“Well, I had several days to come up with it, sitting around on the boat. And Chime and Balm made a lot of suggestions. It may have gotten a little out of hand,” she admitted.
“Is that why you sent Stone on ahead?”
“No. I was afraid that if I was too late, you’d give up and leave.”
So she had seen that, too. Moon was torn between relief that he didn’t have to conceal it or find a way to tell her, and guilt for feeling it in the first place.
Watching his expression carefully, Jade nodded to herself. “I didn’t think another court would understand that you aren’t like an ordinary consort. You wouldn’t be afraid to just fly away on your own, leave the Reaches behind.” She settled her spines again. “In one way it was a relief. I knew they couldn’t treat you too badly, or you’d just leave. But if you did, I had no idea where you’d go, or how I’d find you.”
He took a deep breath. “I thought about it. But I didn’t want to give up, just yet.”
“Well, that’s good.” Jade’s tail moved restlessly, betraying her nerves.
“How are Frost and Thorn and Bitter?” Moon asked, because he wanted to know and it was a less fraught subject. “Did Frost make trouble?” The last time Moon had left for any length of time, Frost had kept the nurseries in chaos with dire predictions.
Jade said, “She did at first, but I told her that another queen had stolen you and I was going to fight her for you, and she was happy with that. Thorn and Bitter seemed to be withholding their approval until I actually brought you back.” She added, “Your birthqueen hasn’t met with me yet, but your clutchmate seems reasonable. Have they tried to make you accept another queen?”
“No.” Moon absently scratched the back of his head, still trying to get his mind around the fact that Jade had come up with an elaborate plan to rescue him. “I don’t think they’ve thought that far ahead. They just keep saying they wanted to see me.”
“What a strange thing to say.” Jade mocked him gently.
Moon heard someone rustle outside in the hall, and remembered they didn’t have much time. “I need to tell you what’s going on here.”
She frowned. “That sounds ominous.”
“It is.”
They sat down on the furs, and he told her about the crossbreeds, the Fell, and what the ruler in Aventera had said.
Jade listened with growing consternation. “I can’t believe your birthqueen kept the crossbreeds. I can’t believe she managed to get the court to accept them. She must be… very strong-willed.”
Moon agreed. “That’s one word for it.”
“But if the Fell can hear them…”
“If they can, I don’t think it’s on purpose.” Jade gave him a look, and he said, “I know, but…” He ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. “I don’t know. The point is, we have to stop the Fell here. If they take Aventera, they’ll head into the Reaches.”
“Yes, but I can’t bring the court into this. There’s just not enough of us to fight off another Fell flight, even if we’re acting in concert with another court. We can’t afford to lose more warriors. We’re barely large enough to survive as it is.” She made an annoyed gesture. “Please don’t repeat that to your clutchmate or your birthqueen. I’m going to have trouble enough getting you back without them thinking they’re sending you off to starve.”
He hissed in annoyance. “Of course I won’t repeat that. And the court won’t starve. I can bring in enough game to feed a lot of Raksura.” And Ember can’t, he didn’t add. He didn’t want to mention Ember, since Jade hadn’t, but the other consort’s presence in Indigo Cloud was hanging on him like a weight. There was something else he had to mention, though. “So you still want me back, even though I have half-Fell relatives?”
“It’s not your half, that’s all that matters.” Distracted, Jade tapped her claws on the wooden floor. “I have an idea.”
That was a relief. “What?”
She hesitated. “I’d better save it for the meeting with your birthqueen.”
Before he could press her to tell him, Balm stepped into the doorway and cleared her throat. She said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s a warrior here who says if you want to speak further to Onyx, you need to go now.”
Jade’s spines twitched in annoyance. She told Moon, “Better warn Delin about the Fell.”
Moon agreed, still reluctant, and Jade and Balm left to return to the awkward meeting with Onyx. Moon wondered if Celadon would help Jade or argue against her, or just stay neutral. He still wasn’t sure how Celadon felt toward him, or how he felt toward her.
As soon as the queens had gone, Russet and a few other Arbora came in. Russet said, “Would you like something to eat? Or perhaps to rest?”
Moon was beginning to share Stone’s opinion of interfering Arbora. He said, “No,” and walked out before they could argue with him.
Moon returned to the colony’s main entrance. The flying boat still had an audience, the Arbora sitting on the rocks below it and the warriors clinging to the crags of the ridge or lying on the broad branches of the slanted mountain-tree. Ignoring them, Moon shifted and reached the ship’s rail with a couple of bounds.
Chime and the others were still out on deck, and now Delin was with them. As Moon landed and shifted back to his groundling form, Delin came forward eagerly. “So you are well! When we arrived at Indigo Cloud and heard you had been carried off, we were very worried.”
Delin was elderly but had all the determination and stubbornness of his grandson Niran, and that was saying something. His hair, beard, and mustache were silky white, a contrast against gold skin weathered by many long voyages on his family’s wind-ships. He had a pad of paper tucked under one arm, with a half-completed sketch of Opal Night’s split mountain-tree and the wall and valley. “I’m glad you’re here,” Moon said, and was a little surprised to discover how much he meant it. It would be a relief to have someone around who understood about Raksura but wasn’t one. “Can we talk somewhere?” Delin also knew a great deal about the Fell from an Islander scholar who had made a study of predators. That particular scholar hadn’t survived his obsession with various groundling-eating species, but he had passed along a lot of his knowledge before he died.
Delin eyed him sharply, then motioned for him to follow. “This way.”
As Delin led them across the deck, Chime asked anxiously, “Did you see Jade? What did—Uh, I mean, how did—”
“It’s fine.” Moon hoped that was enough of an answer for now. “She’s trying to talk to them about getting me back.” He had to add, “So the plan to steal me is off for now.”
Chime twitched, embarrassed. “Oh, she told you about that.”
“It was a good plan,” Song said from behind them. “It’s almost a shame to give it up.”
Delin took them down the hatch near the deck’s steering cabin, into the ship’s hold. There were multiple chambers down here, and cargo space for storing water jars and food. They went from the passage into a long room the ship’s crew used for eating. There was a low table down the center with stools, and in an attached cubby was a small metal cooking stove carefully insulated from the wooden floor and walls with thin sheets of slate.
Delin chased out two women who were talking at the table and a man who was chopping up root vegetables, then gestured for the Raksura to sit. In Raksuran, he said to Moon, “I have been learning your language, somewhat.” His accent was terrible, but he managed to make the words understandable; Moon was impressed. “But if it is a complicated subject, we should perhaps speak in Altanic.”
“Wait,” Chime said. He jerked his head significantly toward Root. “Is it private? You know what he’s like.”
Root hissed at Chime. “I won’t tell anyone.” He turned to Moon in appeal. “Don’t make me leave! We’ve been wondering what happened to you, and if you were all right, and—”
“Root, you can stay.” The problem was that Chime was right; Root did have a tendency to blu
rt out whatever was on the top of his mind. And he also had a tendency to say things that were true but that no one particularly wanted said aloud. “Just don’t say anything in front of anyone from Opal Night. I don’t want them to know I told you.”
Root nodded, solemn and serious. “I won’t.”
Song pressed Root’s hand. “Just don’t say anything.”
Moon turned to Delin. “There’s a part of this story that other Raksuran courts can’t know. Will you promise not to tell anyone about it?”
Delin considered this seriously. “What I learn I put into my books. But they are written in the old language of the Golden Isles, and not a trade language. If it is nothing that directly affects my people, I will give my bond not to speak of it to any Raksura, excepting yourselves.”
Moon thought that was good enough. He told the story again, the same way he had told Jade, leaving out any of his personal feelings, or trying to. When he was finished, Delin looked thoughtful and all the Raksura aghast.
“They kept the crossbreeds?” Horrified, Floret spoke for all of them. “Why? Why would they even…? How could they think…?”
“I don’t know, but they did.” Moon rubbed his eyes wearily. He had eaten with Celadon and the warriors before they left the flying island this morning, and it hadn’t been a particularly tiring flight, but the conversation with Jade had left him emotionally raw.
“And one is even a mentor?” Chime clutched his temples, as if thinking about it hurt his head. “They were raised as Raksura, so they act like Raksura.”
“Would that work?” Song said, incredulous. Root was obeying the injunction not to talk, but was listening intently. Probably committing everything everyone said to memory to remind them of it later.
“Apparently it did.” Chime shook his head.
“But how?” Floret still sounded horrified. “It’s not like you could take a groundling baby and raise it as a Raksura. It couldn’t shift—”
“But it would speak Raksuran,” Moon interrupted, tired of hearing about it, “and it would know what you mean when you flick your spines or move your tails, and know all your stories, and how to act. It would do everything you do except shift. It would be more Raksuran than me.”
“Well, yes, but…” Floret frowned, confused and upset. “Let me think about it.”
Song said, reluctantly, “But it wasn’t a good idea in the end, was it? If the Fell can hear what the crossbreeds think, even if the crossbreeds don’t know about it like you and the daughter queen believe, that’s bad, very bad. We don’t know how much the Fell can find out from them.”
Chime turned to Delin. “What do you think?”
Delin had been lost in thought through the entire conversation. “I wonder where the Fell got the idea to make crossbreeds.”
Chime said, puzzled, “What do you mean?”
Moon said, “Malachite said the Opal Night mentors were trying to find out why the Fell wanted crossbreeds, but there was nothing in the histories about it.”
Delin said, “The one thing we know, that almost everyone knows, about the Fell is that they are parasites. They take everything from other species. They descend on a city or dwelling place, kill and eat the inhabitants, steal their clothing, their treasures, live in the ruins of their homes, until they grow bored and hungry and move on. They make nothing of their own. No one has ever found any evidence that they even write down their own language, or keep any kind of histories. Perhaps not even oral histories. The scholar Venar-Inram-Alil was a great fool in some ways, but he traveled a long distance to talk to survivors of Fell attacks, and to look at the remains of the places they lived, and he believed they were creatures of the moment, like animals, who thought little or nothing of their past or future.” He spread his hands. “Where would such creatures get so radical a notion, to not only crossbreed with their most deadly enemies, distant relations or not, but to keep the children alive and raise them.” He leaned his elbows on the table. “It doesn’t surprise me that Raksura re-captured the crossbred children and raised them as their own; it astonishes me that Fell thought to create them in the first place.”
Chime nodded slowly. “It’s strange if one Fell flight does it, it’s more strange if two… They could have got the idea from each other, the way they pass knowledge between flights, but that still doesn’t explain where the idea came from in the first place.”
“Maybe they got it from groundlings,” Song said.
As if he couldn’t contain himself a moment longer, Root burst out, “They steal everything else from groundlings, maybe they stole that too!”
“But what groundlings? And why would Fell listen to groundlings?” Floret protested. “That’s crazy. Fell eat each other. They don’t think other species are even people.” She made a helpless gesture. “I would have said they don’t think we’re people, except for how they keep trying to breed with us now.”
Song said, darkly, “Just because they want to breed with us doesn’t mean they think we’re people.”
Everyone stared at her, but Moon felt she had a point. Delin absently tugged at his beard, winding the glossy hair around his fingers. He said, “Chime, you know much of your people’s history. There is nothing in your lore about another species attempting to communicate with the mentors?”
“Not that I know of. And I think I’d remember it if I’d ever run across it in the libraries.” Chime eyed him. “You’re thinking that if some other species is giving the Fell ideas, it tried to do it to us at some point, too?”
“It seems a logical thought.” Delin shrugged, realized he had more than half his beard wrapped around his fingers, and shook his hand free. “Our records show that after a time when they seemed to be dying out, the Fell have now been growing more and more virulent through the eastern lands and seacoasts, and this matches Stone’s recollections. I wonder if they have somehow changed, and these attempts to crossbreed are part of it.”
“They’ve been getting worse, and now they’ll come here, to the Reaches,” Chime said glumly. “I mean, what else is all this for? They want to make the flights more powerful with crossbreeds and build up their numbers and then start attacking the courts here.”
The others twitched uneasily at the thought. “Pearl thinks—” Floret started to say, then shot a glance at Moon that was half guilt and half defiance. Everybody knew Floret was still technically in Pearl’s camp, though since Jade and Pearl’s arguments had been mostly focused on crops and clutching and drains and the other mundane issues concerning the court, it hadn’t mattered as much. Moon made a tired gesture for her to continue. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Delin hastily scribble a note. This trip must have been a jewel mine of Raksuran behavior for Delin’s studies.
Floret gave a little shrug, instinctively settling the spines she didn’t have in groundling form. She continued, “Pearl thinks the Fell haven’t attacked the Reaches in such a long time because they know the only thing all the courts would ever agree on is banding together to kill them. It was different in the east, with the few courts that are there being so spread out, with such separate territories. But the courts here feel all the Reaches belong to Raksura, even if we only hunt our own territories. An attack on one court would seem like an attack on them all.”
“She’s probably right,” Moon said. He couldn’t see anything else bringing the Raksuran courts together.
Before Delin could comment, they heard footsteps in the corridor. A young woman ducked her head in and said, “Grandfather? I’m sorry to interrupt, but there are strange Raksura up on the deck who say they want Moon to come back into the colony.”
“Why?” Chime demanded before anyone else could. “What do they think we’re doing to him?”
Moon set his jaw and didn’t growl. He didn’t have time for Opal Night’s machinations right now. “I’ll talk to them.”
He left the cabin, the others trailing along behind. The warriors couldn’t be here to tell him that Opal Night had agreed to let hi
m return to Indigo Cloud; he would be surprised if Jade had even managed to meet Malachite yet. As he climbed the stairs to the deck, he was half-expecting to see Rise. But it wasn’t her. Five warriors waited there, and he was fairly certain he had seen them with Onyx at the ill-fated dinner.
They were still in their winged forms, four perched on the railing and one female standing on the deck. Something about their attitude made Moon’s hackles rise, as if they took a contemptuous but proprietary interest in the flying boat. Like it was a possession they claimed but didn’t particularly want. They ignored the Islander crew, who stood at a little distance and watched curiously. Five warriors seemed like overkill for an escort back to a colony which was barely forty paces away.
Moon walked up to the female leader. She was big, with dark copper scales. He was still in groundling form and she and the other warriors didn’t shift. That was bad manners at best, a threat at worst. Moon said, “What do you want?”
The warrior said, “You’re to come with us.” She threw a dismissive glance around the deck, ignoring the hostile Indigo Cloud warriors gathered by the hatch. “Enough playing with the groundlings.”
Moon felt a flush of heat, a rage all out of proportion to the stupid remark. He wrestled with the urge to shift and throw all five warriors off the flying boat. He held in a hiss though he thought his jaw might pop from the effort, and managed to say, calmly, “No.”
Her spines shivered in surprise. Moon turned away. He got two steps before he sensed her behind him, nearly breathing down his neck. That did it.
Moon whipped around, shifted as he turned, and flared his spines and snapped his wings out. The warrior flinched, so startled she shifted to groundling. She was younger than he expected. He said, with grating emphasis, “I’ll go when I’m ready. Now get off the boat.”
Two of the male warriors had already fallen off the railing, either in precipitous retreat or pure surprise. The last male and the other female held on, but ducked down to show they were no threat. Behind Moon, he heard Delin ask, “Is it rare for a young consort to threaten warriors?”