Spice’s voice seconded her. “Well, he couldn’t be here to help!”
River hissed at them and dropped from the branch, snapped his wings out, and angled to catch the updraft.
Moon stayed where he was, flexing his claws into the wood, while Bramble and Spice and the others dug and chatted and sawed at the rotted support. He didn’t think the Arbora were taking advantage of him, not intentionally. But it had been turns since they had had a real first consort, since Pearl’s consort Rain had died. After that there had just been a few young consorts sent away to queens in other courts, and Stone. Maybe they hadn’t thought about Indigo Cloud’s place with the other courts. Most of them had only seen foreign queens and warriors when they came to visit, and that had been rare for Indigo Cloud even before the court moved here.
It doesn’t matter, he reminded himself, if the Arbora or the warriors or even Jade led him astray, let him get away with more than he should. No one was going to ask for or accept excuses for his behavior. You’re on your own, as usual.
Later that day, a storm came up, the high wind and heavy rain making only indoor work possible. Jade was busy with Balm somewhere in the colony, so Moon ended up sleeping with Chime in his bower.
Queens and consorts usually had warrior lovers, and no one seemed to mind that Moon slept with Chime occasionally. Which was good, because Chime had really wanted to.
Stubbornly, Chime had never moved out of the teachers’ level up to the warriors’, though he did have a bower with a balcony looking out into the lower central well below the greeting hall. Moon hated storms but the tree’s heavy trunk made the thunder a distant grumble, and the air from the balcony held the fresh scent of rain that had drifted in through the knothole. Chime’s bower-bed was warm and comfortable, but Moon couldn’t relax into sleep.
He finally said, “I need to ask you something.”
“Um.” Still half-asleep, Chime nuzzled his shoulder. Chime claimed to have gotten used to every aspect of being an Aeriat rather than an Arbora, except for the need for more rest. Once he was asleep he was hard to wake.
“Can consorts and male Arbora turn their fertility off like queens and female Arbora?” Moon was hoping the reason Jade hadn’t clutched yet was something that he needed to do, or needed to stop doing. One of those things that everyone assumed he knew all about that he had no idea existed.
In the past months, Moon had found out everything he could about clutches, and why stillbirths seemed so common. The mentors said that the babies in a clutch might be conceived at different times, so that when the first was ready for birth, some of the others might not be as developed. It also didn’t help that queens developed in the womb faster than consorts, and consorts faster than warriors. This wasn’t as big a factor for the Arbora clutches, because Arbora and warrior babies developed at about the same rate. Moon thought he had asked about everything he needed to know, but it hadn’t occurred to him that the conception process might entail more than the obvious.
Chime pushed up on one elbow and stared blearily at him. “No. Why would we need to suppress our fertility—I mean, why would they? They don’t need to. It’s the females who decide when to clutch.” He shook his head, baffled. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason.” Moon let his breath out in disappointment. There went that, unless it was a secret consort thing that not even a former mentor would know about, which he doubted. That left the other, far more disturbing possibility: that Moon wasn’t as fertile as a consort was supposed to be.
Chime settled back down, grumbling, “You do ask the oddest questions.”
A few days went past, mostly uneventful. There were no more platform collapses, and no serious sickness and only a few hunting injuries. The work on the gardens was going so well, the hunters decided to go ahead with the plan to take the warrior fledglings and the younger Arbora on a teaching hunt. Moon took advantage of the opportunity to ask to bring Frost, Thorn, and Bitter along, too.
There was a Raksuran prejudice that queens and consorts didn’t hunt; they were taught to, but only later, when they were past fledglinghood. But Moon would have died as a boy if his foster mother hadn’t taught him to hunt when he was barely able to leap from branch to branch. He thought he would have trouble convincing Pearl that the royal fledglings needed to learn along with the others, but she gave in with only minor grumbling.
That actually made Moon more worried than anything else. The concession had been granted with suspicious ease, almost as if Pearl felt sorry for him for some reason. He made the mistake of mentioning it to Chime, who said, “You really are crazy, aren’t you?”
“No.” Moon hissed in annoyance. “It’s just strange. I know she’s humoring me, but why would she bother?”
Chime sighed. “She probably thinks she owes you a favor after you saved Plum and have been helping so much with the work on the gardens.”
Moon grudgingly admitted that might be it.
Despite Moon’s suspicions, it was a very good day. Moon didn’t let Frost and Thorn try to take any game, but had them watch the others and then get their claws dirty helping the Arbora bleed and gut the carcasses of their prey. Bitter didn’t make any attempt to fly, but he did obviously enjoy the outing. He was carted around by Moon, Balm, Chime, and the female warrior Floret, as well as Bone and some other Arbora hunters, mostly Bramble and Salt. He helped with the gutting and got as covered with mud, loam, and blood as Frost and Thorn.
After they returned to the tree, Moon took the royal clutch down to the nurseries for baths and sleep. On his way back, he passed one of the small workrooms and saw two Arbora sitting on the floor, bent over a glittering pile on a stone slab, deep in a discussion about whether to use amethysts or polished onyx. It was Merry and Gold, the two best artisans in the court. Curious, Moon stepped into the room to look at what they were making.
It was a fingerwidth-wide band, in pieces now so it was hard to tell if it was meant for a bracelet, necklace, or ankle or arm band. It was figured with the coiled shapes of Aeriat, all with wings half-spread and outstretched arms, intended to hold polished stones that hadn’t been set into place yet. Moon was startled again by how intricate the Arbora’s creations were, how much hard work they were willing to do just for the sake of art. “That’s beautiful.”
Merry and Gold both flinched, staring up at him. “Moon!” Gold, an older female with masses of curly auburn hair, managed to say, “Uh, we didn’t hear you come in.”
“Sorry.” Moon sat on his heels for a closer look at the piece. “Is it for Jade or Pearl?” Now that they were getting visits from other courts, the Arbora might be feeling a need to make sure their queens had more impressive finery.
Moon looked up in time to catch a fleeting expression of relief on Gold’s face, but it was gone too fast to be sure he hadn’t imagined it. “It’s for Pearl,” Merry said. Lifting his brows, he added, “You think she’ll like it?”
Gold nudged Merry’s shoulder, giving him a quick glare, as if she hadn’t liked the question. That Moon definitely hadn’t imagined. “Of course she will,” he said, and stood, leaving before it got more awkward. They must have thought he would be annoyed that it was meant for Pearl and not Jade.
It was two days later when Moon figured out who the piece was actually for.
It had rained all night and much of the morning, very bad conditions for work on the outer platforms, so most of the court was staying inside today. Moon sat with the others in the teachers’ hall, which had become a common gathering place for Arbora and Aeriat alike.
It was a large central chamber below the greeting hall, its walls and domed ceiling covered with a detailed carving of a forest, with plume trees, spirals, fern trees, and many others, their branches reaching up to entwine overhead, their roots framing the round doorways that led off to different passages. With the shells set into the walls glowing with soft white light and the hearth basins filled with warming stones, it was a comfortable welcoming space. There was always som
eone there, and it was a good place to go if you wanted to talk, or just listen to others talk. Someone was always making tea, baked spiced roots, or flatbread, and the older Arbora gathered there to tell stories, or read aloud from one of the books in the mentors’ library.
Moon liked the readings best, since that was his only chance to hear what was in the books. He had taught himself to read the other languages he could speak, but Altanic and Kedaic had much simpler writing systems. The written Raksuran language was proving just as twisty and complicated as the Raksura themselves.
He had been trying to remedy this, timing many of his visits to the nurseries to coincide with reading lessons. He sat with Frost, Bitter, and Thorn while Rill or Bark or one of the other teachers drew the letters and words on clay tablets and the fledglings copied her. When they read from the simpler books, Moon looked over their shoulders. It wasn’t a particularly effective way to learn, since he couldn’t be there for every lesson and he couldn’t ask questions without giving himself away. But he had made some progress, memorizing all the characters for the various sounds, and he was starting to recognize a number of words. He didn’t think anyone had caught on, except, oddly enough, for Thorn.
At the third lesson Moon had attended, Thorn had eyed Moon thoughtfully, and moved his tablet so Moon had a better view of it. Moon had eyed him back, but they had never spoken of it, and Moon was fairly sure Thorn hadn’t shared his suspicion with anyone else, even Frost or Bitter. He thought Thorn might like having a secret to share with Moon, something that was his alone. That suited Moon.
But that rainy afternoon in the teachers’ hall, no one brought out a book. Instead, Rill said, “Moon, tell us a story about groundlings.”
The Arbora and older warriors settled in to listen, and even the young warriors lounging on the fringes of the group were hard put to conceal their interest. The entire court knew Moon’s life had been substantially different from theirs, but most of them had little idea of what that really meant. They knew he had traveled widely and seen strange places, but so had Stone. Moon had never seen much point in trying to convey what it had really been like, so he avoided stories like the time he had had to flee a Morain cliff-town in the middle of the night, got trapped in a tunnel and had to hide in a crack in the rock barely wider than his body while his former comrades hunted him.
So he told them about the Deshar in the hanging city of Zenna, and their elaborate social customs that made passing through the place so difficult for visitors. Predictably, everyone wanted to hear more about the Deshar’s attitudes about sex, which were as baffling to the other Raksura as they had been to Moon at the time.
“So if they have sex without this ceremony first, they can’t have it again?” Bone said, scratching the scar around his neck thoughtfully. He was clearly having trouble following this strange brand of logic.
Moon tried to explain. “Sort of. You can only have sex with your permanent mate, and you can’t have a permanent mate without the ceremony, and if you have sex before the ceremony, nobody wants to be your permanent mate.”
Bark frowned. “But do they have to have a permanent mate?” Except for queens and consorts, Raksura usually didn’t.
“If they want babies. If you have a baby with anybody but a permanent mate, it’s bad. For you and the baby.” The idea that offspring might be unwanted was hard for Raksura to understand as well. Queens and Arbora only clutched when they wanted to, and there were always teachers to take care of the babies or fledglings.
“But how do the others know if someone’s had sex?” Chime protested. “How can they tell? If they have sex without the ceremony, shouldn’t they just keep quiet about it?”
“Do they change color when they have sex?” Balm asked thoughtfully.
“No. They just seemed to know.” Moon admitted, “I never figured that part out.”
Bone snorted, stretching to pick up the kettle. “Strange creatures. Though I’m sure they’d say the same of us.”
If confronted by a Raksura, the Deshar would probably have been too busy having hysterics to say anything. In the east where Raksuran courts were rare, groundlings confused them with Fell. Before Moon could point this out, one of the soldiers, Grain, dropped down the stairwell from the greeting hall, calling out, “Where’s— Moon, visitors just arrived from another court! Two queens, and some warriors, and they’ve got a consort with them!”
Everyone gasped and exclaimed. Moon exchanged an alarmed look with Chime and Balm. That meant this was the most formal form of visit. It would have to be today, Moon thought. Everyone would have been tracking mud and water through the greeting hall all morning. Knowing Raksura, the visitors had probably planned it this way to put them at a disadvantage. He said, “Is someone telling the queens?”
“Yes, Sage went up there,” Grain told him, bouncing up and down with excitement.
Rill stood hastily, shaking crumbs out of her skirt. To Balm, she said, “We should give them tea in the greeting hall first, give them a chance to dry off before we send them up to the queens’ hall.”
Balm got to her feet, looking down at herself helplessly. “I have to get up there.” The senior female warriors were the ones who were supposed to initially greet visitors, and as Jade’s clutchmate, Balm was the most senior one available. She was wearing an old pair of brown pants and a shirt stained with the juice from the berries they had all been eating, and her only jewelry was a copper armband. She was still beautiful, but it was definitely not the way to be dressed while formally greeting two foreign queens and a consort. Moon looked worse, but he wouldn’t have to appear until the first round of formal greetings were done, and that might take quite a while, depending on how difficult the queens all decided to be.
“Wait, wait,” Rill said, and whipped off her dress, holding it out toward Balm. “Put this on!”
“Oh, good idea.” Balm took her shirt off and pulled on the sleeveless dress. She was much taller than Rill, so on her it was more of a tunic, but the dye on the soft fabric was a blue that faded to violet toward the hem, and it looked good against Balm’s dark groundling skin. Someone else contributed a necklace of flat polished amethyst and everyone judged Balm ready to go.
Balm took a deep breath and started up the stairs with Grain, as everyone else scattered to get cushions and one of the better tea sets. Moon headed off to take the back passages up to the consorts’ level.
As Moon traveled upward through the colony, he warned everyone he met about the visitors. When he reached the Aeriat levels, he skipped the queens’ level and went right to the consorts’, tracing a path through the maze of empty rooms and antechambers and bathing rooms to his bower, just above Jade’s.
He hadn’t spent a lot of time here. During the evenings, he was either down in Jade’s bower, or Chime’s, or sitting with the others in the teachers’ hall. But this was the first time he had had a room in a permanent structure that was just for him.
The curving ceiling was carved with Aeriat in flight, on a background of waves that Chime had said symbolized the west wind. The half-shell of the bed hung near the far wall, lined with comfortable blankets and cushions. The hearth basin was in the center, and filled with fresh warming stones. There were a couple of furs and some cushions to sit on, and a woven-reed basket stood against the opposite wall, holding a few extra blankets and his clothes. A normal consort Moon’s age would have far more possessions than this, baskets stuffed with belongings and gifts. What Moon had was a narrow shelf in the wall, holding the things that the fledglings and the Arbora children had given him on his visits to the nurseries. These were usually shiny rocks or pieces of wood, or intricate little sculptures made out of twigs or twisted scraps of cloth.
He opened the top basket, and pulled out his best set of clothes. The shirt and pants were made of the same silky fabric, the color a blue so dark it was almost black. He also had a belt-sash woven through with gold threads. That, with his consort’s gift, a heavy red-gold bracelet with the serpentine
shapes of two entwined Raksura etched into the band, should be enough to make him look respectable. And respectable was about as good as it was going to get.
Chime ducked in through the doorway, having hastily changed clothes as well. “Is that what you’re wearing?” he said, as Moon was pulling the shirt over his head. He caught Moon’s narrow-eyed look and waved his hands. “Sorry, I’ll be quiet!”
Moon had arrived at Indigo Cloud with nothing except the clothes on his back, which by that point had been about to fall off. He now had clothes for both everyday use and to save for special occasions, which was more than he had ever owned in his entire life. “Did you hear where they were from?”
“Yes, and it’s a little odd.” Chime paced anxiously, tightening the sash around his waist. “One of the queens is Tempest, from Emerald Twilight.”
“Again?” That was odd. Unless this visit was meant as amends for the last abbreviated one. Or revenge for the last abbreviated one. But they brought a consort.
“I know, it doesn’t make sense.” Chime waved his hands, baffled. “The other queen is Zephyr, a sister queen from Sunset Water. They’re related somehow. I think she’s the daughter of an Emerald Twilight consort, maybe Shadow’s clutchmate, who was given to the reigning Sunset Water queen.”
Moon committed that to memory, in case it came up in later conversations. One of the benefits to being a consort was that he wasn’t expected to talk much during these visits. He would presumably have to speak to the other consort at some point, though. Just don’t get in a fight, he reminded himself.
Chime continued, “But I can’t think why Tempest is here with her. It’s not like a Sunset Water queen would need an introduction. They must have known we’d be happy to make an alliance with them.”
“We’ll find out,” Moon said. He folded his arms, resisting the urge to pace with Chime. It would be a while before he needed to appear. The warriors would be made comfortable down in the greeting hall, and the queens would be taken up to the queens’ hall to make pointed conversation with Jade, then Pearl would appear, then finally they would send for Moon. It might be different, considering the extra queen and the consort, but…