Halcyon flicked her spines, this time in a shrug. “Ice knows I’m the only one who could replace Tempest. I’m not worried about the others.”
I’m worried about us, Moon thought. This plan wouldn’t work with a live consort or warrior around to explain that Ash wasn’t the guilty party. He wasn’t sure why they were both still alive now. Wait, we weren’t alone. He looked around and didn’t see any sign of a third prisoner. He demanded, “What did you do to Root?”
“The young warrior who was with you?” Halcyon glanced at one of her warriors, the big green-scaled woman.
The warrior snorted with contempt. “Nothing. He ran away.”
Chime hissed at her. “He wouldn’t run away, he’s too stupid. You hurt him.”
“We didn’t,” the warrior said, and her spines ruffled angrily. She repeated with emphasis, “He ran away.”
Moon didn’t believe it either. Root might be dead. But if he had run back to the others, all he could tell them was that strange warriors, possibly from Emerald Twilight, had taken Moon and Chime away. Which would suit Halcyon’s purpose completely.
Maybe she had planned to kill them, but when it came down to it, found it hard to take that final step. Especially with a consort. Maybe she just wasn’t certain if her warriors would go that far. Moon didn’t think pretending he didn’t understand that would do any good. “When are you going to kill us?”
Chime made a faint noise. Either he hadn’t realized this inevitable component to Halcyon’s plan, or he just didn’t want Moon to mention it aloud.
The warriors stirred a little uneasily, but Halcyon hissed with amusement. She stepped close, close enough for Moon to feel her breath. Every muscle tensed and the back of Moon’s neck prickled, but he didn’t step back, didn’t drop his gaze.
She said, with dry amusement, “I didn’t say I’d kill you.”
“Then what did you plan to do with me?”
“That’s up to you. You could cooperate.” Halcyon trailed the back of her claws against his cheek, sending a shivering pulse down Moon’s spine.
“What do you mean?” Moon was fairly certain he knew exactly what she meant, but he wanted to stall. It had to take extra concentration to keep Moon and Chime from shifting without affecting her own warriors. All they needed was a chance to escape. Moon thought he could outfly a queen, especially a queen who hadn’t been doing much of anything but sitting around Emerald Twilight plotting against her clutchmate. It was Chime he was worried about; with all the long distance flying they had been doing lately, Chime might have an advantage over the other warriors. But a queen could catch a warrior easily. Which was probably why they had bothered to drug Chime and bring him along, as a hostage for Moon’s good behavior.
As if in idle speculation, Halcyon said, “I could say I took you from Ash. Your queen wouldn’t want you after that. You could stay with me.”
Moon hoped she couldn’t hear how hard his heart was pounding. “I think you’re underestimating my queen.”
She laughed. “They said you knew very little of our ways. I see they were right.”
“What about your consort?” Presumably he was back at Emerald Twilight, enjoying the respite from his queen.
Her lip curled. “He does what I tell him to do.” Her hand dropped and she ran sheathed claws down Moon’s throat. “A change would be interesting.”
“No,” Moon said, reacting before his brain caught up to him. Keep stalling, he thought. Keeping himself and Chime alive was all that mattered. “It wouldn’t—”
A sound high above them made everyone look up. It was a warrior, flying down from the upper branches.Not flying, Moon realized. He was falling. One of the others leapt up to catch him, breaking his fall. But the others stared at what hurtled down after him.
A flash of vivid blue and silver-gray resolved into Jade, wings spread and spines furled, as she dropped down on them like vengeance itself.
With a startled growl, Halcyon jerked Moon around, his back to her, her claws pressed against his throat. She yelled at the warriors and they sprang into the air to attack.
Jade flared her wings to meet them. She slapped three Emerald Twilight warriors out of the air without a pause for breath, then closed with a big male and tossed him aside in a spray of blood.
Root appeared out of nowhere, leapt on a smaller warrior, and wrestled him off a branch, but Moon didn’t see any of the others. Not that Jade needed them, apparently. Moon couldn’t do anything but stare, Halcyon’s claws pricking his skin. He had seen Jade fight Fell, but never seen her take on other Raksura, not when she was really angry. The fight with Ash had been nothing; these warriors had no chance against her.
Halcyon must have realized it too. She shrieked, “Stop! I’ll rip his throat out!”
The remaining warriors broke off and veered away from Jade. Three were gone, either fallen to the forest floor or caught on the branches and platforms somewhere below them. Some of the others flapped unsteadily to nearby branches, badly wounded. Root dropped to land on the platform near Chime, who crouched uneasily.
Jade snapped her wings in and landed ten paces away from Moon and Halcyon. Flexing her bloody claws, she bared her fangs. She radiated fury like a furnace. Her scales were slick with rain but unmarked. None of the warriors had been able to land a claw on her. She took in Halcyon’s position, how she was using Moon as a shield, and sneered. “Coward.”
Halcyon snarled, her voice rising in rage. “Bitch.”
Jade hissed an unpleasant laugh. “Dead woman.”
Halcyon tossed Moon aside and leapt for her. Moon hit the wet grass with a thump and rolled, then scrambled up. Jade and Halcyon slammed into each other, tumbled across the platform, and broke apart. Their scales were already streaked with scratches and blood. They circled each other, moving fast, then Halcyon darted in and nearly caught a slash across the face.
Moon tried to shift to his winged form and hissed with relief when the change flowed over him. Halcyon was obviously too distracted to maintain control over him. But unlike Ash, Halcyon was closer to an even match for Jade. And after that brief conversation, Moon doubted either of them were in any state to think about consequences or negotiate. He stepped over to the firepit and grabbed the kettle. It was a heavy one, with an iron bottom meant to hold warming stones. As Halcyon ducked away from a slash, Moon lunged in and slammed her in the head with it, putting all his weight behind the blow.
Halcyon jolted forward, right into a blow from Jade that rocked her head back. Between that and the kettle, she dropped like a rock.
Jade stood over her, breathing hard. She stared at Moon, incredulous, offended, and still wild-eyed. “What was that?” she demanded, her voice gravelly with rage.
“You can’t kill her,” Moon said deliberately. He dropped the kettle beside the firepit and shifted back to groundling, hoping that would calm Jade down. Halcyon’s head was cut and bleeding, some of her spines broken and crushed, but he saw her furled wings tremble, showing she was still breathing. “We have to take her back to Emerald Twilight and make her tell what she tried to do.” If Jade killed her, the warriors could lie about what had happened, claim they were attacked. Emerald Twilight might choose to believe them just to avoid the disgrace.
Jade didn’t think much of that idea. A growl thickening her voice, she said, “She won’t tell them. She’ll lie.”
“Her warriors won’t, if you threaten them. Tell them you’ll kill her unless they tell the truth.” The survivors had all fled the tree, but Jade could still catch one if she hurried.
Jade shook her spines and hissed in pure fury. Root shifted to groundling and dropped to a crouch, prudently not taking sides. But in a small voice, Chime contributed, “You can ask for a mentor as witness when you get to Emerald Twilight. That will involve the Arbora, and the other queens can’t pretend it didn’t happen. They’ll be forced to deal with her.”
Jade shook her spines and grimaced with contempt. “We’ll never get her there withou
t killing her, so I might as well do it now.”
Moon countered, “They have simples that make you sleep. It worked on me. It’ll probably work on a queen.”
Jade’s shout of thwarted rage was so loud it hurt Moon’s ears. He winced, and Chime and Root both flattened themselves down in the grass and covered their heads. She stalked back and forth, then stopped and flung her hands in the air. “You’re right! I’ll go get a damn warrior. If that piece of excrement moves—” She growled again and flung herself into the air.
“Get the green female!” Moon yelled after her. She had seemed like the leader of the warriors, and was probably the one most attached to Halcyon.
Root sat up to watch Jade speed away. “She carried me here, so I could show her the way,” he confided to Moon. “I’ve never flown so fast!”
Chime pushed to his feet. Shaking a little, he wiped the sweat off his forehead. “I’ll go look for the simple. It’s probably in one of these shelters.” He went to the first one and ducked down to look through the entrance.
“Hurry.” Moon sat down the grass, keeping a wary eye on Halcyon. The simple had given him a headache and a dry throat. His neck was bleeding a little from Halcyon’s claws, but not enough to worry about. It felt like the end of a very long day, though so far he had only been conscious for a small part of it. “Where are the others?” he asked Root.
“On their way here, following Jade’s markers. We were going to wait until they caught up, and attack in the middle of the night, but—” Root waved a hand, indicating the disturbed camp. “Jade changed her mind.”
“This is it.” Chime came out of the shelter, holding a lizardskin bag, intricately tooled and dyed. He sat down to rummage in it and pulled out various cloth packets and a couple of stoppered bottles. “I’ll have to mix another batch, but it won’t take long. You don’t have to be a mentor to make it work, which is probably why they picked this one.”
Moon reached over to ruffle Root’s hair. “So you just pretended to run away?”
Root nodded, fairly pleased with himself. “Right, until they stopped chasing me. Then I followed them from a distance, until they got to this camp. Then I flew back to find Jade. We left the others, so we could get back here by dark.”
Chime glanced up from the herb packets. “That was smart.”
“I know.” Then Root popped up and cuffed Chime in the head. “Ow!” Chime protested in outrage, reeling back.
“I heard what you said earlier. I’m not stupid,” Root said, coming back to sit next to Moon. “I have a big mouth, but I’m not stupid. There’s a difference. A big difference.”
“Hey, no hitting,” Moon said belatedly. Though he figured Root probably did owe Chime that one.
“I’m sorry.” Chime subsided, looking abashed.
“Jade’s back,” Moon said, and got to his feet.
Jade dropped down to the platform and flung the dazed warrior to the ground. She was in groundling form, a tall woman with light bronze skin and reddish hair. Her shirtsleeves were torn, and there were scratch marks on her arms, and a few rapidly darkening marks on her face about the size of Jade’s fist. “Are you happy?” Jade shouted at Moon.
“Yes,” he told her. “But I’m easy to please right now.”
Oddly enough, Jade didn’t appreciate the joke.
While she paced, fumed, and made certain that any of Halcyon’s warriors still lurking in the area knew that a rescue attempt would end in a bloodbath, Root tied up the female warrior and Chime made the simple. Halcyon was groaning and starting to wake by the time he finished, but once it was administered she settled into a deep sleep. While searching the packs left behind for rope, Moon found a cake of very good tea, so he built up the fire again, filled the dented kettle from a waterskin, and made some. Chime and Root went to scout for injured warriors, and found three dead, victims of the first clash with Jade. They found a few blood trails, but the survivors must have retrieved all their wounded.
Darkness had fallen and it was well into the night before the Indigo Cloud warriors arrived. It was good timing, because it had taken about that long for Jade to calm down.
While Chime and Root greeted them and answered questions and traded various congratulations and recriminations, Moon stood up and stretched his back. His headache had gone, but he had spent most of the time sitting by the fire, watching Jade stare grimly at Halcyon’s unconscious body, braced to intervene if she suddenly changed her mind about leaving the other queen alive.
Moon circled around the fire to the shadows where Jade stood. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you wanted to rescue me, again.”
“I did rescue you,” she pointed out, though she sounded more huffy than angry. Her sigh was too weary to be a hiss. “Did you have to hit her with the kettle?”
“It had a handle. It was easier than a rock.” Moon felt some of the tension melt out of his spine. As impressive as she was while enraged and defending her consort, he still liked her normal self better.
“It’s not going to make a very good story, in the annals of my time as sister queen.” She quoted dryly, “‘Then her consort jumped up and knocked the foreign queen unconscious with a kettle.’”
“If Cloud had been fast with a kettle, then you wouldn’t be here,” Moon admitted.
“That is hardly fair to Indigo. Indigo was nothing like—” She waved a hand back toward the camp. “That.”
Before she could get worked up again, he took her wrist. “Come on, the others can keep watch. Let’s go to bed.”
“Sometimes you have good ideas,” she said grudgingly, and let him tow her over to the shelter.
The trip to Emerald Twilight took a day and a half, with Jade and Balm taking turns carrying the unconscious Halcyon, and Vine carrying the woman warrior, whose name turned out to be Torrent. During the awkward and desultory conversation around the camp at night, she admitted that she was from a queen’s clutch, sister to Tempest and Halcyon. She seemed to feel bad enough, so Moon managed not to ask her if there were any sisters besides Tempest from that clutch who weren’t crazy.
They knew Halcyon’s surviving warriors followed them at a distance, but none of them ventured any closer, or tried to talk to them. Balm said, “I bet they would have tried to stop us if we were heading toward Indigo Cloud. But they know we must be taking her back to Emerald Twilight. They’re probably going to quietly slip back into the colony, and hope Ice is too distracted by dealing with Halcyon to worry about who was with her.”
Once they arrived at the court, Jade didn’t waste any time. She dropped the still limp Halcyon on the landing platform outside the greeting hall, and Vine set the woman warrior down. At first the warriors and Arbora who hurried out seemed to think that they had found Halcyon and Torrent injured in the forest, and brought them back here for help. It was reassuring evidence that only Halcyon’s group of warriors had been involved in the plot, and that most of the court had known nothing about it. But it made Moon feel even worse for those about to hear the truth. Then Jade demanded a mentor be called as witness, and the whole colony had seemed to go still.
One of the older mentors who had helped Flower came out, and Tempest, Ash, and three of the other sister queens, and every warrior and Arbora who could get outside in time. They all listened in shocked silence to Torrent’s guilty recital. Tempest kept her expression under control, though her spines trembled with the effort. Ash kept alternately flaring hers and flattening them, looking from Jade to Tempest to the other queens, incredulous and horrified.
Afterward, Tempest stiffly offered Jade hospitality, seemed relieved when Jade refused it, and they left. Ice and Shadow hadn’t appeared, and Moon was glad for it, because the whole thing had been deeply embarrassing. He made a resolution to ask Stone if he had ever fathered any clutches who tried to kill each other and what to do if they did.
It was a relief to be shed of Halcyon and Torrent, and they made good time back to Indigo Cloud, reaching it during th
e late afternoon five days later.
As they approached the colony tree, Moon could see already that the Arbora had made progress while they were gone.
Several of the garden platforms had neat planting beds built, others had plots that had been stripped of grass and were now covered with turned earth. The weeds and moss that had choked the main runoff pools were gone, the deadfall cleared away from some of the old orchards. There were Arbora out on the platforms too, digging in the gardens, weeding, moving baskets of dirt. The two flying boats were still anchored in place, with a few Arbora climbing over them, sanding claw-damaged wood and making other repairs.
Warrior lookouts had already spotted them and carried the word to the tree. More warriors flew out to meet them, and swooped around and called out greetings. Moon and Jade and the others landed in the knothole and were almost swept through the passage into the greeting hall by a happy swarm of Arbora.
The well rapidly filled up with Raksura, coming up the stairs from the level below or dropping down from above. All the shell-lights were lit, and caught reflections off the polished wood and the rich carving, the slim pillars along the criss-crossed stairs, the overhanging balconies. The waterfall across from the entrance ran clear and fresh, streaming down the wall to the pool in the floor, which now boasted floating flowers.
Heart pushed her way through the growing crowd to hug Jade impulsively, and tell her, “We were so worried! We expected you days ago!”
“We were delayed unexpectedly. I have to tell Pearl about it first.” Jade released Heart and asked anxiously, “What about the seed? Is it all right?”
Heart admitted, “We’re not sure yet. The instructions the Emerald Twilight mentors sent said it had to be coated in mud from below the roots and then soaked in heartwater.” Before Moon could ask, she said, “That’s the water drawn up through the roots. We had to get it just as it came out of the wood, through the spring in the top of the tree. But first we had to find the spring. That took most of a day. Stone thought he knew where it was, but apparently it moves around when the tree grows. Or that’s what Stone said, anyway. Now we’re just waiting to see if it will show the signs that it’s ready to be placed in the tree.”