by Martha Wells
The Fell’s distinctive stench permeated their surroundings and would be carried on the wind even over long distances. It was probably one of the reasons they relied on less scent-sensitive groundling species as their main prey. If they were anywhere nearby, their odor would be hard to disguise, and Stone’s senses were far more acute than an ordinary Raksura’s.
“So,” Pearl said. She looked around at all the anxious faces. Moon knew he didn’t feel much relieved. “I’m not going to tell you to go back to sleep as if nothing happened. But there is no immediate threat, and there is no point to behaving as if there was.”
For Pearl, that was an inspirational speech. All the Arbora and warriors here had grown up with her, and they knew it was an attempt to reassure them, as well as a not so subtle hint that they should shut up and stop panicking.
Pearl turned to go, collecting a few of her warriors with a dip of her spines. She exchanged an opaque look with Jade, who turned to follow. Yes, Moon figured they were probably going to talk over what had happened.
As Jade passed him, Moon caught her wrist. “I’m going to spend the rest of the night in the nurseries.”
Jade didn’t question it. She brushed the back of her hand against his cheek. “Just try to get some sleep.”
Moon didn’t make any promises, as he was pretty certain that wasn’t going to happen.
Jade and Balm both leapt up the wall onto the first balcony level with Pearl to head up toward the queens’ hall. Chime was climbing down the steps back to the teachers’ hall with Heart and Merit and the others, still arguing about the characteristics of shared dreams. Moon found himself standing next to Stone. Keeping his voice low, he asked, “Did you have it?”
Stone eyed him. “Did you?”
“Yes.” Moon didn’t ask Stone exactly what he had seen. Stone was the one responsible for Moon being the first consort of Indigo Cloud rather than a feral solitary, and also the closest thing Moon had ever had to the relationship many groundlings had with their male sire. Moon didn’t want to know what form Stone’s vision of the destruction of the court had taken, and he didn’t want to talk about his own. The images were still too vivid.
Stone jerked his head toward the stairwell down to the teachers’ hall. “Do the mentors know what it was?”
“They said it was a shared dream, not a vision. And no, they don’t know why it happened.” Moon still felt uneasy to the core. “You’ve never heard of anything like that?”
“No.” Stone looked away from the Arbora and the warriors who still gathered at the far end of the room, all restless and talking anxiously. “This isn’t just chance. Things like this don’t happen for no reason.”
Moon wished he could believe Stone was wrong.
CHAPTER TWO
One Change of the Month Later
Hunting was normally the Arbora’s job, though in the Reaches it was necessary to have warriors present to keep watch and help transport them and their prey to and from the colony tree. Moon had wondered occasionally why they didn’t just let the warriors do the hunting themselves, and attributed it to a combination of tradition and warriors being lazy. It had turned out the answer was that the warriors were terrible at hunting.
Moon crouched on the branch, his foot claws caught in the rough bark. “If you let me go down there and be the bait, we could get this over with.” The warriors were only doing the stalking today because their prey was a creature who had been pursuing the Arbora on their hunts and scaring away the usual game. It was just too big and too fast for the Arbora to deal with on their own, and it had already injured too many of them. The Arbora who had been attacked hadn’t been able to describe the predator well, and the hunter who had seen it best was still in a healing sleep back in the colony tree.
Chime, perched on the branch collar a little further down, said, “Uh, the hunt would be over with, all right. We’d have to spend the rest of the day recovering your body.”
Annoyed, Moon settled his wings. It was raining lightly, which wasn’t helping anyone’s temper. The already muted light falling through the multiple layers of leaves in the mountain-tree canopies was dim and more gray than green. The court had been tense since the shared dream, with everyone braced for it to be repeated, or for the event that it foretold to occur. Neither had happened. Nothing had turned up in the mentors’ augury, despite their best efforts. Jade had sent messages to their two closest allies, Sunset Water and Emerald Twilight, to see if they had had any similar experiences. The answer had been no, and the messages, delivered by warriors, had been too polite to convey what the other courts were actually thinking: that Indigo Cloud had collectively lost its mind.
Below, on a lower branch, one of the warriors startled a nest of flying lizards, sending them fleeing in a small explosion of multicolored squeaking, alerting half the Reaches to his presence. Moon hissed in frustration. He had been hunting for survival since he was a fledgling, while most of these warriors had still been playing in the nurseries. It had taken them three days to follow the signs and traces from the platform where the Arbora hunters had been attacked to here, and now they weren’t even sure where the thing had gone to ground. He told Chime, “I’ve been bait before—”
Chime nodded. “I know, and I find that terrifying.”
“—and I wasn’t talking to you.” He looked up at the smaller branch arching above them.
Jade perched up there, partially concealed from this angle by the drooping fronds of a fern tree that had taken root on the broad branch. She said, “Not every problem can be solved by you trying to get yourself killed.”
“Not every problem,” Moon agreed. He looked down toward the platforms nestled in the branches across from their vantage point. “But this one could be.”
The suspended forest was made up of layers and layers of these platforms, formed when dirt built up in the entwined mountain-tree branches until it had enough depth to grow grass, form ponds and swamps, and support entire forests of smaller trees. The platform their quarry might have gone to ground in was unusual in that another mountain-tree had taken root in it. Usually when this happened, the sapling mountain-tree died off or fell when its weight grew too heavy. This one was apparently intending to survive.
It was already a few hundred paces tall, its smaller canopy mingling with that of the mountain-tree that supported the platform, and its trunk was a good hundred paces around. Its roots had grown through the dirt of the platform and twined around the branches below it, and there was plenty of room to hide in that extensive and complex structure.
Jade said, definitively, “If anyone’s going to be bait, it’s me.”
Moon twitched his spines at her. “That is not fair.”
Jade snorted. “You sound like Frost.”
Moon had been teaching Frost and some of the older fledglings how to hunt, but there was no way he would have let any of them even come along to watch this. He had had to grow up the hard way, and while he was determined to teach all the fledglings how to take care of themselves in an emergency, he meant them to have a more normal Raksuran upbringing, which included comfortable nurseries guarded by determined Arbora and no fights to the death with suspended forest denizens. He pointed out, “Frost hasn’t done this before. I have.”
Jade’s sigh was part hiss of irritation. It didn’t sound like she would change her mind anytime soon.
Chime said, “This thing is too smart to be lured out by a Raksura acting as bait. If it wasn’t, we would have killed it already.” He added, “Maybe we need a mentor.”
He had a point. Moon just wished they could get this over with. He had been restless enough lately, worrying about the dream.
Ferns fluttered on the branch above, and Jade said, “I am not dragging a mentor all the way out here to tell us this damn thing is hiding under that sapling. We already know that.”
Moon had to say, “Probably hiding under the sapling.”
Jade swung down onto the lower branch to stand next to him. Exasp
erated, she said, “If we still can’t find this thing by twilight, I’ll—”
Then Chime said, “Wait.”
Moon turned. Chime had kept his gaze on the arched roots winding through the platform. He continued, “There was movement. Wait . . . There it is again.”
Jade stepped to Chime’s side and crouched to follow his sightline. She said, “At the base of the root that’s almost at the edge of the platform.”
“Yes.” Chime’s spines flicked in excitement. “I thought I saw the ground ripple. Now there’s a furrow.”
Moon saw it now, a too-perfect circle in the moss-covered dirt, next to one of the sapling’s roots. It shaped the outline of something with a big round body. Too big. But the Arbora had all agreed that the creature had attacked from under the top dirt and moss layer of a platform. Maybe they only saw a small part of it, Moon thought. Maybe the rest of it had been hidden. It would explain the warriors’ difficulty in following its trail.
Jade dove off the branch collar and spread her wings to drop silently. Moon jumped after her, and heard Chime’s claws scrabble on the wood as he scrambled to stay with them.
Jade landed on a branch a hundred or so paces down. It was closer to eye level with the platform that had the sapling, though still far enough away to keep the predator there from sensing their presence. At least, Moon hoped so.
As Moon landed beside Jade and furled his wings, Balm climbed out of concealment behind a big knot of red tree fungus. She said, “You saw something?”
“Chime did.” Jade pointed out the furrow for Balm, then glanced around at the surrounding branches. Another dozen or so warriors were hidden in various spots around them, some well-concealed, others peeking curiously out. “Now we just have to figure out how to do this.”
Balm leaned back to pass the word along to Briar, who was still crouched behind the fungus. Chime said, “Can we just . . . leap on it? All that dirt on top of it should keep it from reacting too quickly.”
Sometimes it was easy to tell that Chime had come late to being a warrior. His knowledge of how to attack things from the air was still sporadic. Keeping his voice low, Moon started to explain, “Digging itself just under the surface like that is probably an attack position—”
The predator burst out of the ground, spraying dirt and moss clumps, with so much force the mountain-tree sapling shook. It leapt forward off the platform, the round armored body blossoming with grasping limbs. Diagonal bands of flesh snapped out from under the upper shell. Moon snarled in astonishment. Chime said, a little unnecessarily, “Wait, it’s got wings!”
Jade launched herself into the air as the predator dove toward them. Moon knew she was going for the eyes or the head, and he leapt off the branch and aimed for the chest.
Moon swept in as the limbs on this side flailed at him. He twisted under and in toward the predator’s lower body, getting a brief glimpse of small mouths surrounded by tiny tentacles lining each jointed limb. It jerked at the last second and he missed, hitting its side below the first row of limbs instead of the underbelly. Then its body snapped upright as something knocked the creature backward; that had to be Jade, landing on the head. Hopefully an irritated Raksuran queen was more than this thing had counted on.
Moon held on with all his claws, trying to see a vulnerable point. He had temporarily lost his bearings and wasn’t sure which way was up and which down; the sinking feeling in his stomach told him they were freefalling. The thing must be a glider and Jade had knocked it right out of the air.
A limb groped for him and he slashed it away, then managed to get a look up toward the head. Jade ripped at the predator’s face but she was far too close to that wide mouth. The limbs reached up to drag at her. The armor around the cheeks moved and Moon’s heart thumped in terror; the creature might be able to extend its jaw to close on her.
Before he could yell a warning, Jade planted a powerful clawed foot in the creature’s jaw hinge. Moon heard a gurgling noise go through its body. That would hold it for a moment, but they were still falling and running out of time.
Moon couldn’t see any vulnerable point nearby and scrambled down the armored body, headed for the back end. If there was any other opening, it might be down there.
He reached the rear section and saw a thin spot in the armor around a puckered opening. He stabbed his claws into it. The predator jerked, its body contracted, and Moon looked back in time to see Jade swing out of range of its mouth.
Then he heard Balm shouting, “Drop, drop, now!”
Moon yelled, “Jade, drop!” and let go.
The predator tumbled away, but a stray limb slapped Moon in the head. He rolled and managed to get his wings out, his eyes filling with pain-tears. He squinted to see and made out Jade, just a blurry blue shape cupping her wings to slow her fall.
The predator fell toward the mist barrier hiding the lower levels of the forest. It rolled upright and shot its wings out—and then something large, dark, and fast knocked it out of the air.
Moon let his breath out in relief, flapping to stay aloft. He had wondered where Stone was.
There was a flurry of motion, some of the predator’s limbs went flying, and the two combatants fell below the mist. Moon landed on the nearest branch, a little winded.
Another warrior dove down, aiming to land beside him. Moon saw the vivid green scales with the blue undersheen, and growled.
River landed anyway. One of his virtues was that he wasn’t afraid of Moon, even though every time they had fought, Moon had won. River said, in disgust, “That was typical.”
Over the past couple of turns River’s position had moved from insisting that Moon was embarrassing the court by existing to insisting that Moon was embarrassing the court by not behaving like a proper consort. Moon said, “You need to find another reason to hate me and we can just talk about that all the time.”
“There’s so many to choose from, I get confused.” River flicked spines in derision.
Moon sighed. He decided to try honesty. “You thought Jade and I were going to get killed and it scared you and this is the only way you know how to say it.”
That worked. River snarled and fled the branch.
Stone reappeared, flapping up through the mist, carrying the creature clutched in his front claws. Its lower body hung open, guts dripping out. Stone circled around and dropped it on the platform.
Moon jumped off the branch and banked down to land nearby. Jade beat him there. As Chime, Balm, and the other warriors swept in, Stone shook his spines out and dragged his claws through the tufts of grass to get the foul-smelling ichor off them.
Stone shifted down to groundling to say, “Were you trying to kill it or just annoy it?”
“I didn’t have time to choose a better approach. I didn’t want it to get away.” Jade circled around toward the creature’s head.
Moon told Stone, “We were slowing it down for you, because you’re old.”
Stone’s expression was eloquent of the wish to slap Moon in the head. He said, “Slowing it down by throwing yourselves into its mouth? Did you think it was a picky eater?”
Chime said helpfully, “I think it only looked like they were doing that from a higher angle.”
Jade prodded a broken gliding wing with her foot-claws. “Why didn’t we know this thing could fly?”
Balm looked pointedly at Briar, whose spines drooped in dismay. Briar had been in charge of the group of warriors who had tracked the creature here. Briar said, “We thought it was climbing between platforms on branches. I guess this explains why we kept losing its trail.”
It did explain that. Moon was inclined to be sympathetic, especially now that they knew the warriors hadn’t actually lost their quarry and they hadn’t been stalking an unoccupied platform all this time.
Jade seemed to agree. She let her breath out and looked around at the gathered warriors. There were twenty of them here, female and male, older and more experienced like Vine and Sage, and younger and possibly even
more experienced like Song and Root. After three days taking turns hunting and tracking, they all looked tired and bedraggled. Jade said, “No one’s dead, and we got the stupid thing. That’s all that matters.”
The warriors all flicked spines in relieved agreement. Stone didn’t look impressed, but then he usually didn’t.
Sand, who had been watching the surrounding branches, said, “Jade, Aura’s coming back.”
Moon turned to look. The four warriors who had been scouting the surrounding clearings were circling down toward the platform. Jade stepped forward as they landed. Their spines all twitched anxiously, but none of them seemed to be hurt. Aura said, “Jade, we found something you need to see. There’s a groundling flying boat.”
Everyone stared, the dead predator temporarily forgotten.
“Serene found it,” Aura continued. Behind her, Serene nodded, her spines signaling excited confirmation. “She heard something and went to check it out, and there it was.”
As Aura paused for breath, Moon asked, “Golden Islanders?” The Indigo Cloud court had had to borrow wind-ships from a Golden Islander family of scholars and traders for the long journey from the old colony in the east to the Reaches. Moon had friends among them that it would be good to see again. From the way Chime’s spines had just lifted with excitement, he felt the same way.
“No, not them.” Aura still looked worried. “It’s not a wind-ship, not anything like one.”
That wasn’t such good news. Jade frowned. “What was it doing? Did you see what sort of groundlings were aboard?”
“It’s just floating there,” Serene said.
“We couldn’t see anyone aboard,” Aura added. “We didn’t get too close. We didn’t want them to see us, and we were afraid they might be looking out through the window openings.”
This ... could be a problem, Moon thought. He found himself meeting Stone’s sour gaze. Yes, the Golden Islanders were the only groundlings who would be visiting the Reaches for a good reason. And if this flying boat wasn’t just hopelessly lost, it might be looking specifically for the Indigo Cloud colony tree.