[Firebringer 03] - The Son of Summer Stars (21 page)

He watched the late, late afternoon sun floating infinitesimally upward, growing gradually younger and brighter with each passing moment. Its strong yellow light illumined the distant Hallow Hills. He felt the rhythm of Wyzásukitán’s wings change, descending now. The warband of unicorns far ahead and below had just left the rolling Plain. The Scouts of Halla were streaming into the rills of their ancestral land.

The wyverns pressed forward relentlessly, the white wyrmking at their head screaming his hatred for unicorns. Tek braced herself, determined not to be driven farther back. Already her warriors around her were dangerously bunched. They had no room to pivot and dodge, none to charge to one another’s aid. The wyverns had them pinned against the moonpool cliffs, escape to either side so narrow that few unicorns could have survived a dash for freedom. The rest would have been overtaken and cut down. Better far to make a stand. Indeed, it was their only hope.

The pied mare glanced to left and right, surveying the battle. Dagg fought shoulder to shoulder with her, his mate, Ryhenna, on his other side. She spotted Ses farther back and to the left, the cream-colored mare with the flame-bright mane holding her ground in a press of other unicorns against the surge of oncoming wyverns. Tek searched the opposite way, glimpsed her own dam, Jah-lila, even farther distant, flanked by her foster father and namesake, the healer Teki.

The unicorn warhost stood spread in a long, shallow ribbon against the moonpool cliffs, more wyverns pouring from their holes and rushing toward them at every moment. Coldly, clearly, Tek grasped Lynex’s strategy: with luck, he hoped to break through the unicorns’ ranks and splinter them, then surround each smaller group and overwhelm it. Barring that, she knew, he planned to grind them against the cliffs until their line thinned and collapsed.

The extent to which her troops had allowed themselves to become stretched was not good, the pied mare saw. No helping it now. Her only viable tactic was to form them into an outward-facing crescent strong enough to resist the momentum of the wyvern advance. Then, carefully, she must pull the tips of the crescent inward, massing and thickening the formation before bulging its forward edge into a point. Perhaps, just possibly, she could then drive this wedge into Lynex’s army, thus breaking it in two.

But they stood a long way from there yet, she acknowledged grimly, even as she whistled to rally the herd. She heard others take up the cries, pass them on in shrill piping that rose above the grinding noises of battle. Raggedly, the crescent began to form.

Scarred Lynex, amid his double-dozen huge bodyguards, reared at the heart of the onrushing mass, driving his followers with shrieks and threats. Despite all the foes her warhost had slain so far, Tek realized, as many more faced them now, fresher, larger, wilier and older than any they had fought earlier in the day. The new onslaught’s force was tremendous. Again and again, Tek hurled herself forward, fighting furiously. Half a dozen wyverns fell before her hooves and horn. Dagg and Ryhenna protected her shoulder. Overhead, Illishar harried and stooped.

Others of her band did not fare so well. The pied mare spied places where the ranks of her defenders had grown perilously thin. The crush of fighters impeded reinforcements from reaching those spots. She saw Ses standing at one such point, nearly the sole defender. How much longer could she hold out? To the other side, Teki and Jah-lila worked feverishly, marshaling warriors to strengthen the line.

The crescent had stalled coalescing into the wedge needed to drive the wyrmking’s hoard apart. Tek whistled the rallying cry again, again, but the exhausted unicorns were faltering. Before them, Lynex, three times the size of any other wyvern on the field, hooted his glee.

“Smash them, crush them!” his largest head shouted.

“Rip them, rend them,” the two middle-sized pates flanking the main one cried.

“Snap them, slash them, bite and devour them,” three of the smaller maws ranted, while the littlest nob gabbled and hissed: “Smash, rend, slash, devour!”

The wyverns were breaking through. Tek saw the line waver in two places. Ses leapt toward one of the weakening points, spurring on comrades with her whistles and cries. Ryhenna sprang to join her. On the opposite side of the pied mare, Teki and Jah-lila forged toward the other spot at which the warhost’s ranks were in imminent danger of giving way. Too slowly. Defenders crumpled beneath the wyverns’ teeth and claws. The crescent was staving in. Tek felt her own heart quail. The healer and the red mare would never reach the breach in time.

“Dagg, go!” she shouted, giving her shoulder-friend a slap on the rump with the flat of her horn.

The dappled warrior sprinted toward the buckling formation’s edge, shouldering his way across the fray, whistling encouragement to those who still lived and desperately fought on. Tek returned to the struggle before her. She dared not follow Dagg’s progress even a moment more. His absence and Ryhenna’s created a gap in the ranks around her. She leapt forward to fill the breach.

The seven-headed wyvern king towered above her, his immense bodyguards writhing. They bore down on Tek like a mountain falling. Illishar swooped, dived, trying to strike at the wyrmking’s heads, but his double-headed bodyguards battered the gryphon tercel off. The pied mare found herself unable to hold her ground. Notwithstanding her furious charges, she was being driven back, step by step. How many more before she found herself against the cliff? Her folk around her, she knew, found themselves in the same case: hemmed in, incapable of breaking free.

“To war! To war!”

The cry rang out from behind the wyverns whom they faced. Faint at first, it strengthened suddenly as the wind turned and carried the resonant war chant to the pied mare’s ears full force. Unicorns. Unmistakably a warcry of unicorns. Beyond the wyrmhoard, a raising of dust and a thunder of heels. The words grew nearer and louder yet.

“We be the Scouts of Halla! In the Firebrand’s name we come. Aljan-with-the-Moon-upon-his-Brow has summoned us to your aid, Queen Tek. Wyzásukitán hastened us from the Smoking Hills. The wyverns! The wyverns! To war!”

A flood of unicorns crested the wyvern shelves. Smaller than the common run, all were dark roans, deep blues and greys, brick-red dapples, brindles of tarnished gold, their leader a young stallion of frosted maroon. The pied mare could only gape as the shaggy strangers stampeded down the limestone slopes like a cascade of maddened hill goats. Tek wasted not one moment of the wyverns’ panic. As the white wyrms spun, shrieking, she whistled: “Forward! Strike hard, warriors of the Ring!”

Around her she saw, felt, heard her own folk plunge ahead with renewed vigor, rushing to meet these unknown allies who called her queen and claimed to come from Jan. The wyverns, caught between two closing pincers of unicorns, screamed in terror, their ranks disintegrating.

“A trap!” the deserters shrilled.

“Stand your ground, you bloodless fools,” shouted the wyrmking’s central head. “We outnumber them still!”

In full rout, scattering for their lives, his troops ignored the command. The Vale’s warhost, rumps no longer against the cliff, joined the newcomers in pursuing and skewering as many as they could. Few wyrms managed to clamber back into their caves, for the rush of newcomers had swept them downslope, away from their dens’ entryways. For the first time since the arrival of Lynex, Tek began to feel—not just hope, but truly feel—that the unicorns might carry the day.

Lell galloped across the Hallow Hills through the late afternoon light. Signs of battle lay everywhere. Strewn upon the summer grass, in the meadows and little stands of trees, upon the grassy, broken slopes and beside the streams, lay carcasses of the slain. Mostly wyvern, the half-grown filly noted with relief. Her folk were prevailing, then—or had been earlier. Sun hung low over the western horizon, its light a warm, golden amber, not yet deepened to crimson. She would have to hurry. Lell turned her eyes from the slain and galloped on.

She had left the oasis where suckling mares, weanlings too young to be initiated, the old and the infirm had remained in the Plainsdwellers’ charge, there to await news of the battle’s outcome. But Lell had not waited. Five years old, she was of age to join the warriors. Had a pilgrimage been made this year, she would have been initiated. But Jan had not returned and the herd been deep in plans for war. The harsh winter of three seasons past had slain every other filly and foal her own age. The herd would brook no pilgrimage of one.

What, then, the prince’s sister fumed, was she to do—wait till she was a doddering mare and the sucklings at last grown old enough to join the Ring? She refused to wait! Jan would never have allowed such a travesty—and in his absence, she would not permit the most glorious battle of her people’s history to pass her by. Besides, she reminded herself smugly, the twins had said she
must
go. They had come upon her as she had been preparing in secret to slip away. She had feared at first they meant to stay her, report her to Calydor, sound the alarm.

They had done no such thing, only said they had come to aid her, knew where the sentries stood and what path was best to avoid their eyes. They said they had come to tell her Calydor was occupied elsewhere and that now was the ideal time to slip away. He would not miss her for hours, perhaps until morning, if she went straightaway. Then they told her the route to the Hallow Hills, as glibly as though they had fared it themselves.

“But we
have
fared it,” Aiony had told her, though Lell had breathed not a word of her thoughts aloud.

“Night past,” Dhattar continued, “we followed the path of past pilgrims in dreams.”

Lell had long since abandoned hope of grasping the twins’ meaning when they spoke of their dreams. Instead, she had accepted their aid gratefully, tucking the course they described away into memory honed by Illishar, like the rhyme and meter of a lay.
This is what Jan would have wanted me to do,
she found herself thinking, a bit uncertainly—and then with more confidence,
at least, this is what Jan himself would have done were he in my case.

And the way had not proved so very hard to follow, after all. She fared only half a day behind the warriors. They had departed the previous afternoon, she the following morning. Grass trampled and earth turned by their passing remained for Lell to follow. She pushed relentlessly, resting but briefly before pressing on.

Where was Jan?
The thought beat at her unceasingly as she ran.
Why had he not returned?
She felt as though she must make up for his absence somehow, must go in his stead. None of the others could be relied upon, the twins cautioned, not even Calydor. Though a seer, he had not dreamed what they had dreamed. He would not believe them, they feared. And telling him would spoil Lell’s chance to go. Tek would need
her,
they insisted, no other. She must kindle fire. She must join the fray before sunset, must fly like the wind with the heart of a pard. She must not yield.

Lell set her thoughts aside as she came to a rocky rise. White limestone and black earth marked a difficult trail. From somewhere beyond, the amber filly heard, the din of battle rose. Her limbs trembled. She had run since dawn. It was not fear, she told herself, and began to climb.

The slope was steep and slippery. Scree tumbled continually from beneath her hooves. At times the hillside lay bare before her, devoid of scrub; at times it wound through trees. Choosing her footing, she climbed higher. Panting, she tried to scan the path ahead. Oddly, what she most feared was not wyverns, but her own folk, Illishar’s airborne eyes, especially. That he might spy her before she reached the fray and swoop to thwart her only hardened her determination. Though she had often confided her intention to join the warriors, somehow she doubted he would approve so readily were he to encounter her here, now, preparing to fling herself into battle.

Panting, she reached the top of the precarious slope and ducked into cover of the trees. The noise of war seemed much closer now. Cautiously, she made her way through the grove toward it. The trees around her were odd, their aroma smoky and sweet. Never before had she seen trees with such scabrous, twisting trunks and bluish-silver leaves in the shape of crescents, hearts and rounds. The limbs were all sprouted in rose-colored buds, some already burst open into flower. Their odor was smooth, milklike, soothing. The most tempting thing she had ever scented.

Milkwood, she realized suddenly. The magical trees grew here alone, on the moonpool cliffs of the Hallow Hills. Jah-lila had eaten of these buds in her youth, Lell knew, when the red mare had first become a unicorn. Ryhenna, too. Their properties were marvelous. Famished, Lell sampled a spray of buds. She had barely eaten over the last days of hard travel, and not at all today. The savor of the buds was sweet without cloying, creamy as mares’ milk. A cool tang ran through her. It made her both shiver and long to taste again.

The sounds of battle grew more insistent. The amber filly tore herself away and sprang on, trotting now, seeking the source of the din. Ahead of her, the trees thinned. She scented water. She found herself on the shore of a pool, perfectly round and perfectly clear. White limestone sand made up its bank and bottom, falling away into a blue spring that roiled and bubbled. Strangely, the surface of the pool lay perfectly still, mirror-smooth. Lell started, understanding where she was.

“The Mirror of the Moon,” she whispered, naming the sacred mere about which initiates kept night-long vigils, into which they gazed to glimpse their own futures, and from which they drank in solemn ceremony, becoming warriors of the Ring.

Lell shivered again, parched with a day’s waterless journey, and yet at the same time cold. Slowly, respectfully, she approached the mere. Bending, she drank—not the single, ceremonial sup of the newly initiated, but a great draught. The taste was sweet. The amber filly stared into the crystal waters, searching for some vision such as Dhattar and Aiony beheld each time they glanced into any puddle or stream. But she saw nothing. No fate. No destiny.

Lell skirted the pool’s edge. The clatter of battle grew steadily louder. She reached the far side of the mere. Leaving the moonpool behind, the amber filly hurried deeper into the trees. Presently, she saw grove’s end, open sky beyond turning deeper and deeper gold with the advancing sunset. The milkwood plateau dropped away in an almost vertical cliff. Below lay the wyvern shelves, sloping in broken ledges to the south, toward the Plain. Caves pitted the soft, white stone.

Across this rocky expanse, the battle sprawled. Wyverns and unicorns clashed and charged across the crumbling surface. Lell saw unicorns pursuing wyrms, surrounding them. Hemmed by inward-facing rings of warriors, the captured wyverns reared and snarled, fighting with tooth and tail and claw. Horned warriors dodged and darted, feinted, struck. Others guarded entry to the caves.

Snorts and shouts sounded above the clash: shrill whistles of warriors, screams from the wounded, groans from the dying, curses, triumphant yells, the thump of heels upon the rock. A fine white dust hung above the fray, stirred by the ceaseless scritch of bellies and tromp of hooves. Sky was the color of goldenflower. Black shadow of the moonpool cliff crept slowly across the shelves.

Lell watched, mesmerized. Shaking, she was unaware of fear. She picked out the black-and-rose form of Tek below her, rearing and stabbing at a two-headed wyrm. Far ahead of the pied regent, the amber filly glimpsed the red mare, Jah-lila, and the black-and-white pelt of the healer, Teki. They seemed engaged in cutting off retreat to the south. Far from them, on the other side of the field, Lell saw Dagg’s grey-dappled figure fighting alongside the coppery form of Ryhenna. They made up part of a ring surrounding a pair of wyverns, one of whom lay wounded.

To their flank, separated from them by a great distance, Lell saw her dam, Ses. The cream-colored mare ramped and reared, mane tossing along the curve of her neck as bright as poppies, as flame, despite the late afternoon’s advancing shadow. Her mother’s back was to the cliffs. Lell watched without the slightest qualm of being spotted. What troubled her more was how she was to descend that sheer, near-vertical slope and join the fray.

The gold in the sky was taking on a tinge of fire. Scanning aloft, she did not see Illishar. Fear seized her. Then she found him—on the ground, beak and one claw buried in the throat of a massive wyrm. He was dragging the lifeless form up slope. When he cast the slain thing across an entry, blocking it, the warriors that had been guarding that cave sprang away, freed to other tasks.

The field swarmed with unicorns the amber filly did not recognize: odd roans, all brick and slate, lapis and ruddy sienna. Darting and springing about like deer, they maneuvered the treacherous footing of the wyvern shelves undaunted, fighting with ferocious energy. One among their number, a dark maroon, fought alongside Tek. Lell caught his cry above the din:

“For the queen! For the queen, in Halla’s name!”

Her own people’s shouts were “For Jan, the Allmother’s Firebringer!” and “For pied Tek, regent and prince’s mate!”

Who were these strange little shaggy unicorns? Allies, clearly. They bore down on the foe with a fury her own folk strove gamely to match. The white wyrms they fought twisted and struggled, lashing and sometimes bowling hoofed warriors off their feet with powerful sweeps of their otherwise useless tails. The amber filly, gazing upon the seething turmoil below her, had no idea how to interpret it. Were the unicorns winning? She hoped so.

Yet at the same time, she had the uneasy feeling the battle might still go either way, as easily tipping in the favor of the wyverns as not. Dusk was fast drawing on. What would happen at nightfall? Would the two sides fight on? Would darkness return the advantage to the wyrms? If they managed to slip safe below ground under cover of darkness, the amber filly reasoned, they could easily hide in the earth for as long as they chose. Would Tek dare risk leading a second assault down into the twisting maze that was their dens?

It was their sheer size, more so even than their numbers, Lell realized, which might determine battle’s outcome. The stinging wyrms were easily three and four times the size of the youthful, stingless peaceseekers she and the twins had aided three nights before. These wyverns were old, toughened, loyal to their king. Some had double heads. Largest of all loomed their seven-faced sovereign, massive Lynex, unmistakable, far larger than the bodyguards that ringed him. Furiously, Tek, the dark maroon and others of the stranger-unicorns threw themselves against the wyrmking’s protectors, trying to break through. Already three of the royal guards had fallen.

Lell came to herself with a start. Would her brother, Jan, have stood gaping so, like a witless foal, when there was a task to be done? Sky above was turning from golden to amber. She must kindle fire. No time to lose, for the twins had told her she must bring fire to the battlefield before the setting of the sun. Clumsily, Lell bent to strike the tip of her horn against one flinty heel. A spark leapt up, flared, then fell to earth and died. Nervously, Lell tried again. No spark this time. A third strike. This time two sparks glowed, but each snuffed out in midair before reaching the ground.
Tinder,
she realized. She must use tinder to catch a spark, nurture it. Frantically, the darkamber filly cast about her for something dry and fine. Dead grass or shredded bark, anything would do. Below her, the battle raged on. Overhead, the sky blazed, the fiery tinge intensifying with every second that passed.