, stop. Stand!” All at once, his friend charged past him, veering across his path.

  Jan ducked, trying to dodge, but the twisting river course was narrow. He plunged to a halt. “Dagg, we’ll lose them!” he cried.

  Dagg shook his head, nearly winded, blowing hard. “Wrong way,” he gasped. “We’ve run wrong. Can’t you hear them? They’re behind.”

  Jan stopped shouldering, staring at him, then lifted his head and listened. Above the pounding of blood in his throat and the harshness of his own breathing, of Dagg’s, he caught sound—far in the distance, just for a moment—of the whinny of unicorns in flight and the loonlike sounding of the horns.

  “But how . . . ?” Jan wheeled, beside himself, still panting. His limbs twitched with fatigue. “I was following. . . .” The faint, far sounds were fading now into the utter stillness of the Woods. Dagg shook his head. “Come, haste. We’ll have to go back.” He started past Jan.

  “No. Hold,” cried Jan suddenly. “We mustn’t. The pans are between us and them now.”

  Dagg halted in midstep. They stood looking at each other. Above them, the sky was the color of rueberry stains, and the Woods all around had grown dusky, the silence deep. Jan shook his head and tried to think. His blood had quieted at last; his breathing stilled, and so, too, the sense of panic that had gripped him. He turned and climbed the sandy bank of the wash.

  “We’ll go west,” he said. “The Plain lies that way, and it can’t be far.”

  He glanced back over one shoulder at Dagg. His friend sidled, uncertain, gazing at the dark Woods before them with wide, nervous eyes. Jan turned at once and began shouldering his way through the undergrowth that bordered the wash, giving the other no time to reply. Dagg had to follow to keep him in sight.

  “Let’s be off, then,” Jan told him. “The sun’s low.”

  Lost

  9

  They came upon a glade just as the Woods grew too dim for them to make their way. Pans had been there, a great many of them, but the scent was old. Another scent fingered in the air as well—pungent, like cedar, and somehow dry. Jan had never met that odor before. He and Dagg emerged into the open. The sky above was purpling. Dagg turned to him.

  “What now?”

  “We wait,” Jan told him. “The moon should be up soon. Once it gets high enough, it’ll cast good light.”

  Dagg fell silent. They gazed about them. In the last moments of twilight, Jan studied the glade. Something about it struck him as strange; he could not quite get his teeth on it. Then he had it. The glade was round. The trees bordering the open space made a perfect Ring, and all the ground cover had been cleared from the interior. He and Dagg stood on brown, bare soil.

  In the middle of the clearing lay a Circle of stones. A grayish powder lay in little heaps within, along with a few leafless twigs, oddly blackened. It was from these that the pungent aroma arose. Jan approached the Circle of stones. He stepped inside.

  The dust felt soft beneath his heels, incredibly fine. The branches, puzzlingly brittle, crunched and compressed as he stepped on them. Dagg set one hoof inside the Ring as Jan bent to sniff the powdery gray stuff, savoring its acrid, aromatic scent. Dagg fidgeted suddenly and stepped back outside the stones.

  “What’s wrong?” Jan asked him.

  “Don’t stand there,” Dagg told him. “It’s hot.”

  Jan lifted his head and realized that his friend spoke true. The dust was warm beneath his hooves. But the heat felt good against the night air’s chill. “I wonder what makes it so?”

  “This is some sort of pan place,” muttered Dagg. “Let’s wait at the glade’s edge.”

  Jan nodded over one shoulder toward the edge of the clearing. “You go,” he murmured. “I’ll keep watch.”

  So they waited, Jan within the Circle of stones, Dagg amid the darkness at the verge of the wood. And while the two of them kept watch, another watched them, unseen, from across the glade—one who had led them there, though they did not know it, for private ends: that the prince’s son might see a thing no unicorn within the Ring had ever seen before.

  The sky darkened through deep blue to black, then turned a dark silver. The moon rose, huge and brilliant, throwing black shadows through the trees. By its light, Jan saw countless pan tracks crisscrossing the soft earth of the glade—but his and Dagg’s were the only hoofprints within the Circle of stones.

  Just then, very faintly, Jan caught sound of something, a little run of sliding notes. He started, straining his eyes against the shadows beyond the glade. His heart had gone tight. He could make out nothing through the trees. Stepping from between the stones, he backed toward the wood’s edge.

  “Dagg,” he breathed. “List.”

  Dagg lifted his head. “What is it?” he said lowly. “It isn’t unicorns.”

  Jan and Dagg melted out of the moon’s light into the Woods. Among the shadows now, Jan craned his neck; but still nothing met his gaze across the glade but moonlit trees. The notes came again then, just a snatch. They fluted through the dark.

  “It’s singing,” murmured Jan, suddenly sure, “but no words to it. Like bird’s song.”

  The sound grew clear now, continuous, one clear voice piping wordlessly up and down. Jan and Dagg stood perfectly still. As they listened, it was joined by another voice, and then a third. Three soft, sweet strains trilled in the stillness, drawing near.

  Dagg sidled. “It’s a night bird. It must be.”

  Jan shook his head. He felt no fear, only fascination now. “No bird,” he breathed. “Hist, I want to listen. I want to know what creature sings so sweet.”

  Beside him, Dagg went rigid, his nostrils wide. “It’s pans,” he whispered, strangled. “I can smell them. Fly!”

  Jan felt the muscles of his friend beside him bunch. “Stand still,” he hissed, “or they’ll see you.”

  Dagg hesitated. But Jan felt strangely, perfectly at ease. He wanted to see—he had to see—what would happen next, and he would not have Dagg bolting and spoiling it. The pans were coming into the glade.

  They moved in a long file, a whole band of them, and made themselves into a Circle. Crouching and lounging, they faced inward. Jan saw small ones, weanlings the size of hares, and old ones, gaunt and gray-flanked among the rest, not just the slim, strong half-growns and warriors that had attacked them earlier. And then, within the Circle under the moon, three pans began to dance. Goat-footed, high-stepping, they moved and swayed.

  “They dance,” Jan murmured, with a little start of surprise.

  Dagg shook his head. “Only the unicorns dance.”

  But it was so. The goatlings were dancing there, each dancer holding a flat bundle of marshreeds bound with grass. The reeds were bitten off in uneven lengths and, held to the pursed lips of the dancers, they produced the high, sweet singing. Those watching from the Circle nodded as the dancers passed, glancing at one another, snuffling and making small gestures. Jan felt a tremor down his spine.

  “They’re talking to each other,” he breathed.

  Dagg, pressing against him, muttered doggedly, “Pans can’t talk.”

  Jan shook his head. “With the pipes,” he whispered. “With their forelimbs.” A flash of insight went through him then, hot and sharp. “And they were talking to each other earlier, with their rams’ horns in the Woods.”

  Dagg stood silent a moment, watching the glade. The dancers piped and turned. The watchers murmured, nodding. Dagg shrugged. “Not talking—they can’t be. It’s just chatter.”

  Jan shook his head again, but kept his tongue. It was speech, he was sure of it. Then that legend of the pans in the old lays must be false. The goatlings were not speechless, had not turned away the Mother’s gift. The discovery astonished him. He strained his ears to the pipes, his eyes to the intricate movements of those stra
ngely jointed forelimbs, and felt the uncanny certainty that if only he could watch long enough, listen deeply enough, he could come to understand.

  Dagg beside him shifted suddenly. “What’s happening?”

  Jan came back to himself. He realized the snuffling murmur was dying now. A hush followed. One by one the dancers handed their pipes to members of the Ring, and for three moments in turn one strain of the music paused, and then resumed.

  The dancers caught up blackened stakes, the male brandishing one in each forelimb like long, straight hooves. Each female held one stake to her forehead like a horn. They snorted, tossing their heads, and pawed at the earth. Jan felt a rush of recognition.

  “It’s a singer’s tale,” he hissed. “They’re telling it—but without words.”

  The two females circled lazily within the goatlings’ Ring, seemingly unaware of the male stalking them. The music of the flutes grew soft and secretive. Suddenly, the male caught up a branch and threw it down before his quarry. The females whirled, leaping back as if surprised as the other sprang up, brandishing his stakes. The panpipes shrilled.

  The mock unicorns lowered their heads and charged, the pointed stakes at their foreheads aimed—but the male batted them lightly away. Once more the females charged and again were put to flight. This time the male pursued them, round the inside of the Ring, until his quarry at last outdistanced him.

  The male pan halted, raising his forelimbs, his head thrown back in triumph. The fluting of the panpipes swelled. The mock unicorns straggled away in defeat. The dancers left the inside of the Ring, rejoining their fellows at the rim.

  “The ambuscade,” murmured Jan. He was shaking, but from astonishment, not fear. “They were telling the others how they put us to flight.”

  “But,” Dagg hissed through clamped teeth, “that isn’t how it happened at all!” The interior of the pans’ Ring lay empty now. The fluting continued, very soft. “They didn’t rout us,” Dagg insisted. “We didn’t deign to fight. . . .”