Moon rippled his spines, hoping he was conveying unconcern. One of the things he had finally figured out over the past few months was that while he could read Raksuran body language fine, his own didn’t quite match theirs and didn’t always mean what he thought it did. Realizing this had explained at least some of his problems fitting into the court. “Stone didn’t sound like he wasn’t coming back.” And Moon had had the strong impression that Stone was ready to settle down. “He’s wanted to come to the Reaches for a long time; I don’t think he was planning to leave any time soon.”
“That’s good.” Chime settled his spines, then said, reluctantly, “Of course, River said—”
Balm hissed in disapproval. “Chime, no one cares what River said.”
Moon could guess what this was about. “I’d rather not be blind-sided.” River was Pearl’s favorite warrior, and the leader of her faction. Like Balm, he was a warrior from a royal clutch; in River’s case, it had given him an attitude. It had been made worse by the fact that Pearl, for some unfathomable reason, had decided to sleep with him.
After the trip back from the freshwater sea, Moon had been hoping River would be reconciled to his existence. He hadn’t been. If anything, their relationship was worse, since Moon had realized that River wasn’t just making trouble, he really did honestly think Moon was a terrible consort and bad for the court.
Balm’s face was grim. Chime flicked his spines at her and said, “It’s ridiculous, but River said Stone was going to use the trip to the Golden Isles as a way to look for another consort.” Looking at Moon, Chime’s expression turned guilty. “It’s not true, of course. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“That’s why I told you not to,” Balm said.
Chime hissed at her. Moon said, “It’s all right. I would have heard it sooner or later.”
Chime still looked uneasy. “I just—”
A distant shriek made Moon’s spines flare. He went still and scanned the platform.
“That was an Arbora,” Chime whispered, shocked. “Someone’s hurt.”
Balm shushed him. Then she said, “There! See it?” an instant before Moon spotted the thrashing in the undergrowth, near the center of the wooded platform. He sprang off the branch, snapped his wings out and dropped toward it, hard flaps speeding his way.
Balm and Chime were right behind him. Several other warriors dropped off various branches and vantage points to converge on the spot.
Moon dove on the platform and saw the flicker of scales through the trees and undergrowth as Arbora ran toward the disturbance. From the way the trees swayed and thrashed, whatever they were fighting in there was huge.
Then Balm called to him, “Moon, stay back! Let us handle it!”
Moon swallowed a growl but broke off, letting the others go in first. But he swept around in a tight circle, cupped his wings to slow down, and dropped into the branches of a spiral tree. He climbed down until he had a view of the fight.
He saw a hole in the platform floor, surrounded by clumps of dirt and grass and torn roots. Something was inside it, visible only as white tentacles a good twenty paces long. They had clawed tips, striking and slashing at the warriors and Arbora who dodged and struck back. The creature had one struggling Arbora in its grip, and two others lay sprawled on the ground nearby.
As the warriors attacked, two Arbora closed in, armed with the short spears they used to augment their own claws for hunting. They stabbed at the tentacle that held the captive hunter. The warriors swooped in from above to strike at it. Balm ripped one tentacle open with her foot-claws. Chime tried a similar strike, missed, and almost had an aerial collision with Sage, but it still helped distract the creature.
The warriors tore at it and the creature seemed to realize it was badly outnumbered. It tossed the hunter away and pulled its tentacles back into its lair. That’s a relief, Moon thought. The thing looked as if it would be nearly impossible to fight in that defensive position. Now they just needed to retrieve the wounded and get out of here.
The Arbora grabbed the unconscious hunters and retreated as the creature sunk rapidly down into its hole. Then one tentacle snapped out, snatched a warrior out of the air, and yanked him down just as the creature disappeared underground. Moon gasped in dismay.
With a chorus of shocked cries and angry growls, everyone charged the opening.
That’s not going to work, Moon thought. They couldn’t possibly retrieve the warrior without losing half the others. Unless…These platforms weren’t thick enough for an underground nest for something that large, and they were mostly roots. If that’s not a lair, it’s a tunnel.
He scrambled back up the tree, sprang into the air, and headed for the edge of the platform. Someone shouted behind him but he couldn’t stop to explain. If he was right, he would only have a few moments to catch the creature.
He reached the edge and dove down, past the exposed roots jutting out from the side, and swung in to land on the platform fifty paces below. The white vines stretched up over his head, filling the damp air with a scent like sweet rot; the purple leaves cut off what little light there was. He scanned the underside of the platform above and spotted the torn roots and moss bundles hanging down where the creature had tunneled up through the forest platform to attack the Arbora. Ha, I was right. And he could hear something thrashing in the vines in that direction.
Moon tore through the thick vegetation, relying on speed and surprise to protect him from whatever else lived here, and headed toward the sound.
It cut off abruptly and Moon knew the creature had heard him. He crouched and sprang up, two flaps taking him high enough to catch hold of the mass of twisted roots that formed the underside of the upper platform. The creature might be able to spot him, but the vantage point gave him a view of the vine surface.
Dirt clumps fell down the tunnel opening, and warriors and Arbora yelled at each other somewhere above. But below it, and as far as he could see, the vines were completely motionless. Moon hissed in frustration. The creature had to be here somewhere; it hadn’t had time to dig down through to another platform.
He sensed movement near him and looked up with a snarl. A tree frog nearly twice his size huddled in the roots barely ten paces away, staring at him with wide frightened eyes.
Moon had never tried to talk to a tree frog before, but it was worth a try. In Raksuran, he said, “Where is it?”
It might not have understood the language, but it had seen enough of the situation to get the idea. It pointed to a spot about thirty paces south of the tunnel opening.
Moon didn’t hesitate, swinging across the root mass until he was above the spot. He caught a flash of slick white skin, too iridescent to be one of the vines, and dropped for it.
He crashed through the flowers into purple-tinged darkness and landed on something hard that writhed and snarled in fury. Moon sunk his claws in and yelled for help. He thought he heard a hoarse echo that sounded like Chime, then shouts from the Arbora. Then a tentacle whipped down and wrapped around his waist, and Moon stopped paying attention to anything else.
It dragged him off the creature’s body, slammed him into the rotting moss, and started to squeeze. Stunned, Moon curled around it and sunk his teeth into the dense flesh. The creature must not have been expecting that much resistance because he felt its body jerk. The tentacle under him flailed and tried to slam him down again.
Moon bit through a vein filled with some of the worst-tasting blood he had ever encountered, then felt another tentacle slap down and grab his leg. He had an instant to think, Oh, this is going to be bad. Then he heard a chorus of snarls and wingbeats as the rest of the warriors arrived in an angry rush.
The tentacle flung Moon aside. He hit the ground hard and rolled, then staggered up to see tentacles flailing as the creature tried to flee. Warriors landed on the body, and several big Arbora leapt through the vines after it.
Moon spat out blood, decided the others could finish the creature off, and started to te
ar through the crushed vines, looking for the warrior. He found the crumpled body a short distance away. It was Sand, a young warrior of Jade’s faction. He was unconscious, shifted to his groundling form, but still breathing.
Chime crashed through the vines as Moon gently felt Sand’s ribs to see how bad the breaks were. His own chest hurt and his ribs ached, so he knew Sand had to be badly off.
“You’re alive! He’s alive!” Chime shouted, waving to the Arbora who climbed out of the tunnel in the platform above. “Moon got Sand, and they’re both alive!”
“Chime, Chime, take a breath,” Moon said, his voice coming out hoarse.
Sand’s eyelids fluttered and he groaned, then gasped, “What happened?”
“Nothing. We’ll tell you later.” Moon eased down into a sitting position. “Just lie still.” He asked Chime, “Were the Arbora all right?”
Chime nodded, stepping through the crushed vines to crouch next to Sand. “Three of them are hurt, but nobody’s dead.” He touched Sand’s forehead and frowned in concentration. Watching his face, Moon saw the moment when he remembered again that he wasn’t a mentor and couldn’t put Sand in a healing trance. Chime winced and drew his hand back, and Moon looked away.
After a moment, Chime said, “I hate hunting.”
Nobody had been eaten, so Moon was counting it as a pretty good day. The warriors transported the wounded, the Arbora, and their kills to the colony. Moon went back with the first group. He managed to slip away from the storm of exclamations, explanations, and recriminations that immediately erupted in the greeting hall and flew up the central well to the queens’ level.
No one was out in the queens’ hall, which was a relief. It was a big chamber, the far side looking out into the colony tree’s central well, with the open gallery of the consort level above it. There was a fountain against the inner wall, falling down into a shallow pool, and above it a huge sculpture of a queen. Her outspread wings stretched out across the walls to circle the entire hall, finally meeting tip to tip. Her scales, set with polished sunstones, glinted faintly in the soft light of shells mounted on the walls that were spelled to glow. He heard muted conversation from the direction of Pearl’s bower and quickly took the passage that led into Jade’s.
At first, Jade hadn’t wanted to move up here, feeling that the bower near the teachers’ hall that she and Moon had shared when they first arrived was more convenient. But when visitors from other courts started to appear, it would look as if Indigo Cloud was far worse off than it actually was if the royal bowers were empty. These chambers held what Moon thought was some of the best carving in the colony and had their own hot bathing pool.
The heating stones in the metal bowl hearth radiated warmth, and Moon leaned down to put the kettle on. His ribs twinged, pain spreading up from his waist to his chest, and he winced. He shifted to groundling, then carefully pulled up his shirt to look at the damage.
He already had some bruises, black and purplish against the dark bronze of his groundling skin, but he didn’t think anything was broken. But climbing up into the bed, a big wooden half-shell suspended from the ceiling, might be out for tonight. He could make do with sleeping on the furs and cushions near the hearth.
Then Jade slammed in from the passage and hissed at him. “You could have gotten killed.”
Or maybe he wouldn’t be sleeping in this bower at all. “We don’t live in a safe place, Jade. We all might get killed.”
She didn’t like that answer. Her head tilted. “So maybe we should avoid throwing ourselves on top of predators. Alone. Without waiting for help.”
“There wasn’t time.” Moon grimaced and managed to pull his shirt off over his head. “You’ve told me—twice!—to go after Fell—”
“The first time, I didn’t expect you to actually attack a cloud-walker, and the second time, I told you to follow the kethel, not personally invade the Fell flight.”
Moon had been scouting, not invading, but he didn’t bother to mention that. “I don’t see your point.”
Jade’s first burst of anger was already fading to exasperation. “My point is that you are the first consort. My first consort. You can’t afford to risk yourself.”
“I’m not going to stand by and let someone get eaten.”
“I know. I know you’re not.” She pressed her hand to her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut. “But…you have other responsibilities.”
Other responsibilities, like fathering a clutch. Moon waited, his heart pounding, for her to bring that up.
Jade had decided three months ago, after the flying boats had left, that they should have a clutch, but nothing had happened yet. Moon was doing his part at every opportunity, so he had no idea what was wrong. And he found himself extremely reluctant to ask Jade if she had changed her mind.
He had also wondered if having a clutch was harder than he had supposed. He had seen groundlings have babies, but never another Raksura; he hadn’t even been sure if they had live births or eggs, and he hadn’t known that queens and Arbora females could control their fertility. Because of the problems at the old colony, all of the Arbora had stopped clutching long before Moon had gotten there, and the youngest babies had been nearly a turn old. But if there was something he was doing wrong, he was certain Jade would have pointed it out.
At one point another possible answer had occurred to him, but since Stone had already left with Niran and the others, there was no one to ask about it.
Jade looked at him and must have sensed his agitation. She shifted to her Arbora form, the closest equivalent that queens had to a groundling form. Her whole body softened to look like an Arbora’s, and her wings vanished. She had the same blue and silver-gray coloring but fewer spines, and more long frills in her mane. She stepped close, put her hand on the back of his neck and pressed her forehead to his. She said in a growl, “I understand that you had to help. Just don’t get yourself killed.”
Moon closed his eyes, breathing in her scent. “I realized where it was taking Sand, and there was no time to tell anyone else. I had to go.”
She stepped back. “No one died; I’m satisfied with that.” She eyed him. “I’m going to get a mentor to see to you.”
Moon sat down on the furs, trying not to yelp when his abused muscles contracted. He didn’t need a mentor, but he was too relieved that they weren’t going to talk about clutches or his inability to provide them to argue. “Is Pearl going to give you trouble about this?”
Heading for the passage, Jade made an eloquently derisive noise. “I can handle Pearl.”
Moon lay back on the furs, squinting at the ceiling overhead, considering his favorite carving. It depicted a whole court of Raksura, in different woods and set with polished gemstones. Queens in the center, larger than the others, and consorts next, with a darker wood used to represent their black scales, then clusters of male and female warriors, bodies twined or wings flared in flight. The outer edge was Arbora, wingless, stocky, and muscular where the Aeriat were slender. The artwork everywhere in the mountain-tree never showed Raksura in their soft-skinned groundling forms, something else Moon didn’t understand. Even though he had grown up alone, outside of a Raksuran court, he had known in his blood that both his forms were him, that he didn’t belong in one body or the other but both.
You’re still here, he reminded himself. Considering his past record at trying to fit in to settlements, this was an achievement.
Chapter Two
Two days later, the queens called for a formal augury.
Moon was still getting used to the vagaries of Raksuran behavior, but even before the augury started he had already gotten into trouble with Chime by making a comment implying that it was just a way to shift blame for important decisions onto the mentors.
“No, this kind of augury is very accurate, and very important to the court,” Chime insisted, too loudly.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.” Moon couldn’t help glancing around to see if anyone else had heard.
&
nbsp; They were in an anteroom on the edge of the cavernous greeting hall, which at the moment held almost every member of the court. Arbora and warriors gathered on the main floor and lined the two open stairways that criss-crossed up the far wall, below the balconies and the round doorways opening into the higher levels. Above the staircases, the huge well wound up in a big spiral through the tree.
Almost everyone was in their groundling forms, though several younger warriors kept their wings and clung to the walls or hung from the balconies by their foot-claws or tails. Only the children in the nurseries, and a few teachers who had stayed there to watch them, were missing. There was a low hum of conversation, some jostling among the warriors and younger Arbora, and an air of anticipation and impatience. But even with almost everyone present, there was still plenty of space in the greeting hall: a reminder of how small the Indigo Cloud court was now compared to its former glory.
Unappeased, Chime persisted, “So what’s wrong? Why do you think this is a bad idea?”
Moon hissed, annoyed. “I don’t think it’s a bad idea.” He just didn’t think it was a good way to solve this problem.
And he was worried about what else the augury might reveal.
“But then why—” Chime began, when Balm gave them both a prod from behind and said, “Come on, Jade’s waiting.”
Jade was waiting, sitting at the edge of the clear circle in the center of the hall, radiating impatience. Moon started toward her, and Chime and Balm followed.
The hall had been an impressive enough sight when they first arrived at the tree, but was even better now that the wood and inlay had been cleaned and polished, all the shells spelled to glow with soft light, and the moss scrubbed off the walls. The narrow column of water that streamed out of a high channel and fell to the pool in the floor was now clean and sweet.
Jade looked up at their approach, smiling briefly though the angle of her spines said she was somewhat annoyed. She said, “You look nervous.”