Edge of Worlds (The Books of the Raksura)

by Martha Wells

  As the warriors dropped down to the greeting hall floor, Sharp said, uneasily, “You don’t think the dream is going to become real . . .”

  “No,” Jade said, absently enough for it to be convincing. “But if it’s a warning of some danger, we want to be prepared.”

  There was something Moon had to check on first, before worrying about the rest of the court. “I’m going to the nurseries.”

  Jade flicked a spine in acknowledgment and Moon dove down the stairwell into the teachers’ hall. The round hall was crowded with uneasy Arbora, all talking nervously. They barely noticed as Moon flashed past and flung himself down the passage that led to the nurseries.

  He slid to a stop in front of a round doorway with a lintel carved with the figures of baby Arbora and Aeriat, took a deep breath, and shifted back to his groundling form. He couldn’t hear any crying or screaming inside, which was a good sign.

  Moon stepped through into the first big low-ceilinged chamber and almost ran into Blossom. She lifted her hands and said, low-voiced, “It’s all right. It didn’t affect any of the clutches, whatever it is.”

  Moon let out his breath, the tension in his chest easing. He hadn’t realized how afraid he was until this moment.

  Everything was quiet, though some sleepy Arbora toddlers played near one of the several shallow fountain pools. Doorways led off into a maze of smaller rooms, and teachers were moving in and out of them, checking on their charges, a few being trailed by querulous Aeriat fledglings. The inhabitants of the nurseries had changed over the past two turns in the colony tree. Several Arbora had clutched, producing new Arbora babies and warrior fledglings, and the court’s population balance was finally on its way to becoming more stable. Moon asked, “Did it happen to you?” From what the others had said, everyone’s version of the dream was a little different. The one thing in common had been the overwhelming violence of the attack, the helplessness, the sense that the court had been caught with no warning at all.

  Blossom’s nod was grim. She was an older Arbora, though the only sign of age yet was the threads of gray in her dark hair. Raksura lost all their coloring as they got older, and Blossom’s skin was still a warm bronze. She was the teacher Jade and Moon had chosen to be in charge of the care of their first clutch. “The Fell attacking the Reaches.” She lifted her shoulders, not quite shuddering, and turned to lead the way across the room. “It was like the old colony all over again, but worse.”

  At the far end of the main room was another small chamber with a pile of furs and cushions. Moon and Jade’s clutch was in the center of the pile, three female and two male, sleepily climbing on each other and tugging on one another’s frills. It was more and more likely that they were queens and consorts. Mixed gender clutches were unlikely to produce warriors. They were with the other royal clutch, the last three survivors of the Sky Copper court. The two fledgling consorts Bitter and Thorn were half-awake, leaning on each other, and Frost, the little queen, sat in front of the babies to guard them. “What’s going on?” Frost demanded. “Blossom said everyone’s having the same dream.”

  Blossom shushed her. “Keep your voice down, some of the others are still sleeping.”

  In a piercing whisper, Frost repeated, “Is everyone really having the same dream?”

  Moon sat down beside the nest and untangled Cloud’s still soft claws from Fern’s frills. At a little over a turn old, the clutch couldn’t talk much and were mostly concerned with playing, along with eating and sleeping and other bodily functions. “It looks like it, but we don’t know why yet. You didn’t have the dream?”

  Frost shrugged her spines. She was in her Arbora form, small and deceptively soft. Her scales were green, and as she had grown over the past turn, the yellow tracery was becoming more pronounced. All queens had a second contrasting web of color across their scales, and it was a sign that Frost was finally maturing. She was still a long time from officially leaving the nurseries, whatever she thought. She said, “We dream about Fell all the time.” Thorn and Bitter sleepily nodded.

  The Sky Copper clutch had survived the Fell attack on their colony to the east, only to be captured by a Fell flight. It would have been a horrific event for anyone to go through, let alone fledglings, and they still bore the effects of it, though it wasn’t as obvious now. “But you weren’t dreaming about them tonight?” Moon asked, just to make sure, as Sapphire lunged into his lap and started to chew on the cuff of his pants. Queens shared mental connections to their courts; it was how they brought the court together, how they could hold other Raksura in their groundling forms and keep them from shifting, and other abilities Moon still wasn’t so certain about. But Frost wasn’t in the Indigo Cloud bloodline, so even if it was possible for a queen to give a nightmare to the whole court, he didn’t think it could have come from Frost.

  “Blossom already asked that,” Frost informed him. “We weren’t dreaming.”

  “If any of the clutches did have the dream,” Blossom said as she lifted Solace and Rain out of the nest and deposited Rain in Moon’s lap, “they don’t remember it. When we started to wake them, they all wanted to play or eat or go back to sleep. They weren’t shifting, either.”

  When fledglings and baby Arbora were frightened, they shifted at random, even in their sleep. As proof he hadn’t been upset, Rain curled up in Moon’s lap and hissed out a contented breath as he fell asleep. Bitter crawled into the nest, pulled Cloud and Fern against his chest, and followed suit. Frost gave Thorn a push and he joined them, curling up in a ball. Moon arranged Solace, Sapphire, and Rain next to Thorn. It calmed abraded nerves just to come down here and touch their little soft-scaled bodies. He felt better able to think about this logically now. “I need to get back to Jade.” She was going to want to know the nurseries weren’t in chaos, for one thing. “Frost, keep an eye on everyone, all right?”

  When the Sky Copper clutch had first come to the court, Frost had been, off and on, an incorrigible terror. Over the past couple of turns, Frost had gradually been getting better, either from growing more secure at Indigo Cloud or just getting a little older.

  Moon had expected her, and maybe the two fledgling consorts, to be jealous of his new clutch, but it had just seemed to make all three of them happier and easier to deal with. Bitter, who had refused to speak to anyone but his clutchmates, had even started to talk to the new babies. Maybe a new royal Aeriat clutch, along with the clutches that the Arbora had produced, had been another sign of security in their new court and colony.

  Frost hesitated, clearly torn between wanting to watch over the other clutches and wanting to be a part of whatever was going on. She said, grudgingly, “Someday I’ll be big, and I can fight the monsters.”

  “It’s not a monster.” Moon pushed to his feet, and thought, Probably not a monster. In the Reaches, anything was possible.

  Blossom followed him out to the doorway. Keeping his voice low, Moon said, “So whoever did it, didn’t want to upset the clutches.”

  “Which means it was one of us. Unintentionally, I mean.” Blossom eyed him a moment. “Could it be Chime?”

  Moon hesitated. Before Moon had come to Indigo Cloud, Chime had been an Arbora and a mentor. The Fell influence at the old colony had caused disease and a drop in warrior births, and one day, Chime had shifted and found himself a warrior. This was apparently a natural process that happened in courts on the decline, but that hadn’t made it any easier for Chime to cope with. Warriors never had mentor powers, and so Chime had also lost his ability to heal, to augur, and to manipulate rocks and flora to produce heat and light. But the change had affected him in odd ways, and he had gained the ability to hear things he shouldn’t be able to, and to get odd insights about groundling magic.

  Those insights had warned them of traps, but had also lured Chime into dangerous situations. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that something had made Chime do this. But while Chime could hear strange things, he had never shown any ability to make anyone, includ
ing other Raksura, hear him. Moon said, “Maybe, but I doubt it. I think he’d know if he did.”

  Blossom nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true. He always does seem to know.”

  Another consort whipped through the passage down from the teachers’ hall, not quite with the speed Moon had. Ember jolted to a halt and shifted to his groundling form. He said, “They said you were already here. Is everything all right?”

  “They didn’t have the dream,” Moon told him. “Did you?” Ember was Pearl’s consort, given to Indigo Cloud by the court of Emerald Twilight. His skin was a lighter bronze than usual for the Aeriat of Indigo Cloud or Emerald Twilight, and his hair was a light gold-brown. He was young and had been gently raised, but had a comprehensive knowledge of court politics in the Reaches, which made him nearly the opposite of Moon in every respect. Moon liked him, but Ember made him feel large, awkward, and like the feral disaster that most of Indigo Cloud had considered him when he had first arrived.

  Ember nodded, stepping past Moon and Blossom to look worriedly into the nurseries. “So did Pearl. I saw Floret on the way down and she said she did too.” He told Blossom, “I’ll help you get the babies settled.” Like a real consort, Ember was good with clutches. Pearl was probably only waiting another turn or so for him to mature a little more before she had another clutch herself.

  Moon left them and went down the passage back to the teachers’ hall. It was a big chamber with walls carved with a forest of spirals, plumes, fern trees, and other varieties, their branches reaching up to the domed ceiling and their roots framing the round doorways that led off to other chambers. It wasn’t as large as the greeting hall, but it was less drafty and somehow more intimate, as if the tree carvings made you feel sheltered and protected. This was where both Arbora and Aeriat tended to come in the evening, to share food and conversation and stories. Now it was crowded with disturbed Arbora and warriors, gathered around Jade and Pearl.

  The reigning queen, Pearl was the birthqueen of both Jade and Balm, though Moon had never been able to see the physical resemblance that was obvious to other queens. She was a head taller than Moon, and her scales were brilliant gold, overlaid with a webbed pattern of deepest indigo blue. The frilled mane behind her head was a golden sunburst, and there were more frills on the tips of her folded wings and on the triangle-shape at the end of her tail. Like all Raksuran queens, she wore only jewelry. Her relationship with Jade had become notably more tranquil since Jade had clutched, and she didn’t hate Moon nearly as much as she had when Stone had first brought him to the court.

  Pearl flicked her spines and several of the warriors turned to shift and leap up the stairs toward the greeting hall, probably going to join those who were guarding the entrance. Moon started through the crowd, and the Arbora made way for him until he stood beside Chime and Bell, Chime’s other clutchmate, and chief of the teachers’ caste. Bell leaned in to whisper to Moon, “They told you none of the clutches had the dream? It’s strange.”

  “It’s not that strange,” Chime countered, and several Arbora hissed at him to be quiet.

  Heart, the chief mentor, sat on the floor near the hearth bowl, staring at the warming stones. Or staring at the way the heat rising from the stones bent the air. She was a small female Arbora, in her groundling form, her brow knit in concentration. The spell-lights in the room shone on her dark amber skin and found highlights in her bronze-colored hair. She was using a quick and dirty method of scrying for danger or other momentous happenings that Moon had seen mentors use in emergencies. Jade and Pearl both watched her, their tails moving restlessly.

  Keeping his voice low, Moon asked Chime, “Where’s Stone?”

  “He went outside to take a look around, see if there’s anything out there.” Chime was back in his groundling form, and lifted his shoulders uneasily, unconsciously twitching the spines of his scaled form. “You don’t think the Fell are really about to attack . . .”

  “No.” Moon gave him a reassuring nudge to the shoulder. There hadn’t been any Fell stench in the draft coming through the knothole entrance. The one thing the Fell could never disguise was their odor. He didn’t think there was any reason to panic now. But what the vision might be telling them was that there was plenty of reason to panic later.

  The other two young mentors, Merit and Thistle, watched Heart intently. Most of the other Arbora waiting worriedly were teachers, the soldiers and hunters having either gone up to guard the greeting hall or to search the colony on Jade’s orders. Most were in their groundling forms, their skin various shades of bronze and copper, their hair dark or light or reddish brown. Arbora were shorter and often rounder and heavyset compared to the taller, thinner Aeriat. Seasons in the Reaches tended to be cool and more rainy or warm and less rainy, and this night was warm and damp, so most of the Arbora were dressed in brief kilts.

  Bone, the chief of the hunters’ caste, came in from one of the doorways on the far side of the room. The crowd parted to let him make his way toward Pearl and Jade. His groundling form showed the signs of age, with his hair turning white and an ashy cast to his dark bronze skin. He was stocky and heavily muscled, and he had a ring of scar tissue around his neck where something had once tried to bite his head off. He reached Pearl and said, quietly, “The doors in the lower part of the tree are still shut, and nothing’s disturbed them.”

  He meant the doors out to the root levels, on the forest floor. Pearl flicked a spine in acknowledgment.

  Then Heart looked up. “I can’t see anything. If it was happening somewhere now, or about to happen here, I’d know.”

  Merit’s shoulders slumped in relief. Thistle said, “No one could fail to see it, let alone Heart.”

  Pearl tilted her head and looked at Jade. Jade said, “Stone will be back soon. He can confirm it.”

  Pearl turned to regard Heart again. Moon would have twitched uneasily under the fixed predatory intensity of her gaze, but as an Arbora, Heart didn’t have the same reflexes. Pearl said, “So what was it?”

  Heart rubbed the back of her neck and glanced at Merit and Thistle. She said, “They think it was a shared dream.”

  Merit was close to Heart’s age, but to Moon he had always seemed younger. In his groundling form, he had wide-set eyes, warm brown skin and fluffy light-colored hair. He was a little on the easily distracted side, but, like Heart, Moon had seen how powerful a mentor he was on a few memorable occasions. Thistle was young too, part of the copper-skinned and reddish-haired bloodline of Indigo Cloud, with a determined chin. Merit said, “That’s a dream that comes to one of us, and is so . . . powerful, it spreads through the rest of the court, everyone who’s asleep.”

  “That’s what I said,” Chime muttered under his breath.

  “Everyone, but not the clutches,” Moon said.

  Everyone looked at him, then back to Merit.

  Merit lifted his hands. “Arbora babies don’t show mentor potential until they’re at least ten turns old, sometimes older. Maybe fledglings and babies don’t develop their connection to the rest of the court until they’re older.”

  “It must be rare,” Jade said, watching them with the scales of her brow furrowed, “considering we’ve never heard of it before.”

  “It is rare,” Thistle said. “We’ve seen mentions of it in the mentors’ histories, but that’s all.”

  “If Flower hadn’t made us read everything the court has, we wouldn’t know about it,” Merit added.

  Not for the first time, Moon wished Flower were still here. She had been the court’s oldest mentor, the one who helped guide them out of the east and to the Reaches. She had been dead for nearly two turns now.

  Pearl’s expression suggested shared dreams weren’t rare enough. “It has never happened to this court, not in our memories. Why now?”

  Merit and Thistle turned to Heart, who said, “We just don’t know.”

  Then Jade cocked her head, and a moment later Moon heard voices from the stairwell up to the greeting hall. Jade said, “
Stone’s back.”

  Pearl turned and took the stairs in two bounds. Jade followed and Moon went after her, everyone else trailing behind him. He noticed he was getting better at this part, at realizing what his place was and taking it. Two turns ago he would have stood there a moment, waiting to go with the warriors and Arbora, while they stared at him awkwardly.

  Stone was in the greeting hall with Knell and some of the other soldiers and warriors. He was in his groundling form and a little damp from the light rain outside. Raksuran queens and consorts grew larger and stronger as they grew older, and Stone was old enough to remember when the court had first left the Reaches, generations ago, so his winged form was too big to easily get through the part of the knothole entrance where it narrowed. Tip to tip his wings were more than three times Moon’s twenty-pace span.

  In his groundling form Stone was lean and tall, like all the groundling forms of Aeriat. One of his eyes was partially blind, with a white haze across the pupil, and his skin and hair had faded to gray with age. He wore battered gray pants and an old shirt, with absolutely no concession to the idea that consorts were supposed to dress to do credit to the court. But one of the benefits of being a line-grandfather was that you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. As Pearl came toward him, he said, “There’s nothing out there.”

  There were murmurs of relief from the Arbora and warriors, and Jade’s and Pearl’s spines flicked, shedding tension. Pearl said, “You’re certain?”

  Stone said, “There’s nothing in the air. It’s not as damp as it was last night and there’s a breeze. I can scent the redflower that just opened on the next mountain-tree, but no Fell.”