THE FALLING WORLD

The night before Jade left for Ocean Winter, Moon had a stupid argument with Chime.

“You’re going?” Moon asked, startled. Jade would be taking five warriors with her, which was usual for a queen making a visit to another court, but he hadn’t thought Chime would be one of them.

Chime looked up, worried. “You don’t want me to go?”

They were in the greeting hall, the heart of the Indigo Cloud court’s colony tree, sitting near the pool fed by a narrow fall of water that streamed down the polished wood wall. The hall lay at the bottom of the huge well that spiraled through the center of the tree, stairways criss-crossing upward, leading to overhanging balconies, and the soft illumination coming from shells spelled to glow that formed part of the decorative inlay. When they had first arrived here nearly a turn ago, the place had been desolate and empty; now it was busy with warriors flitting around the upper levels and Arbora bustling back and forth, storing away baskets of roots. One of the more important harvests had ended today, so there was going to be a gathering to celebrate it, and to wish Jade luck on her trading trip.

Moon shrugged. “No, no, it’s fine if you go. I just thought … You aren’t normally excited about leaving the colony.” He had been certain that Chime would use the fact that Moon wasn’t going as an excuse to stay behind as well. Five changes of the month ago, when they had returned from Opal Night, Chime had acted as if he never wanted to leave the court again. A normal warrior would have been honored to go on a trip with the court’s sister queen, but then Chime wasn’t a normal warrior. Moon wasn’t a normal consort, either, and that was one of the reasons why they had been drawn to each other.

“I know. I’m not.” Chime ran his fingers through the water at the edge of the pool, startling a few tiny flying lizards who had taken up residence there. He was in his groundling form, where he had dark bronze skin, fluffy light hair, and usually a stubborn expression, though now he just looked thoughtful and a little worried. When he shifted, he would be a dark reflective blue, with a gold sheen under his scales. Moon’s groundling form was much the same, lean and angular, with dark bronze skin, dark hair and green eyes. Chime continued, “But I’m hoping that if I talk to the Ocean Winter Arbora, they’ll let me into their libraries.” He shrugged uneasily. “It’s an older court. Maybe they’ll have something on Arbora who change into warriors.”

“Something that Opal Night didn’t have?” Moon asked, and tried not to sound skeptical. Opal Night was one of the oldest courts in the Reaches, possibly the oldest one, and Chime had been all through their libraries.

Chime sighed, partly resigned and partly annoyed, as he was well aware of all these objections. “I know. But Opal Night’s always been a prosperous court, as far back as their histories go. Their recorded instances of this—” he waved at himself “—happening were all secondhand from other courts. Ocean Winter is old, but it’s never been as big. I’m just hoping they have a firsthand account somewhere.”

Moon said, “Or a firsthand account of how someone got changed back.” Shifting was what defined a Raksura; you were either an Aeriat—an infertile warrior or a fertile consort or queen, who shifted to a winged form—or an Arbora who shifted to a wingless form but still had the colorful scales, the razor claws, the tail, the spines, and the other things that made you Raksura. But before Moon had come to Indigo Cloud, Chime had been an Arbora mentor, and had shifted one day and found himself a warrior, gaining wings but losing the powers of healing and divination that only Arbora mentors had. He had never been reconciled to the change.

At Opal Night, Chime had found mentions of Arbora transforming into warriors, and confirmation of what they already knew, that it only happened to courts under pressure from disease, food shortages, or reduced population. He hadn’t found any mention of mentors-turned-warriors having odd flashes of insight or being able to hear things they shouldn’t. Chime had had moments where he knew upper air dwellers like cloud-walkers or sky-sailors were passing overhead, and sometimes he could hear a distant rumble that might be the voices of the mountain-trees.

Chime had left Opal Night with little more knowledge than he had started with, and a promise from some of the mentors to send word to him if they stumbled on any more information in their own searches. Moon didn’t think he was going to get anything better than that at Ocean Winter.

Chime poked absently at one of the lizards, which hissed at him and fluttered its wings. “I’m a fool, I know that too.”

“I don’t think you’re a fool. I just … have a lot of experience with looking for things without much chance of finding them, for turns and turns.” Moon had been orphaned as a fledgling and grew up outside the courts, not even knowing he was a Raksura or what a Raksura was. Being found and hauled away to Indigo Cloud had been filled with revelations, some of them disturbing. He didn’t regret any of it now, but he could sympathize with both the need to dig into the unknown and the urge to leave things as they were.

Chime grimaced. “You found what you were looking for.”

“It found me, a long time after I gave up.” Moon watched the Arbora, mainly Rill, Weave, Snap, and Bark rolling out the mats and cushions across the hall floor where everyone would sit for the gathering. The air was filled with the scents of baking flatbread, spiced roots, and other treats. He had never thought he would have a home of any kind, let alone one like this. He had trouble imagining wanting anything else, now. Maybe he didn’t have as much sympathy for Chime’s problem as he should. Chime had grown up with this, knowing who he was, protected by a large number of affectionate and quarrelsome Raksura.

“So I should give up?” Chime didn’t sound impressed. “And somehow the answer will just show up?”

“No.” There wasn’t much resemblance between the two situations, after all. “But I think …” Moon realized he was about to tell Chime that he should give up, just accept what had happened to him. It sounded like good advice inside his head, but he had the feeling that once he said it, it would sound terrible. “I don’t know what I think.” And if it was making Chime feel better to search for answers, then he didn’t want to discourage him.

“I think you think I’m wasting my effort.”

“No, I don’t think that. It’s not like you have other things to do.” Chime stared at him, and Moon thought, why did I say that? He seemed to have lost what little ability he had had to talk to people. “That’s not what I meant.”

Blossom called out, “Come on, we’re ready!” and Chime pushed to his feet and stalked away before Moon could say anything else.

“I said something stupid to Chime,” Moon told Jade later in her bower.

“You had an argument?” she asked. It was long after the gathering, and she was sitting on a fur mat, sorting out jewelry to take with her tomorrow. Just because Indigo Cloud had the upper hand in this alliance didn’t mean Jade didn’t have to try to impress the reigning Queen of Ocean Winter. Not that Moon thought Jade needed anything but herself to impress anyone with. Like all Raksuran queens, she had no groundling form and could shift only between her winged form and a wingless shape that looked more like an Arbora. Her scales were blue, with a silver-gray web pattern. Behind her head, the frills and spines formed an elaborate mane, reaching all the way down her back to her tail.

Ocean Winter had already visited Indigo Cloud for a formal greeting between courts. The sister queen had come with her consort, and it had all been very correct and dull. Now Jade was going to return their visit so they could work out the details of a trading agreement between the two courts. Since the alliance between Opal Night, the most powerful court in the Reaches, they had had more greetings and requests for alliances than they could handle. Ocean Winter was not a particularly prestigious court, and Jade had decided it was better if Moon didn’t accompany her, so as to make it clear just which court was the one begging for a trade alliance.

Moon put the kettle on the heated stones in the bowl hearth set into the floor. Mentors could spell stones and plants and other objects to make them produce light or heat, something else important to the court that Chime couldn’t do anymore. “I don’t think you can call it an argument when one person says stupid things and the other just stares at them.”

Jade looked up, lifting one scaled brow. “I think you can call that an argument.”

“I talked to him later at the gathering, and I think he was over it, but … I don’t want to tell him he should stop trying to find out more about what happened to him.” Chime was increasingly obsessed with exploring what it meant to change from a mentor to a warrior, and the strange and erratic flashes of insight he had were sometimes helpful, and more often just taunting reminders of the mentors’ skills and powers he no longer had. “But …”

“But you think he should stop.”

“Yes. I do.” Moon shook his head. He knew he was a fatalist. He had spent most of his life not expecting to be particularly happy or comfortable, looking for the basics of shelter, food, and company that wasn’t actively trying to kill him. Maybe he just didn’t understand what Chime was really looking for or why. But Moon had gotten the answers he had needed from Opal Night, so maybe he was right that he didn’t understand Chime’s situation as much as he thought he did. “Maybe that’s just me.”

“I don’t know.” Jade sighed. “This court has had so many changes in the past few turns, but nothing has been as strange as what happened to Chime when he changed.” She gathered the jewelry into a heap and set it aside. “He’s going to have to work it out for himself, to try to find a mental place where he can live with it.”

“So you think I should just shut up.”

Jade smiled. “I think you should shut up and come over here.”

Later, half-asleep and sated, Jade sleeping on top of him with one leg still pressed possessively between his thighs, Moon decided Jade was right and he should just keep his mouth shut about it. Chime would be leaving tomorrow with Jade and the others, and by the time he came back there would be other things to talk about. Moon’s opinion wasn’t going to change, and Chime needed to work this out for himself.

TWENTY DAYS LATER

Moon circled the pond. Maybe he should bring the Sky Copper clutch out here to teach them about drains, since that was apparently going to be the main concern of the Indigo Cloud colony for the rest of their lives.

Snap surfaced with a spray of muddy water and gasped. “I think I see the problem.”

Blossom sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I think I see the problem, too.” She was an Arbora teacher, and rightfully should be inside doing something more important, but had been dragged out here to give her opinion. Moon was out here just because he was bored.

Bramble and Blaze, both female Arbora hunters, flicked their spines in a particularly disparaging way. Blaze said, “We’ve heard that before, Snap.”

Snap shook water and mud out of his frills, spraying Moon and Blossom. “This time I’m sure!” He took a deep breath and went under again.

Blossom brushed the mud off her scales and said, “I hope he’s right about this. We don’t want to lose those lower platforms.”

Moon ignored the mud and absently raked his foot claws through the grass. They were on one of the colony tree’s higher platforms, the great dark wall of the tree’s trunk looming behind them. The sunlight was green-tinted from the spreading canopy hundreds of paces above their heads, and it held the other wild mountain-trees at bay, so they formed a large clearing around the colony tree. The platforms were made by intertwined branches and heavy vines and turns of windblown dirt, now supporting gardens or fields or whole forests of smaller trees. This platform hadn’t been replanted yet and was too overgrown with grasses and wild saplings to tell what it had once been used for. Blossom thought it was too high up in the tree for root vegetables or orchards, and that it might once have been a pleasure garden, with elaborate plantings and water features. Now it was just waste ground, buzzing with clouds of gnats that hung in the humid warm season air of the suspended forest. Whatever this platform had once been, Snap, one of the Arbora in charge of the colony tree’s ancient, extensive, and recalcitrant drainage system, thought the pond here was a key element in the blockages they were trying to clear.

Moon just wished there was something to do that was a little more distracting.

He looked up and realized that everyone was staring at him sympathetically. Blossom smiled. “They’ll be back soon.”

Moon tried not to twitch at being read so easily. He said, “I’m not worried.” Jade had taken not only Chime but her clutchmate Balm, plus Song and Root, all of whom were Moon’s best friends in the court. She had taken Coil, one of the reigning queen Pearl’s warriors, with her as well, but Moon wasn’t attached to him. When they had first left, it had been easier to resign himself to missing them. Now that he was expecting them back any day, he was just restless and impatient.

Then Bramble said, “Hey, how long has he been down there?”

Moon glanced at the water, where a few bubbles broke the surface. Too few bubbles.

Blossom’s eyes widened in horror. She dove in head first and Moon jumped in after her.

The pond was deeper than it looked, the water clouded and muddy. Moon followed the thrashing down to the bottom and found Blossom in the process of extracting a struggling Snap from a hole in the wall of the pond. All Moon could see was churning mud and struggling bodies. He caught hold of a root and felt Blossom’s claws rip at a bundle of smaller roots and debris jammed into a channel outlet. The bundle must have trapped one of Snap’s arms. Blossom had managed to loosen the debris and partly drag it out of the channel, but Snap still struggled to free himself. Moon used his longer reach to work his way further down the channel, got a better grip on the roots, and wrenched backward at the same time as Blossom.

The obstruction came loose with a rush of more muddy water, and all three of them shot to the surface. Moon shook mud out of his head frills to find Bramble crouched on the edge of the bank, hissing urgently at him. “Moon, Moon, stay down!”

He blinked at her, but sunk lower down into the water so most of his head was concealed. Snap coughed and sputtered as Blossom dragged him up onto the bank. “You idiot,” she said, shaking off the root tendrils trapped in her spines. “You could have—”

Blaze, standing and facing away from the pond, hissed at her to be quiet. Moon lifted up just enough to get a view past her.

Five strange warriors and a queen were landing on the platform about thirty paces away. Moon hissed under his breath and sunk further down under the water, so only the top of his head and his muddy frills were visible. What a time for visitors to arrive. Consorts were expected to behave in certain ways, which didn’t include sloshing around in muddy ponds clearing drains.

The group wasn’t attempting to approach the pond. Raksuran etiquette demanded that strangers be greeted by a female warrior, so they were politely ignoring the two hunters and Blossom, who had just punched Snap in the stomach, apparently to help him bring up the last of the muddy water he had swallowed.

Two warriors from Indigo Cloud’s patrol circled and then dropped toward the platform. They landed at an angle so the visitors turned toward them and away from the pond. It was Serene and Sand, both warriors of Jade’s faction, and their slightly fixed expressions told Moon they knew he was here.

Moon debated staying underwater, but as the only Aeriat who had matte black scales, consorts were distinctive. It was much harder to tell the difference between a consort and a warrior in their groundling forms, and Moon’s clothes wouldn’t betray him either. He had come out here expecting to help with the work, so was wearing an old pair of pants cut off at the knees due to the acidic red mud patches on the lower garden platforms, and a light-colored shirt with tears and stains acquired while playing with the kids. And he had left his consort’s jewelry in his bower. He decided to chance it, and shifted to groundling.

Bramble edged sideways as Moon pulled himself out of the pond, sitting where she could partially block the strangers’ view of him. Moon crouched on the bank to wring the muddy water out of his shirt, keeping his head down. Serene had just shifted to groundling to greet the strangers, and was young enough to show her nervousness at the responsibility. She had the coppery skin and reddish curly hair that ran in one of the Indigo Cloud bloodlines. She was dressed in a light shirt and pants, wearing only some copper bead jewelry, but then she obviously hadn’t expected to be doing this when she had come out this morning. “I’m Serene, of Indigo Cloud.”

The foreign queen was young too, with emerald green scales and a gold web overlay. Her jewelry was moderately impressive, with a belt and pectoral that were all polished opals to keep from competing with the brightness of her scales. There were three female warriors in the group, all larger and more physically impressive than Serene. One stepped forward and said, “I’m Muse, of Ocean Winter. Our daughter queen has come to greet your queens, and to discuss trading between our courts.”

Moon froze. Ocean Winter? Bramble hissed in surprise. Blossom and Snap stared, startled. Blaze turned to Moon, drawing breath to speak, but Blossom thumped her in the shoulder and she subsided. Sand looked confused, and Serene frowned, and started to say, “But our sister queen—”

Moon caught her eye and gave one sharp shake of his head. Serene swallowed the words and finished with, “—is not here, today, and—

But of course our reigning queen will greet you, if you follow us to our greeting hall.”

Muse consulted her queen with a look, got a nod, and told Serene. “We’re happy to follow you.”

Serene and Sand leapt into flight and the Ocean Winter group followed. They all flapped up to catch a draft and ride it down toward the knothole of the colony tree.

The Arbora all turned to Moon at once. Blossom whispered, “What does it mean? Are they lying about what court they come from?”

Bramble’s spines rippled worriedly. “Maybe they left before Jade arrived.”

The timing was wrong. Unless this group had been making a tour of foreign courts, or had decided to sit out in the forest for days, that just didn’t make sense. Moon pushed to his feet. “Get back inside. Pass the word to the others, tell the Arbora to get off the platforms for now, and warn the warriors that something might be wrong.”

The visitors had reached the knothole and disappeared inside it. Moon shifted, bounded off the edge of the platform, and snapped his wings out.

A few flaps took him down to one of the largest platforms, tucked up against the trunk of the tree. When they had first arrived here it had been a weedy overgrown plot of encroaching jungle. Now it was covered with neat beds filled with roots, berry vines, and tea plants. There weren’t any Arbora working out here today, most of their efforts being concentrated on the other still overgrown platforms. The bridges and ladder structures all connected here, since it had a doorway into the trunk. During the day while the Arbora were out working, the heavy wooden plug that sealed it would be open.

Moon took the paths through the beds and bounded through the round doorway. The young soldier who sat nearby on guard duty leapt to her feet and hissed in reflex. “Something wrong, consort?”

Moon paused to say, “A daughter queen from Ocean Winter just arrived to talk about trade with us.”

She stared. “But … Oh.” Her expression went grim as she realized the possible implications. “I’ll send someone to tell Knell!”

“Tell Stone, too!” Moon had already turned away, headed down the nearest passage into the colony. He was tempted to look for Stone first, but he knew if he didn’t go straight to Pearl she would be furious. And he needed Pearl’s temper working for him right now instead of against him.

He took the back way up, half-climbing, half-leaping up one of the winding stairs that paralleled the central well, past the carvings formed out of the smooth wood, detailed depictions of plants, huge landscapes, stylized images of the wind, of Aeriat in flight or battle or Arbora at work. He went all the way up to the passages that joined the queens’ and consorts’ levels. There was a back way into Pearl’s bower from here, though Moon was reluctant to use it. He didn’t like using the front way that led from the queens’ hall either, but he didn’t want to risk being seen by the visitors yet.

He took the back passage into Pearl’s territory, shifting to groundling as he passed the carved arch of intertwined warriors and Arbora that guarded the anteroom. This was only the second or third time he had seen these rooms, but he didn’t take the time to look around.

He stopped in the doorway of the main room, which held a lavish bathing pool and in the back, a large hanging bed draped with fine fabrics. Pearl sat in the center of the room, near the hearth bowl, on a pallet of furs and cushions. She was in her winged form, not her Arbora form, so she wasn’t all that relaxed, despite appearances. It made it much less awkward that she wasn’t alone. Her new consort Ember sat beside the hearth, pouring out tea, and some warriors sat nearby, Drift, Floret, and a few others. But not River.

Moon cleared his throat, which was as close as Raksura got to the groundling customs of knocking or clapping your hands or stamping a foot to request entrance to someone else’s space. He knew Pearl wasn’t going to like the fact that he was wet and muddy, but he didn’t care.

Everyone in the room stared at him. The warriors’ expressions ranged from dubious to anticipatory amusement. Ember just set the teapot down and looked worried. Pearl flicked a spine in annoyance. Her scales were brilliant gold, overlaid with a webbed pattern of deepest indigo blue. The frilled mane behind her head was like 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. She eyed Moon. “What have you done?”

Moon stepped further inside. “A daughter queen from Ocean Winter just arrived.”

He didn’t have to explain what that meant. Pearl’s spines flared and she uncoiled and came to her feet in one motion. “With what news?”

Moon said, “They said they were here to talk about trade.”

Floret hissed in realization, and the other warriors stirred uneasily, the amusement giving way to confusion. Pearl’s spines twitched in suspicion and speculation. Moon felt a rush of relief that he didn’t have to explain the implications. Pearl was so deliberately difficult at times, it was hard to remember that she was a battle-hardened reigning queen. Pearl said, “Someone send to the Arbora, tell the ones working outside to come in—”

“I did that already,” Moon interrupted, then wished he could swallow the words. Surely there was a more diplomatic way to say it, but he had no idea what it was. Drift, pushing to his feet to take the message, froze.

Pearl hissed in reflex, then flicked her spines again. “Did the strangers see you?”

“No. Serene greeted them—”

Footsteps pattered behind him as Heart, the chief of the mentors, arrived in a rush, sliding to a halt when she saw Moon. She was young for her position in the colony, and was a particularly beautiful Arbora, with dark amber skin and bronze-colored hair in her groundling form. Moon finished, “I tried to signal her not to mention Jade. I think she understood.”

Heart said, “She did. No one’s said anything. The Ocean Winter warriors are acting as if nothing’s wrong, as if …” She hesitated, threw a glance at Moon. “As if Jade and the others never got there.”

More noise in the passage as Knell and Vine arrived, both hastily shifting to groundling as they saw Pearl. Knell was one of Chime’s clutchmates, though he didn’t much resemble Chime. His groundling form had dark hair and his skin was more brown than bronze. To Moon’s relief, Stone shouldered past them. He stepped up next to Moon, but didn’t say anything, just watched Pearl. Like Moon, he was lean and tall, and a consort, but unlike Moon he was very old, though his groundling form didn’t necessarily show it, unless you knew what it meant when the color of Raksuran groundling skin faded to gray. He had one bad eye, partially blinded by a white haze across the pupil.

“Did the foreign queen bring a consort this time?” Pearl stepped around the cushions, her claws clicking on the polished wood floor.

“No. But she’s young,” Heart said. “The Ocean Winter daughter queen. Younger than Jade. Maybe she doesn’t have one yet.”

Pearl hissed under her breath. “Has there been any word from the patrols?”

Knell said, “No one’s reported anything unusual.”

Vine added, “I was just out there. All the Aeriat patrols are circling the clearing. No one’s missing.”

Pearl turned to Floret. “You and Vine get out there, take the patrols and make a search of the area outside the clearing. Don’t be obvious about it.”

Floret gave her a nod and hurried out with Vine. Moon twitched, wanting to follow, but he couldn’t be in two places at once.

“But why would Ocean Winter want to war with us?” Ember said. He was young, delicate, and perfect, where Moon was gawky, awkward, and strange. He had stayed seated on the cushions, and set the teapot aside. “They’re an ally with Sunset Water and Emerald Twilight, too. We’re also tied to Opal Night, and all their allies. It doesn’t make sense.”

Pearl tilted her head in acknowledgement, which Moon was glad to see. Ember had a better understanding of court politics in the Reaches than anyone else in Indigo Cloud. Pearl said, “We’ll see what they say when I greet them.” She nodded to Stone. “I’ll want you there. And you,” she added to Moon, while he was frantically groping for a good reason to include himself in the group. She eyed him with disfavor. “Just clean yourself up first.”

Moon raced up to his bower, jumped in and out of the bathing pool, and threw on a good set of clothes. The shirt and pants were black, because that was easier to match jewel colors with and consorts often wore dark colors. He added the sash with the red woven through it and his consort’s bracelet and had to fight down a surge of despair. Don’t panic. You don’t know anything yet.

He made it down to the consorts’ passage to the queens’ hall, a small chamber with walls carved with scenes of Arbora building platform bridges in the suspended forest, framed by towering mountain-trees. It was meant to be a private retiring room for consorts, where they could compose themselves before joining any gathering in the larger hall beyond. Moon found Stone waiting there, his head cocked to listen. He hadn’t bothered to change clothes, or put on jewelry, but then he never did. Stone said quietly, “They just got up here.”

Moon nodded. He could hear a faint murmur of voices, Serene making polite stilted small talk with Muse, the Ocean Winter warrior. It was Serene’s first time to greet visitors from another court, and it must be even more nerve-racking to do it under these circumstances. Moon whispered, “Aren’t you going to tell me it’s nothing, that they’re fine? That one of the warriors got hurt, and it delayed them?”

“After twenty days?” Stone snorted derisively. “Not likely.” But he gave Moon’s shoulder a rough nudge. “Whatever happened, Jade can handle it.”

That was what was worrying Moon. That whatever it was, Jade hadn’t managed to deal with it and return yet.

Ember came down the steps into the passage. He had changed clothes too, though there had been nothing wrong with the ones he had been wearing. He said softly, “Pearl is about to come out.” Watching Moon with sympathy, he added, “I’m sure they’re fine.”

Moon took that in the spirit that it was meant and just nodded tightly. Stone didn’t acknowledge Ember at all, and Ember just eyed him warily and didn’t say anything. It wasn’t that Stone didn’t like Ember, so much as that he was completely indifferent to Ember’s existence.

They heard Pearl’s voice as she came out of her bower into the queens’ hall. Ember slipped past Moon, waited exactly long enough at the entrance, then stepped into the hall. Moon didn’t need to see to know Ember had arrived at the seating area at precisely the same moment as Pearl without appearing to hurry, and was now seated gracefully on a cushion behind her. Usually Moon got to witness this performance, since Jade as sister queen was supposed to greet visiting queens first, and Moon would have been out there with her.

Stone waited a moment to give Ember time to get seated, then started out. Moon followed.

Moon usually found it awkward and unnerving, even when Jade was here, to walk out into the hall under the scrutiny of a foreign queen. Now he was just impatient. One side of the queens’ hall looked 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 that fell down to a shallow pool, and above it a huge sculpture of a queen with outspread wings stretched out across the walls to circle the entire chamber, meeting tip to tip. The queen’s scales, set with polished sunstones, glinted faintly in the soft light.

On the ring of cushions facing the Ocean Winter queen and her warriors were Pearl, Ember, and Heart, with several of Pearl’s favored warriors scattered behind her.

As Moon took one of the cushions behind Stone, he caught the Ocean Winter queen eyeing him surreptitiously. Moon set his jaw and didn’t snarl. He could hear faint sounds echoing up from below, the voices of the Arbora and warriors, louder than usual at this time because everyone had been called inside.

Pearl introduced him. “Moon of Opal Night, first consort to Jade, our sister queen.” She tilted her head to indicate the foreign queen. “Garnet, daughter queen of Ocean Winter.”

Garnet inclined her head, and betrayed a trace of nerves as she settled her spines. She said, “We came primarily to continue the talk of trade begun during the earlier visit by our sister queen. We heard from her that you were interested in trading for seedlings and grains. We have those in abundance, but we are a small court and lack—”

“Is that the only reason you came?” Pearl interrupted.

Garnet frowned, and her warriors tensed, startled. “We also want to formalize our alliance. We heard from other courts you were much interested in trading partners.”

“Which courts?”

“Sunset Water, to name one.” Garnet flattened her spines in an effort of self-control. “If that information was not meant to be shared, I apologize.” She hesitated, then admitted, “But we also wish to begin trade as soon as possible. We have more crops than we know what to do with but very little woven cloth.”

Pearl sat back, flicked a spine. “Why didn’t you bring a consort?”

Garnet’s spines stiffened in offense, but she kept her voice under control. “I haven’t taken one yet.” Her gaze went from Pearl to Stone and Moon, to Heart, as if she was realizing that there might be something to their attitude besides the usual structured rudeness of a strange court. “What is this? If you have changed your minds about an alliance between our courts—”

Calmly, Pearl said, “If you’re lying, I’ll rip you apart.”

Garnet surged to her feet and snarled, “Try it.”

Moon moved before he knew he meant to, shoved to his feet and shifted to his winged form in one motion. His spines flared, his wings half extended, his snarl echoed through the open well of the tree.

Heart, the warriors, and Ember flinched in startled reflex. Stone didn’t move, and neither did Pearl. Garnet’s spines shivered in reaction. Her gaze went from Moon to Pearl, now more shocked than angry. She said, “What is it? Lying about what?” Her voice was rough.

Moon growled low in his throat. She’s playacting. But deep in his heart, he knew a Raksuran queen that young could easily fake anger, but not the dismay and frustration of the unjustly insulted.

With the same lazy calm, Pearl said, “Moon, sit down and be quiet.”

Moon lashed his tail and sank down to sit again. After a moment he managed to shift to his groundling form. Garnet took a deep breath and sat down as well, her gaze still fixed on Pearl.

His expression completely opaque, Stone said, “Tell her.”

Beside Pearl, Heart said, “Yes. I don’t think she’s lying.”

One of Garnet’s warriors hissed, and Garnet quieted her with a look. She regarded Pearl again, no less angry but a great deal less confused. “What do you think we’ve done?”

Pearl said, “Twenty days ago our sister queen, Jade, left for Ocean Winter with five of her warriors to make arrangements for the trade alliance we had discussed when your sister queen visited two changes of the month previously.”

Garnet’s eyes narrowed. “Twenty days … We left six days ago and saw nothing of them. How do I know this is true …?” Her gaze went to Moon and the words trailed off.

Moon didn’t know what he looked like, but it must have convinced her. Garnet shook her head impatiently. “We haven’t seen your sister queen. She did not arrive at our court before we left. I don’t know what proof I can offer.”

Pearl tilted her head thoughtfully. “Perhaps you wish to leave immediately, to return to your court to ask if anyone has seen her.”

Garnet didn’t fall for that. She said, “I assume that would only confirm your suspicions. In your place, it would certainly confirm mine.” She hesitated, then said, “You can keep me here as hostage, and send someone to our court to search.”

Her largest female warrior hissed a protest again, and actually reached to touch Garnet’s arm. Garnet shook her off impatiently.

Pearl flexed her claws, their jeweled sheaths catching the light. But she said, “That is … wise of you.”

Moon stirred in frustration, wanting to object or argue. Even if we left for Ocean Winter now, they’ve had days to hide the evidence. But a reluctant part of him found Garnet’s sincerity convincing.

Garnet said, “All I can say is that Ocean Winter wants and needs alliances and trade. There is no advantage we could get from attacking you.” She flicked another look at Moon. “The regard your court is held in by Opal Night is well known. Ocean Winter has no desire to make enemies.”

Pearl eyed her for a long moment, and Garnet didn’t flinch. Then Pearl flicked her claws. “If you will leave the hall for a time, we will discuss our suspicions, and your generous offer.”

Pearl sent Garnet and her warriors to the guest quarters, with a guard of warriors and soldiers to watch them and make sure they stayed where they were put. Bone, Bell, and Knell had arrived at the queens’ level by that point, and joined the conference. Bone was the leader of the hunters’ caste, and his heavily muscled groundling form showed the signs of age and past desperate encounters. He had white hair and an ashy cast to his dark bronze skin, and a ring of old scar tissue around his neck where something had once tried to bite his head off.

Bell was another of Knell and Chime’s clutchmates, and the leader of the Arbora teachers’ caste. He had the same dark hair and skin as Knell, and the same height, but was a bit slimmer.

They waited until Serene returned to report that the guests were safely ensconced and had seemed to settle in without protest.

Stone broke the uneasy silence. “The foreign daughter queen was right. There’s no reason for them to attack us.”

Moon had gotten to his feet to pace. He had managed to stay in his groundling form, but he had to move. Even though he wasn’t sure he believed it, he said, “They could take whatever they want instead of trading for it.”

“They don’t want the damn cloth.” Pearl’s voice was an annoyed growl. “That’s just their excuse. They want an alliance.”

Moon stopped to stare at her. “How do you know?”

Pearl flicked her claws at Ember, who said, “They’re a small court, and they’ve had setbacks. They’ve had trouble getting consorts. Indigo Cloud is small and new to the Reaches, but you already have two powerful allies.” He leaned forward. “It’s not what you have now that they’re interested in. It’s what you’ll have in the future: consorts from Emerald Twilight’s and Opal Night’s primary bloodlines.” Ember spread his hands. “It might be twenty turns before there are young Indigo Cloud consorts available, but the suit of a queen from a longtime ally is more likely to succeed. So they meant to become a longtime ally.”

Moon shook his head and walked to the edge of the hall, looking down into the central well. Spell-lights gleamed a warm yellow-white from balconies and doorways all the way down to the greeting hall. Cool air flowed up the well, laced with the scents of green plants and wet earth, clean water, bread baking, and a myriad of Raksura. Not enough to even come close to filling the huge colony tree, but there were a few more than there had been when they had first arrived here.

He wanted Ocean Winter to be guilty because then he would know exactly where Jade and the others were, and it would only be a matter of finding a way to get to them. If Ocean Winter was innocent, then it meant something had happened on the way there. And that meant the best chance was that there was nothing left to find but bone fragments.

Knell said, “We’ll know more when the patrols send word. If it’s really just the Ocean Winter Queen and her five warriors, then there isn’t much chance this is a trick.”

Moon stepped off the edge of the platform, shifted and snapped out his wings, and drifted all the way down.

Moon ended up in the bottom of the tree, below the Arbora’s work rooms and storage areas. The passages here were more cave-like, the walls rough wood with no carving, the floors knobby and uneven underfoot. He was sitting on a landing near the edge of an open channel that curved down a set of rough stairs. Water rushed down it, mostly obscured by curtains of moss, then dropped to vanish into an enclosed pipe which diverted waste water down into the roots. The water was drawn up naturally through the tree, then tapped at various points to use for drinking and bathing. Most of it left the tree through the waterfall that fell from the knothole, but some of it was diverted down here, for the lower level bathing rooms and for flushing the latrines. When the drains worked the way they were supposed to.

The channel was flowing fast and the smell wasn’t obtrusive, though it attracted gnats and beetles. There was no one else down here.

A faint scrape from above was his only warning. He looked up to see Stone’s big black winged formed snaking down the stairwell, his claws catching in nooks and crannies. Stone’s winged form was far larger than any other Raksura Moon had ever seen; tip to tip his wings were more than three times the size of Moon’s twenty pace span. Raksuran queens and consorts grew larger and stronger as they grew older, and as line grandfather to Indigo Cloud, Stone was very old. Stone sank down onto the stairs and shifted all in one motion, flowing into his groundling form.

Moon said, “Word from the patrols?”

“Not yet.” He sat down next to Moon. He was the closest thing Moon had ever had to a father, the one responsible for finding Moon in the wilds of the east and bringing him to Indigo Cloud.

“I should have gone with her,” Moon said. He figured that was what Stone had come down here to say, and he wanted to get it out there first.

But Stone said, “We won’t know that until we find them. Maybe you would have just been more of a hindrance than usual.”

Moon couldn’t handle optimism at the moment. And it didn’t sound as if Stone expected the patrols to find Ocean Winter warriors lurking in the outskirts of the clearing, either. “You mean if they’re dead, then it’s a good thing I’m still around to keep the alliance with Opal Night.” He didn’t even know if that was true. He had no idea what happened to consorts whose queens died before they made a clutch. It was the clutch that made a consort part of a court, not just being taken by a queen.

Stone hissed in more than his usual level of annoyance. “You’re good at feeling sorry for yourself, but I don’t want to hear it just now.”

Moon snarled and pushed to his feet. Stone caught his arm and yanked him back down. Stone said, “The question is, are you going to help me go after them?”

Moon’s heart thumped. “Will Pearl try to stop me from going?”

“Not this time. This isn’t a normal situation, and there’s no daughter queen to lead the search.” Moon knew his expression was dubious, and Stone gave him an exasperated look. “Pearl is Jade’s birthqueen, remember?”

Sometimes Moon didn’t remember it. It was hard to remember that Pearl and Jade had been disagreeing on things long before Moon had come along, that because they fought didn’t mean Pearl wanted Jade dead. His nomadic past had made him used to thinking of relationships as temporary and fragile. “Who should we take with us?”

Stone frowned, but when he spoke it was clear he had already been making plans. “I want to bring some hunters. Chances are whatever happened, it was when they camped for the night. Hunters will be better at picking up trails and traces on the platforms.”

Moon rubbed his eyes, trying to banish all the images of what that “whatever” might be. The warriors he trusted most, Chime, Balm, Song, and Root, were with Jade. “I want Floret and Vine.” They were experienced at travel away from the court, and good fighters.

Stone grunted agreement. “Keep thinking. We’ll need twice as many warriors as Arbora, so they can switch out carrying duties. And a mentor.”

A mentor to scry for them and help find the way, and for healing. And to keep us from falling into whatever trap caught Jade, Moon thought.

Moon was climbing the back stairway, on his way up to the queens’ hall, when River stepped out of a cross-passage.

Moon was in groundling form and had a moment to wonder if this was an ambush. It wouldn’t be the first time. When Moon had first arrived at the court, he and River would have been happy to see each other dead, and even though the dislike was no longer actively violent, they would never be friends. Before Moon’s bloodline had been traced to Opal Night, River had made it plain that he thought a feral solitary of a consort was bad for the court and a waste of Jade’s time. But it couldn’t be an ambush now; River was in groundling form too, tall and slim with coppery skin and dark hair, and he was alone.

Queens took warrior lovers all the time, but Pearl had turned River away because he had, for many turns, taken the place of a consort. Now that she had a real consort again, there was no place for River. He was still in Pearl’s faction, but he seemed to have lost much of his status in the court. The politics of status between warriors of different factions and alliances within the court was more difficult to navigate than interactions between any species Moon had ever encountered before, and he still didn’t completely understand it.

“What?” Moon demanded. River had clearly been lying in wait here for him, knowing Moon tended to take this secluded stairwell that led up through the bowers when he wanted to avoid the central well.

River said, “I want to go with you. To look for Jade and the others.” As Moon stared, he added, “You know why.”

“I don’t know why. I don’t think about you, I don’t care about you, nobody does.”

That wasn’t meant to refer to the end of River’s time in Pearl’s bed, but River clearly took it that way. River’s voice tightened, and he said, “I have more experience than the others. I’m a better choice.”

Pearl had sent River to follow them to the freshwater sea, on the trip to recapture the colony tree’s seed, and he had come with them to the leviathan. They had been in a great deal of danger and all the warriors involved had proved themselves under pressure. Floret and Vine had gone on that trip too, which was why Moon wanted them now. Drift had been there as well, but Moon hated him worse than River. He said, “It’ll be a good chance to give the others some experience.”

River hissed in derision. “You’re going to trust Jade’s life to idiots who have never left the court before?”

“Better idiots than you,” Moon said, but River’s assumption that Jade was alive made his heart pound a little faster. It was stupid, since River knew no more about what had happened than anyone else, but it still made Moon feel better.

River snapped, “You know you can trust me to fight for the court. That’s all that should matter.” He hesitated, then set his jaw as if it took effort to get the next words out. “If I’m passed over, everyone will know that I’m nothing in this court.”

Moon rubbed the bridge of his nose, and managed not to say that was River’s own fault for trading so much on his relationship with Pearl that too many of the other warriors were happy to see him lose status. He hated River and River hated him, but they had fought together before, and River had argued, but never refused to obey Jade. And after their trip through the leviathan’s insides, Moon knew River wouldn’t break when confronted with the unexpected.

He didn’t distrust the other warriors, but he needed to concentrate on finding the missing, not wonder if the warriors were going to listen to a consort in a crisis, or if they were going to do something stupid because there wasn’t a queen to keep them in line. He didn’t know that River would listen to him all the time either, but at least River wasn’t stupid.

He growled, “All right. If Stone agrees.” That last was pointless, since Stone’s indifference to River’s presence or absence was even more complete than his indifference to Ember, but it gave Moon the option to change his mind.

River hissed, partly in relief and partly in some emotion that clearly wasn’t gratitude. But he said, “Thank you.”

Moon snarled at him and went on up the stairs.

As the sun set, the warriors brought the word that no sign or scent of any attack had been found in the colony tree’s immediate vicinity. Moon wasn’t surprised.

Moon was in the queens’ hall to hear the news, with Stone, Pearl, Ember, a dozen warriors, and the Arbora caste leaders Bone, Heart, Bell, and Knell.

Floret finished describing the search and sat down, watching Pearl uneasily. Pearl was on her feet, facing the central well. She said finally, “So there is no attack.”

One of the warriors in the back of the group stirred. Floret ignored him, but Pearl tilted her head in his direction. “Yes?”

Band, a young male warrior with more mouth than brains, said, “Just because they aren’t out there today doesn’t mean they aren’t on their way. Maybe they meant to arrive after the foreign queen left.”

Moon saw Floret give Vine a look of long-suffering annoyance, and Vine returned it. Apparently they had been hearing this from the younger warriors all during the search.

Knell twitched around to face Band and said, “As soon as the Ocean Winter party arrived, we’d know something was wrong. We would be on the watch for an attack. It doesn’t make sense for them to plan to arrive later.” He glanced at Pearl. “It doesn’t make sense for them to send a queen in here at all, if they meant to attack.”

“It doesn’t make sense for them to plan an attack at all,” Pearl snapped. She paced a few steps, lashing her tail. “And I don’t believe they have.”

Moon didn’t believe it anymore, either. It had just been a faint hope to cling to, to make the terrible day bearable. He said, “I want to leave tomorrow, to go look for them.”

Pearl turned to face him. One brow lifted in ironic comment, she said, “I know. You and Stone have already been recruiting warriors and Arbora to go with you.”

Stone growled under his breath and started to speak, but Moon said first, “If we’d waited, you would have been angry about that, too.” In Pearl’s current mood, direct honesty seemed the best defense. “You know there isn’t time to waste.”

Pearl’s spines twitched at his tone, and for an instant he was afraid she was going to say that there could very well be plenty of time, since the chance that Jade’s group had survived was almost negligible. But she said, “I can’t leave a consort in charge of a court.”

Moon stared, taken aback. Even Stone looked a little startled. The warriors on the other side of the hearth looked horrified.

Ember said anxiously, “We’re talking about Moon, right? Moon in charge of the court? Because I don’t think I should be left in charge of the court.”

It had occurred to Moon that Pearl might want to stop him from going, but it had never crossed his mind that she might want to go in his place. He hesitated, realizing it did make sense. Pearl was faster, stronger than Moon, her senses more acute. She and Stone working together would be a powerful force. But Moon would be stuck here, with no idea what was happening, unable to affect the search. Maybe that’s for the best, he thought, though it hurt. Maybe he was too emotional, and it would cause him to make bad decisions. Pearl’s record for making bad decisions wasn’t so great either, but in this maybe her perceptions would be clearer than his. He swallowed down the protest and the lump in his throat, and managed, “You could. I’ll do it. I’ll stay, if you want to go.”

The scaled furrows in Pearl’s brow deepened as she considered it.

Then Heart said reluctantly, “Pearl, you can’t. We have to let Garnet go eventually, and the word will spread everywhere.”

Knell added cautiously, “And if something happened, and you didn’t come back …”

Bone sounded reluctant, but seconded Knell. “With you gone, Moon would have to fight half the idiot warriors in the court. Not that that would be a bad thing, necessarily, but wearying for the rest of us.” He added, “We can’t chance leaving the court without a reigning queen. We just can’t do it.”

“‘We?’” Pearl said with a hint of a growl, but Moon could see the moment had passed. “Very well.” She regarded Moon again. “You leave tomorrow morning.”

Stone pushed to his feet. “Then we have a lot to do tonight.”

Pearl called Moon and Stone to the queens’ hall in the late evening. Moon had expected to be summoned for an argument about something at some point. But when they arrived, Pearl was facing Garnet and one of her warriors.

Uneasy, Moon took a seat beside Stone. Floret, Vine, and a few other warriors were seated behind Pearl. Behind Pearl’s back, Floret leaned out and tried to give Moon some sort of warning signal involving lifted eyebrows, but he had no idea what she meant by it.

With something that might be malice or irony, Pearl said, “Garnet has a request.”

Stone sighed. Moon eyed Garnet warily. She said, “I know you are planning to retrace your queen’s route to Ocean Winter. I want my warrior Venture to accompany you.” She gestured to the female warrior seated at her side, who was big, broad-shouldered even for an Aeriat, with copper skin and light-colored curling hair. She gazed back at Moon, her expression cool and confident.

This was an easy decision. Moon said, “No.”

Garnet was taken aback. She turned to Pearl, who tilted her head in a way that clearly said, he’s not my consort.

Talking to Pearl, Garnet said, “Venture is the clutchmate of our reigning queen. She will be helpful to you in your search, and if it takes you into Ocean Winter territory, she can explain your presence to our patrols.”

Moon said, “And betray us at the first opportunity, if you’re lying.”

Venture’s expression tightened, and Garnet’s face worked as she struggled not to react. Garnet said finally, “The consort speaks freely.”

Pearl’s spines flicked once in amusement at Garnet’s discomfiture. “It’s his bloodline. His birthqueen is Malachite of Opal Night.” She added dryly, “She also speaks freely.”

Pearl had a love-hate relationship with Moon’s recently discovered lineage. She hated that an older and more powerful queen than herself had a proprietary interest in Moon, but she loved to use Opal Night’s patronage as a diplomatic club on other courts. Every court that might consider crossing Indigo Cloud was well aware that they weren’t just dealing with a small struggling court recently re-established in its ancestral territory, they were dealing with Malachite, the Terror of the Western Reaches.

Garnet bared her teeth briefly at the implied threat. She said, “Allowing my warrior to accompany him will be a sign of good faith on your part.”

“I don’t have good faith,” Moon said, “so why should I show signs of it?”

Garnet said pointedly, “Good faith on your reigning queen’s part.”

Pearl abruptly tired of the game. In a tone that meant that she was not interested in further arguments, she said to Moon, “Take her with you.”

Moon set his jaw, but he had had a moment to consider that there had to be a reason Garnet wanted Venture to go with them. If Venture tried to sabotage the search party, then Moon would have proof that this was a plot by Ocean Winter. He said, “Yes, Pearl.”

Pearl regarded him with narrowed eyes.

Moon and Stone spent the rest of the evening in the sitting area in the consorts’ bowers, sending for various warriors and Arbora to talk to them about the journey, and waiting for word from the mentors.

The debate about how many warriors to take had been a serious one. Moon asked for twenty, though he didn’t think Pearl would agree; that number came too close to leaving the court short of warriors, which they couldn’t afford to do whether Ocean Winter was really their enemy or not. Pearl refused, but not for that reason. “If we send so many into Ocean Winter’s territory, they can take it as an act of war,” she said. “Then they would have a legitimate reason to attack us, if we can’t prove they had something to do with Jade’s disappearance. If they did, it may have been their plan all along.” She added, “There’s a reason we usually only send five warriors on trips to strange courts.”

Moon conceded this point reluctantly, and they ended up with nine warriors: Floret, Sage, Serene, River, Drift, Sand, Aura, Briar, and Band. Sand was in Jade’s faction, Aura and Briar were young female warriors who hadn’t really picked a faction yet, and Drift was Drift. Moon had wanted Sage, who was also in Pearl’s faction but was an easygoing older male who had never given Moon any problems. Pearl insisted on keeping Vine, since Moon was taking Floret, and Vine was good at keeping the younger males in line. Band was one of the younger males who needed to be kept in line.

Many of the hunters had volunteered to go, but Bone had chosen Bramble, Strike, Plum, Salt, and Braid. “They’re the best trackers,” Bone told Moon and Stone. “Sharp eyes and sharp noses.” He squeezed Moon’s shoulder, but didn’t add any reassurances. They both knew too much about the dangers of the Reaches.

And then there was Venture. Moon wasn’t sure what her purpose was, but he was fairly sure it wouldn’t be to help them find Jade and the others.

When it was late and the colony was mostly quiet, Stone said, “Go get some sleep.”

Moon shook his head. “I don’t think I can.”

“Do it anyway.” Stone gave him a shove that was half annoyance and half affection. “We fly tomorrow.”

So involved in planning the trip, Moon had almost forgotten that part. He left, grudgingly.

He didn’t want to go to his own bower and he didn’t want to go to Jade’s or Chime’s. Those rooms, empty except for the lingering traces of their scent, would just emphasize their absence.

And he didn’t want to think about a future where their scent was all that he had left of them.

So Moon went down to the teachers’ hall and then to the nurseries.

The nurseries were as familiar a place as Moon’s own bower; more so, because he spent more time here. He stepped through the door with its carvings of fledglings and baby Arbora at play into the big low-ceilinged chamber. The spelled shell-lights lit a maze of smaller rooms opening off the main area, which held several shallow fountain pools for washing and playing. Everyone was asleep, the younger fledglings and babies curled up in nests of furs and blankets on the floor, along with the Arbora who watched over them.

Blossom, sleeping near the doorway, woke as Moon stepped inside and started to sit up. He motioned her to go back to sleep, and stepped past her to head for the room at the back of the nurseries.

In a cubby carved out of the wall, the Sky Copper clutch slept in a nest of blankets. Rill slept only a few paces away. She cracked an eyelid as Moon sat down, then subsided as she saw it was him.

After a few moments, someone stirred and then Frost crept out. She sat next to Moon and curled against his side. “I wish I could go with you.”

It wasn’t a surprise that the news had spread among the fledglings. “I wish you could come, too.” Within the past couple of months, talking to Frost had become less like negotiating with a small angry hostage and more like talking with Spring, the female warrior fledgling from the last clutch of Amber, the sister queen who had died before Moon came to Indigo Cloud. Frost was turning from child into adolescent, but also settling into the court. Moon said, “You’re a little too small yet.”

“I know.” Frost sighed. “I can’t wait until I’m big enough to go off to rescue everyone. Then you won’t have to do it.”

That was a dire thought. “Hopefully when you’re big enough, everyone won’t need rescuing so often.”

Frost gave him a pitying look, as if Moon’s unreal expectations made her sad but she wasn’t going to try to disillusion him. She tugged on his arm. “Come sleep with us.”

Moon followed her into the cubby where Bitter and Thorn were curled up. Moon took a blanket from the stack against the wall and lay down next to them.

Sleep was still elusive, but at least here he could relax, surrounded by the scents and soft sounds of the court’s future.

Moon woke before dawn with Bitter tucked up against his chest. He disentangled himself and eased away without waking the fledglings.

As he went up the back stairwell, he could hear the court stirring, earlier than normal. He ran into Heart in the interior passage to the queens’ hall. She looked hollow-eyed and tired; she and the other mentors must have been scrying all night. Before he could ask, Heart reported, “No one sees death. We can’t see what happened, but we don’t see death.”

“Do you see us finding them?” Moon asked.

Heart reached up to put her hands on his shoulders and said, “Not yet. But you know how this works. Sometimes we have to be … closer to the event, to get anything useful.”

“I don’t know how this works.” Moon stepped back, putting a tight lid on his seething frustration. “Did you decide who’s coming with us?” They were taking a mentor, both for scrying along the way and in the hope that Jade and the others were stuck somewhere with too many of the group wounded to transport.

“Merit will go.” Heart pushed her hair back, betraying some frustration. “I wish I could, but—”

“I know.” Heart was chief mentor and they needed her here. This wasn’t like the journey to find the seed, where Flower had been their best hope. And Merit was the second most powerful mentor in the court. “It’s a good choice.”

Heart pressed her lips together for a moment, then met Moon’s gaze. “Take care of him. I know he can help you find … whatever happened.”

Moon just nodded. Mostly what he wished at this moment was that Flower was still alive. He didn’t want a mentor he needed to take care of, he wanted a mentor who could take care of him and anyone else who needed it.

Not long after dawn, they gathered in the greeting hall, and Moon checked over the supplies everyone had collected. Even though they were bringing a mentor, Moon made sure everyone had flints to start a fire with, plus blankets, dried meat for emergencies, waterskins, and cutting tools. Even Band didn’t need to have it explained to him that if he was separated from the others, it would be stupid to die because he didn’t have anything to carry water with or no ability to start a fire.

Merit had prepared a pack with an extensive collection of dried herbs and powders, most for making medical simples and a few to help with augury, and the other things he needed for healing. “Where’s your blanket?” Moon asked him. “And some spare clothes?”

Merit blinked, looked around as if he had misplaced them, then said, “Oh, I forgot.”

As Merit hurried away to pack another bag, Moon rubbed at the incipient headache in his temple. Merit wasn’t a fool by any stretch of the imagination, he was just intensely focused on his duty as a mentor at the moment. Moon would probably have to put another Arbora in charge of him to make sure he ate and slept regularly.

He looked up to see Venture watching him with bemusement, as if it was a very good joke to see a consort pretending to have any idea what a long journey might be like. He ignored her, since from Garnet’s comments he was certain Ocean Winter knew of his origins, so Venture was just trying to deliberately provoke him.

Most of the court had gathered to see them off, but Moon was surprised to see Pearl drop down from the queens’ hall. She usually didn’t bother to watch anyone leave the court, no matter how important the trip.

The warriors had gathered, the Arbora had decided who would carry them, and Stone was already outside on the knothole’s ledge when Pearl stopped Moon with a claw on his arm. Her voice low, she said, “Bring them back.”

Moon felt his heart thump. Everyone had been carefully preparing him and themselves for the worst. He said, “I will,” putting all the conviction he could into it, even knowing it might be a lie.

Pearl stepped back, and Moon led the others away and into flight.

By agreement, Stone flew ahead to scout the most likely route Jade would have taken to Ocean Winter and look for signs of camps. Stone could fly much farther and much faster than Moon or the warriors, so he could search much more territory in a day than they could, crossing the path they thought Jade would have taken. His senses were far more acute, as well. They knew Jade had been in no hurry, and would probably have camped each night, and there would be evidence of that.

Flying through the suspended forest was normally a fascinating experience, with mountain-trees grown in all sorts of bizarre shapes, their platforms of entwined branches supporting small forests of their own, with waterfalls, pools, herds of different grasseaters, colonies of treelings, and all sorts of animals and strange fungi and plant growths. Now Moon was just impatient to keep going, to get out of Indigo Cloud’s territory as quickly as possible.

Warriors should be able to fly most of the day without stopping, but because six of them were carrying Arbora, Moon called a halt three times, to let the Arbora stretch and rest briefly and so the warriors could trade carrying duties. Moon knew from personal experience that being carried in flight was uncomfortable, so at the first stop it was a relief to find that the Arbora were taking it well. Bramble and Braid had actually fallen asleep, and the others, having never been so far from the colony, were too interested in the scenery to mind the discomfort.

Stone still hadn’t returned by the time the light started to fail, so Moon found a platform they could camp on for the night. It was a relatively small one in a large and gnarled mountain-tree, with a pool collecting runoff from the trunk. Several large spreading fern trees had taken root on it, and the grass had been recently flattened by a herd of grasseaters who must have reached it by one of the masses of entangled vines and roots that formed bridges from the other platforms.

As soon as they were set on their feet, the hunters spread out to search the platform for signs of dangerous predators. Moon sent Sand and Aura up into the fern trees to keep watch and made the warriors stay put until Bramble signaled it was safe.

With the hunters in charge, the minimal camp went together fast, including a dirt hearth and shelters constructed from stretches of fabric made water resistant with tree sap. There weren’t any rocks handy, so Merit used chunks of mountain-tree wood that was too old and hard to burn, spelling them for fireless heat.

Moon sent River, Drift, and Briar with two of the hunters, Plum and Salt, to take a kill from the grasseater herd on a lower platform. He wanted to keep them all fed at every opportunity, to be prepared for anything. Once they were gone, Moon shifted to groundling, but he was so tense it didn’t help much to lose the weight of his wings.

He paced on the flattened grass near the hearth. The other warriors distributed themselves around the camp, stretching and talking quietly. Floret stayed near Moon, as if waiting for instructions. He wished he could think of some.

Bramble brought the water kettle and set it on the wood to heat. Then Venture strolled up. She said, “You’ve done well today, consort.”

There was no rational response to that, so Moon didn’t make one. Bramble, crouched near his feet, hissed deep in her throat.

Venture asked Floret, “Are we waiting here for the line-grandfather?”

Floret, rather pointedly, asked Moon, “Moon, are we to wait here for Stone?”

Moon nodded, still lost in thought.

Floret told Venture, “Yes, we’re waiting for the line-grandfather.”

Venture gave her an ironic nod. “The consort spoke freely at the court, with a reigning queen present. Why not now?”

Floret tilted her head, annoyance turning to something more dangerous. Venture clearly had opinions about young consorts who thought they were qualified to lead bands of warriors and Arbora. But then young consorts who had never been feral solitaries normally would never have left the court without a queen to protect them, either the queen they had been taken by or a close relative. From Venture’s point of view, Moon’s presence here was foolhardy, rash, and scandalous, and Pearl was worse for allowing it. It was a valid point of view for a Raksura, except that Moon was tired of hearing about it. He said, “Venture, why are you with Garnet?”

A flicker of surprise and something else crossed Venture’s expression. She said, “Queens are always accompanied by female warriors. Maybe with your background you haven’t had that explained to you—”

“Queens are accompanied by their clutchmates. You’re supposedly the clutchmate of the reigning queen. Did she not want you? Or does she not trust Garnet?”

Venture stiffened in offense. A queen usually kept any female warrior clutchmates close by; they were important advisors and companions. If Venture was with a daughter queen, then either the reigning queen didn’t like her or she was meant to keep an eye on Garnet. Floret and Bramble watched her with fixed expressions. Bramble, in groundling form, flexed her shoulders as if raising spines she didn’t have at the moment; under her sleeveless shirt her muscles rippled.

Venture showed her teeth briefly. “I was sent to Garnet as an honor to her,” she said, and walked away.

Floret and Bramble both relaxed. Floret muttered, “If I said something that idiotic, Pearl would slap me so hard my fangs would fly out.”

Bramble, dipping the metal travel cups into the tea, snorted. “I guess it’s no fun for her to scratch when someone scratches back. Why did she ask you about Stone, Floret?”

Floret sat beside the hearth. “She’s pretending she thinks I’m in charge to make us angry.”

Bramble took Moon’s wrist and put a cup in his hand. “Oh, wonderful. It’s lovely enough having her along without that.”

“I know. It’s not as if we can’t argue and fight on our own, we don’t need an outsider poking us.”

She was right about that.

Merit came to the hearth, carrying his pack, and Moon asked him, “Can you do an augury?”

Merit nodded. “I’ll get started right away.”

Just before the light failed entirely, River and Drift and the others returned with two kills, big furry lopers. “We only need one,” Moon said. They had all eaten that morning, and he didn’t think an easy day’s flight was enough to make them that hungry.

River dumped the second carcass and shook blood out of his frills. “Stone’s coming back here tonight, isn’t he?”

It was all Moon could think about, so he wasn’t certain how he had forgotten that Stone was going to need to eat too. “You’re right,” he said.

River stared at him blankly, apparently having prepared a defense that now he couldn’t use. Moon turned and went back to the hearth.

It was full night when Stone arrived.

Moon sensed him first, the near-silent movement of air over big wings, the sudden cessation of calls and hums and chirps from the night-dwelling insects, birds, lizards, treelings, frogs, and other creatures. A moment later the sentries hissed softly.

Merit had spelled some moss and wood for light, and Moon pushed to his feet as Stone’s big shape appeared at the edge of the platform. Stone landed, shifted to groundling, and crossed toward the hearth.

Moon found himself holding his breath. Stone said, “I found their first camp.”

“But not them,” Moon said. He was half-expecting the tension in his chest to ease a little, but it didn’t.

“No. No sign of any trouble, either. The firepit and latrine were covered, nothing left behind. No blood scent.” Stone stretched and rubbed the back of his neck. “I searched all around it, down to the forest floor.”

Moon reminded himself the goal today had been to pick up their trail, and Stone had done that. No one had really expected that they would find anything so soon.

Stone returned to his winged form long enough to eat, then shifted back to groundling and joined Moon at the hearth. Floret, Serene, and Bramble sat nearby. The other Arbora and the warriors who weren’t on guard duty kept a distance, some still eating and others already retiring into the shelters to rest.

Stone took the cup Bramble handed him and said, “How did it go today? Any trouble?”

“No.” Moon knew he meant Venture. She had gone into a shelter with Aura and Band. “The only thing she could do is delay us. I’ll leave her behind if she tries.” He had thought Venture might fake an accident and claim to be too hurt to fly; if so, she had better be able to display an open wound or a broken bone.

Stone didn’t comment on that. “I’ll start out again after I get some sleep.” He took a sip of tea and winced.

Bramble said, “It’s good tea. You’re too picky.”

Stone ruffled her hair. “I’m a delicate consort.”

Stone lay down on a blanket by the hearth, since he only meant to sleep for a few hours. Moon went into the little shelter the Arbora had built for him, mainly because he needed some privacy from the others. He could feel everyone staring at him, wondering what was going on in his head, if he would break down.

When Bramble crawled in after him, he said, “I want to be alone.”

Bramble said, “Floret told me to sleep with you.”

“What?” Moon stared at her.

“To keep Venture from trying anything,” she explained.

Moon needed a chaperone about as much as he needed another arm. “I’ll rip her head off if she tries anything,” he said, exasperated.

“She doesn’t know that.” Bramble cracked her knuckles suggestively. “It’s my job to make sure you don’t have to rip her head off.”

Moon said, “Are you serious?”

“We tossed lots for it and I won.” Bramble handed him a blanket.

Moon threw the blanket down. “Fine. I’m not having sex with you.” It was something many groundling races would have found inexplicable, that Moon would be considered compromised by the close presence of an infertile warrior from another court, but not by Floret, an equally infertile warrior and not by Bramble, a fertile Arbora. It didn’t make much sense to Moon, either, at times.

Bramble pretended to look hurt. “I’m too proud to beg.” With a little exasperation, she added, “Strike will be in here too, and the others right next to us.” She sat cross-legged, facing him, and said seriously, “You need to let us protect you. Just let us worry about it, so you and Stone can worry about finding the others.”

Moon rubbed his forehead, trying to get past kneejerk annoyance and think. “Why would Venture come after me? It would just make Ocean Winter look worse. If Ocean Winter isn’t responsible for Jade and the others disappearing, it doesn’t make sense.”

Bramble said, “Venture might think we’re lying about Jade’s party being missing, that we’re just trying to get an advantage over them. Or maybe you’re right, this is all a trick to get rid of Garnet.”

Moon hadn’t said exactly that, but it was certainly a possibility. “If Garnet was away from Ocean Winter when Jade arrived, she might not know what happened. Or that anything happened.” Then the reigning queen had sent Garnet off on this supposed trading trip, hoping that Indigo Cloud would take revenge on her. Except that meant a large part of the Ocean Winter court had taken part in the conspiracy. That was a little much for even Moon’s suspicious nature. “That doesn’t sound likely.”

“No, it wouldn’t be a big plot, it would be a small one.” Bramble straightened her blanket. “Say Ocean Winter is innocent. But when Garnet arrives at Indigo Cloud, Venture realizes this is a chance to get rid of her. So she gets herself sent along with us, then she does something to you. Pearl assumes it really is war, and she kills Garnet in revenge for you and Jade.”

Moon lay down, head pillowed on one arm. The problem with that was that Venture would have to be willing to die to make it happen. And there would have to be a queen in Ocean Winter who would be willing to risk outright war with another court just to dispose of a rival. Even Halcyon hadn’t included a war in her plot against Tempest. “Is that what the Arbora think?”

“Not really,” Bramble admitted. “We talked about a lot of possibilities, but most of them are pretty unlikely.”

It was true. The most likely possibility was still the one that they could do nothing about, that Jade and the others had been attacked during the night at one of their camps, and that none of them had escaped. Moon tried to push those thoughts away, knowing they would accomplish nothing except to make him even more crazy.

From outside the shelter, Stone growled, “Shut up and go to sleep,” and that put an end to speculation for the night.

Moon woke before dawn with Bramble’s head pillowed on his hip and Strike curled up against his side. When Moon had first met Strike he had been an adolescent, one of the small group of Arbora hunters who had escaped the Fell attack on the old colony in the east. Now he was a little taller and broader, though still obviously young.

He shook them awake and sent them to get the others up. By the time the light changed from pre-dawn dark to gray morning, they were on their way.

The next two days went much the same as the first. Moon and the warriors flew through the day and made camp in the early evening. Then Stone arrived by sunset, having found another one of Jade’s camps, but no traces of anything happening to the Raksura who had camped there.

That was the most nerve-racking part of the day, waiting for Stone to return, knowing the word he might bring could end all hope. Moon spent it pacing, trying not to pace, keeping an eye on the warriors’ hunting efforts, and watching Merit scry. Merit was vague about his results, mostly because his results were vague. At least Moon knew he was trying hard, maybe too hard; all he did was scry, staying up most of the night to do so and sleeping during the day when he was being carried by a warrior. He staggered around blearily before they left camp every morning and had to be reminded to eat and wash. Moon worried that he would push himself too hard, but Merit insisted he was fine. “I know you’re thinking about how Flower died,” Merit said on the second morning. “But this is different. I’m a tenth her age.” Moon just hoped Merit wasn’t overestimating his stamina.

Venture was less trouble than Moon had expected; she mostly stayed with the younger warriors, who seemed overawed by her.

“Seemed” was the important point. On the third evening, when Venture was out hunting with Serene and Sand, Aura came to Moon’s hearth to report to Floret.

“She asks a lot of questions.” Aura wrapped her arms around her long legs. She was young, with dark copper skin and red-brown hair. Moon didn’t know much about her, except that she had Arbora clutchmates. She looked from Floret to Moon. “Mostly about Jade, and the consort, and the court. I think she doesn’t believe we’re telling the truth, that Jade was still at Indigo Cloud, hiding somewhere. That this is all a trick to make Ocean Winter look bad.”

Bramble, Merit, and Plum sat nearby, and River had crept close enough to listen. Floret frowned and glanced at Moon. “Can she really believe that?”

“It could be a trick,” Bramble said, and shooed away a flying frog that had landed on her pack. “She knew you’d tell us.”

Moon suspected Bramble didn’t want to hear evidence to contradict her own theories. As of last night, the Arbora had arrived at a consensus that this was an elaborate plot by Ocean Winter to take over Indigo Cloud’s territory. Moon had stopped listening at that point, so had no idea how this was supposed to be accomplished. He knew the Arbora were only doing it to occupy themselves on the long flights, coming up with complicated plots to argue the merits of over the hearth in the evening to keep from thinking about what might have happened to their lost queen and warriors. But it was too much for his already tense nerves.

Aura didn’t agree. She said, “No. Venture thinks Band and I are idiots. She thinks we’re so overawed by a reigning queen’s clutchmate showing us attention that we can’t think straight.”

River made a skeptical noise. Moon ignored him and said, “You can think straight. What about Band?”

Aura twitched a little uneasily. “I know he’s been rude to you,” she admitted. “But he’d never go against anything Pearl wanted.”

Everyone muttered agreement. Moon caught River’s eye, and River gave him a cynical shrug. To Aura, Moon said, “Make sure he’s not alone with her. I don’t want her to take advantage of him.” Band might not intentionally betray Pearl, but he might be talked into something stupid that would amount to the same thing.

Aura’s brow furrowed and she nodded seriously.

Aura went to rejoin the others and the Arbora huddled up to discuss this new information. Floret sat down and planted her chin in her hand. “That’s not good.”

River said, grimly, “Did you really think this was an Ocean Winter plot?”

“I wanted to.” Floret’s answer was bleak.

Moon rubbed the bridge of his nose, partly to conceal his expression. He had wanted to, as well.

At midmorning on the fourth day, their route took them near the camp Stone had located the day before. On impulse, Moon called a halt at it, to give the warriors a chance to switch out who was carrying an Arbora, and to give the Arbora a chance to stretch and rest. The place was just as Stone had described, a large platform hanging on the outer branches of the left hand cluster of a gnarled twinned mountain-thorn.

Standing in the sparse grass near the small stream, Moon looked up at the twisted thorn branches arching overhead. They were huge, each one supporting its own little forest of small spiral and fern trees, of bushes and puffblossoms and every other kind of foliage that called the Reaches home. The second half of the thorn hung to one side, blocking off the view of the other platforms and sheltering this one. It didn’t look so much like a tree as it did a giant carved puzzle, festooned with greenery. He wondered why Jade had chosen this spot; the lack of visibility was worrying, though it also meant that predators on the platforms of the other mountain-trees couldn’t see the camp. Maybe there was a storm and they needed the extra shelter.

There was little sign left of Jade’s camp, just the remains of the small firepit, the latrine spot, and a place where what had been a neat pile of fruit peels and other food debris had been turned into a nest by scavenging insects.

Moon paced absently around while the others explored or drank from the pond. They were here, he thought, days ago. Just days. But standing here he had the same feeling that he got in ancient groundling ruins: that an unbridgeable gulf of time separated him from the people who were once here.

A tiny spark of blue near the firepit caught his eye, and he dove for it as if he expected it to be the answer to something. But it was just a bead, stained with dirt. He dug around a little and found a few more and a frayed piece of thread. It hadn’t been torn off in a struggle, but looked as though the loose thread had finally given way under the weight of the beads.

He should just drop them. He knew they weren’t Jade’s, and he couldn’t remember if he had ever seen Chime or any of the others wear blue beads like this on their clothing. But he closed his hand around them and held them tightly, and after a moment dropped them into the bottom of his own pack.

That evening they made camp as usual, on a smaller platform in a young mountain-tree that had been crowded into a narrow column by more robust neighbors. It was the first platform Moon spotted in the area with a pond and no obvious signs of predators, and he couldn’t be bothered to find one that was more comfortable. Seeing Jade’s deserted camp had affected him more than he had expected, and his mood was so obviously dark that no one complained.

They set up camp, hunted and ate, and waited for Stone. Moon paced almost continuously, his nerves drawn tighter than ever. They were only two days from Ocean Winter at most. We have to be close. It was hard not to imagine scenarios where Stone discovered a camp with them all alive but the warriors too injured or sick to fly, and Jade guarding them and waiting for help to arrive.

But evening passed into dusk and then night fell, and Stone didn’t arrive.

Everyone except the lookouts huddled in worried groups; no one went to sleep. Floret, Bramble, Merit, and Strike sat at the hearth with Moon, not speaking. It was so late, Moon was starting to wonder desperately what they would do if Stone was lost too. Where is he? If Stone had found Jade and the others, if he had fallen into the same trap, whatever it was … Moon knew vaguely the area where they should search for him, but the suspended forest seemed so unbelievably vast at the moment.

Of everyone here, Moon knew he was the one most used to being miserable for long periods of time, and even he felt like he couldn’t take a moment more of this. He didn’t know how well the others could cope.

Then from the branch above Drift called out excitedly, “I hear him!”

No one needed to ask who he meant. His skin flushed hot with relief, Moon was on his feet in an instant and reached the edge of the platform just as Stone landed. He winced away from the rush of air from Stone’s wings, then Stone shifted down to groundling.

Moon demanded, “Well?”

Stone said, “I couldn’t find a camp.”

Merit had spelled some moss and clumps of flowers to light the camp, but Stone’s expression was hard to read. “What—” This was a setback, but not an insurmountable one. “We’ll just have to help you search tomorrow.”

“Moon.” Stone shook his head, weary, his shoulders hunched as if his back ached. “I couldn’t find a camp, because there isn’t one.”

Moon just stood there. For a long moment, he couldn’t understand what Stone was saying.

Stone stepped forward and put his hands on Moon’s shoulders. “The camp yesterday was the last one.”

Moon pulled away. Now he understood, but he didn’t want to. “But … That camp wasn’t disturbed. There was no sign of anything …”

“Whatever happened to them, it happened sometime after they left there.”

Moon turned away, taking a few steps into the dark at the edge of the platform. He wanted to shift and throw himself into the night; he wanted it so badly his blood burned with the need to change. But he knew if he did it would be a sign of failure and weakness, and he would lose the confidence of the warriors and Arbora. You can’t afford to break down, even for a moment. You need to keep searching. Jade, Chime, Balm, Song, Root, and Coil were depending on him.

He took a deep breath, forced down the sick disappointment. He turned back to Stone.

Stone hadn’t moved, and it occurred to Moon that he must be exhausted. Moon took his wrist and tugged, pulling him over to the hearth. The warriors and Arbora had been staring in dismay; now they moved, the warriors hurrying to bring Stone a portion of the meat left from their last kill, Strike and Plum putting a kettle on for fresh tea.

Stone didn’t groan, but he eased down to sit beside the hearth like he was in pain. Moon sat beside him. Stone put an arm around him, pulled him close, and gently bit his ear. He whispered, “This isn’t over.”

Moon nodded as he sat up, swallowing down the lump in his throat.

They sat there while Stone ate, the warriors and Arbora making occasional quiet comments to each other. No one asked what they were going to do now, a small mercy which Moon would be grateful for forever. When Floret asked Moon to approve her choice of who would stand watch for the rest of the night, Moon saw Venture watching them with a thoughtful expression. He wondered if she still thought they were acting all this out just to fool her. If she did, she must be a complete idiot.

When Stone was drinking tea, Merit cleared his throat.

Moon looked up, and Merit said, “I have an idea. I don’t know that it will work.”

Everyone stared at him and Moon’s heart thumped. He felt a little like a drowning groundling who had been tossed a lifeline. “Tell us.”

Merit took a deep breath and admitted, “I’ve tried scrying on Jade and Balm and Chime, trying to see where they are, and that’s not working. I want to try something else.”

Moon suppressed the urge to panic about the fact that Merit couldn’t see where they were. He managed, “What else is there?”

“I want to try to scry the last camp Stone found. Maybe I can see what they did, what they talked about, to give us some idea of what to do next, where to search.” He spread his hands. “I mean, we assume they just flew on in the direction of Ocean Winter. But if they didn’t, if they went hunting, or if someone was hurt that night at the camp.”

Stone had been listening intently. “Do it,” he told Merit.

Moon couldn’t tell if it sounded like a good idea or it sounded like grasping at the last fast-disappearing hope.

Merit nodded, both relieved and unnerved. “I need something from that camp first. If we can go back there tomorrow morning—”

“Wait.” Moon turned for his pack, and rummaged in it for the beads he had found. “These were near the fire pit, buried in the dirt. I think they came off a shirt or a pack.”

Merit held out his hand. “Is there still dirt on them?”

“A little.” Moon was just glad no one had asked him why he had picked them up.

He handed the beads over and Merit carefully rolled them on his palm. Merit muttered, “I think this will work.” He stumbled to his feet, still engrossed in the beads, and headed off toward the shelters. Plum and Salt got up and followed him without being asked. While Merit was auguring, he had no attention for anything else and needed to be guarded. The rest of the time he was so exhausted from the augury and the travel, he had no attention for anything else, and still needed to be guarded. The other Arbora were taking turns at it.

Moon blinked and rubbed his eyes, realizing he had drifted for a moment. He told Stone, “You need to get some sleep.”

Stone sighed, packed his cup away, and got up. “Come on.”

Moon shook his head. “I’m going to wait and see if Merit gets anything.”

“You don’t know how long it’ll take him.” Stone leaned down, caught Moon’s arm, and hauled him to his feet. “Merit can sleep tomorrow, and you have to be able to fly.”

Moon lay down in the shelter with Stone, not that he expected to sleep much. His thoughts chased in circles, and he slept for only moments at a time, until he woke in the deep gray-green light of early dawn to find Merit crouched just outside the shelter. Merit whispered, “I think I saw something.”

They flew back to the twinned mountain-thorn and reached it in the late afternoon. Moon chose the same landing spot as before, on the large platform where Jade’s deserted campsite lay. Tree frogs, each nearly as large as an Arbora, leapt away at their arrival, a good sign that the platform was still clear of predators. The light was murky, making the spot look subtly different. Somewhere above the mountain-trees’ multi-layered canopies, the sky had gone gray, threatening rain and throwing deep green-gray shadows across the suspended forest.

Despite its size and the complexity of the entwined branches, the mountain-thorn didn’t have nearly as many platforms as a mountain-tree and they were much smaller. Most of them were above this one, dripping curtains of vines and other vegetation. Moon thought their quarry, whatever it was, would be in the branches and the canopy, not on the exposed platforms. He turned to Merit. “Which way?”

Serene had been carrying Merit, who staggered a bit as he recovered from the flight. He yawned, looked up and around at the branches arching over them. “I’m not sure.”

Merit wasn’t exactly sure what he had seen in his vision, either, but his scrying had shown that someone, maybe Chime, had seen something astonishing. Merit had explained, “And I think Jade spoke to someone – something—in the mountain-thorn near their camp. I feel like there’s something there, some clue, and we just didn’t see it because we weren’t looking in the right place.”

Something astonishing. Moon didn’t like the sound of that. Astonishing things hidden in the bowels of mountain-thorns and other cave-like places were more likely to be dangerous than awe-inspiring. Merit had added, “But I don’t see death. I mean …” He ran a hand through his hair. He was hollow-eyed with exhaustion. “I don’t want to give false hope or anything. But I just don’t get any sense of death, or pain, or fear … I get surprise.”

“Surprise?” Stone repeated, his tone making it clear this was not the good news Merit seemed to think it was.

“Yes.” Merit had nodded. “I keep getting the feeling that they saw something that surprised them.”

Moon didn’t like the sound of that, either.

Now Moon told the hunters, “Find a way into the canopy. They would have had some reason to leave camp.” He turned to River. “You stay here with Drift and Briar and Venture.” As River opened his mouth to protest, he added, “If we walk into the same trap the others did, somebody’s got to get us out.”

River’s protest caught in his throat. “All right,” he said instead.

Turning to follow the hunters, Moon wasn’t sure why he had chosen River to guard his back. Maybe because he wasn’t sure what River would do if they didn’t return, whether he would come after them or go back to the court for help, but he knew River would do something. And because River was the one least likely to be influenced by anything Venture said. He had chosen Drift mostly to be company for River, and chosen Briar in case they needed a female warrior to do the thinking.

Venture didn’t protest being left behind. She looked disinterested in the whole process, as if certain now that the whole thing was an elaborate sham for her benefit.

Looking for food was the obvious reason to leave the platform, and the mountain-thorn’s enormous branches held whole forests of other trees, some of which probably bore fruit or berries. This platform was cradled in several branches, but the largest was the easiest and most obvious way into the canopy.

The hunters started up it, climbing to find a path along the branch through the thick clusters of symbiotic trees and plants. Moon, Stone, and the warriors followed, hanging back to give the hunters room to look for tracks.

Moon used his foot claws for purchase on the branch’s uneven surface as it sloped upward. Within moments the relatively open platform turned into a tunnel formed by the thick foliage. The scents grew thick, too, with the mountain-thorn’s own faintly sweet musk heavy in the air. Behind Moon, Stone hissed in annoyance and shifted to his groundling form; the passage was too narrow for his winged shape.

The constant birdsong, hum of insects and lizards, click and clink and call of treelings and frogs and everything else that lived here was louder in the closed-in space. The foliage cut off the breeze, and the humid air clung to Moon’s scales. The branch curved upward and they passed under a thorn vine, the first of the outer layer. This one was as big around as Moon’s wingspan, a good twenty paces, the thorns tall and curving with tips as sharp as his claws. This mountain-thorn had obviously never been tamed by a colony tree seed, and the big thorn vines grew all around the outer layer of the tree’s canopy, making almost impenetrable knots.

Bramble hesitated, then motioned Braid, Plum, and Strike to split off to climb along the thorn vine to the next large branch. “Make sure they didn’t go that way,” she told them.

Salt said, “Why would they go that way?”

“I don’t even know why they’d go this way,” Bramble retorted.

Moon said, “Sage, Sand, Aura, go with them.”

Wings rustled behind him as the three warriors swung up to the thorn vine after the hunters.

Moon and Stone continued down the branch after Bramble and Salt, with Floret, Serene, and Band spreading out behind them. Moon wanted to growl in frustration at their slow pace; Bramble was right, there was no way to tell if they were on the right path. They might have to explore the entire mountain-thorn.

Then Bramble said, “There’s a patch of ground fruit through here. Melons and redflower. If they came this way, they couldn’t have missed it.”

Moon pushed past a bush to catch up with her. She crouched above an area of flowering vines that had taken over a relatively flat part of the branch, and the dirt was lumpy with the belowground fruit. Salt moved through the patch and pulled at the vines, looking for signs that some of the fruit had been collected. Salt muttered, “If they were looking for food, they would have taken some of these and turned back.”

Moon looked around and tasted the air. Salt was right, if Jade’s group had come in this way and found this ground fruit, there would have been no need to go any further into the canopy. But he didn’t see anything that could be interpreted as surprising or astonishing, just multiple levels of tree-lined branches and hanging foliage, and colorful streaks as a swarm of tiny flying lizards fled. Disturbed by Salt’s efforts, a clump of the small creatures that Moon thought of as walking mushrooms pulled their roots from the ground and ambled away. He could hear the other warriors and Arbora searching around the foliage, moving cautiously. Thinking aloud, he said, “But Chime was with them.”

“So?” Stone said.

“So he’d never been on a mountain-thorn before, except for Emerald Twilight. He’s never seen a wild one like this. Maybe he wanted to explore further.”

Merit, who had been sticking close to Stone, said, “There are all kinds of rumors about mountain-thorns. That herbs and other things grow on them that don’t grow on mountain-trees.”

Stone stepped past Moon and motioned the Arbora to keep moving. “We know they left the camp and came in here. The why doesn’t really matter.”

Maybe it doesn’t, Moon thought, following. Maybe he had been infected by Bramble and the other Arbora, trying to create complicated theories about everyone’s behavior.

They pushed on, the two hunters keeping in contact with Plum’s group with clicks and whistles. From what Moon could hear, Plum had followed the thorn vine down to another branch, and they were working their way along it now. Another giant thorn-vine loomed low overhead, then another. For a stretch it was nothing but thorns, and all of them crept carefully, avoiding the sharp points.

Then the branch curved around to run beside a platform, an open flat space in the green cavern. It held a glade of trees, with tall slender green trunks like thick grass stalks stretching up, topped with brushy caps of tiny gray-green leaves.

Salt hesitated. “Go across?” he asked Bramble.

Her eyes narrowed. “Stay on the branch.”

The branch grew narrow, and it was awkward to make their way along it, but Moon could see why Bramble wanted to avoid the platform. The ground was soft and lumpy, covered with a white moss with a texture like bread dough. Six broad pathways formed by branches snaked away from the far end, all weaving away into the canopy in different directions. Moon’s throat went tight. And no way to tell which one they might have taken, if they even came this way at all. They could be searching this mountain-thorn for a long time.

Moon spotted movement on an upper branch that curved around behind the platform, but it was only the second search group. Plum waved. We should have brought more people, Moon thought.

Then Stone hissed at the hunters to stop. They froze, and he said quietly, “You see it?”

Moon didn’t see it, though he could sense faint motion somewhere ahead, a slight displacement of the air. Then his spines rippled. Something had moved.

Thirty or so paces ahead, a tree in the center of the platform shivered and unfolded its trunk.

Moon hissed a warning to the warriors behind him as the creature unfurled itself, tendrils lifted and expanded out as it turned toward them. It was at least fifty paces tall and even now looked like an animate tree, the central trunk supporting dozens of branches, all in fluid motion, sprays of tiny gray-green leaves fountaining up like a Raksura’s spines.

One of the warriors growled, and Bramble said, “Moon—”

“Get back,” he told her. Bramble made a sharp gesture to Salt and they both slipped back behind Moon. There wasn’t much room to retreat on the narrow branch and he tried to watch the animate tree while looking for a gap in the thorns behind them.

Then Stone stepped forward. Moon said, “Stone—”

Stone said, “I don’t think it’s a predator.”

Floret eased up beside Moon. “Stone, why do you think that?” she whispered.

Moon tasted the air. “The scent isn’t rank.” All he could smell was plant, that intense mixture of earth and green, the subtle odor that came from broken grass stalks.

Merit peered around Moon’s elbow. “It’s not just a moving plant, it knows we’re here.”

“It can’t talk to us,” Bramble said, her voice a whisper too. “It doesn’t have a mouth.”

“How do plants talk?” Salt wondered.

Stone took another cautious step forward, moving along the branch, closer to the tree. “I don’t know, but all the Arbora need to shut up now.”

Moon stepped with him, ignoring Floret, who was tugging on his spines to pull him back. “Stone—”

Stone kept moving. “If they wanted to kill us, they would have attacked us already.”

A chill shivered straight down Moon’s spine. He motioned the warriors to drop back, ignoring Floret’s hiss of protest. Every slender tree on the platform was one of these creatures, the others just hadn’t shown themselves yet. If Chime or one of the other warriors had walked into this … Except Stone was right, the tree-beings weren’t doing anything except watching and waiting. He said, “This … is different and a little creepy, but it’s not surprising or astonishing.” He didn’t think this was what had sparked Merit’s vision. Plant people just weren’t that odd.

Stone grimaced in agreement. “But maybe it—they—saw Jade and the others.”

They picked their way forward along the branch. Plum’s group watched anxiously from their overhanging vantage point, their spines twitching nervously. Stone stopped directly across from the tree. Its vines or tendrils or whatever they were waved gently, drifting on a current of air Moon couldn’t feel. This close he could see dark gleaming spots on each of the leaves. Those are eyes, he thought, finding an uncomfortable resemblance to the multiple eyes of branch spiders and other similar predators. Then Stone said, “We’re looking for people like us. Did they come through here?”

All around them, on the other tree-stalks, hundreds of leaf-eyes swiveled to regard them but none of them unfurled their limbs. The tree swayed toward them and it took everything Moon had not to leap backward. But its vines formed patterns in the air, shaping figures, spreading stalks from each vine to make more complex designs.

From behind them, Merit said softly, “Maybe that’s how plants talk.”

Moon watched the show until it ceased, then threw a despairing glance at Stone. Stone’s jaw was set. Hoping against hope it was some sort of sign language he wasn’t familiar with, Moon said, “Did that make any sense to you?”

Stone growled low in frustration, then made his voice even and soft again. “We can’t understand you.”

One of its tendrils, drifting near the ground, flicked up and brushed Moon’s tail. He flinched away, his fight or flight reflex almost sending him right off the branch. The only thing that stopped him was that the vines jerked back too, as if the tree was just as startled as he was.

Stone tensed, but didn’t flinch. He said, “See, I don’t think it’s dangerous.”

“Just because it doesn’t eat people doesn’t mean it’s safe …” Moon began, but the tree’s tendrils stirred into motion again, making more complicated gestures. He gave up. The creature seemed more interested in talking than attacking.

Floret muttered, “It probably wants us to leave.”

Merit eased forward cautiously, staring intently at the tree. “Let me try. It might understand this.”

Merit stepped away from Moon and Stone, and the tree’s leaf-eyes turned to follow him. He started to act out a pantomime of someone crossing the platform, and others searching for him.

Floret groaned under her breath, but Moon thought this was better than nothing. The tree seemed to be studying Merit closely, though it was hard to tell. Then it suddenly stretched out a tendril and brushed Merit’s arm.

Merit froze, then shook his head, frills flying. He sat down abruptly and Moon lunged for him.

Moon got there a heartbeat before Floret, grabbed Merit’s arm and hauled him to his feet. Merit blurted, “One came first, and went up the wind-curved branch toward the trunk. Others followed, and tried to speak to it. It didn’t understand but it thought they must be after the first one, and pointed the way for them. And can we hurry up and go, our voices make it itch and we’re keeping the children awake.”

Above them the tree’s vines waved in silent agitation.

Moon handed Merit to Floret and waved to the other Arbora and warriors to follow. “Thank you,” Stone said to the tree, and they made for the branches on the far end of the platform.

They had to step down onto the spongy ground, but Moon was careful not to use his claws. They were here. Until now, he hadn’t really believed it. He looked back to see the tree folding itself into its stalk again, some of its leaf-eyes still watching them.

“Wind-curved … which one is that?” Stone demanded.

Merit, tucked under Floret’s arm, pointed to the third branch from the left. “That one!”

The branch arched up away from the platform before dropping down to wind away through the heavy greenery. Bramble hurried past them to lead the way.

As they climbed further away from the platform, Stone asked Merit, “You all right?”

“I think so, yes,” Merit said, though he thumped himself in the side of the head as if trying to shake something loose. “Floret, you can put me down.”

Floret did, but kept a hand on his arm to steady him. Merit said, “It doesn’t see things the way we do. It touched Moon’s tail because it looked like a vine. Our tails were the only things on our bodies that made any sense to it.”

They were past the arch in the branch now and at the point where it turned away into the canopy, out of sight of the platform. Floret looked warily back, as if checking to make sure the trees weren’t following them. “So that was who Jade spoke to in your vision? That tree person?”

Merit nodded. “I think so.”

Moon hissed under his breath. This didn’t make sense. “Why did one of them go into the canopy alone?” Jade had been here to go to Ocean Winter, not to explore, and she wouldn’t have let the others get so distracted.

Stone shook his head, his intense frown suggesting that he found this behavior just as unlikely as Moon did. “Did it say if it saw them come back?”

Merit said, “No. But then, they didn’t have to go back the way they came in.”

Bramble echoed his thought. “Maybe that’s what they did. The firepit in the camp was covered, so they must have come through here in the morning, after they had gotten ready to leave.” Her attention was on the terrain ahead, as the branch wove down through the layers of the canopy. More thorn vines crossed above and below them.

Plum’s group climbed down an intersecting branch and Moon signaled them to fall in at the back. Now that they knew Jade’s group had taken this branch, there was no reason to split up.

The canopy grew more shadowy as they made their way further in. The Arbora found more patches of ground fruit and roots, and a whole grove of bevel nut trees clustered on a branch that crossed above them. Multicolored treelings fled shrieking as they passed, and tree frogs bigger than Moon hung from the thorn vines and stared unblinking at them. Thick clouds of insects swarmed around them, then departed, frustrated by their scales and by Stone’s strange scent. Moon still didn’t see any reason for Jade or Chime or any of the others to want to come this far into the canopy. There were lots of interesting things here, but only if you liked somewhat creepy plant life.

After they passed a place where giant blue globules of what might be mold or some sort of spore hung from the bottom of another branch, Band said, “Maybe the tree lied. It could be sending us into a trap.”

Moon hissed in pure irritation. “We know that.” It was a possibility, but Merit’s moment of contact with the tree-person had given Moon the impression that it wasn’t much interested in the strange creatures who had walked past it. It spoke like something that just wanted to get back to its own concerns.

Bramble said, “Maybe—”

Just ahead of her, Salt stopped abruptly and said, “Or maybe they saw this.”

Moon pushed forward and stepped past Stone. Below their vantage point, the branch they stood on curved down into a giant open space in the center of the enclosing green foliage of the canopy. At first Moon thought they were looking at a jumble of fallen platforms, overgrown with vines and small trees. Then he saw shapes among the foliage that were too regular, straight lines, spirals, elegant curves. He thought, It’s a city.

Something had built a city inside the mountain-thorn, an enormous city.

There were hisses of awe from the Arbora and warriors. It filled the entire center of the canopy, a space big enough to comfortably fit Indigo Cloud’s colony tree. It must have been built on a series of branch platforms, but Moon could see fragments of weathered white and gray stone through the vines and creeping greenery. Even buried by plant growth, the structures were huge, monumental buildings. There were round towers, so covered with moss they looked like trees. The city must have been too heavy for the platforms, because the supports had clearly collapsed at some point, sending buildings sliding into each other, crushing the platforms below. Structures had crashed into branches, held up only by the heavy entangling vines. There were broken bridges, toppled columns.

“This isn’t anything Raksura would build,” Plum said, in a hushed voice. “Is it groundling? Or Kek?”

“Kek couldn’t move those stones, not without help,” Bramble muttered, sounding confused.

“Maybe the tree-people built it,” Sage said. “Before they were trees.”

Then Floret said, “Moon, is it like the city under the island? The forerunners’ city?”

Floret had waited for them on the surface, and hadn’t seen the underwater city for herself. Moon said, “No. I don’t think so.” He hoped not. “I’d have to see the inside.”

Then Stone said, “It’s a flying island. It fell here. That’s what twinned this mountain-thorn. It hit the trunk and split it in two.”

Moon shook his head, about to say that it was impossible, that it was too big for a flying island city. But the longer he looked at it, the more sense that made. The high arch of the canopy overhead had long grown back, so there was no sign of the damage it must have done to the upper part of the tree. But it would explain the stone construction, and the way it had collapsed.

He took a step forward, and Stone caught his wrist. His voice low, Stone said, “If Chime saw this, he would have wanted to get closer.”

“But he would have known that might be dangerous.” Chime, having stumbled on this place, might have been hard put to pass it by, but he would have been too wary to linger. Moon didn’t know about Coil, but even though Jade, Balm, Song, and Root didn’t exactly suffer from any lack of curiosity, they all knew better. “Merit, is this what you saw in your vision?”

Merit boosted himself up on his foot-claws to see past Serene, and she pulled him forward to give him a better view. “It must be. It’s a huge surprise.”

Stone was giving Moon a look, and Moon didn’t need to ask what he meant by it. While this city was bizarre, it wasn’t nearly as astonishing as some of the other strange things he knew Jade and Chime had seen. They went inside, Moon thought, and that’s where it happened.

Chime should have known better, Moon thought. Somehow he knew it was Chime who had gone into this place and that Jade and the others had followed. Chime should have known better, which made him think that Chime must have had a reason to come here. Maybe not a good reason, but a reason nonetheless. Or something forced him to come here. Something or someone the tree-person hadn’t seen.

Like the creature imprisoned in the underwater city.

The thought made Moon so cold it locked his joints for an instant and he slipped while climbing over a knot in the branch. That Band was the one who caught his arm to steady him didn’t make the moment any less awkward. Fortunately Band looked more confused than anything else and said nothing to call attention to the incident.

Chime would have known to resist a mental voice like the one that had drawn the Fell to the coastal island. And the other warriors all knew enough about that voice to be frightened by it and tell Jade. So maybe it didn’t just ask Chime to come to it, maybe it forced him somehow.

He reminded himself they didn’t know anything yet, that just because the city was old was no reason to suspect that it was a prison for some horrible creature. There were stories all across the Three Worlds about the flying islands and their former inhabitants, all vague, all contradictory, probably because the flying island people hadn’t been one species, but many, all very different from each other. Moon had never heard a story about monstrous creatures imprisoned on islands, either. But that didn’t set his mind at ease.

By the time they made their way down to a branch near the city’s fringe, the gray-green light was deepening into heavy gloom. It was only the edge of evening, but there must still be clouds overhead and the mountain-thorn’s canopy blocked so much light that night would always fall early inside it.

Moon burned with frustration but there was no way they could start the search now. The city was already in deep shadow, and even with Merit spelling light for them, it would just be too dangerous. Walking into the same trap that Jade and the others had sprung wouldn’t help anyone.

Trying to distract himself, Moon told Stone, “If they’re in there somewhere and just … stuck, we might be able to see firelight once it’s full dark.”

Stone didn’t say any of the things he might have said about the unlikelihood of a trap that provided access to food and water and firewood but no way out. He just grunted thoughtfully. “There’s no telling if they’re inside. They might have found something here that led them somewhere else.”

Moon had thought of that. It was one of those possibilities that meant they were alive, but just not acting in any way that made sense.

Moon didn’t want to split the group overnight, so he sent Aura and Sage to take the alternate route along the thorn vine and to lead River and the others back here.

They made a camp on the intersection of two broad branches, about a hundred paces above the edge of the nearest crumbled stone terrace. The building it still supported was a mostly featureless lump under the vines and moss, but Moon could make out three large domed towers, linked by a bridge at least three stories tall. This close, they could see there were openings into the lowest level, big circular portals into blackness, each one three times Moon’s height. With most of the city cloaked in shadows and the canopy going dark around them, it wasn’t a reassuring sight.

It was already too late to hunt, but they had eaten last night and the Arbora collected some melons and other ground fruit and roots from the scattered patches on the surrounding branches. With all the forage available, if any of the inhabitants of the city had survived the fall, they might have been able to live for a time here.

He said that to Bramble, as they sat beside the pile of thorn chunks Merit had spelled for heat, so the Arbora could make tea and bake some of the roots. Bramble said, “That would make sense.”

But Merit, sitting nearby and spelling clumps of moss for light, said, “I don’t know. I feel like this place is old.”

“Of course it’s old,” Bramble said. “But whoever lived here still had to eat.” She glanced at Moon. “And if it is a forerunners’ city, like the underwater one you found, then the people who lived here probably ate the same kind of things we do.”

“I mean very old,” Merit explained. “So old it didn’t fall into the mountain-thorn. That it fell, and the mountain-thorn just grew up around it.”

Bramble frowned at the city, considering it. Moon wasn’t sure why it should be startling. He had seen the underwater city, grown out of the base of the coastal island, older than the Raksura and the Fell. And the Opal Night mountain-tree had grown through the ruins at its base.

But this just seemed wrong, here in the heart of the Reaches.

In a little voice, Strike said, “If it’s a forerunners’ city, does that mean it has a monster trapped in it too?”

Everyone went quiet and still. So quiet and still, Moon knew the question had already occurred to all of them; Strike had just been the only one to dare speak it aloud.

Bramble gave Moon an apologetic grimace, aware that bringing up the possibility repeatedly probably hadn’t helped. Stone, apparently agreeing, flicked a fruit stone at her and bounced it off her head. As Bramble shook her frills and rubbed her temple, Moon said, “It doesn’t mean that. Even if it is a forerunners’ city, and there’s nothing to say it is, it would be a wild coincidence if it had something that dangerous locked up somewhere in it.”

Everyone rustled and settled their spines, at least pretending to be reassured. Then Venture, who had been staring at them in incomprehension, said, “What’s a forerunner?”

Aura looked at Moon, he nodded, and she said to Venture, “I’ll tell you the story,” and took her aside.

The conversation went off into tangents then, and Moon stopped listening. He had to fight the urge to shift and fly into the city. They needed light to search, he told himself. They might not be looking for trapped Raksura but for a sign that something had lured or taken them away to somewhere else.

Merit collected his pack. “I’m going to try scrying again. Now that we’re here, maybe I can get a better vision.”

Moon glanced at him, then hesitated. Merit was hollow-eyed with exhaustion, and it brought back a vivid memory of how Flower had looked, scrying their path to the leviathan and the stolen seed. He reminded himself that Merit was young, and had seemed confident about being able to take the strain. He hoped Merit was right. No one had ever mentioned anything about young mentors dying from too much use of their powers. He said, “Band, Serene, keep an eye on him.”

It was late at night when Moon twitched awake to quiet footsteps on the moss and dead leaves. He had fallen asleep sitting up beside the hearth, and the quiet footsteps were Merit’s.

Four warriors were on guard on the branches above, but the others were scattered around close to the hearth, drowsing or just sitting up, too nervous to sleep. The Arbora had put up one shelter, but no one was using it. Stone had stretched out beside Moon, in his groundling form. He was breathing deeply, but Moon didn’t think he was asleep.

Merit made his way unsteadily around the hearth, followed by Band and Serene. Stone sat up, soundlessly. Merit knelt in front of Moon, wavered, and Moon gripped his shoulder to keep him upright. Merit was small for an Arbora and had always looked a little fragile, at least to Moon; it was reassuring to feel the solid muscle under his hand. Merit said, “I’m sorry, I just saw the same vision again,” and folded forward into Moon’s lap.

Moon caught and cradled him, felt his chest to make sure he was breathing well. As the other Arbora gathered around, Serene said, “He tried very hard.”

“I know.” Moon handed Merit off to Plum, who carried him to the shelter.

Moon looked toward the city, holding back a groan of despair. The place was huge, and after so long they could easily miss the subtle traces of tracks. Some idea of where to start the search would have been …

Moon blinked, then squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. It was a faint glow, in the center of the darkness where the city lay. It was partially obscured, so he must be seeing it through a window or door. He nudged Stone and pointed.

After a moment, Stone made a thoughtful noise in his throat. “Not fire. Not a mentor’s light, either.”

The color was wrong for a mentor’s light, too white. Not that Jade had had a mentor with her to make one. “We didn’t see that in daylight.” Even the murky green light inside the canopy hadn’t revealed it, and if it had been lit, they should have seen some sign of it when twilight fell. “I don’t think it was lit until some time after dark.” He raised his voice a little to say, “Sage, did you see that light?”

Sage was on watch, on a branch about thirty paces up, where the dim moss-lights wouldn’t hinder his night vision. He answered, “What light?” The other warriors on guard muttered a puzzled agreement. A slight rustle of wings sounded as Sage dropped down beside Moon. “Where–Oh.” He told Moon, “The angle is wrong, we can’t see it from up there.”

Moon tried to visualize where the light was, from his memory of the city, but he hadn’t looked at it long enough to have a strong recollection of detail. He said, “Jade and the others would never have seen this.” They would have approached the city in daylight.

Stone grunted an acknowledgement. “They could have walked up on whatever is making that light, with no warning.”

The Arbora had all drawn closer to listen. Moon heard slight, edgy movement from the warriors. Strike whispered, “But why did they go in at all?”

“Good question,” Stone said, not patiently. “Still don’t have an answer, no matter how many times someone asks it.”

Moon hissed in frustration. “One of them got lured in somehow, and the others followed.”

There was a murmur of agreement from Bramble and Plum and the others. Salt added softly, “Chime likes to learn new things, but he doesn’t want to die, either.”

“Or,” Floret pointed out, “they didn’t go in at all. We don’t know that they did.”

Unexpectedly, Venture said, “Do you really think that? Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that in the last place we know they were, we find this?”

Everyone turned to stare incredulously at her, where she sat beside the hearth with Band and Aura. She drew back in confusion and affront, then said, “Am I wrong?”

Exasperated, Floret said, “You’ve made it clear you thought this whole search was some kind of trick to start a war with Ocean Winter.”

Venture half-sighed, half-hissed. “I’m not a fool.”

Moon supposed that was all the apology they were going to get for Venture’s skepticism over the past days. He got to his feet, and shifted to his winged form. “I’m going in there. If the light goes out by morning, we’ll never find where it was.”

There was an immediate chorus of protest. “Moon, you can’t—” Floret began at the same time as Venture said, “Consort, that’s madness—”

River stood and shifted. “I’ll go with you.”

Drift caught River’s wrist and hissed in alarm. “No! You don’t have to prove anything.” River might be bent on getting back into a higher position among the warriors by risking his life, but Drift clearly wasn’t happy about it. “You don’t have to take such risks when you don’t—”

“I do.” River’s expression was such a mix of impatience and anguish that Moon had to look away.

Stone’s low growl of annoyance cut off the protests. He stood up. “Moon and I will go. The rest of you stay here.”

Venture said, “But consorts shouldn’t—”

Stone turned, stepped across the hearth, and stood over her. Venture shrank back. He had ignored her until now, and he had been mostly asleep during the short times he had been at their camps, and maybe she had made some incorrect assumptions about his temperament. Stone said, “Do I need to repeat myself? Because I don’t like to do that.”

“No, line-grandfather,” Venture said quietly.

Stone looked around at the others. Nobody argued.

Moon walked to the edge of the branch and climbed out on a knoll. Facing away from Merit’s moss-lights, his eyes adjusted rapidly and he could make out more of the city, the elegantly curved outlines of the towers in what dim moonlight filtered through the mountain-thorn’s canopy. He spread his wings and dropped. There was little air movement this far inside the canopy, and he had to flap rapidly to reach the top of the nearest structure. He landed lightly on the sloping surface of a roof, the mossy stone cool under the scales of his feet. Stone’s silent shadow passed over him.

Moon couldn’t see the light anymore, but he had marked the location. It was above his current position, several hundred paces further in. He crouched and leapt into flight again.

Long hops and short flights took him up across the city, an occasional ray of moonlight revealing a roofed terrace with the columns formed into the shape of willowy trees, a sculpted hollow in a plaza that might have been a pool or a fountain, curved bridges between towers still miraculously intact. He landed at the base of a large structure and looked for the light again. It was shining from a jaggedly round opening a short distance down the side of the domed wall of the next tower, throwing a white glow on the heavy coating of greenery below it. He tasted the air deeply, but could scent nothing but mountain-thorn and treelings.

Stone landed beside him with a soft whoosh of air and scrape of scales. He shifted down to his groundling form and tugged on Moon’s frills, telling him to follow. Moon stepped after him, not sure why Stone wanted to be a groundling in this place.

It was too dark to see the shape of the opening against the wall, but Moon felt the change in the air as they passed through it. The slight sounds of their footsteps bouncing off the walls told him the room was cavernously large. Listening hard, he thought it was empty.

Then suddenly it wasn’t. He heard running water and felt a cool breeze. The scents carried on the air were intense and dry and floral, as if it had swept into the chamber over fields of tall grasses filled with flowers, not through the branches of the mountain-thorn. There was movement around him, brushing past him, close enough to detect acrid sweat on skin and sun-warmed fabric and the sensation of falling–

It was gone. The room was dark, silent, filled with the smell of dirt and stagnant water and the mountain-thorn, the air still and heavy and damp. The breath had stopped in Moon’s throat and he had to gasp to get his lungs working again. His arm hurt and it took him a heartbeat to realize it was because Stone was gripping it, so hard even in his groundling form that Moon’s scales were grinding together. Moon managed to whisper, “You saw that?” Except “saw” was the wrong word. It hadn’t happened in front of his eyes, it had all happened in his head.

“Yes.” Stone let go of Moon’s arm, and rustled in his pack. After a moment he pulled out a small rock spelled for light. Its glow lit a floor stained with moss and broad treesnail tracks, strewn with beetles and windblown dirt, but still showing patterns of blues and grays flecked with metallic silver.

“It was the past,” Moon said. “I think.” Those scents came from somewhere else, somewhere far across the Three Worlds from the Reaches. Either that or the city was capable of suddenly shifting to a new location and back in the space of a heartbeat, something he wasn’t quite ready to rule out.

Stone’s expression was more annoyed than awed. He said, “If that keeps up, it’s not going to make searching this place any easier.”

Moon had to agree. He wondered if that brief moment of vision was what it felt like to be a mentor. He wondered what Chime had felt when he had stepped in here.

Stone handed the rock to Moon and stepped away, shifting back to his winged form. They crossed the large chamber slowly, the light reflecting off arches overhead. They passed through two more doorways into two more cavernous rooms, and Moon began to feel cautiously optimistic that they had seen the only vision the city had to offer. Then they reached a gap in the floor, a long deep trough bisecting the chamber and disappearing under the curved wall to the left. It was only about twenty paces across, and Moon assumed it had once held water. He crouched and leapt to cross it—

And hit a midair wall like a curtain of air, heavy smoky scent, babble of voices, fear not his own squeezing his heart, and the terrifying sense that something had just rushed past not far below his feet.

The vision vanished when Stone knocked him out of the air and dumped him on the dirty floor past the trough. The light-rock bounced out of his hand and slid across the floor. Moon sat up, shook his spines, and gasped, “That was a bad one.”

Stone grunted assent, warily scanning the chamber around them.

Moon pushed to his feet, still unsteady, and found the light-rock. He looked back at the trough, a slice of deeper shadow in the dark floor, and wondered what he would have seen if he had fallen into it. He had the sense that something had traveled in the dark space, and that something had gone terribly wrong with it.

Stone growled low under his breath and moved on. Moon followed.

They crossed the chamber, slowly and cautiously, then went through a passage that connected several smaller chambers, all silent except for the occasional hum of insects. From the curve of the walls, they were inside one of the larger towers. Then Stone hissed sharply at Moon.

Moon shifted to groundling, tied the light rock up in the tail of his shirt, then shifted back. In the renewed darkness ahead, he saw the shaft of dim light, a white glow shining from below.

They crept forward, until Moon saw that the light shone up from a hole in the floor, a good fifty paces across. From the cracks and crumbling pavement around it, the shaft wasn’t meant to be there. He looked up to see it mirrored the jagged hole in the curved roof he had spotted from outside.

Then Stone whispered, “There.” A moment later, Moon saw it too.

Something small lay crumbled on the floor, its shadow etched by the glow from the opening. Not a body, was Moon’s only thought as he started forward.

Stone caught his arm and jerked him back. Moon realized Stone was right and hissed at his own stupidity. The thin layer of moss and dirt on the floor might show tracks, though Moon couldn’t see any in this strange light. Stone shifted to his winged form, stretched out one long arm, and hooked the object with his claw. As he lifted it, Moon saw it was a bag with painted designs on the tough fabric, the kind with the tie-down flap that most of the Raksura in Indigo Cloud used.

Stone brought the bag toward them and dropped it into Moon’s hands. The flap was already open, and Moon dug through the contents. There was some food, dried fruit and berries, and a cake of tea, all of which bugs had gotten into. But there were also a couple of copper and leather bracelets, a roll of pressed paper, a wooden pen, and a cake of ink wrapped in leaves.

“It’s Chime’s,” Moon said. None of the other warriors would have brought writing materials to give them something to do during a visit to another court, and he knew Chime had planned to try to get access to the Ocean Winter libraries.

Stone, just a dark shadow against the light, stretched further, extending his wings slightly to balance himself, and craned his neck to look down the opening.

The light went out. Stone flinched back with a startled growl. Moon shifted to groundling just long enough to untie the light-rock from his shirt tail. He held it up, heart pounding, but nothing leapt at them out of the opening.

After a moment, Stone hissed, and held out his hand. Moon put the rock into his palm. Cautiously, Stone stretched forward again and dropped the rock into the opening. Moon couldn’t stand it a moment more. He jumped up, caught hold of the scales under Stone’s right wing and climbed up to his collar flanges. Hooking his claws on them, he twisted around to look.

The light-rock fell, its glow giving Moon heartbeat-long glimpses of shattered tile and crumbled stone floors and walls, some covered with encroaching vines. It was impossible to tell if something had burst up through the ruined island or had tunneled down. Then the rock tumbled into overhanging leaves, broad and deep green, and vanished.

Stone grunted thoughtfully, and Moon climbed down his back and dropped to the floor. Stone eased away from the edge, then shifted to groundling. In the now complete darkness, he said, “Should have brought more of those rocks.”

“We can go back, get Merit to make more,” Moon said, then remembered that Merit was probably still unconscious. He thought of the vines and foliage half-glimpsed below, and said, “This is old. I mean, nothing tunneled up here from below just to come after them.”

Stone said, “We have to wait for daylight.”

Moon felt a growl build in his chest, and suppressed it. There was no other choice.

Moon and Stone retreated back to the camp, told the others what they had found, and then withdrew to talk over what they meant to do once dawn broke. The others seemed determined to sit up through the night talking. At least they were quiet, mostly because Moon told them if anybody woke Merit, he would personally beat them into unconsciousness. He was hoping Merit would be recovered enough in the morning to use the bag in his scrying.

Sitting near the hearth with Stone, Moon went through the contents of it again, feeling the corners carefully to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. He doubted Chime had had time to leave any clues about where he had disappeared to, but he unrolled the paper anyway.

He was expecting to find the sheets blank. Chime shouldn’t have had much time to write anything down during the journey; Moon had been assuming he had brought it along to give him something to do at Ocean Winter. But the pages were covered with notes.

It was all in Raksuran, of course, in the red-brown ink the Arbora made. The oiled skin wrapped around the roll had protected the pages from the insects that had attacked the food. Moon thumbed through it all, frowning, trying to pick out something he recognized. He could read Altanic and Kedaic and bits and pieces of other groundling trade languages, but his knowledge of Raksuran was rudimentary at best. It didn’t help that it was insanely complicated compared to the symbols of a trade language. He knew all the letters now, and could read the names of most of the people he knew, and pick out a number of simple words and sentences. But nothing Chime had written here looked simple.

He glanced up to see Stone watching him with an ironically lifted brow. Moon hissed in frustration and shoved the papers at him. “Fine, you read it.” No one knew Moon couldn’t read Raksuran, except maybe Thorn. But perhaps Stone had guessed. Or if he had ever had a suspicion, this had confirmed it.

Stone took the sheaf of papers. “You should have that little scrap that Pearl took teach you. At least then he’d be good for something.”

“Leave Ember alone,” Moon said, by habit.

“Quiet.” A line of concentration between his brows, Stone sorted through the papers, turning so the light from the nearest moss bundle fell on the pages, reading sections here and there. “Most of this isn’t recent. He’s been writing down everything he’s found out about changing from an Arbora to a warrior.” He looked more closely at one page. “Looks like he’s been copying things out of court histories, but I don’t recognize these names.”

That made sense. “I know he spent some time in the libraries at Opal Night while we were there. He’s been looking for stories about other Arbora who turned into warriors.”

“Hmm,” Stone commented, and kept reading. After a while, he handed the papers back to Moon. “I can’t see anything there about this city, or even this whole trip.” Stone sighed. “He thought he could talk his way into the Ocean Winter libraries?”

“Yes.” Moon rolled the papers up again and carefully tied the protective skin back around them. Going through the motions, as if he was certain Chime would eventually get these back.

Stone glanced at the shelter, then across the hearth where the nearest Arbora and warriors were talking quietly. He lowered his voice. “You’ve thought about why they might have gone into that place.”

It was an oblique reference to the creature at the forerunners’ city, and the way it had drawn groundlings and Fell to it. “Yes. But … if there was something here that could trick, or force, Raksura to come to it, why hasn’t it done it before? And why can’t we hear it?”

“Because no Raksura ever camped close enough before. Or no Arbora-turned-Aeriat who’s been able to hear and see things others can’t for the past turn.”

Moon growled under his breath, because he wanted to argue and couldn’t. “You think a creature made that light? And if it did, why did it stop making it?”

“Stop asking questions that start with why.” Stone looked toward the dark shape of the city again. “I don’t know. If it called Chime to it and the others followed …”

“Why is the light still lit? Why didn’t we find the creature, or find their bodies, or—” Moon ducked Stone’s slap at his head.

Stone growled, “Go to sleep.”

Moon retreated away from the hearth, knowing that Stone had reached the limit of his patience for speculation. But Moon was too jumpy to even try to sleep, and ended up going to sit with the others and rehashing all their theories with Bramble and Salt. If he got any sleep that night, it was purely by accident.

As soon as dawn started to lighten the gloom under the canopy, Moon sent the Arbora to gather hanging moss and make bundles of it using the cords from the shelter tarps. They also needed to eat, so he sent Drift, Sand, and Aura off to hunt on the platforms of the nearby mountain-trees. It took all his patience to wait, but by the time the light had brightened into full morning, they had four grasseaters to share, several bundles of hanging moss, and Merit had stumbled out of the shelter. Moon explained the situation while Merit was eating his share of the meat, and Merit spelled the moss bundles into light for them.

Moon divided the group, leaving two of the Arbora, Salt and Strike, and two warriors, Sage and Aura, to guard Merit while he scryed over Chime’s bag. The others he and Stone took to the city.

They landed on the balcony Moon and Stone had found last night. In daylight, they could see worn carving under the coating of moss and greenery, but the encroaching vines had bitten into the stone and obscured most of it.

They had warned the others about the voices and images that had seemed to pervade the place last night, but as they crept through the doorway, there was nothing. It was just an empty ruin. Moon wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, if the visions only came at night, or if he and Stone had changed something in the ruin just by entering it.

As they moved through the chambers, the spelled light-bundles shed a warm yellow glow onto the walls, revealing reliefs that were partially covered by furry green or white mosses and creeping vines. They were all complicated designs of circles crossed by lines, with square intricately detailed glyphs that must be writing or symbols of some kind. It looked intriguingly like navigational charts that Moon had seen ships use off the coast of Kish, but far stranger and more complex. In a low voice, Braid said, “Merit might be able to make some sense of this.”

“Maybe,” Plum said doubtfully.

They made their way through the other chambers. In dim light, the trench was just an empty channel running through the floor, no more than thirty or so paces deep. The bottom held stagnant water, a variety of encroaching water plants, and some white and gray swimming things that had too many limbs to be fish, but without the hard carapaces of shellfish. The Raksura all leapt across it without incident.

When they reached the big chamber, it was dimly lit by the large hole in the arch of the ceiling. In daylight Moon could see it was cracked and crumbled around the edges, and had clearly been caused by whatever had crashed through the floor.

At Moon’s direction, the warriors held the light bundles at various angles, until they could see the faint marks in the moss around the hole. Bramble, Plum, and Braid examined them closely.

Avoiding the scuffed tracks on the floor, Moon stepped as close as he could to the opening, Stone moving to stand beside him. The crumbling edges of the ceilings and floors of the level below this one were visible, all the way down to what should be the lowest part of the city, where it was obscured by a small jungle of greenery. There was no sign that anyone had climbed, or been dragged, either up or down it. But Moon thought he, or any Raksura, could probably do it without causing much, if any, disturbance.

Keeping his voice low, Moon said, “We couldn’t see our light once it fell past those trees. How could the light from below shine up through them? Our light wasn’t that bright, but still …”

Stone said, “Maybe it wasn’t a light.”

Then from the other side of the hole, Bramble said, “There’s no scent left, but these are foot tracks. I can’t tell if they’re Raksura, but—”

“But Chime’s bag was here,” River interrupted, moving his moss bundle onto his other shoulder. “So they must be—”

“I know that,” Bramble growled. “I’m trying not to make any assumptions. And don’t move the light.”

“There were at least five of them,” Plum said. She had nearly flattened herself to the floor, studying the faint scuff marks. “That fits, too.”

Bramble added, “They came from across the room, that way, from the same direction we did.”

Plum stood and moved around the hole in the opposite direction. “And they didn’t leave. But something did. This whole side shows scrapes and scuffles. Whatever it was, it didn’t cross the floor to leave.” She frowned and looked up at the hole in the ceiling. “It’s as if it went up and out that way.”

Moon’s breath caught in his throat. No bodies, he reminded himself.

The others just stared. Sand made a noise of distress, and Briar said, “So … they went down there, and then something big came out? And we don’t know if they came out?”

Plum looked around to see the reaction she had caused and said hastily, “As far as I can tell. The tracks are confused, I can’t really …” She made a helpless gesture.

Bramble and Braid circled around to Plum, and Bramble crouched to look more closely at the floor. She said, “That’s what I’m seeing, too.”

“We could get into this shaft from below, couldn’t we?” Plum said. She scraped her claws against the tiles. “What’s under this floor?”

Moon shook his head. Stone had tried that earlier, climbing around the outside of the structure and into the tangled greenery and jumbled rock below it. Stone said, “As far as I could tell, the levels under this one are collapsed, like this part of the city fell first and the rest got pulled down around it. It’s too much to tunnel through, and I couldn’t see any openings.”

“Pulled down?” Plum said, and exchanged frowns with Bramble and Braid. Arbora in general knew far more about building things than Aeriat, and Plum had been a teacher before she had decided to turn hunter. “That’s odd, isn’t it?”

Bramble’s spines flicked thoughtfully. “I’m trying to imagine something falling like this, and … wouldn’t it more likely break into pieces in the air and come down in sections?”

“Yes, but a flying island wouldn’t necessarily do that,” Braid said, warming to the subject. “It’s the mineral chunks inside the rock that keep them aloft, right? So if the mineral pieces stopped working at different times—”

They continued the debate and Moon hissed impatiently under his breath, and said to Stone, “We have to go down there.”

“Not we.” Stone folded his arms. “I’ll go. I’m waiting to hear if Merit got anything off the bag.”

“You’re not going without me.” Moon had had this argument before, and always won it. “What if there’s a passage too narrow for you to get through? Are you going to have to come all the way back up and get me?”

Stone gave him a look that would have turned poor Ember’s bones to water. Moon got that look a lot, so he was used to it.

River said, “I’m going too. You can’t stop me.”

Drift groaned in dismay, and Floret said wearily, “Pearl is not sleeping with you again, so just get over it.”

River dropped his light bundle and rounded on her, snarling. Stone’s sharp growl cut across the chorus of outrage on River’s behalf and agreement with Floret.

Fortunately, before Stone took more precipitous action, someone called out from above. “Hey, Merit needs to speak to you. Should we come down there?”

Moon looked up to see Aura and Merit peering over the edge of the hole in the dome. He flicked his spines in assent, his heart beginning to pound.

Aura took Merit under her arm and dropped down to the floor. As she set Merit on his feet, the others reached them and gathered around. Merit looked past them toward the hole in the floor. “That’s it, then.” He turned to Moon and Stone. “Chime—I think it was Chime—went down there because he thought he was helping someone. I think the others followed him.”

That was what they had expected, but it was still nerve-racking to hear it confirmed. Moon said, “So something lured him down there.” It might be another creature that the forerunners had imprisoned, but it could also be some kind of predator, using this place as a trap.

“Maybe,” Merit said. He looked around the big chamber again, narrowing his eyes as if to see past the shadows. “This place … feels dead and alive at the same time. Those things you saw last night … That has to be a part of it. I don’t understand how Chime’s visions work since he’s changed, and neither does he, but I can’t believe he wouldn’t have seen those too.”

“Are you seeing them?” Moon asked.

Merit grimaced, as if he had hoped to see them and regretted the missed opportunity. “No. I don’t know why any of us would see them last night but not today.”

Stone said again, “The light’s not on.”

They all turned to look at the opening. Under the dim daylight and the glowing moss, it was just a hole in an ancient ruin, nothing more. Moon said, “We have to do it.”

Merit let out a breath and settled his spines. “I’ll go with you. I don’t want to, but … I think I’d better.”

River had moved close to listen. Stubborn as a rock, he said, “And me. I went through the gullet of that leviathan with you, you know I won’t panic.”

Drift said, “River …”

River rounded on him. “I’m not going to do anything stupid and get myself killed. But I’ve got experience the rest of you haven’t.”

Drift subsided reluctantly.

That was what Moon had been thinking, so he didn’t argue. Whatever River’s reasons were—and Moon was fairly sure the motive was to get himself a place in Jade’s faction—he could be depended on in a situation like this.

Stone stared at nothing for a moment. It would have been impossible to tell for anyone who didn’t know him well, but Moon could see he was clearly having some internal debate. Then Stone growled in a way that made everyone except Moon flinch back a little and said, “Get the packs together.”

Stone went first, taking his winged form to flow down over the edge of the opening like a dark cloud. Moon went next, with River and Merit behind him.

The walls were crushed and crumbled, lined with broken tiles and broken shards of paving stone, coated with streaks of moss and dripping with water. The climbing was easy, with plenty of claw-holds. These were the levels below the tower floor, crushed down by the weight of the structures above them. Whatever had fallen through here had cut through the thick slabs like a claw slicing through fruit. Moon climbed around a pillar wedged into the wall, forming a gap that allowed a glimpse into the darkness between the compacted floors.

It wasn’t like Jade not to leave anybody outside the ruin if she had had to go in after Chime. She might have left one or two warriors behind to get help if the rescue went wrong, but then something had happened to them as well. Moon could easily imagine her taking Balm and Song with her, leaving Root and Coil outside. He didn’t want to imagine what had happened next.

The light from above began to fail, but Merit was spelling chunks of rock and broken tile as he climbed, leaving a trail of faint light behind them, just enough to see what was ahead. Vines curled out of the gaps in the broken stone, with parasite bulbs and feather spikes and other plants that could thrive just on the air studding the ruined walls. Snails bigger than Moon’s head were tucked under the leaves and multi-colored miniature versions of tree crabs skittered away from his claws.

Below, the foliage was getting thicker as they drew closer to the lowest depths of the city. The lights Merit created shone down on layers and layers of big air ferns that had grown out across the width of the opening, blocking any view of what they were climbing into.

Then from above Merit whispered, “Stop! Do you hear that?”

Moon froze in place. Below him, Stone stopped, the end of his tail curled inquiringly. Listening hard, all Moon heard was dripping water, a buzz of insects somewhere nearby, and the faint sound of the others’ breathing. He looked up at Merit, who balanced easily on the collapsed wall, next to River. Moon said, “Hear what?”

Merit frowned slowly, and started to climb again. “A rushing sound, like something falling … I think we’re getting close. That must have been something like the visions you had last night.”

Below, Stone turned one baleful eye to glare up at them, then started to climb again, the foliage barely rustling as he passed.

Then Stone’s tail twitched and he halted abruptly. Moon hissed to warn Merit and River, then crept slowly down toward Stone, past the thick growth of ferns and vines. He climbed down alongside Stone’s dark shape, staying close to the wall.

He could see just enough to tell the foliage abruptly stopped here, leaving most of the passage open, just a big dark empty space. Then Moon narrowed his eyes. Not quite empty.

Near the center of the space there was a shape, an unmoving shape, just hanging in midair. Moon’s heart squeezed tight with dread. He turned and slipped back up the wall, past the barrier of ferns, to where River and Merit clung to the narrow ledge. River flattened his spines, reading something off Moon’s expression. Moon said, “I need a light.”

Wide-eyed, Merit handed him the bulb of a parasite plant, spelled to glow. Moon tucked it in between his side and his wing and climbed back down.

Beside Stone again, Moon hung with one hand and his foot-claws, and held out the light.

The figure was Coil, the fifth warrior Jade had taken with her. He hung suspended in the air as if he had just leapt into flight, wings partially extended, hands out ready to brace for a landing. When Moon had realized the shape hanging in mid-air was a Raksura, he had expected to see it caught in some net, or impaled on a piece of debris. But Coil was just suspended there, like a fish suspended in water, like a bug caught in amber. Not coherently, Moon said, “But … What?”

Stone’s body rumbled with a nearly soundless growl, then he adjusted his position on the wall. A heartbeat later he shifted to his groundling form. His feet were balanced on a ledge barely a hand-span wide and he had one hand jammed into a gap between the crushed floor levels. Moon braced to grab him if he fell, but Stone balanced easily. He said, “He’s trapped in something, we just can’t see it.”

“But what …” Moon let that go, as there was obviously no point in asking what Coil could possibly be trapped in. He tilted his head, trying to see Coil’s face in the dim light. He could see a gleam on Coil’s eyes, as if they were open. He couldn’t make out his expression. Moon took a deep taste of the air, but he didn’t scent death. “Could he still be alive?”

There was a rustle above them as River and Merit climbed closer. Stone leaned back and told them, “Careful. Stay close to the wall.”

River eased down beside Moon and hissed in astonishment. Merit gasped, his spines flicking in agitation. Groping for an explanation, any explanation, Moon said, “Merit, do you know what this is?”

“It’s …” Merit’s expression was baffled and frightened. “No, but … there’s something here. I mean, I can’t feel it, I can’t see it, but I hear voices. I don’t know what they’re saying …”

“Can we get to him?” River craned his neck, trying to see better. “There’s nothing to perch on, but if we got a rope—”

“No.” Stone jerked his chin. “Look up.”

Moon twisted to look. The jumble of intertwined creeping vines, the air ferns, the parasite bulbs and other plants stopped about twenty paces up. Stopped as if a knife had cleanly sliced them off. Moon looked around at the walls. There was still moss and some small plants growing out of the gaps between the floor levels and the cracks in the stone. But nothing extended out into the center of the shaft. He felt the wall behind them and found a loose fragment of tile. Gently, he tossed it toward Coil.

The tile flew for about ten paces then started to slow, as if it had fallen into honey. It slowed to a gradual stop still several paces from the tip of Coil’s wing.

Like a bug caught in amber, Moon thought again. “A rope would never reach him, and he’s … too stuck for us to pull out.”

Stone studied the scene again. His expression was opaque, a sure sign he was deeply disturbed. He shook his head slowly. “If this is what it looks like …”

“The others are lower down.” Moon swallowed back bile. “Merit, can you tell if Coil is alive?”

“No. But—” Merit leaned forward a little, narrowing his eyes. “Look at his right foot, fourth claw.”

Moon squinted. Hooked on Coil’s claw was a sprig of greenery, that must have caught there from his last perch on the wall. After a heartbeat, Moon realized what was wrong with that. “It’s still green. It’s not even wilted.” The fragment of vine was frozen, just like Coil.

River sucked in a breath. “Even if they’ve only been here a day, and we know they were here longer, the vine should have wilted—”

“There’s a chance he’s alive. They’re alive,” Moon said. He didn’t want to speculate any further than that.

“Stay near the walls, and only climb where the plants grow,” Stone said. He leaned away and shifted back to his winged form, then started down the wall again. Moon ducked to avoid his tail, then followed with River and Merit.

Every nerve itched now, both with renewed fear of what they might find and terror that whatever this effect was would catch them too. How are we going to get them out? What if we can’t get them out? The thought was agonizing. They didn’t even know what they were dealing with.

Forty paces down they found Root, suspended in the air, posed as if he had just leapt off the wall and was aiming for a perch on the opposite side of the shaft. They all paused for a moment, then Stone rumbled in his throat again and kept climbing.

The shaft grew wider, and the lights Merit spelled didn’t reach far across it. But when he looked down, Moon could see shapes in the dimness.

The shaft ended in a large space. Not a cavern; a pocket formed in the bottom of the city.

Stone hesitated, and Moon tasted the air again. There was still no scent that didn’t belong, no hint of movement in the deep shadow. And there should be movement. This section of the city must be resting on part of the mountain-thorn’s trunk. It should be alive with insects, and teeming with the things that fed on them.

Merit plucked some moss off the wall, held it until it began to glow, then dropped it. It fell, scattering fragments, about sixty paces or so to land on a cracked pavement. Stone made a low noise in his throat. Moon said, “More, Merit. As many as you can.”

Merit spelled more moss and parasite plants to glow, dropping them down into the chamber. When he had almost denuded this whole side of the shaft, the light gradually revealed the figures standing below.

Moon had been expecting this, but it still squeezed his heart and stopped his breath.

Chime was near the center of the chamber, in groundling form, standing frozen in place. Merit started to spell and toss shards of tile and fragments of paving stone toward the still figure, illuminating more of the space as the glowing fragments gradually slowed and came to a halt in midair. Jade, Balm, and Song were about twenty paces away from Chime, toward the other side of the shaft, perched on a triangular wedge of fallen wall. Jade and Balm faced Chime, looking down on him. Song stood behind them and half-turned away, as if she had just heard something. All three were in their winged forms.

Stone pushed off from the edge of the shaft and dropped to the pavement below. The faint sounds as he moved around were almost imperceptible, but Moon could tell he was carefully exploring the chamber. If Stone walked into something and was trapped as well … Moon asked, “Merit, are you having any more visions?”

“I can still hear voices, off and on.” Merit stirred uneasily, and a little dislodged moss and dust drifted down. “Not any words I can understand. They’re like echoes, as if the people speaking are a long distance away.”

Then Stone came back into view, settled his wings and shifted to groundling. Moon strangled the urge to tell him to be careful, and dropped down beside him. Merit’s spell-lights had marked the whole side of the danger area, but it still made his spines twitch to land so close to it. River followed, with Merit tucked under one arm.

Stone paced along the perimeter, then sat on his heels near the edge, studying Chime.

River set Merit on his feet and flicked his spines in agitation. “How did they get all the way down here? This magic, or whatever it is that freezes things in place– why did it stop Coil and Root up there, but let the four of them get here?”

“Whatever is doing this let Chime come down here.” Moon’s voice came out low and harsh. “It lured him down. Then when Jade and Balm and Song came after him, it … did this. Jade must have left Root and Coil up at the top, and they heard something that made them follow, and they fell right into it.”

River twitched and settled his spines. “So where is it?”

Then Stone said, “I think it’s still there.”

Moon stepped to his side, crouching down so he could see what Stone was seeing. Merit scooted over in beside him. From here, Moon had a better view of Chime’s face. With Chime in his groundling form, it was easier to read his expression. His lips were parted, and Moon thought his eyes were focused on some point only a few paces away from him, his chin tilted up … Moon let out his breath in a hiss. “He was—is—talking to someone.”

Stone nodded. “And Jade and Balm. They’re looking at it too.”

“So it’s hiding itself from us.” Moon sat back. “It knows we’re here.”

“Or …” Merit eased back from the edge. He shook his head. “I think there are a lot of things in here we can’t see.”

Moon felt a chill pass through the skin under his scales, an aborted flight reflex. He took a deep breath, making himself think. “It didn’t happen just because they were here. This thing has been here a long time.” Long enough to keep the jungle from growing down through this part of the shaft. “And that light. The one we saw last night. What does that have to do with it?”

Stone growled under his breath. “We’ll have to wait for tonight, to see if it comes again, and find out.”

It was still some time until dusk, and they knew the light might not appear until much later. Moon sent River up the shaft to tell the others what they had found, while he waited with Stone. Merit withdrew a short distance away and tried to scry.

Hoping for some clue, Moon explored the shadowy corners of the chamber, taking one of Merit’s spelled rocks for light and tossing broken tile pieces ahead of him to make sure he didn’t walk into a trap. The walls were covered with faded paint and inlay, too stained by turns of dripping water and mold to make out anything but the occasional elegant curve. They had been crushed along the top and tilted sideways at an angle that didn’t look at all stable, and Moon found several broken supporting columns strewn around. But a huge single slab of stone had come through the ceiling at the back; braced against the floor, it seemed to have kept the big chamber from collapsing. Now it was supported by a wayward branch of the mountain-thorn that had grown up through a crack. Vines had worked their way in as well, and small colonies of parasite plants. They crept across the floor, stopping well short of the frozen area.

Moon gave up and returned to the others. Merit had found a spot further back in the chamber, cleared off a space on the floor and spelled all the plants around him to glow with light. The paper and ink from his bag was spread out and he huddled over it, writing rapidly. Stone still sat near the edge of the frozen area and Moon sat down beside him. After a time, Stone cocked his head, and a few moments later Moon heard the faint sounds of more than one Raksura climbing down the shaft. Moon sighed, but he had expected this. “Who do you think is with him?”

“I’m betting on Floret, and probably Bramble,” Stone said. He added thoughtfully, “Bramble bit me in the head when she was barely three days old. It was an omen.”

Moon was exasperated enough to growl. “I left Floret in charge up there.”

Stone snorted at this example of naiveté. “Warriors obey queens. Us they obey as long as we’re standing there staring at them.” “I noticed.” Moon pushed to his feet.

River, Floret, and yes, Bramble appeared on the wall of the shaft and one by one carefully dropped down to the chamber floor. Only a little sulky, River said, “I told them not to come.”

“We know,” Moon said. Floret and Bramble stared at the tableau, Bramble sidling cautiously to the right and craning her neck to try to see better. He could tell from their expressions that they were in shock, so he didn’t say anything.

After a time, Floret turned to him. “But when the light comes back, it could do this to you.”

Moon said, “Believe me, there is no horrible possibility that I haven’t thought of already.” And it was very much a possibility. The light had to have something to do with whatever had happened here. It might be a trap, a lure. But whatever it was, they had to find out, and the only way to do that was to stay down here and watch for it.

Floret shook her head. “I just … I don’t know.”

Bramble said, “Can’t we try to get a rope in there and haul them out?”

From behind them, Merit said, “You can try. It won’t work.”

Bramble hissed in frustration. “I want to try it anyway.”

Floret looked at Moon. He pressed his hands to his eyes. “Go ahead.”

They tried. It involved bringing down almost all the rope the Arbora had with them, searching for the right size of rocks, and an attempt to build a sling to hurl them. For a stretch of time it seemed it might work, which made it all the more painful when it finally failed. The frozen area was more solid toward the center where the four Raksura were trapped; none of their attempts made it any closer than the spell lights Merit and Moon and Stone and River had already thrown into it. Bitter disappointment made Moon finally break down and shout, “Get out of here or I’ll kill all of you!”

Stone, who hadn’t moved or spoken during any of the preceding efforts, stirred. “Moon, go sit down. The rest of you—” He turned to survey the group of abashed warriors and Arbora. “Go back up there and wait.”

Moon went and flung himself down on a patch of vines, fuming. The others left reluctantly.

Moon hadn’t thought he would ever sleep again, but he woke with a start, some internal sense telling him that the sun had just set. He sat up, bleary and confused for a moment. He didn’t even remember shifting to groundling. He scrubbed at his ear, wiping moss away.

Nearby, Stone sat up and stretched. “We need to move back further.”

He meant move further into the vegetation line. Moon got to his feet and helped Merit gather up his spell-lights and notes and drawings. It gave him a chance to look at what Merit had been making diagrams of, not that any of it made sense to him. Even if Moon had been able to read any of the Raksuran script, the drawings looked more like calculations. It gave Moon a little spark of hope, that Merit was apparently working on something. But he was afraid to ask what it was; if Merit was just passing the time, Moon didn’t want to know it right now.

They settled again some thirty or so paces back, among a soft patch of air ferns. Moon shifted to his winged form, just because he felt safer that way.

And they waited. Moon was wide awake now, and settled into the patient trance acquired by turns and turns of hunting through various parts of the Three Worlds. The chamber was quiet but not completely silent; he could hear the soft distant calls of nightbirds and treelings and other creatures that lived in the lower depths of the mountain-thorn, a creak as wind stirred the outer branches and vibrated through the trunk. Merit leaned against his shoulder and sighed.

Moon wasn’t sure how much time had passed, when Stone tensed. Then Merit sat up straight and whispered, “This is it.”

Moon couldn’t see it at first, then he realized the shadows were no longer black but gradually lightening to gray. At first it was easier to see Chime, then slowly the air around Jade, Balm, and Song grew brighter. As if whatever was causing the light, was closest to Chime. The glowing tiles and clumps of moss Merit had dropped into the area grew dimmer, not because they were fading, but because the air around them was growing lighter.

Then out of that light more shapes formed, shadows at first that grew gradually more solid. Like the Raksura, they were frozen in place. They were groundlings of some kind Moon had never seen before. Their skin was a slick blue hide, their heads smooth and almost fish-like, with lipless downturned mouths and only a small bump with a single nostril for a nose. Except unlike fish and other amphibians, the expressions in their wide eyes were easily read. There was terror there, and shock, and confusion.

Not unlike what Moon was feeling right now. What happened here? What did Chime find?

They were dressed in loose drapes of different fabrics, filmy and light or heavy with brocade. Their appendages were willowy and their hands long-fingered and delicate. Moon couldn’t tell how many limbs they had; it seemed to vary from individual to individual. They stood all around the frozen area, some huddled in groups, others apart, some half-crouched, all staring upward. Except the one who stood a few paces from Chime. He—she—it stood with one arm uplifted, hand extended and slender fingers spread as if to catch something that was falling towards its head. And it stared directly at Chime’s face.

Moon pushed to his feet slowly. He stepped forward and hit a wall of sound and motion, voices crying out, the sour tang of fear heavy in the air, choking dust, smoke, figures ran, turned, clung to each other—

Stone grabbed his arm and Moon hissed out a breath, dazed. The chamber was silent, empty except for the still figures, but the silence was like the echo after a great crash of sound. Stone stood to one side, and Merit to the other. Merit’s expression was rapt, the light pulling glints out of his scales. Moon managed to say, “Did everybody see that?”

“Yes.” Stone’s voice rumbled in his chest. “So what do we think about this?”

Moon gathered scattered wits. “When the light’s glowing we can see the past. They have to be the people who lived here, and this was the moment the city was destroyed.”

“It’s not the past, it’s not a static image. It’s a moment, happening over and over again.” His voice almost dreamy, Merit said, “It has to do with that one in the middle. The one Chime was talking to. I was hoping … I was hoping the light would show us more.”

With forced patience, Stone said, “Merit, you need to explain that for us.”

“This is … I think Chime is talking to a groundling sorcerer. I think he’s the one who did this.” Merit leaned forward and waved a hand to indicate the whole frozen area.

It didn’t make sense. Moon said, “If he did this, he trapped himself too. And no one’s looking at him except Chime. The other groundlings are all looking up.”

“Whatever they were afraid of, it was up there, coming toward them,” Stone agreed. He eased forward, trying to see up the shaft without getting too close to the spell area. “There it is,” he said grimly.

Moon stepped up beside him and craned his neck to see. Not far up the shaft was the ghost image of a boulder. It filled most of the shaft and the light seemed to be coming from it.

“Yes,” Merit said, twitching with excitement. “The rock we find on the forest floor. We’ve always thought it was there and then the forest grew up around it. What if it fell from the sky, long before the mountain-trees grew here? If this city was passing over this area when the rock started to rain down, and it was hit—I think the working or spell the groundling sorcerer did was meant to save the city, or at least try to save the groundlings who were down here.”

Moon sorted through that and it made him see the whole scene in a different light. “So a big rock fell from the sky and hit the city, smashed it down out of the air, and he was trying to stop it. And instead he … froze everyone here.” If that was the case then it wasn’t a trap, it was a terrible mistake, made in a desperate moment.

Merit frowned, twitching his spines. “It didn’t freeze them, it preserved them, but not the way he meant it too. It’s like he created a temporary world where they all lived, but he wasn’t strong enough to actually make it happen. So it’s stuck here, always on the verge of happening. The visions, the things I heard, they’re echoes of the event, all coming from what he did.”

Moon understood some of what he was saying, but not all. “Then why can’t we see them when the light isn’t showing?”

Merit’s expression went bleak. “Because it’s been too long. Time is passing in the moment, but slowly, so slowly. It might have taken hundreds and hundreds of turns, but they died. Their bodies aren’t there anymore. They rotted away.”

Moon blinked. The pavement the groundlings stood on wasn’t bare, it was littered with debris. He had seen it as just the same broken tiles and stone rubble that covered the rest of the floor, but were there bones there, rotted wisps of fabric …

Stone narrowed his eyes. “So how did Chime get stuck in the middle of it? And the others.”

“Maybe it has to do with the light. Maybe …” Maybe the light made the frozen area, or the moment, or whatever it was, more permeable. Moon bent and picked up a tile fragment and tossed it into the area. But like the others, it just fell more and more slowly until it finally stopped.

Merit said, “It does have to do with the light. It’s all that’s left of the falling rock that struck the city, the moment of impact, the moment this sorcerer tried to stop. Every day it repeats, the moment almost happens but not quite happens, and the light is visible. That must mean the wall between the moment and the real world is very thin during this time.” He turned to them. “Since Chime changed, he’s been able to hear and see things that he shouldn’t be able to. It’s like his mentor abilities changed too, and we just can’t understand how. I think the magic left here drew him in, and when he saw the light he followed it. He saw a vision, but instead of just seeing it for an instant, he was able to walk into it, into the moment, and doing that opened it up long enough for the others to follow him.”

Moon’s throat was dry. “The groundling sorcerer saw him, and Chime spoke to him.”

“But the opening didn’t last.” Merit lifted his hands, claws sheathed, and made a gesture of dropping something. “It all went back to the way it was.”

Stone said, “Do they know what’s happened? Any of them?”

Merit’s spines shivered. “I don’t think so. If anyone knows … it would be the groundling sorcerer.”

“So what do we do?” Moon was glad his voice came out mostly even. It sounded hopeless. It sounded like they were trapped inside this moment of death suspended forever.

But Merit said, “My lights went in there, and they’re still glowing. Which means a mentor can get their power inside the moment.” He looked at Stone. “We need more mentors. How far away is Ocean Winter?”

After some experiments to make sure the light hadn’t made the danger area any wider, they climbed up the shaft to tell the others about the plan, such as it was.

While Stone and Merit returned to the camp outside the city to get ready to leave, Moon had River lead Venture down the shaft so she could see the situation with her own eyes. It was Floret’s idea, who said, “She believes us now, but it’ll just be easier for them if she can tell her queen that she saw it herself. And it’ll help her be able to describe it. I mean, I couldn’t describe this to anyone if I hadn’t seen it myself.”

Moon would be staying here, mostly because he felt his lack of experience with Raksuran courts was a real disadvantage now. A normal consort would know exactly how to navigate this situation without a queen’s protection; Moon had no idea. It seemed simpler to send a line-grandfather and a mentor, since the usual rules of court etiquette tended not to apply to them, and Venture to attest that they were telling the truth. He was mostly worried that Ocean Winter would take violent exception to Garnet being held in Indigo Cloud as a hostage, and insist she be released before they agreed to help.

He asked Floret, “Do you think the Ocean Winter queen will be angry about Garnet?” He was debating the idea of sending two warriors back to Indigo Cloud to tell Pearl the situation, but he could only spare two and it just wasn’t safe for so few to travel through the suspended forest.

Floret thought about it, frowning, and finally shook her head. “Yes, but by helping us she’ll get such a big advantage over us that it’ll benefit her court in the long run. And it isn’t like Garnet or her warriors will be hurt or uncomfortable. Just very bored and anxious.”

“It’s not like anyone at Indigo Cloud will do anything rash,” Bramble added. “We brought most of the rash people with us.”

By dawn, Stone, Merit, and Venture were ready to leave. At the camp outside the city, Stone told Moon, “Keep an eye out. Don’t let them get too comfortable here.”

He meant, don’t get so distracted worrying about Jade and Chime and the others that you let everybody else get eaten. Moon just said, “I won’t.”

Stone shoved him in the head and walked toward the path through the mountain-thorn. Merit shouldered his pack, nodded to Moon and hurried to catch up. Venture hesitated, but just nodded and followed. She was treating Moon like a real consort now, like an important member of a foreign court; in other words, not someone she should be speaking casually to without a pressing reason.

Watching them go, the humid breeze ruffled through Moon’s spines. The calls of birds, treelings, and insects were a continuous din. The scents were heavy and so intertwined with that of the mountain-thorn itself, it would have been hard to pick out a predator’s rank odor until it was almost on top of you. The other thing Stone had probably wanted him to think about was the fact that Stone’s presence tended to drive off large predators. With him gone, maintaining two separate camps with people going back and forth between them was a bad idea.

Moon had left two Arbora, Salt and Strike, and two warriors, Sage and Aura, stationed at this camp. They were all watching him, alert and a little worried. Moon said, “Pack up. We’re all going to make a camp in the city.”

Strike jumped to his feet, excited to see the inside of the city, and Salt and Aura hurried to start taking down the shelters. Sage, the oldest warrior here, looked distinctly relieved.

It would take one day, maybe less, for Stone to reach Ocean Winter carrying Merit and Venture, one day to get back, plus whatever time it took to talk the Ocean Winter queen into allowing her mentors to help. If she agreed; the others seemed to think it wouldn’t be an issue, but Moon couldn’t let himself have that much confidence.

The waiting was going to be painful. But at this moment, Moon couldn’t remember what it felt like not to be waiting in terrible suspense.

They made their camp in the big chamber with the shaft opening. Moon found out that some of the others had experienced several visions in the chamber while the light was shining, but the sensations seemed confined to specific spots. So Bramble and Braid had carefully mapped them out, marking off the danger areas with piles of pebbles and broken tiles.

After working out a roster of lookouts for the top of the dome and the chamber where Jade and Chime and the others were trapped, Moon sent a group of the warriors hunting. The Arbora already had the lumps of wood Merit had spelled for heat, flown over in the water kettles, and more clumps of moss, wood, and other things spelled for light than they could possibly need. The Arbora just spread the treated cloth on the floor so they wouldn’t have to sleep on the muck covering the pavement and they were done.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully. Moon wanted to stay below in the chamber to keep watch over the trapped group himself, but realized quickly that was impractical. Any threat was more likely to come from outside the city, and he needed to be at the top of the shaft to deal with it.

That evening, Bramble, Plum, and Braid took turns telling stories. Band kept reminding them of his favorites that Blossom and Rill had always told until, frustrated, they forced him to tell the stories. He wasn’t bad, though he tended to make up details when he forgot the actual plot. If it failed to really distract Moon, at least it distracted some of the others and gave them something else to talk about.

Moon either fell asleep or passed out from exhaustion at some point, but woke suddenly sometime well into the night when Bramble nudged him. He sat up abruptly, dislodging Salt who had had his head pillowed on Moon’s hip.

Moon had been sleeping in a sweaty and uncomfortable pile with the rest of the Arbora. The light was shining up from the shaft, throwing a soft illumination over most of the room. River and Drift were sleeping curled together a short distance away, with Aura and Band just past them. Bramble and Serene were wide awake and standing over Moon, which meant it was the second shift of guards, and that Floret and Sand were down at the bottom of the shaft, and that Sage and Briar were on top of the dome. When he managed to focus his eyes on her, Bramble said, “Briar says something’s wrong outside.”

“Should I wake the others?” Serene added.

“Not yet.” Moon carefully detached himself from the pile of Arbora, and stepped over Strike. His left leg had gone partially numb and he limped over to stand under the opening in the dome. One of the warriors leaned over the edge, waving at him. Moon shifted, braced himself, and leapt upward.

He caught the crumbling edge with his claws and hauled himself up. For a moment he couldn’t see anything except the surface of the dome itself, curving away toward a lower tower. Then Briar’s shape moved in the dark and she whispered, “This way. Sage is down here, so the light doesn’t ruin his vision.”

Moon followed her down, seeing that they had sensibly stationed Briar up near the opening so she could use the light to make sure nothing approached over the dome and Sage further down the curve, so he could keep an eye on the surrounding canopy.

They reached Sage and Moon crouched beside him, while Briar returned to her post. After a moment, Sage said, “There. Do you see it?”

Moon blinked hard. His eyes were still bleary from sleep, and dazzled by the light. But after a moment he made out the shapes and textures of the mountain-thorn’s branches and the heavy growth along them, coiling just past the city’s platform. Then the leaves and other foliage moved, rolled like a wave, as something undulated through the growth about two hundred paces into the canopy.

If they could see it from here … it’s big, Moon thought, the skin under his spines itching with nerves. Oh, that’s all we need. “They took the offal from the hunt out to another tree’s platform like I told them to, right?” They better have.

“Yes, Floret made certain. All we have near the camp is fruit,” Sage said. “It’s not been drawn here by that.”

There were, conceivably, large creatures in the suspended forest that were plant-eaters, but Moon wasn’t willing to bet that this was one. “Then it’s after us.”

“Probably,” Sage agreed.

Moon considered several ideas, all of them bad. He said, “Let me know if it gets any closer.” It felt like a stupid thing to say, as if Sage, having managed to see the thing, would take his eyes off it for a moment now. But Sage just gave him a serious nod.

Moon climbed back up the dome and dropped down through the opening to the floor of the chamber. Bramble and Serene watched him anxiously. Moon had a number of conflicting impulses. Wake everyone up now or let them get more of the sleep they needed while he waited to find out just how bad the situation was. Go down to the bottom of the shaft and take over guarding Jade and Balm and Chime or trust Floret to do the job he had given her while he worried about the rest of the group. It was a reminder how nice it was to have queens in charge of the hard decisions. He took a deep breath, and said quietly, “There’s something nearby, in the mountain-thorn’s branches, something big. It’s probably hunting.”

Serene looked up at the opening above their heads, her spines twitching. Bramble said, “Uh oh.”

“Right.” Moon hesitated again. “Bramble, go down the shaft and tell Floret. Tell her we’ll hold tight here until we see what this thing is going to do.”

Bramble hurried toward the shaft. Moon told Serene, “Don’t wake the others until it’s time to switch the lookouts. I’m going to check around down here.”

Serene twitched a spine in assent.

Moon circled around the sleeping piles of Raksura and did a quick but thorough walk through the surrounding chambers, making sure they were empty of anything dangerous and that the routes to the outside were still clear. He had two brief visions, just flashes of sunlight and the sensation of falling and overwhelming doom. Though the overwhelming doom lingered long enough to where he couldn’t tell if it had come from the vision or was just a natural product of their situation. Then he went back up to the top of the dome.

Sage whispered, “It’s getting closer.”

Moon hissed. He told Briar, “Tell Serene to wake the others.” He couldn’t leave the lower chamber unprotected, but if the predator got any closer he would have to move the Arbora.

The movement drew closer to the platform, then they could make out a shadow, a big shadow, blotting out the lighter colored stone as it climbed up onto the city’s platform. Moon’s eyes tracked it more by the change in the darkness’ texture, the void where what little light there was should be gleaming off the city’s stones. It moved forward, disappearing between structures, winding around towers. It was headed right for them. It was still nearly five hundred paces away, but there was no mistaking its intention. Moon drew breath to order Briar to go and tell Floret to flee with the Arbora to the other edge of the city, when it stopped abruptly. Sage whispered, “It’s seen us.”

From behind them, Briar asked, “Didn’t it already know we were here?”

“I thought so, but …” Sage let the words trail off as the upper part of the predator lifted up, as it tried to get a better look at them.

On impulse, Moon stood up.

There was a long moment when no one moved. He thought, It is surprised. It didn’t know we were here, but it was heading for this building. He thought about the tracks the Arbora had found around the edge of the shaft, the scrapes that looked as if something large had climbed out of it. Did this thing hunt the lower chamber on some sort of schedule, searching for prey who were trapped in the spell area? But then how did it get in and out of the spell area without being trapped itself?

And was he looking at an animal, or something else?

After a long moment, the shadow turned away. Sage and Briar hissed out in relief. Watching it move toward the edge of the city, Moon felt the tightness in his chest ease. But he felt this was just a temporary reprieve.

Sage said, “Well, maybe it won’t come back.”

Briar snorted. “Optimist.”

They watched all night and through the morning. The movement in the canopy stopped long before dawn, and Moon found not knowing where the creature was actually far more nerve-racking than being able to track its progress.

By early afternoon, he decided he had to go over and see if it was there. It felt like a bad idea, but everyone agreed that they should do it. Which didn’t make it less of a bad idea.

Moon made Floret stay behind but agreed to take Serene and River with him. All the Arbora wanted to go, but Moon only took Bramble.

As they flew across the short distance to the canopy, he carried her himself. From the uncomfortable glance Serene gave him, it was probably one of those things consorts weren’t supposed to do, but if Moon was going to take an Arbora into this situation, he wanted to keep her as close as possible.

The canopy was so thick on this side they had to land on one of the big branches supporting the platform. The bark was cracked from the weight of the platform’s stone, but the wood was as solid as bedrock as they climbed up along it. It led upward into the forest of small trees, ferns, and vines that grew along the wide branches. Bramble slipped a pace ahead or two of Moon, tasting the air deeply. Moon couldn’t detect anything but mountain-thorn, but he noticed the treelings and birds were suspiciously quiet; there was nothing but the hum of insects in the air.

They had moved some distance into the canopy when Bramble froze and twitched her spines, signaling them to halt. A moment later Moon caught it too: an odd odor, blended with the mountain-thorn’s scent and hard to define.

Bramble glanced back to make sure they had all detected it, then crept forward again.

A little further on, she slipped through a thick stand of grassbrush and hissed in dismay. Moon motioned Serene and River to stay back and stepped up beside Bramble.

Ahead a whole section of the winding branches of the mountain-thorn had been scraped raw, bark, thorns, trees, and plant life scoured away by the rough skin of whatever had climbed across them. The bare area formed a pathway extending back into the mountain-thorn. Moon guessed whatever it was, it was about thirty paces wide. Bramble said, low-voiced, “It’s not that big.”

As an attempt to be optimistic, it wasn’t successful. Moon told her, “We don’t know how long it is. This thing could be huge.”

From behind Moon, River hissed, “What is it?”

“Tracks,” Moon hissed back.

Serene leaned around him to look, made a worried noise in her throat, and retreated back to describe it to River.

Bramble glanced at Moon, spines cocked inquiringly. He told her, “We follow it.” In his own attempt to be optimistic, he added, “Maybe it left.”

Bramble’s expression suggested this was a fond hope. He picked her up and leapt to a branch above the clearing that still had its coating of brush and small trees. Serene and River followed, and they made their way above the cleared area, leaping from branch to branch. The pathway wound back through the mountain-thorn, deeper into the green-tinted shadows.

Bramble proved her hunter’s eyes were better than Moon’s when she suddenly squeezed his arm, denting his scales with her claws. “There!” she hissed.

Moon signaled the others to halt with a flick of his spines. He narrowed his eyes, scanned the clearing below. A moment later he spotted it.

It was hard to see, blending in with the gray bark, and at first it looked like one of the huge thorn branches curled in on itself. But it was a living creature, wound up into a giant knot and resting on the wood it had scraped raw. Moon couldn’t tell much about it, couldn’t see its head or even if it had one. Its hide was mottled gray-black, and its scales were large, ridged, and spade-shaped.

Moon twisted around and motioned for the others to go back. Serene and River turned and fled, and he followed with Bramble.

They waited through the day and into the evening. Moon had decided not to send the warriors out to hunt, hoping the creature would lose interest in them. Raksura didn’t need nearly as much meat when they weren’t doing anything other than sitting around and waiting, and the dried travel rations and fruit they still had was enough to keep everyone mostly content.

As the green twilight began to deepen, Moon went up on top of the dome with the warriors on watch, Floret, Serene, Sage, Briar, and River. There had been no movement in the canopy yet, except for the small flickers of birds and other creatures. Moon was certain there were other predators in the canopy watching them, but nothing else seemed eager to venture up to the city and try its luck.

River kept saying, “What do we do about it?” Moon didn’t answer, currently spending most of his energy not hitting River in the head. He had been thinking about it all day, coming up with various unworkable plans.

Floret said, “I just wonder why this thing came here now. If it just wants to eat, there’s lots of grasseaters on the platforms of the other mountain-trees around here. Is it attracted to us because we’re moving around so much?”

Serene shook her head. “We haven’t been moving that much, except to go hunting.”

“That’s all it takes,” River said. “Obviously.”

All the female warriors flicked their spines in annoyance and Serene eyed him as if considering slapping him sideways.

Moon said, “I don’t think it was after us. I don’t think it knew we were here.”

Floret settled her wings uneasily. “So nothing we do will help. It’ll either come back, or it won’t.”

She was right, but Moon wished she hadn’t put it quite that way.

The night wore on and there was no movement in the canopy. When nothing had happened by the time the light started to shine up from the shaft, Moon was cautiously optimistic and even thinking he might be able to afford to take a shift guarding the lower chamber. It might not do Jade and Chime and the others any good for him to be there, but it would at least make him feel like he was doing something for them.

Then Serene muttered, “Oh, no.”

Moon saw it too. Sinuous movement in the canopy, right in the spot where they had last seen the predator. He snarled under his breath. “It’s the light. That’s what’s drawing it here.”

Just as it had last night, the predator advanced up onto the city’s platform and worked its way further in. Moon turned to Aura. “Go get me one of the moss light bundles. A big one. And wrap it in a blanket before you bring it up here.”

Aura sprang toward the dome’s opening while the others stared at him. Floret said, “Moon, what are you going to do?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t want to give her the chance to talk him out of it. Aura jumped back up to the edge of the opening clutching a blanket-wrapped bundle. Moon took it and leapt into the air, snapped his wings out and shot toward the predator.

He tore open the blanket at the last moment and dropped the glowing moss, then circled away to land on a balcony and half-furl his wings.

The moss fell where he meant it to, about ten paces in front of the predator as it crossed an open plaza. It stopped and reared back, lifted its front section the way it had before. The moss provided enough light to get a better view of it.

Away from the mountain-thorn’s canopy, its scent was easier to detect. It was metallic and heavy, like earth, like rock. There was no rankness of predator to it. Moon heard Floret and Serene land on the roof of the tower above him, their claws scraping as they clung to the stone. He twitched his spines, warning them to stay back.

He couldn’t see anything on its front that was recognizable as eyes, but there were four irregular lighter patches that might serve that function. The scales in those areas were tiny and delicate, like flower petals, very different from the big rough plates the rest of it was covered with. Moon took deliberate steps along the edge of the balcony and the head twisted slightly to follow him. He thought if this thing was just a mindless predator it would have attacked him by now. Maybe it made its lair in the ruin, and had been gone when they arrived. But that didn’t explain why it seemed to be drawn to the light. He said, “We don’t want this place. We’ll leave as soon as we can.”

It drew back a little, rough scales scraping along the pavement. Then it surged forward.

Moon snapped his wings in and leapt up and back, landed on the curve of roof near Floret. She and Serene hissed in chorus.

The predator hadn’t come forward any further, making no attempt to come after them. But that had definitely been a warning. Moon’s heart was pounding in reaction, his pulse beating in his ears.

Floret whispered, “Did it understand you?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.” If it had, they might have been able to come to some sort of agreement or bargain, but as it was, they still had no idea what this thing wanted. He shook out his spines, trying unsuccessfully to shed some tension. “Let’s get back.”

The light from the lower chamber winked out as usual, but the moss-light on the plaza showed the patient creature was still there, waiting.

As the canopy began to lighten with dawn, it made no attempt to leave. So it’s a stand-off, and you can stop waiting for it to give up, Moon thought. Midway through the night, he had changed out the look-outs so the warriors could stay rested, but he had remained up on top of the dome. He was too edgy to rest anyway, but had shifted to groundling for a short time just to take the weight off his back.

Now Moon rubbed his face wearily. His eyes felt like they were full of sand and his head ached. He had to face the fact that it wasn’t safe for the Arbora. As soon as it was light enough, he was going to tell the warriors to take them back through the canopy to the outer platform, and to be ready to carry them away if the predator attacked. He was trying to decide which warriors to keep with him when Band said, “Moon! Look!”

Moon shifted back to his winged form and looked first at the creature, which still hadn’t moved from its position on the lower plaza. So he missed Stone’s approach and had to scramble back as Stone landed on the dome.

Two Arbora had been huddling up near Stone’s collar flange and now jumped down. It was Merit and an older female Arbora Moon didn’t recognize. Merit said, “This is Violet, the chief mentor of Ocean Winter. Their sister queen Flame is on the way too, with some warriors.”

Violet had a heavy pack slung over her shoulder. “Hello, Consort. I see we need to move even faster than Merit thought.”

Stone twisted off the dome and fell into flight, one hard flap taking him to the edge of the plaza. The waiting creature lashed its body like a tail, banged against the tower walls surrounding it, but didn’t retreat. Moon picked up Merit and told River, “You take Violet.”

They dropped down to the floor of the chamber, near the startled Arbora gathered anxiously in the camp. Salt spotted Merit and shouted, “Stone’s back!”

Moon took them straight into the shaft, dropping from hand hold to hand hold, down through the foliage and past it to where the spell area started. He asked Merit, “Do you have a plan?”

“She does,” Merit said, breathlessly enough that Moon adjusted his hold so he wasn’t squeezing Merit around the chest. “She thinks that I’m right about the way to reach Chime.”

“Stop!” Violet called out when they reached Coil. River scrabbled, missed a handhold but caught the next and hung there. Moon stopped with Merit, waiting impatiently. A moment later, Violet said, “All right, let’s go on.”

Moon stopped when they reached Root, but Violet waved at him to continue, and he dropped on down to the floor of the lower chamber. He set Merit on his feet, as River landed with Violet. Merit hurried to the cleared spot in the moss and Violet followed, unslinging her pack.

She stepped close to the edge of the spell area and stared hard at Chime. Then she turned to Moon and said, “We’re going to do something similar to the way we look into someone’s mind, to test for sickness or foreign influences. But we want to try to actually communicate with Chime. We’re going to try to—” She waved her hands. “Nudge him awake. He was able to defeat this groundling’s spell before, when he walked into it and stopped it long enough for the others to follow him. We think he can do it again, if he is made to realize what has happened to him.”

“I couldn’t do it alone,” Merit said, “But Violet is much stronger. We’re going to try to do it together.”

“All right.” Moon just hoped they knew what they were talking about. He had had mentors look into his thoughts before, to check for Fell influence. He had never been aware that anything was happening. He turned to River, “Go tell Floret that if the creature comes any closer, she needs to get the Arbora out of there and back to the outer platform.”

River nodded sharply and leapt for the wall of the shaft.

Merit settled on the floor, drank from a water skin, and took a deep breath. Violet sat beside him and they joined hands.

Moon watched them for a while, heart pounding, until he finally realized this was not going to be the quick process he had thought it would. He stayed where he was, not pacing or moving around for fear of disturbing them.

He couldn’t hear anything from above, and wished he had thought to tell River to come back down afterward, at least so he could send him back up to find out what was happening.

Moon looked at Chime, hoping for some sign of consciousness. After a time he realized he had been staring so long he almost thought he could see Chime’s eyes move …

Moon’s breath stopped in his throat. “He’s moving. Chime’s moving.”

His gaze went to Jade, but she and Balm and Song still stood like statues. The light began to glow softly and the groundlings materialized. For a moment that was all, but then a little motion caught Moon’s eye and he saw the lifted edge of the groundling sorcerer’s robe was falling. The motion was terribly slow, but it wasn’t his imagination.

As Moon watched he saw Chime’s expression change slowly to consternation, his head start to turn. The sorcerer’s stiff body became fluid, its gaze leaving Chime, slowly lifting up. The motion was gradually getting faster. Moon waved his arms and yelled, “Chime, can you hear me?”

Chime moved a little faster all the time, but his gaze passed Moon as if he couldn’t see him. And maybe he couldn’t, maybe he was only seeing what the groundling sorcerer saw, what the other groundlings trapped in this moment saw.

Moon turned back to the mentors. They had both shifted to groundling, as if the effort of what they were doing had left them with no power to keep their scales. Merit’s face was drawn with effort and Violet’s dark bronze skin had gone ashy. They had woken Chime, but they couldn’t keep this up for long. And Chime didn’t seem to be reacting to them, he wasn’t looking for them, he was still facing the sorcerer.

No, I’m thinking about this wrong, Moon realized. Chime was the one who had walked into the spell, who had temporarily stopped it by getting the sorcerer’s attention. If Chime walked out of the spell, Jade and the others would still be trapped inside. The only solution was to tell Chime what had happened.

Before he could stop himself, Moon surged forward. He hit a wall of air that was like slamming into mud. He pressed forward, each step a little easier, and pushed toward Chime.

To his relief, Chime’s head turned toward him and his eyes widened. “Moon! What—”

“You’re trapped in a spell!” Moon said, having to force the words out. It felt like something was squeezing his throat. “You’ve been here for days and days. Merit and a mentor from Ocean Winter woke you but you have to keep doing whatever it is you’re doing or we’ll all be stuck here.”

“A spell?” Chime’s body moved more fluidly, almost at normal speed, as he turned to stare at the groundling sorcerer. “I knew that, I knew the groundlings were trapped here, but—”

“The groundling froze time, trying to save the city. It didn’t work, and it trapped you too. Just don’t let it freeze us again.”

The groundling’s head turned toward Moon. Chime’s expression was aghast. “I don’t know what I did! I just—I tried to tell it that it must have been here for thousands of turns. It didn’t believe me—”

“Keep trying, keep talking to it, I have to get the others!” Moon headed toward Jade, still standing on the broken chunk of debris. She and Balm moved now too, their spines lifting, their heads turning slightly, but so slowly. Song turned to stare down at the groundlings below her, who still reacted to the invisible threat overhead.

As Moon drew closer to them, it was like walking into mud again, deeper and thicker mud the further he got from Chime and the sorcerer. His muscles burned from the effort and it was grindingly hard to draw breath. He managed to inflate his lungs enough to shout, “Jade!”

Jade’s head tilted and her eyes focused on him, widened in shock. From her perspective he must have just appeared in front of her. He said, “This is a spell-trap! You’ve been here for days! You have to get out, now!”

For a moment she didn’t move and his heart sunk. She must think it was a trick, a hallucination. But he had forgotten about the difference in time between them. All at once, Jade grabbed for Balm’s and Song’s wrists, and lunged forward off the rock, dragging them with her.

“That way!” Moon pointed past the groundling sorcerer to the edge of the frozen area. He couldn’t see anything outside it but a blur. He didn’t think that was a good sign.

Jade pressed toward him, Balm and Song both obviously badly confused but following her. Moon sensed movement above and looked up to see Root falling toward him, gaining speed the closer he got, Coil some distance above him.

Moon braced himself and as Root came within reach, he grabbed his ankle, turned and slung him toward the edge of the frozen area. Moon staggered, the effort nearly enough to knock him flat. Root yelped, the sound distorted as he flew faster and faster the closer he got to Chime and the sorcerer. He sailed over their heads and vanished into the blur that marked the spell’s boundary. Chime gestured and shouted at the sorcerer, still moving almost at a normal speed, and as Root passed overhead Chime pointed up at him and yelled, “See? I’m telling the truth!”

Coil saw what Moon had done and brought his wings down in a flap that propelled him forward enough to accelerate and vanish through the blur after Root. The groundlings were all jerking into motion too, fleeing in slow confusion toward the edges of the chamber. Moon turned as Jade reached him. She shoved Balm and Song forward and ordered, “Keep moving! Follow Root and Coil.”

Balm grabbed Song’s arm and pressed forward grimly. Song bent forward, and together they started to move faster. Moon caught Jade’s arm to keep himself upright and gasped, “Chime’s keeping the—” It really took too long to explain and he had no idea how. “He has to go last, or we’ll get stuck here.”

“Right.” Jade slid an arm around his waist and pulled him toward Chime.

Moon leaned his weight forward, his legs trembling with the effort. The pressure eased as they approached Chime, and Moon could hear him arguing with the sorcerer, though he couldn’t hear the sorcerer’s answers. “I’m not lying, it’s not a trick,” Chime said, his voice harsh and urgent.

Moon couldn’t hear the response, but as if the sorcerer had spoken, Chime replied, “No, the other survivors left, more turns ago than I can count. It’s over, it’s long over. There’s nothing more you can do!”

As they reached him, Jade said, “Chime, follow us.”

Chime turned to her, his expression bewildered. “But I have to convince him– There’s– It’s attacked the city, he has to save them—”

“He’s falling under the spell again,” Moon gasped. It was even harder to breathe, pressure crushing in on him from all directions. “The mentors, they must have lost him—”

Jade growled, grabbed Chime by the shoulder, and flung herself forward.

Moon hit the ground a moment later, and Jade and Chime landed beside him. He got a lungful of air, enough to clear his head. A few paces in front of him Violet had collapsed and Merit leaned anxiously over her. Blood trickled out of her nose. Coil and Root stood nearby, staring in wild confusion, and Balm and Song were just staggering to their feet. Moon shoved himself up on his arms and turned to look back at the sorcerer.

The groundlings who ran toward the edge of the spell area faded out of sight as they reached the boundary, but the sorcerer had turned his head toward Moon. From the look of shock and disbelief in his eyes, he could see them.

From somewhere above, Stone roared, and Floret yelled, “Moon! Merit! Are you there? Did it work yet? That predator is trying to get in!”

“We need to get out of here,” Moon told Jade, “There’s something up there—”

“Of course there is.” Jade stood and dragged him upright. She ordered the warriors, “Grab the mentors and get back up that shaft.” She nudged Chime with her foot. “Can you stand?”

Chime waved helplessly and tried to push himself up. Moon felt light as air now that the weight of time wasn’t pressing in on him. He pulled Chime to his feet. “I’ll take him.”

“Good, now go!” Jade gave Root a shove to get him moving.

Balm had picked up Violet and flattened her spines so she could sling the Arbora over her shoulder. Song grabbed Merit, who wrapped his arms around her neck. Both leapt up to the wall of the shaft. Root and Coil followed, and Moon asked Chime, “Can you hold onto me?”

Chime slung one arm around Moon’s neck and hooked the other hand around Moon’s collar flange. He gasped, “Just go.”

Moon leapt, caught the edge of the shaft and hauled himself up. He paused to make sure Jade was right behind him, and then put all that was left of his strength into climbing.

Above them he heard Floret call for him again and Balm answer, “We’re here, we’re coming up!”

Chime said, plaintively, “What happened? I thought there were groundlings trapped down here. And what are you doing here?”

“There were,” Moon told him, breathless with the effort of dragging them both up the shaft. He no longer felt lighter than air. He felt like an exhausted Raksura climbing up a very tall rock wall hauling another exhausted Raksura. “It’s a long story, and it got complicated.”

Behind him, Jade said, “How long were we trapped?”

“At least twenty-five days? I lost count.” Moon heard Jade hiss with relief. Yes, it could have been so much worse. “The others are up in the city.”

“The others?” Jade asked. “How many did you bring?”

“Uh, a lot,” Moon admitted.

They had just reached the ghost image of the boulder when Balm snarled in alarm. Song, Coil, and Root suddenly stopped and scrambled back down the shaft. Looking past them, Moon saw why.

The predator climbed down toward them, flattening the parasite plants and vines against the walls. It filled most of the shaft, and somewhere above it, Stone roared in rage. Moon frantically skittered down the wall, realizing they couldn’t just drop down; there was too much danger of falling back into the spell area. And they couldn’t let the creature trap them in the chamber below; in the shaft there was at least a chance for some of them to get past it.

Jade swung up around him and put her body between Moon and Chime and the creature. Song managed to scramble away with Merit and Coil swung after her. But the creature ignored them, its clawed feelers missing Balm and Violet, huddled against the wall, and brushing past a trembling Root.

From only a few paces away its hide was still more like rock than flesh, big scales like slabs of mottled gray stone, the edges lifting to show little glimpses of the white flesh beneath. Right above Moon, it stretched out from the wall and extended its big head toward the center of the shaft. Moon shrank back against the rock, trying to become part of it, and Jade’s spines flattened. Chime whispered, “Oh, that’s what he meant.”

Moon didn’t have wits to ask for an explanation. The predator was climbing into the spell area, into the faded image of the boulder. Or what Moon had thought was a boulder. Moving slower and slower as the spell took it, it curled its body around, its shape fitting perfectly into the ghost image of the rock. As if it was the rock.

With most of the creature in the center of the shaft, Moon saw Stone clinging to the wall above it, his winged form braced for battle but something about the tension in his body conveying complete consternation. That was pretty much how Moon felt, too.

As the creature’s long tail slid off the wall and slowly wrapped around its coiled body, the light in the shaft started to fade. The predator faded with it, just like the groundlings on the chamber floor. It was entering the moment preserved in the spell, disappearing into it.

It vanished completely, the shaft shadowed without the light source. For a long moment they all just hung from the wall, staring. Then Chime nudged Moon and said, “Can we go?”

Jade twitched into motion and said, “Balm, keep climbing. Root, Song, Coil, follow her. Go.”

The others flinched and jolted into motion again, continuing the climb up the shaft wall. Jade slipped away from Moon and he managed to unclench his claws enough to reach for the next handhold. Jade asked quietly, “Do you know what that was?”

Moon said, “It’s been hanging around the city, but … What just happened?”

“I know,” Chime said, sounding weary but less confused. “I’ll explain later.”

They ended up on a platform off another mountain-tree some distance away, one that was used as a regular camping point by warriors on their way to and from Ocean Winter. The sister queen Flame had arrived with a party of ten warriors and another two mentors, and led them to it. The Arbora had managed to pack the camp before the rock creature had crashed through it, so Indigo Cloud had withdrawn in good order, and when they landed on what was formally considered Ocean Winter territory, the whole group looked much less scattered and desperate than Moon was afraid it would.

The platform had a large shelter built onto it, the pitched roof made of bundled saplings and the walls open. It had started to rain in the late afternoon just before they arrived, so the warriors scrambled to attach the water-resistant tent canvases to the sides. The Ocean Winter mentors heated some stones left there to warm the space and hurried to tend to Violet, who was conscious but groggy, and Merit, who just curled up on the nearest blanket and went to sleep. Salt and Braid filled the kettles and got tea started.

Fortunately, Flame was the sister queen who had originally come to Indigo Cloud to initiate a trade alliance, so she and Jade had already formally met. Moon could tell that it also helped that he and Stone were here, along with Arbora from both courts. It made both sets of warriors disinclined to be impolite and there was none of the maneuvering for dominance that was usual between two strange courts. And everyone knew Indigo Cloud was going to owe Ocean Winter a big favor for sending Violet to help, so there was not much point in even the structured rudeness Raksuran courts enjoyed so much.

With a few unlucky Ocean Winter warriors posted as sentries, everyone else settled in around the hearth, queens in the front, then Moon and Stone and the mentors, with Arbora and warriors gathered around them. Between the rain and the fresh air on the way here, Chime had revived somewhat, and now sat between Moon and Balm, huddled down and trying to be unobtrusive. Everyone except the two queens had shifted to groundling, another gesture to show that this was a friendly gathering.

Moon was caught between trying to be unobtrusive too and trying to look as much like a real consort as possible. With Flame and her warriors here, he had been extremely conscious that he was again doing something that consorts weren’t supposed to do. He had had Pearl’s permission, but she wasn’t here to take the blame. Fortunately Flame seemed to be too polite to refer to Moon’s part in the whole expedition, whatever she thought it was. The Ocean Winter warriors were staring at him like he had three heads, but that was nothing new.

Once tea had been handed around, Jade said to Flame, “Thank you for sending Violet. I understand if not for her, my warriors and I would still be trapped.”

Flame nodded, with the air of a Raksuran queen who could well afford to be gracious. Stone had told Moon that Flame already knew about Garnet being held hostage from Venture, and Moon was waiting tensely to see if she would mention it. But she only said, “Our warrior Venture, and your line-grandfather and your mentor, had told us some of what happened, but as to the rest …?”

Jade didn’t betray any relief, though when Moon had told her privately about what had happened back at Indigo Cloud, she had covered her eyes and growled. She sipped her tea and said to Flame, “They told you about Chime’s unique situation?”

Chime, leaning wearily on Moon’s shoulder, said, “It was my fault.”

Well aware that Jade needed to be the one to handle this, Moon hissed at him, and Balm poked him in the ribs. “Ow,” Chime muttered.

Everyone politely ignored him, and Flame said, “Merit explained.”

Jade said, “On our way to Ocean Winter, we camped overnight on an outer platform of the mountain-thorn. In the morning, Chime said he had been having strange dreams all during the night, and when we made ready to leave, we realized he was gone. We followed him through the canopy and to the ruin, where he had been drawn by the groundling sorcerer’s spell. I and two of my warriors went down the shaft after him, and I left two in the chamber above to go for help if necessary.” She turned to eye Root and Coil. “But apparently they chose to follow us down.”

Root sunk down a little, embarrassed, and Coil moved a little to take cover behind River.

Jade continued, “The rest Chime will have to explain.”

Moon elbowed Chime and he sat up a little. He said, “It was my fault.”

“We know,” Stone told him. “Now tell us what it was all about.”

Chime took a deep breath. “I didn’t really know, until Merit told me what he had seen and figured out. When I went down there … I thought I was seeing living groundlings, who were trapped. Part of the time, I thought the city was still occupied. I could see other groundlings, but none of them seemed to care that the city was being attacked, that these others were stuck down in this chamber …” He lifted a hand helplessly. “None of it made sense, I can see now.”

Violet, seated behind Flame and wrapped in a blanket, leaned forward. “It was an illusion, caused by the spell. You were seeing what the groundling sorcerer saw, in the moment when he made the spell and died.”

Chime nodded, an expression of relief crossing his face. With Merit still sleeping off the experience, it must be reassuring to have the understanding of the other mentor. “I was trying to convince the groundling sorcerer to let me help him, I thought I was talking to him. Maybe I was, I don’t know. Jade and Balm and Song came then, and really, the next thing I know I heard Merit in my head telling me to wake up and then Moon just appeared in front of me.”

Flame’s head was cocked with interest. “But what was the creature? We saw it enter the chamber as we arrived.”

Moon, along with everyone else, listened intently.

“It was a sorcerer too.” Chime frowned, as if trying to sort it out in his own mind. “I saw it, in the groundling sorcerer’s head. There was some sort of battle, and it attacked the city. It used its own body to crash down into that tower, rolled up like a boulder … The sorcerer was trying to stop it when he made the spell. It must have been caught in it too.”

Jade watched him, frowning a little as she thought. “We didn’t see it when we went down there after you.”

“When you walked into the spell, and opened it temporarily,” Violet told Chime, “it must have escaped. But it was so powerful, it was able to survive.” She lifted her brows. “Unlike the poor groundlings.”

Jade asked her, “Then why did it come back?”

Violet shrugged one shoulder. “It must have realized what had happened. That it was out of its time.”

Moon thought about what that must have been like, to one moment be waging war and the next to find yourself what must be thousands of turns out of your time. It must have spent all the days since Chime had accidentally released it exploring, trying to find out what had happened to it. Stone had seen it lift up and move through the air when it had returned to the shaft; perhaps it had been using its magic to travel over the Reaches, finding nothing of what it remembered of its own world.

Everyone was quiet, absorbing that thought.

Then Flame set her cup aside and smiled at Jade. “While you’re here, let’s speak about trade.”

Later, Moon sat with Jade, Chime, Stone, and Balm on Indigo Cloud’s side of the shelter. Some of the Arbora and warriors had already curled up to sleep, others were talking quietly. Floret had fallen asleep with her head on Briar’s shoulder; she must be as relieved as Moon to have this over with. Merit had woken just long enough for Bramble to make him eat something, and to prove he was still coherent, just exhausted, then had gone back to sleep. The rain was pattering softly against the roof, a damp breeze making its way between the gaps in the cloth walls. The Ocean Winter group was politely leaving them alone, though Violet had gone back to sleep near Merit.

Keeping his voice low, Moon told Jade, “We owe Merit a lot.” Doubting Merit at all had been a huge error in judgment; Moon felt he should have remembered that both Heart and Merit had been singled out by Flower as the best mentors in the court. “We owe Floret and Bramble, too.” Moon glanced over to make sure River and Drift were further down the length of the shelter, both asleep, before he added, almost not reluctantly, “And River.” He was going to have to make sure Pearl knew just how brave, and more importantly cooperative, all the warriors and Arbora had been.

Jade squeezed his wrist. “I owe you and Stone a lot.”

Stone shrugged and poured another cup of tea.

Chime still looked unhappy. He said, “So what are we going to do about me?”

Jade eyed him. “What about you?”

Chime waved his hands. “I almost got us … not killed, something much worse, as far as we can tell.”

“Chime …” Jade sighed. “It was like being attacked by a predator. It just happened.”

“But whatever has happened to me caused this—”

Stone snorted. “It also caused us to find the seed, remember that? Not directly, but it helped.”

“And to figure out what the Fell wanted with Shade,” Moon added.

“That’s twice it’s been so helpful it’s saved lives.” Jade ticked the incidents off on her fingers. “Plus more times than anyone has bothered to keep track of that it’s been useless but didn’t hurt anything, and only once that it was a liability.”

Stone said, “I wish Moon’s record was that good.”

It was Moon’s turn to sigh. Jade glared at Stone. “If you’re not going to help—”

Chime persisted, “It’s only been a liability once so far! What about the next time?”

Moon hissed at him. “Don’t wake Merit.”

Chime subsided. Balm propped her chin on her hand and asked, “What exactly do you want us to do to you?”

Chime grimaced at her, but Moon could tell he was losing the urge to be a martyr. Chime said, stubbornly, “This can’t go on.”

Moon said, patiently, “Chime, some day you’re going to find a book, or a mentor, or even a groundling like Delin, who knows what this is and why it happens and what you can do about it. Until then, you’re just going to have to put up with it.” He added, “You should talk to Violet. After all this, she might want to help you get into the mentors’ libraries at Ocean Winter.”

Chime perked up a little. “So you think I should keep looking?”

“Yes. I didn’t before, but—that was stupid. Obviously.” It seemed obvious now, anyway. Chime’s situation was unique, and just accepting it wasn’t going to be enough. Chime might never find the kind of answers he was looking for, but not looking for them didn’t mean the problem was going to go away.

Chime said, “No, I knew what you meant, but …” He reached over and squeezed Moon’s wrist. “I was just always afraid something like this would happen, that I’d have a vision and get some of you into trouble somehow. When it did happen—I didn’t know how to explain what I was experiencing, or what was happening …”

Balm pointed out, “If you had tried to tell us, we wouldn’t have understood.”

“Exactly,” Jade said, with an air of finality. “So in the future, Chime, when you tell us you’ve had strange dreams, or strange anything else, we’ll listen better.”

Later in the night, when everyone except the Ocean Winter warriors who were on watch had settled in to sleep, Moon was curled up with Jade on a blanket pallet. The others were gathered close around them, their mingled scents a reassuring counterpoint to the damp forest air. Keeping his voice low, he said, “So you don’t think that I—”

“No, I don’t think you should have stayed at home and left me and the others to die like a normal consort,” Jade said into his ear. “I doubt Flame thinks so either. Ocean Winter knows Pearl had no one else to send, and they know our situation is unique. Not many courts have a consort so experienced at travel, fighting, and strange circumstances.” She let her breath out. “I just don’t know what your mother is going to say about this.”

Moon frowned. “Malachite won’t find out.”

Jade obviously thought this was just wishful thinking. “Please. Ocean Winter may be understanding, but they will spread this story to every court they have contact with. It’s bound to get back to Opal Night.”

Moon turned that thought over. He wasn’t afraid of Malachite, though he didn’t entirely trust her. “So what would she do?”

Jade considered for a moment, giving the impression she was sorting through several awful possibilities. “I have no idea. That’s what worries me.”

On Moon’s other side, Stone made a noise that was half-groan and half-growl. “Quiet, you’re scaring the kids.”

Moon became aware that the others were listening intently. Jade retorted to Stone, “You be quiet,” but tugged Moon closer and subsided.

The prospect of gossiping courts getting Malachite’s attention was something to worry about in the future; for now, everything was as right as it could be. Moon settled his head on Jade’s shoulder and slept deeply for the first time in what felt like forever.