He blinked, and she was sitting back. Her expression was tight and closed. He said, “Did you do it? I didn’t feel it.” He should have felt something; he always had before.
She nodded, looked down and cleared her throat. “I didn’t sense anything wrong. You’re perfectly normal.”
“Perfectly normal,” Chime repeated. The words sounded hollow. He wasn’t the only one who thought so. The others stirred uneasily, and Balm and Jade exchanged a worried look.
Flower hissed under her breath, and got to her feet. “Come with me.”
Flower took him to her bower, and made everyone wait outside.
Her bower was bigger but neater than his, with baskets holding extra blankets, cushions, and clothes stacked against the far wall, a pot and cups for tea neatly set out by the metal pan that held warming stones, and books and writing materials lay on every flat surface.
Chime sat on a fur mat, swallowing nervously. “What? Did you see something in my head you didn’t want the others to know about?”
Taking a seat opposite him, Flower gave him a grim look. “No. But I wanted to do this in private.” She took a deep breath. “Use your power.”
Chime went still and a cold lump settled in his stomach. Aeriat couldn’t be mentors. Queens and consorts mating with Arbora was what produced mentor births among the Arbora, but even queens didn’t have mentor abilities.
His throat had gone so dry it hurt. He looked around, his mind going blank for a moment. Something simple, something easy, he thought. Something any mentor apprentice could do. He picked up a smooth river stone from beside the hearth.
He took a deep breath, focused on the stone, and borrowed some of the sunlight falling down the hall’s airshafts. Carefully, he slid it into the stone.
Nothing happened.
I’m just panicking, he thought, and took a deep calming breath. He tried again, and again. Feeling tears prick his eyes, he looked up at Flower.
Her expression made his heart sink even further. She started to speak, hesitated, then said, “Maybe it will come back.”
Chime hid in Flower’s bower most of the day, huddled miserably in a back corner behind the storage baskets for the winter blankets. He tried shifting back and forth, as fast as he could, then at longer intervals, but he was still a warrior.
By the time Rill and Blossom managed to coax him out that evening, he had a burst of optimism. Maybe his mentor’s ability had only temporarily vanished, from the shock of changing into a warrior. Both Rill and Blossom agreed to a test, and he tried to put one, then the other, into a light healing sleep.
It didn’t work.
“Maybe it worked a little?” Blossom said hopefully, as Chime slunk back into hiding. “I think I feel better.”
His next visitors, sometime later, were Knell and Bell, his clutchmates. Knell was a soldier and Bell a teacher; Chime had been the only mentor to turn up in their main bloodline. Their hunter mother and the soldier who had sired them had died turns ago, taken by the same illness that had taken Rain, Pearl’s consort. Chime was so depressed by this point that he could barely answer Knell and Bell’s questions, and he didn’t come out to talk. Bell tried coaxing and Knell eventually graduated to threats, but Chime didn’t budge, and they finally gave in and left.
Time wore on. At some point that night, Flower wearily said the same thing she had been saying for most of the day, “Chime, come out. You can’t hide from this.”
As a mentor, Chime knew that lack of food and sleep could make Raksura overwrought and paranoid, and that warriors had always claimed to need more food and sleep than Arbora. This knowledge didn’t help, because he still thought they were planning to kill him. “Are you going to kill me?”
Flower, who had apparently reached her limit, snarled and stamped out of the room. Sometime later, Chime sensed rather than heard someone else enter. He thought it might be Knell coming back to haul him out of hiding. Unexpectedly, it was Stone’s voice that said, “Chime. Come out of there. Now.”
Stone was the line-grandfather, the only consort left in the court. Indigo Cloud hadn’t had good luck with consorts, the only fertile male Aeriat. In the past generation, they had died, of disease or from fighting when the court had been attacked. Several turns ago, Pearl had sent away the last of the young ones to other courts when her own consort had died.
Stone was so old his Raksuran form wouldn’t fit into most of the rooms of the colony. That didn’t matter, since Chime was pretty certain that even in groundling form, Stone could beat a warrior senseless. Especially him. Chime asked, “Are you going to kill me?” At this point, it would be something of a relief.
“Nobody’s going to kill you, you little idiot.” Stone’s voice was flat and his tone suggested he had only a limited amount of patience for this, which Chime had just expended. “Don’t make me come in there after you.”
Stone wasn’t known for making idle threats. He wouldn’t have hurt an Arbora, but then Chime wasn’t an Arbora anymore. Chime crawled out from behind the baskets, and eyed Stone warily. As a groundling Aeriat, Stone looked like a tall lean man, his face lined and weathered. Everything about him had faded to gray, his hair, his skin, even his clothes. The only spot of color was in his blue eyes, though the right one was dimmed and clouded. Even in his groundling form, Stone made the bower seem much smaller.
He tossed a skinned grasseater haunch down on the mat and said, “Eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Stone cocked his head. “Did I ask you if you were hungry?”
“Um, no.” Chime sat on the mat, tore a strip off the haunch, and obediently stuffed it in his mouth. He had been sick all day, so he expected to just vomit it up, which would serve Stone right. Instead it sparked his appetite, and he finished the haunch and half of the basket of fruit sitting beside Flower’s hearth before he stopped for breath. “Is there bread left?” he asked Stone.
“If you wanted bread, you should have eaten with the others.” Stone sounded like he was talking to a sulky fledgling. Chime had never known if all line-grandfathers were like Stone or if he was unique to Indigo Cloud. Young consorts were sensitive delicate creatures, sheltered by the court. Since Indigo Cloud had none left, they would have to try to get one from another court, when it was time for Jade to take a mate …
Chime stared at Stone, letting the last piece of half-eaten fruit fall from suddenly nerveless fingers. “I can’t make clutches, not anymore, not like this.” Aeriat consorts and male Arbora were fertile; warriors, male and female, weren’t.
There was possibly a trace of pity in Stone’s expression. “No, you can’t.”
Chime took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. He had never made a clutch, but it was important for mentors to pass on their bloodline. He had always planned to ask to have clutches with Rill or Blossom or both, when they were ready. Another part of who he was, gone. “I don’t … I don’t know …”
“Chime.” Stone leaned forward. “I don’t know why this happened to you, but I know you can’t hide down here. You have to get up, go out, and take up your life.”
Chime just sat there, pushing fruit pits around on the grainy floor. A part of him knew Stone was right. The rest of him still wanted to wail at the unfairness of it. “Can I hide down here for one more night, and come out tomorrow?”
Stone sighed, stretched out a long arm to ruffle Chime’s hair, and said, “One more night. If you don’t come out tomorrow, I’ll come back here and make you regret it.”
Chime nodded glumly. It was only fair.
Stone left, and Chime sat there a long time, listening to the quiet movements of the colony around him. He hadn’t been paying attention before, but he thought most of the Arbora in this hall must be either asleep or off in one of the common areas talking. Talking about me, he thought, with that reflexive starvation paranoia. Then he realized he might be right. They might be talking about what had happened to him. Trying to understand why, fearing it might happen to them, too. Flower had
said she would have the other mentors start searching the libraries, to see if there was any record of this happening before. He wondered if they had found anything yet. You should get up, go up to the library chambers and see if they’re still there, see what they found. The thought of facing the others, knowing he was no longer one of them, made his heart twist.
He had just managed to overcome his depressed inertia and get to his feet, when he heard soft footfalls on the steps to the bower. He tasted the air automatically, hoping it was Flower coming back. But it was Balm who pushed the curtain aside, and said, “Chime, Pearl wants to see you.”
Walking up the central stair to the queens’ chambers on the top level, Chime realized it hadn’t been paranoia. The colony felt disturbed and too quiet all at the same time. Some of the light stones in the stairwell were fading, making shadows cluster more thickly in the big space. Automatically he reached up to brush his hand against one to renew it, and then let it drop. He slid a sideways look at Balm to see if she had noticed, but if she had she didn’t comment on it. She hadn’t objected to walking up the stairs in their groundling forms instead of climbing the inner well, either. He cleared his throat and waved a hand around, indicating the silence in the wrong places, the faint sounds of talking and movement in others. “Is this about me?”
Balm glanced at him and admitted, “Yes. Everyone’s very disturbed.”
They reached the top of the steps, and Chime was startled when Balm turned down the passage to the big chamber that was used as a gathering hall. Whenever Chime had been called up here with Flower for a private meeting, it had always been in either Pearl’s or Jade’s bowers. Using the gathering space felt … official.
The chamber was large, the only opening to the outside a shaft in the center of the high roof. The light from glowing moss baskets in the wall niches left most of the space in shadow. But Chime saw the fruit vines growing down through the open shaft were mottled and discolored. When did that happen? he wondered, shocked. If there was a plant blight on the vines growing on the outer walls, that could be a serious problem for their crops. Why hasn’t anyone done anything about it?
There were a few warriors sitting up on the ledge around the upper perimeter of the chamber; Chime saw Floret, Vine, Sage, and Pearl’s longtime favorite, River. It was too dark to read their expressions, but their body language looked nervous. Pearl herself was pacing on the raised stone platform at the back of the room. Even in the dim light, her scales were bright gold, the webbed pattern over them the deepest indigo; her mane of frills and spines was full and extended all the way down her back. She was at least a head taller than all the other Aeriat.
It took Chime a moment to notice that Jade was sitting on the edge of the platform with Flower. He realized the other Arbora caste leaders weren’t here, not Bone, Knell, or Petal. That hit Chime suddenly like a blow to the stomach. He wasn’t an Arbora anymore, and rules for warriors and Aeriat were different. He felt a lump grow in his throat and sweat break out all over his groundling skin.
Chime had never been afraid of Pearl, from the time when he was barely old enough to walk and she was just the big gold person who visited the nurseries. He was respectful of her temper and wary of her bad moods, but never afraid. She was a queen, he was an Arbora, and she was supposed to protect him. That was the way it worked.
Now he wasn’t an Arbora, he was something else, and he was afraid.
Pearl glanced up, saw him, and went still. Chime dropped his gaze immediately.
She said, “Come here.”
Chime made it to the bottom step, then collapsed in a heap and covered his head. He heard the whisper of Pearl’s folded wings as she came toward him. Her claws clicked on the steps, then she crouched in front of him. Her hand lifted his chin, and he didn’t resist. He looked up into her face, so beautiful even when she frowned. She said, “I’d hoped it was a lie. Shift.”
Chime swallowed in a painfully dry throat, and shifted. Even kneeling on the steps, the unexpected weight of his wings forming on his back made him fall over. He sprawled, and awkwardly pushed himself back up into a sitting position.
Pearl stood, looking down at him, and hissed under her breath.
“I’m sorry,” Chime said miserably.
One of her spines flicked in annoyance. “Did you do this on purpose?”
He sat back, aghast. “No!”
“Then be quiet.” Pearl looked at Flower. “Well?”
Flower spread her hands. “We have some hope the change will reverse itself.”
We do? Chime thought, startled into hope. Then he took a better look at Flower’s face. She didn’t look very hopeful.
Pearl didn’t seem to think so, either. Her tail lashed, and she said with bitter amusement. “Let’s hope it happens soon. Apparently our time is limited.”
Silence sank over the room again. It was so quiet, Chime heard scales whisper as one of the warriors on the ledge changed position. Then Jade said, “Chime, is there anything you want to ask? About … being a warrior?”
Chime was too numb with relief that Pearl apparently wasn’t going to kill him to form a coherent question. But he knew Jade had spoken to him to remind the others it was still him in this different body, and he shouldn’t let the opportunity go by. He said, “Has anybody done anything about the blight?”
The room seemed to freeze and they all stared at him, as if he had asked something else. He realized no one knew what he meant, and pointed up to the discolored vines around the shaft. “The plant blight.”
He wasn’t sure what they all thought he had been referring to, but the room breathed in relief again. Pearl looked up at the vines, her spines folding down into her mane, and said, “They tried. Nothing helps.”
Flower let out her breath in a long sigh. “You’d better go, Chime.”
Chime started to stand, overbalanced and almost banged his head on the top step. He shifted back to groundling and stumbled to his feet. Balm took his wrist to steady him. She said, kindly, “I’ll walk with you.”
They left the gathering hall, but out in the stairwell foyer, a warrior dropped from the ceiling. It was River. He hissed at Chime and said, “You’re not one of us, no matter what you look like.”
“I know,” Chime snapped. “That’s the only thing that keeps me from killing myself.”
Balm snorted in amusement, and shouldered River out of the way. Two landings down the stairs, she said, “Try not to mind that. They’re not sure what your status is going to be, and it worries them.”
It worried Chime, too.
Chime woke the next morning, curled up on a cushion behind Flower’s baskets. Bleary and confused, he frowned at the hall’s ceiling high overhead, wondering how he had ended up here.
Memory washed over him and he moaned. He still had his long, awkwardly light body; it hadn’t just been an extended nightmare.
Flower leaned over the baskets and said, “Chime, remember what Stone told you.”
He winced and buried his head in his arms. “I know, I know. I’ll come out. In a while.”
Flower sighed, and after a moment he heard her leave the bower.
He lay there, listening to the other inhabitants of the hall rustle around and talk quietly. Eventually, the hall went still.
Chime climbed slowly out, his legs cramping from disuse. He stumbled out of the bower and took the passage at the other end of the hall, headed for the other side of the colony. He managed to avoid running into anyone, and came out on a platform overlooking the river.
It was another cool damp morning, a few clouds dotting the blue sky to the south. The colony was built across a shallow river that cut through a narrow valley, jungle-clad hills rising to either side. Some of the lower hills had been turned into garden terraces, where the Arbora planted the crops that helped sustain the court. Raksura had built the terraces, but the building was a relic of some long-ago groundling empire. It was made of gray stone in the shape of a step pyramid, and this platform was one of
many extending from the outer wall, and used mostly for sunning. It had a shallow square pool filled with rainwater, and Chime had chosen it for that and the fact that it faced away from the gardens where the Arbora would be working this morning, and the platforms that the warriors frequented.
Chime took a deep breath and shifted. He looked down at himself, unable to squelch the last spark of hope, but he was still a blue warrior. He swore wearily and started across to the pool.
Walking in this too-light body was odd; each step still felt as if he might lift right off the ground. He stepped carefully up onto the pool’s edge. The water was strewn with blue lilies but mostly clear, and it gave him a fairly good view of himself. All right, he thought, how do I do this? He frowned, trying to figure out how to make the new muscles work. He lashed his tail, his spines lifted and flicked, and then his wings started to unfold. They stopped with only the outermost section extended, the way they had the first time. They seemed to be stuck there, in a resting position, and he rolled his shoulders, shook himself, and bounced up and down before he finally found the right combination of muscles.
His wings stretched and spread, unfolding to nearly eighteen paces, the weight of them making him hunch forward until he got the trick of balancing with his tail. The scaly membrane caught the light, reflecting an edge of gold under the blue. It wasn’t as if he had never seen wings close-up before, but these were attached to him, and that was different.
Trying to move them was like suddenly having four arms. It took effort to make the muscles contract by themselves, without moving his arms, hands, spines, or tail. After a time, he managed to make the right one curl in toward him. The front edge of the wing looked razor-sharp, but the skin folded over the joints was smooth.
“You’re going to have to work on that.”
He twitched and his wings snapped in, a jolt that made him stumble forward and step into the pool.
Balm strolled forward, watching him critically. “You have to catch the wind and play it, mold it, with the surfaces. It’s like … having sex with the air.”