Moon had the same trouble relaxing and letting Lithe in as he had with Flower. Once he managed it, it was over in what felt like an eye blink. Lithe gave him a quick smile, and said, “You’re fine, too.”
“Good.” Moon gave Shade a nudge with his elbow. “Tell them what the progenitor said, and that image they showed us. And about the thing you felt come into the room.”
He hoped he was getting across that Shade should leave out the part about what the Fell had made him do. With a guilty glance at Moon, Shade skipped over the feeding and told the others only about the guide the Fell had spoken of, the image the progenitor had shown them, and what he thought it meant.
When Shade reached the part about the presence he had sensed, Chime nodded grimly. He said, “I heard something while you were gone, a voice. I couldn’t understand what it said. I think it was speaking Raksuran, but I just couldn’t make out the words.” He nodded to Lithe. “That’s why I asked Lithe to look into my mind. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t the Fell, trying to make me do something, somehow.”
“That’s not how it works, is it?” Saffron said. “They can’t take over your mind from a distance.”
“No, I know that.” Chime bared his teeth at her. “But—”
“But you’re different,” Moon supplied.
“Yes.” Chime twitched uneasily. “But she didn’t find anything.”
“I don’t understand how Chime used to be a mentor,” Shade said to Moon.
“Chime was born a mentor, at the old Indigo Cloud colony, but because the court was getting weaker, he changed into a warrior,” Moon told him.
“It wasn’t on purpose,” Chime muttered, as Shade stared at him in surprise.
Moon continued, “He couldn’t do magic anymore or scry. But when we were looking for the seed from our mountain-tree, he heard a leviathan, out on the freshwater sea to the west of the Reaches. He could tell things about it that helped us.”
Shade considered that, biting his lower lip. He said to Chime, “So you can only sense things that are big, and very powerful?”
Chime slumped in resignation. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Moon rubbed his temple. His head ached, pain that seemed centered to either side of his nose, probably from the bad air and terrible scents. He still had dried blood on his chest and arms, and the Fell stench clung to his skin. But everyone else was in the same shape, and he didn’t want to waste water cleaning up. He asked Lithe, “Did you try to see if you could keep us from shifting?”
Lithe said, “I tried on Chime, but it didn’t work.” She lifted her hands in frustration. “Even if I could keep Raksura from shifting, I doubt I could do it to Fell. Queens being able to control our shifting is a Raksuran trait, not a Fell one.”
Everyone looked glum and discouraged and not particularly surprised. Moon had to admit that if Lithe had special powers from her crossbreed heritage, she probably would have noticed before now. He asked, “If progenitors can’t keep rulers from shifting, how do they control them?”
“That’s a good question,” Chime said. “I don’t think anyone knows the answer. Except maybe that dead scholar of predators that Delin knew.”
Moon just hoped Delin was still alive. If Celadon and the others had escaped Aventera and reached the flying island where Jade, Stone, and Malachite waited... He pushed the thought away. They couldn’t count on rescue.
Shade sat forward. “I think it’s the connection between them. Like our queens have with the court.” He turned to Moon. “The progenitor knew what Thedes had said to us.”
Moon had noticed that, too. “I’ve always thought the rulers were the ones who control the flight. I knew the crossbreed queen, Ranea, could make the rulers do things, even across long distances, but I thought that was just because she was a crossbreed.”
Chime’s expression suggested this wasn’t a pleasant thought. “Maybe it wasn’t just her ability; maybe it’s something all progenitors can do.”
Saffron had been listening to the conversation with her expression set in an impatient grimace. But she said, “Can the progenitor do it to us? Or try to do it? Maybe it was her voice that Chime heard.”
At least she sounded as if she was actually trying to help them figure things out. Moon asked Chime, “Was it?”
Chime lifted his hands in bafflement. “I don’t know.”
Lithe reached over and squeezed his wrist. “Just try to listen. You never know what might happen. I’m going to scry and see if I can tell where we’re going.”
Lithe retreated to another cabin for privacy, and Moon helped Chime and Shade check and care for the wounded. He had been in a healing sleep himself, but had never had to take care of someone in one. It was useful knowledge and he was glad to learn it; he just hoped he survived long enough for it to come in handy again.
After that, Moon spent the time making and discarding bad plans. There was just no way they could escape with the wounded, either on the boat or not, especially now that a major kethel seemed settled on the deck to stay. They might be able to set the sac or the progenitor’s nest on fire, but that wasn’t going to stop the kethel outside the sac from attacking them.
It was Shade the Fell really wanted. If they could get out of the sac and Moon could persuade Shade to run with the warriors and Lithe, while he stayed behind to distract the Fell... It wasn’t Moon’s favorite idea, considering what the Fell would do to him and the wounded before killing them. There was also the strong possibility that the warriors might not be able to fly fast enough to evade pursuit.
Moon’s sense of the sun’s passage told him it was setting now, somewhere outside the sac. They were still moving at what felt like the same speed, still toward the north. Moon hated feeling useless, so he went to the foodstores and took out some flatbread, fruit, and strips of dried cooked meat and fish. He divided it up, setting aside a share for Lithe, and made the others eat whether they liked it or not. They didn’t like it, but everyone seemed less edgy afterward.
Shade regarded his portion with a sickly expression. He said, “I don’t know if I can. Ever again.”
Moon took the dried meat and put it back in the basket. “Just the fruit and bread.”
Shade managed to choke it down with difficulty. Watching sympathetically, Chime said, “It’s the Fell stench. It’s making me sick too.”
Moon didn’t comment.
Saffron and Floret and Chime managed to settle who would take turns standing watch in the passage and who would sleep and when. Then Chime told Moon that Moon needed to sleep, that he was starting to say things that didn’t make sense. Rather than have the fight that had just been averted by the food, Moon stomped over to the far end of the cabin, flung himself down on a blanket and pretended to sleep.
After a short time, Shade came over with another blanket and settled down a few paces away, with a studied casualness that didn’t fool Moon for a moment. Moon patted the blanket next to him.
Shade didn’t hesitate, scooting over to curl up next to Moon. Moon put an arm around him and pulled him close. But he didn’t sleep for a long time, listening to Shade weep quietly against his chest.
Moon woke when he heard Lithe and Chime talking quietly. Shade was still curled up against his chest, breathing deeply. Moon eased away from him. When he stirred, Moon whispered, “Go back to sleep,” and Shade subsided.
He got to his feet and stepped quietly across the cabin. Floret had shifted to groundling, and slept sitting up against the wall near the doorway. Moon stopped to check the passage and saw Saffron perched midway up the steps, her attention on the deck above and the rhythmic breathing of their kethel guard.
Chime and Lithe sat near the wounded, with a piece of Delin’s pounded reed paper and one of his drawing sticks between them. Chime glanced up at Moon and said quietly, “Lithe saw something.”
Moon knew he meant the scrying. He sat down beside them, looking at the paper. Sketched on it was a flower, like a lily or a sea-flower, with a door i
n the center. Lithe said, “I saw trees clinging to cliffs, smelled saltwater and rock, heard waves crash. It makes sense; we’re still heading north, and there’s a salt sea several hundred ells to the north of the Aventerans’ plateau—or at least that’s what the court’s old histories say. There’s been no reason to go in this direction for turns.”
“What’s an ell?” Moon asked, still too half-asleep to care about exposing his lack of knowledge.
“It’s an Arbora walking measurement,” Chime said. “That would be... What, about fourteen days of warrior’s flight?”
“Something like that,” Lithe said. She rubbed her temple as if trying to coax more information out of it. “It’s been so long since I looked at the court’s maps. I suspect kethel fly much faster.”
“About three or four times as fast as a warrior. And they haven’t stopped to rest,” Moon said. They must be switching out, the shifted kethel carrying kethel in groundling form to take their places.
“So this door is somewhere on the coast.” Chime tugged the paper around so he could study it. “It all must mean something. That image they showed you, crossbreeds, a salt sea...”
Moon stared at the sketch of the flower with the door inside it, feeling his brain shake off the sleep and slowly grind into motion. “They said Shade was the key. Maybe they meant that literally.”
Chime frowned at the paper, and Lithe said slowly, “The key to this door. Only someone who is part Fell and part Raksura can open it?”
“Or someone who looked like the image they showed us.” Moon wished he had had a longer look at it. “A forerunner, one of our ancestors.”
“All right, so say that’s true,” Chime said. “What’s behind the door? If Shade is right, the Fell have been capturing consorts and Arbora and forcing them to breed for the past forty turns. What would they want so badly...” He trailed off.
Lithe hugged herself. “And it wasn’t just the flight that attacked our colony in the east, it was the one that attacked Indigo Cloud, too. They both failed and were destroyed, and this flight took up the task?”
Moon felt cold creep down his spine and settle in his stomach. Malachite had ruined the plan forty turns ago by finding the flight that had attacked Opal Night, killing the progenitor and all the rulers, and taking the crossbreeds. But the flight that had attacked Indigo Cloud must have begun their breeding experiment sometime before that. Destroying some small eastern court, taking the consorts and the Arbora and breeding them until they died, attacking Sky Copper and then Indigo Cloud to capture more Raksura. The Fell queen Ranea had implied that it was all meant to make the Fell more powerful. Maybe she was a mistake. They never wanted a queen, they wanted a consort like Shade. And then Ranea came along, took over the flight and ruined the plan.
But who—or what—had come up with the plan? Who had gotten three—at least three, if there had been more failures in the east—different Fell flights to follow this scheme, and how had it known that the crossbreeds were still alive in Opal Night’s mother colony? That one of them was Shade, the crossbreed consort they had been hoping for, all this time.
Chime grimaced in distress. “I don’t want Shade to be right.”
“I don’t want a lot of things.” Moon picked up the drawing. “If the voice you heard, that thing Shade thought came into the nest, is their guide, why are they listening to it?”
“What did it offer them?” Lithe added quietly.
There was no answer for that, either.
Chapter Eighteen
The night wore on, and nothing changed. The kethel didn’t move from the deck, and the sac didn’t stop its rapid progress north. None of them slept well and the air seemed to get even worse; thick with Fell stench, stale, and damp, it was making everyone ill. Keeping their voices carefully low so the kethel wouldn’t hear, they talked about using the fire weapon and the oil to escape, and made and discarded a number of plans.
It all came down to the simple fact that even if they could get out of the sac, there was no way any of them could outrun the kethel, whether they tried to carry Lithe and the wounded or not. Moon thought the only way it might work was if some of them stayed behind to try to distract the Fell, while one or two tried to escape. And this would mean abandoning the wounded to die terribly.
As they sat on the floor of the cabin wearing their groundlings forms, weary, sick, and filthy, it was Saffron who finally brought up the inevitable. She said, simply, “I won’t leave Ivory.”
“No,” Floret agreed with a sigh. “I won’t leave Song and Root. I’m not keen on leaving anyone.”
Moon looked around. No one seemed hopeful. He said, “Is anyone willing to run, if we can get you out?” To make it sound less like an admission of weakness, he added, “To tell Opal Night what happened.”
They exchanged a few glances, but no one volunteered. Shade drew his fingers across the wooden deck. He had been quiet through the morning, and Moon had been keeping a worried eye on him. Shade said, “I can’t leave Lithe, or Ivory, or the warriors. Or you.” He lifted his head to meet Moon’s gaze. “I can’t.”
Moon rubbed his face. He hadn’t really expected anything else, but they had all just agreed to die here, and it felt wrong. It felt like failure and surrender. But he didn’t see another way. “All right. That’s settled.” He let his breath out in resignation. “We can’t let the Fell get to this place, whatever it is.”
Floret lifted her head. “The fire weapon.”
Miserable, Chime leaned against Moon’s shoulder and said, “I really don’t want to burn or get eaten, so will you promise to kill me before that happens?”
That was just another weight on Moon’s sinking heart, but he put an arm around Chime and hugged. “Yes.”
Lithe huddled in on herself. “Me too, please.”
Moon could tell he was going to end up killing everybody except Saffron, who was the only one he wouldn’t have minded killing. “Let’s figure out what we’re going to do, first.”
Saffron shrugged. “With the kethel guarding the deck, we can’t get out there with the fire weapon.” She added reluctantly, “So... we use it in here?”
No one seemed happy about that idea. Moon didn’t think it would accomplish anything except suicide. He said, “We need to set the sac on fire. If we set the boat on fire, even with the oil, I’m not sure it’ll do that.”
Chime sat up. “The boat will come apart, and the section that’s not attached to the sustainer will fall on the sac. But the Fell could just cut a hole in it and push the boat out.”
Shade set his jaw, grimly determined. “We just have to get the oil and the fire weapon outside the boat. Maybe I could say I wanted to talk to the progenitor, and get out on deck with it.”
“But you wouldn’t have time to do anything,” Floret pointed out. “You’d be carrying casks of oil and a groundling weapon. That kethel would flatten you as soon as it saw you.”
“We don’t have to go out on deck,” Lithe said suddenly. “We can cut a hole in the bottom of the boat.”
Now that was an idea. Moon said, “We could drop the oil onto the bottom of the sac, then shoot the fire weapon into it.”
Forgetting about their impending deaths, Chime looked excited by the prospect. “There are cutting tools onboard.”
Saffron said, “But what if the Fell realize what we’re doing? If the kethel feels the vibrations through the wood—”
Chime shook his head. “This wood doesn’t vibrate much at all. I noticed that when we first came aboard and slept on the floor. Even with all the groundlings walking around.”
Shade added, “None of you felt it up on the deck when I was climbing around under the boat.”
Lithe said, “And I doubt it would ever occur to the Fell to think that we’d do something to kill ourselves. They’re not exactly good at seeing from anyone else’s perspective.”
Floret agreed. “They’d think we were trying to escape. That might work to our advantage.”
She m
eant the Fell might prepare for Raksura escaping out of the hole in the boat, but not for oil and fire. If they could set a kethel on fire, it would be even better. Moon said, “Let’s get started.”
The first obstacle they encountered was the hull of the flying boat.
They had found some cutting tools during their first search of the cabins, and Moon thought that the small saw would be all they needed to cut through wood that seemed so light and fragile.
While Floret and Saffron kept watch, and Lithe tended to the wounded, Moon, Chime, and Shade went to the stern hold, where the bottom hull of the ship flattened out. They brought a couple of the lamps to light the area, and the soft glow of the spelled illumination was more than enough in the low-ceilinged space. They moved bales of supplies aside, Chime used ink from Delin’s store to mark out a square large enough to dump an oil cask through, and they got to work.
But the rounded blade of the saw, sharp as it was, could barely be forced through the wood.
After Moon and Shade working together managed to cut only a few fragments out, Moon said in exasperation, “I thought Niran was afraid the Arbora’s anvils would break the hull of the Valendera. This stuff is like iron.”
Chime grimaced. “Blossom was in charge of the repairs to Niran’s boats, and she said it turned out to be a bigger job than she thought at first. Now I know what she meant.” He used his claws to pick apart a chip. “I think an anvil is the only thing that would go through this. It’s not like wood from an ordinary tree. It’s all woven through with some sort of fiber. I wonder if they get it from the sea bottom.”
Moon leaned over to look. Chime was right: the outside appeared to be wood, but the inside was more like a thick leaf, shot through with a fibrous web that must make it extremely strong. Shade picked up another chip to examine it, and Moon said, “It makes sense. These boats travel so far, they’d have to be tough.”