Moon crossed the greeting hall, passing the last few Arbora still gathered there, when Heart ducked around a column and said, “Moon, can I talk to you?”
“Sure.” She seemed anxious, and Moon tried not to find that ominous. She might want to tell him something to pass on to Jade. They moved off through a short passage into one of the unused smaller chambers off the greeting hall. “What is it?”
Heart looked up at him. She still smelled of fresh Raksuran blood; when she had shifted to groundling the blood staining her claws had transferred to her fingernails. “The augury...There was something about you. Oh, nothing terrible. It was just that your blood was woven all through the part of the design that indicated an upheaval.”
That...doesn’t sound good. Moon extended his senses, making sure no one was in earshot. He could hear movement and voices in the balcony passages above, but no one seemed to be paying attention to them. He lowered his voice anyway. “What does that mean?”
Heart hesitated. “I think it means that your interest will part from the interest of the court. For a time, anyway. I’m not certain.” Her gaze was worried. “You weren’t...planning to leave, were you?”
That took Moon by surprise. “No. Why would I?”
“Sorry, it’s just—That’s what it looked like.” She shook her head in frustration. “It’s very hard to interpret individual strands in general auguries; Flower always thought it was a mistake to try. And this was an unusual augury anyway, with that intrusion about the watcher.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about it to the others?” Then it occurred to Moon that she might be about to, that she might have wanted to warn him first.
“It was a personal augury, not one for the court. And...I thought it would just make trouble for you. There was nothing in the augury that indicated danger for the court.” Heart smiled a little wryly. “I don’t want to upset anyone over a minor issue, like a disagreement over something the court will do.”
That was a relief. “Thank you for...telling me.” He had almost said warning me.
“As I said, it’s probably nothing,” Heart told him and slipped away. Moon wished she didn’t sound quite so much as though she was trying to convince herself.
Lost in thought, he started across the chamber. Then a warrior came off a balcony somewhere above in an uncontrolled tumble and landed in front of him. Moon stopped abruptly and shifted by instinct. “Sorry,” the warrior gasped in contrition, sprawled on the floor and looking up at Moon. It was Coil, who was one of Pearl’s younger warriors, though Moon didn’t know him well. “They threw me off the—”
Two more warriors landed nearby, and one pounced forward to pin Coil down. From Coil’s expression of mingled embarrassment and fear, this wasn’t play, at least for him. Annoyed, Moon said, “Get off him.”
The warrior looked up, baring his teeth. It was Band, another member of Pearl’s faction. The one who was looking on with a grin was Fair, his clutchmate. Band said, “Why? We’re just having fun.”
A disproportionate amount of the trouble Moon had had in the court came from the younger male warriors. The female warriors and the older males always seemed able to find unobjectionable ways to spend their free time; the younger males couldn’t manage to.
It also didn’t help that Moon had discovered early on that his patience for being argued with by young male warriors was close to nonexistent. Band’s mocking grin was too much to bear. Moon grabbed Band by the throat and threw him.
Band landed about twenty paces away, sliding across the smooth polished wood of the floor. Coil seized his chance, skittering out of reach. But Fair surged forward and stopped a bare pace away. He had been one of those trapped and wounded during the Fell attack on the old colony, so he would have missed the battle to free the court and other events that might have convinced him that Moon was not exactly a safe or easy target. He snarled, “I wonder how tough you are without a queen to defend you, solitary.”
Moon stepped forward, closing the distance between them. He said, deceptively calm, “My queen’s not here. Stop wondering.” He had gotten used to having the solitary accusation thrown in his face during almost every disagreement, but he still felt the prickle along his nerves that told him his spines had hardened and lifted, spreading out across his back and up onto his head, out of his mane of frills.
Fair fell back, his spines flicking uneasily, his attempt at intimidation having failed. He said, “I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”
Moon hissed in amusement, and shifted to groundling just to emphasize his point. He stepped past Fair and headed for the stairs at the far end of the chamber. No one was stupid enough to try to leap on him from behind. Unfortunately. A good fight might clear the air.
Moon took the stairs down to the teachers’ hall and the passage to the nurseries. As he stepped through the round doorway carved with baby Arbora and Aeriat, his appearance was greeted with a chorus of squeaks and trills of delight. That made up for a lot of aggravation.
Moon went out with the hunters again the next day, with Balm and Chime and some other warriors. Pearl had made the stipulation that the area be searched first to make sure there were no tentacle creatures.
“As if I wasn’t planning to do that already,” Bone confided to Moon before they left. “The damn thing wasn’t even any good to eat.”
They got back to the tree at dusk, and Moon flew on inside while the warriors were still helping ferry the Arbora and their kills to the tree. As soon as Moon reached the greeting hall, the disturbed state of the colony was obvious. All the warriors who hadn’t come on the hunting trip seemed to be in motion, flying around in the upper levels, and a group of Arbora were in a tense conversation by the fountain pool. Bell, the leader of the teachers’ caste, saw Moon arrive and hurried over to him. Moon demanded, “What is it?” He hadn’t seen anything wrong near the knothole.
Bell was one of Chime’s clutchmates, though their groundling forms didn’t much resemble each other. Bell had dark hair and his skin was more brown than bronze. He said, “We had a visit while you were gone, a queen from Emerald Twilight.”
That could be good or bad, Moon thought. They had traded with Emerald Twilight warriors, but hadn’t had a formal visit from an Emerald Twilight queen since what everyone insisted on referring to as “the incident” which had occurred on the way back from the forest coast. The augury, with the vision of upheaval and the odd “someone watches” message came to mind; he wondered if the court being watched was Emerald Twilight. “Which queen?”
“Tempest, with five warriors,” Bell told him. “They didn’t stay long and we didn’t even get to see them. They met with Jade and Pearl and Heart up on the queens’ level.”
“They didn’t want to stay the night?” That definitely wasn’t good, at least from Moon’s limited understanding of relations between Raksuran courts. The visitors should have stayed at least until morning and there should have been a special meal for them, put together by the Arbora. And it was also odd that the only Arbora included in the meeting had been Heart; for the other visits, Bell, Bone, and Knell had been there to represent the Arbora castes. Bone had been away leading the hunt, but Bell and Knell were both here. “Uh...Were they not invited to stay?”
Bell’s expression was deeply worried. “I don’t know.”
“Right.” Moon looked up. The warriors wheeling around up in the central well all kept their distance from the queens’ level gallery, clearly not wanting to antagonize the occupants. “I’d better get up there.”
“Good luck,” Bell called after him, as Moon leapt up the wall.
Moon climbed rapidly. As he swung up onto the gallery of the highest warriors’ level, Vine landed beside him and clung to a claw-scarred pillar. Keeping his voice low, he said, “Moon, do you know what happened with the visit?”
“No, I just got back. Weren’t you there?” Vine had fallen a little out of favor with Pearl, but not with Jade, and Moon was surprised he had been left out.
/> “Nobody was. No warriors, I mean.” Vine glanced out into the well. “Not even River, and he’s not exactly thrilled about it.”
All right, that was odd. River had been Pearl’s favorite so long he thought he was a consort.
“See if you can get them to tell us what happened,” Vine urged as Moon moved away.
Moon ducked through an empty bower, out to an interior passage, then up the smaller stairwell that led past the queens’ level and to the consorts’ quarters. As he passed through the unused rooms, he couldn’t hear any disturbance from below. That might be a good sign. If Tempest had delivered some sort of insult or threat from Emerald Twilight, he thought Pearl would probably still be ranting about it.
The stairs opened into one of the smaller halls, the walls carved with scenes of Arbora building bridges between platforms in the suspended forest, the mountain-trees towering over them. Stone had told him that this hall was meant to be a private retiring room for consorts, where they could compose themselves before joining any gathering in the larger hall beyond. Moon had thought that sounded pointless, before he had found himself using the room for exactly that purpose when they had entertained visitors from other courts.
The round doorway led to a short turning passage only a few paces long, there to block any direct view from the queens’ main hall into the retiring room. It was also great for eavesdropping, to make sure you wanted to join any meeting in the hall before you committed yourself by walking into it, but Moon didn’t bother with that now.
Pearl, Jade, and Heart were still here, sitting around on cushions near the large metal bowl hearth. The hearth was filled with heating stones, and the best water kettle and the best tea set the court owned were out, along with a scatter of seating cushions for the absent visitors. So it looked like they had actually intended hospitality, whatever had happened.
And something had happened. Jade faced away from Moon so he couldn’t see her expression, but her spines were flared. Heart, in groundling form, seemed dispirited, and Pearl looked grim, her spines twitching in agitation.
As Moon stepped out of the doorway and shifted to his groundling form, Heart was saying, “I just don’t think we should—you should—worry before we know for certain. We don’t even know—”
Pearl spotted Moon and cut Heart off with a hiss. Startled, Heart lifted her head, saw Moon, and immediately looked guilty.
So I’m not supposed to know what happened, either, Moon thought, crossing the hall toward them. That was a little odd, though at least it meant that Emerald Twilight probably hadn’t declared war on them. He took a seat on the cushion next to Jade. She didn’t look up. Pearl stared at the hearth. Heart cleared her throat, and said, “How did the hunt go?”
“It was good.” Moon wondered how long they could keep this up. They had to know the others would have told him that Tempest had been here. “No trouble this time.”
An uneasy silence followed. It was so uneasy, Pearl stirred and asked, “Did you find the hopper herd Bone keeps talking about?”
Moon admitted, “No, but we found some big lopers.”
“Ah.” Pearl flicked her spines again, looked at Jade and looked away. “Just as well.”
Moon glanced at Jade, then took a good look. She was absolutely rigid with fury.
“Was it about Halcyon?” he blurted, before he realized that might not be the best thing to say at the moment. Halcyon was another sister queen of Emerald Twilight, Tempest’s clutchmate. She had attacked them on the way back from the forest coast, as part of a plot to get more power within Emerald Twilight, and Jade had had to fight her. Nothing that had happened afterward had been Indigo Cloud’s fault, but Moon had always wondered if Emerald Twilight really believed that.
Jade twitched at the name, then made an effort to unclench her claws. “No. No, it wasn’t about her.” Her voice was husky, strained. As if she had been snarling at someone, or trying not to.
“What was it about?” Really worried now, Moon put a hand on her wrist. Pearl watched them with a completely opaque expression. Heart hunched her shoulders slightly, as if braced for Jade’s response.
Jade let out her breath and forced her spines to relax. She managed an apologetic smile and reached over to squeeze Moon’s wrist. “It was about territory, they were just trying to push us, make us react. It was stupid; I let Tempest make me angry, we almost...” She added, “It was nothing.”
Moon hesitated. If he had had the slightest inclination to believe this, Pearl’s ironic expression and Heart’s furtive twitch would have squashed it. His first impulse was to think it was something about him, but he knew he was overly suspicious. Actually, overly suspicious was putting it mildly. And he couldn’t think what it would be, unless Tempest had tossed off some casual insult that had caught Jade at the wrong moment. Though that didn’t seem to fit Pearl’s reaction. Whatever it was, he had the feeling it wouldn’t help to press the point, at least not now.
And he could always get Chime to try to ease the truth out of Heart, later.
Moon said, “All right.” He added, “You should get something to eat.”
“I should,” Jade agreed. She tightened her grip on Moon’s wrist and stood, hauling him to his feet. She met Pearl’s gaze with a look of pure steel-eyed hate. “We’ll talk later.”
Pearl rippled her spines in a shrug, resigned and amused. “For all the good it will do.”
Over the next few days, Jade and Pearl continued to say nothing about what had happened during the meeting with Tempest. Chime reported that Heart refused absolutely to tell him or anyone else what had been said. When Chime had asked her the first few times, she had said only that the queens didn’t want her to discuss it. When he had kept asking she had growled at him that it was none of his damn business and if he asked her again she was going to rip his frills out. “You could ask Balm,” Moon had pointed out.
“You can ask Balm,” Chime had retorted. “She can’t kill you.”
Yes, Moon supposed asking Balm to violate Jade’s confidence wouldn’t go over well. If Jade had even told Balm what had happened. Moon gave up on ever knowing. Maybe it had been nothing, just an exchange of insults that both queens would eventually get over. And it was only a day later that something happened that put the whole incident right out of his mind.
One of the good things Moon had discovered was that teaching fledglings was acceptable work for consorts, and he thought he was fairly good at it. Though he would feel a lot better about his efforts if he could just get Bitter to fly.
Moon nudged Bitter with an elbow, nodding toward two young warriors as they dove past, their wings slanted back for maximum speed. “That doesn’t look like fun?” By this point, he already knew the answer; he just wanted Bitter to know he hadn’t given up asking.
Chewing on a piece of hard yellow fruit, Bitter just shook his head.
It had turned into another warm day, bright sunlight falling through the heavy canopy of leaves high above. Moon and Bitter sat out on one of the mountain-tree’s smaller branches, an expanse of rough gray wood twenty or so paces across. They had a good if oblique view of the giant knothole, the waterfall, and the multiple levels of garden platforms.
Bitter’s clutchmates, Frost and Thorn, fledgling queen and fledgling consort, flew in the waterfall’s spray, dipping and wheeling in the cool air currents off the rush of falling water. A few warriors were also in the air, most further out over the clearing formed by the tree’s giant canopy, some on watch, others just stretching their wings.
Bitter eyed all the fliers noncommittally. He was small for a fledging his age, his groundling form a thin little boy with dark bronze skin, dark hair, and grave eyes, dressed in a brown shirt and pants a little too big for him. He didn’t talk either, except in whispers to Frost and Thorn, but at least he could talk if he felt like it. He apparently didn’t feel like flying at all.
“You’re going to have to do it some time,” Moon pointed out. He didn’t want to press the issue, but
it would have been nice to have a clue as to what the issue was. Bitter liked to fly with Moon, clinging to his chest, so it wasn’t a fear of height or fast motion. It had to have something to do with the destruction of the court of Sky Copper. Bitter, Frost, and Thorn were the only survivors, rescued from their Fell captors and brought to join the court of Indigo Cloud. It had been a traumatic and terrible event for the three fledglings, but Moon wasn’t sure how that had evolved into Bitter’s refusal to learn to fly.
Bitter leaned on Moon’s arm and sighed, apparently weary of Moon’s wrongheaded persistence on this point.
A large number of Arbora were out on the platforms, digging or weeding in the gardens, probably discussing their plans to clutch. Most were teachers or hunters, the ones in their groundling forms dressed for muddy work in cloth smocks or leather kilts. An Arbora had been making his way down the branch toward them for some time, collecting balls of moss fallen off the higher branches that could be dried and used in weaving. His scales were green faded to gray in large patches, and heavily scarred in spots. As he reached them, he said, “Hello, consort. Hello, little one.” It was Dash, a very old Arbora, who wasn’t doing particularly well in his old age. He had been ill in the various sicknesses that had plagued the old colony, and injured in fighting the Fell, and it had all taken a toll. He put his bag aside and sat down beside Moon and Bitter, grunting as his bones creaked. “Now, which one are you?” he asked Moon.
“Moon, Jade’s consort,” Moon reminded him. Dash remembered the distant past better than recent events, and he tended to confuse Moon with the long-gone consorts who had died or been sent away to other courts turns ago.
“Ah, that’s right, you’re new.” Dash stared downward, frowning. “What are they doing down there? In that pool.”
Moon leaned forward to look. A few hundred paces below, some Arbora were working on a small platform, close enough to the waterfall to be drenched by its spray. They were digging out an old drainage pool and channel that had been choked with dirt and weeds. Moon said, “Trying to get it working again. It’s probably got something to do with the blocked drains.”