“What?” Balm lifted her head, tasting the air. “No. What was it?”
It had just been a trace, there and gone almost too quickly to mark it. “Fell.”
“There’s been Fell taint in the air off and on since that ruler came to see Pearl.” Balm showed her fangs in a grimace of disgust. “They must still be in the area, watching the court.”
The wind came from the south, away from the colony. The Fell must be lurking out there somewhere; maybe this valley wasn’t such a good place to nap in the sun after all. Moon asked, “Were you there? When the ruler came?”
Balm shook her head, her spines flaring. “No, I’m not in favor with Pearl. I’m Jade’s...” She trailed off, looking up at Moon, suddenly uneasy.
It was the hesitation that did it. Spy, Moon thought. Spy is the word you’re looking for. He had known that Chime and Balm had only come out here to keep an eye on him; that Balm was here specifically on Jade’s behalf somehow made it... personal.
Chime landed next to them, dropping a carcass on the dry grass. He panted with exertion, proud and flustered with his success. “There, is that right? Can we go now?”
Moon turned away, picked up his own kill, and leapt into the air. Behind him, he heard Chime asking Balm, “Hey, what’s wrong? What did you do?” Moon didn’t listen for the answer.
Chapter Six
Moon reached the colony well ahead of Chime and Balm, finding and following the river back up the valley. Ashe circled the main structure, he identified the pillared terrace that belonged to the hunters by the hides drying on wooden racks. A dozen or so Arbora worked there, skinning something large and furry that had a double set of spiral horns. The place stunk of butchered meat and the acidic tang of whatever they used for tanning.
Moon landed and dumped the carcass on the paving, folded his wings, and shifted. He managed not to twitch when all the Arbora working in the court shifted too. He was going to have to get used to that.
They were all dressed roughly for the messy work, most wearing just ragged cloth smocks or leather kilts. All stopped their work to watch Moon with open curiosity. The one who stepped forward, eyeing the carcass as if he grudged its existence, said, “Well, you killed it. Did you bother to bleed—Oh, you did.” He had the heavyset build of most Arbora, and he was old, showing the signs of age that Moon was learning to recognize in Raksura. His hair was white and his bronze-brown skin had an ashy cast. Other than that he looked as tough as a boulder, with heavily muscled shoulders and a ridge of scar tissue circling his neck, as if something had tried to bite his head off. “I’m Bone,” he added, and kicked the carcass thoughtfully. “Do you want the hide? You’ve got first claim on it.”
“No. Give it to someone else.” It would have come in handy, but Moon hoped to be long gone before they could finish tanning it.
“Huh.” Bone looked as if he might argue, then subsided with a scowl.
That seemed to be it. Moon turned away, wanting to get out of there before Chime and Balm arrived. “Hey,” one of the hunters called out. Warily, he turned back. A woman, silver-gray threaded through her light-colored hair, sat on the steps and sharpened a skinning knife. She said, “Why are you staying down here in the Arboras’ bowers, instead of up there with the Aeriat?”
Moon suppressed an annoyed growl. He had had enough of this from the warriors; he didn’t need to hear it here, too. He said, “Do you have a problem with it?”
She snorted with amusement. “Not me.”
But Bone, still watching him, said, “That’s going to make trouble for you. You should move up there with them. It’d go easier on you.”
Moon shook his head, frustrated with all of it. All his turns trying to fit in had come to nothing, over and over again, and he was too weary to start the whole process again here. The Raksura could take him as he was. He said, “No, it wouldn’t.”
He caught movement overhead, and looked up to see Chime and Balm circling in. Moon shifted and jumped to the terrace roof, then up to the first ledge. He followed it around the outside of the building, to the passage that led to the back entrance into the teachers’ hall.
He was looking for somewhere to be alone, but there were more people here than he had expected. The curtains over the doorways and stairs had been lifted back, and a group of men and women at the end of the hall worked with bone spindles and distaffs, spinning masses of beaten plant fiber into yarn. Near the shallow fountain, Petal and a couple of younger Arbora played with five very active babies, all just old enough to toddle on unsteady legs.
Moon headed for his bower, hoping no one would notice him. But Petal greeted him, waving. “Moon, did you have good hunting?”
“It was all right.” Reluctantly, he stopped beside her. Before she could ask anything more, two figures, one green and one bright blue, crashed down the nearest stairway. They tumbled out onto the floor, spilling a few empty baskets and knocking over a clay jar.
Petal shouted, “Spring, Snow, stop that! What do you think is going to happen if you hurt your wings?”
It wasn’t until the two figures rolled to a halt and separated that Moon realized they were young, half-sized warriors, one male and one female, as wild and awkward as fledgling raptors. They both sat up and shifted, turning into thin and gawky children on the edge of adolescence. They stared wide-eyed at Moon, as startled to see him as he was to see them.
Petal got to her feet, eyeing them with exasperated affection. “The girl is Spring and the boy is Snow,” she told Moon. “They’re from Amber’s last clutch. She was Pearl’s sister queen.”
Amber was one of the queens who had died, Moon remembered. It seemed like he had heard about more dead Raksura than live ones. He was trying to think of a polite response when something grabbed his leg. He looked down, bemused to see one of the Arbora toddlers had shifted and was now trying to climb him like a tree. The rest of the clutch rolled on the floor in play, keeping the other teachers busy.
“Oh, Speckle, don’t.” Petal made a grab for her and the little girl ducked away agilely, still climbing.
“Speckle?” Moon caught the baby and lifted her up. She immediately sank her claws into his shirt, looking up at him with big, liquid brown eyes. Her gold-brown scales and tiny spines were still soft, and she smelled like a combination of groundling baby and Raksura. Moon’s heart twisted, and he reminded himself he planned to leave eventually.
“It almost makes sense when you know the rest of the clutch is Glint, Glimmer, Pebble, and Shell,” Petal said, prying little claws out of Moon’s sleeve as she tried to coax the baby to let go. “Most of us like to give our clutches similar names.”
“Does that mean you’re related to Flower?” Moon asked, still distracted as the baby stubbornly tightened her grip on him.
Petal laughed. “Distantly. She’s much older than I am. Chime, though, is clutch-mate to Knell and Bell. Knell is leader of the soldiers, and Bell is a teacher. The other two were mentors, but they died from the lung disease.” She hesitated, suddenly self-conscious. “Chime wasn’t always a warrior.”
“He told me he used to be a mentor.” Moon ruffled Speckle’s frills. Keeping his attention on the baby, he asked casually, “Who is Balm related to?”
“She’s a warrior from a royal clutch, the same one Jade came from.” Sighing in exasperation, Petal tried to work her fingers under Speckle’s claws. “It’s not true, what they say about female warriors who come from royal clutches. They don’t all go mad because they think they’re failed queens.” She frowned a little and added, “It’s only happened to a few.”
So Jade had sent her clutch-mate to watch him? Or just to find out more about him and report back? Moon wasn’t sure what to make of it.
The warrior girl Spring was still watching them with wide eyes. She said suddenly, “There’s only two of us. The others died.”
“Where’s your clutch?” Snow demanded, half-hiding behind her.
Moon hesitated while Speckle gnawed on his knuckles wit
h fortunately still-blunt baby teeth. He could accept the fact that Sorrow hadn’t been his mother, and that it was impossible for a consort to come from a clutch of Arbora. But it hadn’t changed anything. “They died.”
Petal managed to pry Speckle off Moon just as Flower hurried up the stairs from the common room. “Moon, good, you’re back.” She looked flustered and worried, her gossamer hair frazzled. “Pearl has called for a gathering.”
“A gathering?” Petal looked startled, and not a little alarmed, which made Moon’s hackles rise. She flicked a quick, worried glance at him. “Everyone?”
Flower gave her a grim nod. “Except the teachers who are watching the children, the soldiers guarding the lower entrances, and the hunters too far out to call back.”
Or very fast consorts who make it up to that air shaft when no one is looking, Moon thought, preparing to fade into the crowd.
Flower fixed her gaze on Moon, as if reading his thought, and added firmly, “And you are specifically included.”
Flower wanted Moon to come with her immediately, which he suspected meant she thought he might to try to escape in the confusion. She was right, but since she had grabbed his arm and immediately towed him out of the hall to the main stairwell, there wasn’t much opportunity for an unobtrusive exit.
People hurried in from the fields outside, and the outer terraces and courts. The crowd grew as they went up the stairs, higher and higher, much further up inside the building than Moon had been before. The steps were taller up here, almost too tall for the Arbora. It just confirmed Moon’s growing belief that the groundlings who had built this place had greatly exaggerated views of their physical size. Some of the Arbora shifted and skittered along the walls, using their claws on the reliefs and chinks in the stone. Flower stayed in her groundling form, and Moon found himself reaching down to take her hand and steady her as she climbed.
“Thank you,” she said, a little breathless. She glanced up at him, her brows quirking. “There’s no need to be nervous.”
Moon had thought he had kept his expression laconic, but maybe not. And he wasn’t the only one who was nervous; her hands were cold as ice. “Unlike you?”
She gave him a thin-lipped smile. “Very unlike me.”
The stairs took another turn, ending in a broad landing, and Moon was surprised to see Stone waiting there. As they reached him, Stone leaned down to take Flower’s other hand, and he and Moon lifted her up the last step. “I hate this damn place,” Stone muttered.
“Really?” Flower pretended to look startled. “And you’ve kept your views to yourself all this time?”
“Why do you hate it?” Moon asked, ready for any distraction. Only one archway led off the landing, opening into a narrow passage lined with glow-moss. The Arbora crowded down into it, talking in whispers, nervously jostling each other. At least the closed-in feeling was alleviated by the high ceiling, nearly three times Moon’s height.
Stone growled under his breath, causing several Arbora to give him wide berth. “It’s a dead shell. It’s not Raksura.”
“No one knows what that means except you,” Flower said, with the air of somone who had heard it all before. She turned to lead the way down the passage.
“That’s the problem,” Stone said after her.
As Moon followed her, Stone caught his arm. Twitchy already, Moon managed not to slam himself into the wall flinching away. As the Arbora flowed past them, Stone said softly, “Pearl is old, and she’s ill, and she’s stubborn.”
Moon nodded, thinking what Stone was mainly telling him was, Don’t panic.
Flower waited at the end of the passage where it opened into a larger chamber, and stood to one side so the others still filing in could get past her. “This is going to depend on a number of things that we have no control over,” she said softly, as Moon and Stone reached her.
Stone grunted agreement and stepped past her into the room. Moon fought down one last urge to escape and followed as the other Arbora made way for them.
The place was large and cave-like, with no openings to the outside except for a shaft in the center of the high roof. Sometime in the past, when the pyramid had first been built, this could have been a throne room, or the central mystery chamber of a temple. Vines had crept down through the open shaft, but they were discolored by a creeping white moss.
Everyone here was in groundling form, and the Arbora still crowded in, filling in the floor space near the door. The Aeriat were already here, standing on two broad stone ledges above the doorway and to the right. They were as distinctive as the Arbora; all tall, the women slim, small-breasted, the men lean. Is that all the warriors? Moon wondered, a little shocked. Stone had said the colony didn’t have enough Aeriat, but there were only a third as many here as the Arbora. And there were still more soldiers, teachers, and hunters who weren’t free to be here.
Moon saw Balm up on the ledge with the other warriors, pacing anxiously. Many of the warriors stared at him, and one dark-haired man glared with a familiar, angry intensity. That had to be River in his groundling form, and Moon was willing to bet the man next to him was Drift.
Chime stood on the floor with the Arbora, further down the wall with Petal and Bell, easily visible since he was nearly a head taller than most of them. Chime spotted Flower and made his way toward her, shouldering people aside, ignoring their objections.
The room went quiet, the murmur dying away. Moon scanned the shadows, trying to see what had caught the others’ attention. Scent didn’t tell him anything, since the whole place smelled of anxious Raksura.
Then, on a stone platform across the back of the room, a shadow moved. It spilled down the steps to the floor until a tall form stepped out of it into the light.
Her scales were brilliant gold, overlaid with a webbed pattern of deepest indigo blue. The frilled mane behind her head was like a golden sunburst, and there were more frills on the tips of her folded wings, on the triangle-shape at the end of her tail. She was a head taller than the tallest Aeriat, and wore only jewelry, a broad necklace with gold chains linking polished blue stones. As she moved into the center of the room, the air grew heavier. A stir rippled through all the assembled Raksura, an almost unconscious movement toward her. For the first time, Moon understood why Stone had said that queens had power over all of them; feeling the pull of it in himself turned him cold. I’m not one of them. I shouldn’t be here.
In a voice soft and deep as night, she said, “Where is he?”
Moon’s breath caught in his chest. Leaving, he thought, turning for the door. He would have made it, but Stone was fast even as a groundling, and caught his wrist.
Rather than be hauled forward like a criminal, Moon didn’t resist. He let Stone pull him to the front of the crowd, to the empty space in front of Pearl. As Stone let him go, Moon tried to shift, meaning to fly straight up the air shaft.
Nothing happened.
Moon’s mouth went dry. So Stone hadn’t exaggerated; she could keep them from shifting. He wished he knew if she was doing it to everyone, or just him.
Stone’s voice was neutral, his tone giving nothing away. “Pearl, this is Moon.”
She beckoned him forward with one deceptively delicate hand. Her claws were longer than his, and she wore rings on each finger, thick bands of gold woven with copper and silver.
It wasn’t until the back of her hand brushed his cheek that Moon realized he had taken two steps toward her, that he was within her reach. Her claws moved through his hair, the touch too light to scratch, and she cupped the back of his head, drawing him closer.
Moon looked into her eyes, heavy-lidded, sea-blue, and fathoms-deep, drawing him in. Her scent was strong and musky, but there was a trace of bitterness under it, too faint for him to place. It brought him back to his senses abruptly, and he tried to pull away from her. But sudden heat warmed his body, the tension flowing out of his spine.
That she could keep them all from shifting meant she was connected to them somehow, throug
h mind or heart or something else, and Moon should have realized that. Should have realized the connection could go both ways. For a moment it was as if he was part of every other Raksura in the room, and he leaned toward her.
Then, as if she had judged it for the exact moment she felt his resistance fade, she said, “This was the best you could do.”
Her tone was calm, the warm purr of her voice unchanged. Moon blinked, so caught in her spell that for a heartbeat he didn’t understand. The whole room seemed to take a startled breath.
In that same tone, she continued, “A solitary, with no bloodline.”
Understanding hit him like a sudden slap. He jerked backward, but her hold on him tightened, her claws digging into his skin. Moon twisted out of her grip, the claws opening cuts across the back of his neck, snagging in the collar of his shirt. He fell back a few steps, out of her reach, baring his teeth.
Her lip curled, showing her fangs, and her tail lashed; growls echoed from the assembled warriors perched on the ledges, as if she was the one who had been insulted.
Moon spun on his heel, hissing up at them, furious and humiliated and ready to fight everybody in the room. The growls stopped as the warriors stirred uneasily. Apparently nobody wanted to fight, at least not while they were all trapped in groundling form.
“I didn’t bring him for you,” Stone said, his voice dry and acid in the silence.
The words broke the spell. Moon took a sharp breath, trying to clear his head and make himself think. He couldn’t feel that pull toward Pearl anymore, that connection to the others. There and gone so briefly, it had still left an empty place in his chest, as if something had been torn out of him. It was pure cruelty to let him feel that, to draw him into that, just to rip him away.
Pearl paced, her tail still lashing, her mane rippling with agitation. Cold edged her voice as she told Stone, “Solitaries live the way they do for a reason.”
Stone watched her, unmoved and unimpressed. “He wasn’t a solitary by choice. I told you how I found him.”