Birth of the Firebringer

by Meredith Ann Pierce

  He had no time to finish, for Jan beside him had caught in his breath.

  “Oh,” the prince-son breathed, brushing his shoulder against his companion to still him. “Oh, Dagg. What’s that?”

  A pan had risen from the Ring and now was kneeling beside the Circle of stones. With a sheaf of reeds, she brushed aside the gray powder. A second pan came to the stones and threw down a heap of dead branches. Small lights, like red stars, leapt upward through the twigs.

  Then something flickered upon the branches, something bright. Jan stared, overtaken with wonder. The stuff upon the twigs—it moved, it danced. It was the color of his mother’s coat, of a setting sun. It flowed like a unicorn’s mane, like grass in the wind, like . . . like. . . . He could not say. The branches beneath it blackened and curled. And some began to glow, orange red, then broke at last and fell into a fine, gray dust.

  It cast a fleeting light upon the bodies of the pans. They crowded closer, holding their forelimbs to it. Jan saw their bluish hides trickling sweat, even in the chill night air. Mist rose from the flaring stuff, tendrils that to Jan seemed black against the hoary moon, and pale against the sky.

  “Prince-son,” a voice behind him breathed, “and Dagg. Stand still and do not speak. It is I.”

  Jan started and wheeled, then felt sudden relief flooding through him as he recognized the healer’s daughter. She had slipped up between them in the dark.

  “Come away, softly now,” she said. “I’ll take you to the others. They are not far.”

  Dagg turned hurriedly to follow her. Jan heard him sighing with relief. But the prince’s son had to force himself to go. He wanted to stand watching forever under the moon and the stars. He fell in slowly behind Dagg and the healer’s daughter. They skirted the glade. Then without a backward glance, Tek struck out into the dark. Jan sighed, following her. He caught a last glimpse of the pans in their Ring through the trees. A handful of them had begun once more to dance.

  “They danced,” said Jan, after a time.

  Tek looked at him. “The pans? I saw none dancing, young prince.”

  “Before you came,” he answered, “and just now, as we left. They were beautiful.”

  He stopped short, saying it—for only now as he spoke did he realize that it was so. There had been a strange grace in those upright, two-footed forms, a litheness in those odd forelimbs unlike any grace a unicorn could ever have. Jan saw Dagg eyeing him over the back of the healer’s daughter.

  “Pans?” he cried. “Those twisted little haunts crept up and fell on us this day, without cause.”

  “We’re in their land without their leave,” answered Jan, but so softly he was speaking to himself. That thought, too, was new—it had just come to him. Dagg paid no heed. Jan saw him screwing shut his eyes.

  “They’re like hillcats. They clutched our manes and tried to pull us down. . . .” Jan saw him shudder.

  “Peace,” murmured Tek.

  Jan turned to her. “Was it you,” he asked her, “who led us off? You’ve been ahead of us all this time?”

  The young mare looked at him. “Led you off? I only came upon you a few moments gone, out scouting for stragglers.”

  “There was another then,” Jan told her. “I heard . . . I saw. . . .”

  The healer’s daughter laughed, but gently. “Thought you heard or saw, perhaps? Come, it’s easy to imagine haunts and followers in a dark wood at night.”

  Jan shook his head; he had not meant that at all—but they had reached the others now. Jan spotted them through the trees ahead, in a glade almost at the wood’s edge. He saw the moon shining white upon the Plain not twenty paces farther on. Korr stood with Teki across the open space. The prince shifted impatiently, staring back toward the Woods. He seemed to be attending to the healer’s words with only half an ear.

  Jan followed Tek and Dagg past the sentries into the glade. Spotting them, the prince broke off from Teki and came forward. Those not standing guard had already lain down among the bracken. Korr nodded Dagg away to join the others. Jan halted and gazed at the dark figure standing before him.

  “Struck off to delve the Pan Woods on your own?” the prince said curtly. He stood against the moon, a black shadow against its light. Jan could not see his face. “Did you not hear my order to keep together?”

  His father’s rebuke felt like the slash of hooves. Jan flinched. “We lost sight of the others,” he started.

  “Dawdling when I told you to fly.”

  Jan dropped his head. “We ran wrong,” he mumbled, picking at the turf with one forehoof. “But we knew if we went westward we’d reach the Plain.”

  He heard his father sigh. “Well, I suppose that was clever enough,” he conceded at last. “If only you were half so clever at staying clear of trouble as you seem to be at finding it.” He snorted again. “Heed what I tell you in future,” he added. “And stay with the band. Now find you forage, and rest. The Plain is harder going than the Woods.”

  Korr turned away then, lashing his tail, though there were no flies now, only night millers and moths. Jan gazed after the prince as he went to stand staring out over the moonlit Plain. His heart felt hollow, filled with an ache too keen to bear. He had lost his father’s praise.

  “You are a silent one for thought,” Tek said to him. With a start, he realized the healer’s daughter had not left his side. He said the first thing that came into his head.

  “I . . . was thinking of the pans.” And saying so, he did think of them. The memory of their beauty eased his heart a little. He turned to her. Her eyes were clear, green stones lit by moonlight. “Was it fire?”

  She shook her head, clearly puzzled. “A huddle of pans under the moon was all I saw.”

  “But . . . ,” he started. Then he felt sleep catching at his mane and had to swallow a yawn.

  “Enough,” the young mare said. “The moon’s halfway up into the sky. Time enough for talk tomorrow, on the Plain. Good rest.”

  She bowed to him, going to seek her place among the sentries. Jan bowed in return and, finding where Dagg had lain, he lay down beside him. His limbs felt loose and empty with fatigue. His thoughts were growing woolly, slow. Even the sting of his father’s ire was numbing. Nothing seemed to matter now but sleep.

  He closed his eyes, images flaring before his inner gaze like flame. By morning, he could not recall, but that night he dreamed of goatlings dancing under the bright egg of the moon.

  The Plain

  10

  When Alma made the world, she made the heart of the world first, which was fire, and then the air above the world, and then the sea that girdles the world, and lastly the land. Woods, mountains, and valleys she made, each where each was fitting. But most of the land she shaped into the Plain—not level, but rolling, a vast expanse of gentle rises and wrinkles and rolls.

  Korr kept them moving all day their first day upon Alma’s back, loping in long easy strides where the ground was smooth or downsloping, checking to a trot where it steepened or grew rough. The moon, huge and yellow, floated beside them on the horizon’s edge in the hour after dawn before it set.

  They lay up at noon for an hour’s rest in a shallow hollow between two rills. Jan threw himself down beside Dagg, panting. His muscles ached and trembled as they cooled. Then before he had even half caught his breath it seemed, they were off again.

  Just before dusk, Korr brought them to a halt. Jan’s legs folded under him, his eyelids sliding shut of their own accord. He was asleep before he knew. Later, Dagg roused him, and in the dark after sundown they tasted their first grass since they had left the Vale—tender, green, and marvelously sweet.

  The land remained hilly as they moved northward. The Pan Woods and the Gryphon Mountains beyond dwindled in the distance, becoming a dark line on the horizon behind them, then vanished at last. Jan felt his muscles hardening, his flanks growing leaner and his stride rangier as each day rolled on.

  It was their third morning out of the Woods. The dew was st
ill thick upon the grass, the sun in the east barely risen over the flat rim of the world. Jan’s limbs, still stiff from sleep, were beginning to limber. The band had not yet broken camp.

  “Well,” Jan was saying as his long, slim horn clattered against Dagg’s, “what do you think?”

  Dagg parried him.

  “Keep your guard up,” he heard Tek saying.

  Jan countered Dagg’s sudden thrust and threw him off. They reared together, shoulder-wrestling for a moment.

  “Think of what?” Dagg asked him, struggling.

  “About the Firebringer,” Jan panted, shifting his weight. “That he’ll be the color-of-night, and a great warrior. . . .”

  He braced himself and Dagg slipped from him. The two of them rolled, then scrabbled to their feet and fenced a little, tentatively.

  “More force, Jan,” he heard Tek telling him. “You foot as though this were a dance.”

  But it was, in a way, he thought as Dagg and he dodged, paused, parried, measured, each advancing and giving ground by turns. But he kept his tongue. Dagg was lunging at him.

  “The Firebringer? But that’s history. Zod the singer saw him.”

  Jan fended his friend’s slow, hard jabs with a half-dozen light taps.

  “More force!” called Tek.

  Jan parried harder. “But only in a dream.”

  “A seer’s dream.”

  “List, faster, Dagg,” the young mare instructed. Jan glimpsed her sidling for a better view. Dagg pivoted, grazing him. The sudden sting surprised him. Jan knocked his friend’s horn away.

  “I know,” he breathed, throwing himself after Dagg. “But do seers’ dreams always come to pass?” Taking advantage of his friend’s misstep, Jan rained a volly of feints and thrusts. Dagg was too hard pressed to answer. “Tek?” panted Jan. “Does it?”

  “Well enough, let be,” he heard the healer’s daughter laughing. “Enough hornplay for now. We’ve a day’s running ahead of us yet.”

  Jan and Dagg fell apart, catching their breath. As Tek turned away, they followed her to the edge of the loose Ring of resting unicorns, away from the clash of other pilgrims, early risen, still learning battlecraft. The healer’s daughter turned to Jan.

  “Until he come, little prince,” she said, “all we may know of the Firebringer is what Zod and other dreamers said of him: that he shall come on hooves so hard and sharp they will strike sparks upon the stone. That his blood shall be of burning, and his tongue a flit of flame. That he may not come until the Circle has been broken. And his birth shall mark both the beginning and the ending of an age.”

  Jan shook his head, frowning at her words. Dawn wind was rising now. “I thought only Zod had foretold the Firebringer.”

  The healer’s daughter shook her shoulders. “Others have seen him. Caroc foretold he would be born out of a wyvern’s belly, and Ellioc that he would not come from within the Ring at all, but outside it—a Renegade. . . .”

  “But Caroc and Ellioc were false prophetesses,” Dagg said impatiently. “Nothing either of them foretold has ever come to pass. . . .”

  “Yet,” murmured Tek. Dagg snorted.

  “How could a unicorn be born out of a wyvern’s belly?” He swatted a blackfly from his haunch. “The only one who ever truly saw the Firebringer was Zod.”

  Tek stood three-legged, cocking her head to scratch her cheek with one heel. “Oh, truly?” she murmured. “Then I suppose I have not seen him.”

  Jan looked at her. “You saw . . .” he began. “Where, when?”

  The young mare straightened, shaking herself. “Not in flesh. In a dream.”

  Dagg came forward. “Is that why you changed the ending of the lay, the one you sang at Moondance?”

  Tek glanced at him, and let go a nickering laugh. “So far, you seem to be the only one to have remarked it.” She laughed again, half at herself. “Perhaps the others were all already asleep.”

  “The Beard,” Jan heard Dagg breathe. “I told you she was a dreamer.”

  The young mare sighed. “No dreamer. Only a little of a singer, and a warrior. I saw the Firebringer on the night all unicorns are dreamers: at my initiation, two years gone.”

  Jan snorted. “What do you mean?”

  Tek looked at him. “You have not heard? I thought all colts found out before the time, though they are not meant to.”

  Jan studied her, and she was laughing at him with her green, green eyes—taunting him, daring him. But he refused to be baited. He only said, softly, “Will you tell us of it, of initiation?”

  She nodded then, shrugging. “I suppose. You’ll find out soon enough in any case.” And she made her voice low, like a singer’s cant. Both colts had to lean closer to hear. “Those who have come far over Alma’s back, kept Ring and borne themselves bravely—those whom the Mother finds worthy—will at dawn behold a true vision of their destinies upon the Mirror of the Moon.”

  Jan’s heart missed a step. “Their destinies,” he whispered, gazing at Tek. She sighed, her eyes fixed, unfocused now.

  “Only a glimpse. A glimpse.”

  “And you saw the Firebringer.”

  She had turned a little away from him. “I saw the moon crack like a bird’s egg and fall out of the sky, and from the broken shell stepped forth a young unicorn, long limbed and lithe, a runner, a dancer, and black as the well of a weasel’s eye. He looked exactly as the old song says:

  “The silver moon rode on his brow,

  And a white star on his heel.”

  “But,” said Jan; he had to force himself to speak slowly, “if you saw him born. . . .” Excitement flared in him. “Then that can only mean the Firebringer will come among us in your lifetime.”

  Tek glanced at Jan, then Dagg. She laughed, casting a glance at Korr. “Perhaps. Or perhaps he is already among us, only waiting to be known.”

  Jan turned to gaze after his father, who stood a little apart from the band, watching the fiery dish of the sun pull free of the horizon. Korr was a mighty prince, a fleet runner, a fine dancer. And he was black, black as a starless night. Did Tek think Korr might be the one—did others think it? Dagg had hinted as much at Moondance, days ago.

  Jan felt a rush of longing then. Was there nothing he could do to win back his father’s esteem? And though the prince had not a mark of white or silver on him, odd spots, appearing suddenly, were not unknown among the unicorns. One never knew what lay beneath until spring shed.

  Tek started away from him, murmuring, “We’ll be breaking camp soon.”

  Jan let go his daydreaming and yawned, shaking himself. Dagg shouldered against him. The grass before them billowed and stirred. As Dagg lowered his head to nibble the tender green shoots, Jan turned to follow Tek. There had been something more he had wanted to ask her. The sun was up, the waning moon in the western sky well past its zenith. Tek was rousing those who were dozing still.

  “Hist, Tek,” said Jan lowly. The healer’s daughter turned. “Where were you off to, night past?”

  The young mare frowned and shook her head. “I stood sentry before dawn, if that’s what you mean.”

  She turned and woke another pilgrim. Jan waited till they were out of others’ earshot again. “Earlier—before moon-rise.”

  Tek halted and studied him keenly. “Breaking the Ring is forbidden,” she told him. “And straying away would be madness at night. There are grass pards on this Plain.”

  Jan shook his head. “I saw you.”

  Teki had sung them a lay after dusk, how Alma created her own being from a dance of light in the Great Darkness before time, and the world was but a droplet shaken from her as a young mare shakes bright water from her coat. Afterward, as the others around him had drifted into sleep, Jan had lain restless, gazing off into the dark.

  The sentries, at last getting their turn to eat, had torn at the young grass too greedily to keep good watch. Then Jan had caught a hint of motion from the corner of his eye and turned to see a unicorn slipping away from camp, half hidd
en by the folds and rills of land, then striking out at a fast, silent lope in the direction whence they had come.

  He stood gazing at Tek as she eyed him now in the light of broken day. “I have gone nowhere, young princeling,” she answered, suddenly formal, then turned to rouse another initiate. “You must have dreamed it.”

  Jan watched her go. It had been no dream. Tek’s own mother, Jah-lila, had banished his dreams when he was small. Surely the pied mare could not have forgotten that. He had not been able to see the other’s color, night past, by the dim starlight, but the form and the gait had reminded him strongly of Tek.

  She moved away from Jan, stepping among the Circle of pilgrims, murmuring for them to rise. Jan gazed after her, feeling oddly unsettled and at a loss. Sleepily, the last of the initiates rose and stretched. Korr’s whistle to the band a moment later cut across Jan’s thoughts, and they were off once more across the Plain.

  Jan and Dagg ran with Tek, as had become their custom. Other initiates had singled out warriors to be their mentors as well. Jan said nothing more of having seen Tek slip away, and the morning drifted on. As the unicorns loped over the rolling grassland, the sun pulled higher. White clouds began to stray across the wide, blue sky.

  After a time, he came aware that Dagg had drifted from them, and now was running a little apart from the band, his gaze fixed intently away. Jan followed his stare, fixing his own eyes on the far horizon and the miles of openness between. What lay beyond there? he wondered, the question stirring and murmuring in the back of his mind. What lay beyond?

  Jan came back to himself with a start, as Dagg before him suddenly stumbled, missing his stride. They both had drifted even farther from the herd. How long had he been running, lost in thought? Jan wondered. The sun seemed higher. Before him Dagg snorted and tossed his head. Jan drew alongside.

  “What is it?”

  “Look there.”