Edge of Worlds (The Books of the Raksura) (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone looked at him, then back to Merit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fell’s distinctive stench permeated their surroundings and would be carried on the wind even over long distances. It was probably one of the reasons they relied on less scent-sensitive groundling species as their main prey. If they were anywhere nearby, their odor would be hard to disguise, and Stone’s senses were far more acute than an ordinary Raksura’s.

“So,” Pearl said. She looked around at all the anxious faces. Moon knew he didn’t feel much relieved. “I’m not going to tell you to go back to sleep as if nothing happened. But there is no immediate threat, and there is no point to behaving as if there was.”

For Pearl, that was an inspirational speech. All the Arbora and warriors here had grown up with her, and they knew it was an attempt to reassure them, as well as a not so subtle hint that they should shut up and stop panicking.

Pearl turned to go, collecting a few of her warriors with a dip of her spines. She exchanged an opaque look with Jade, who turned to follow. Yes, Moon figured they were probably going to talk over what had happened.

As Jade passed him, Moon caught her wrist. “I’m going to spend the rest of the night in the nurseries.”

Jade didn’t question it. She brushed the back of her hand against his cheek. “Just try to get some sleep.”

Moon didn’t make any promises, as he was pretty certain that wasn’t going to happen.

Jade and Balm both leapt up the wall onto the first balcony level with Pearl to head up toward the queens’ hall. Chime was climbing down the steps back to the teachers’ hall with Heart and Merit and the others, still arguing about the characteristics of shared dreams. Moon found himself standing next to Stone. Keeping his voice low, he asked, “Did you have it?”

Stone eyed him. “Did you?”

“Yes.” Moon didn’t ask Stone exactly what he had seen. Stone was the one responsible for Moon being the first consort of Indigo Cloud rather than a feral solitary, and also the closest thing Moon had ever had to the relationship many groundlings had with their male sire. Moon didn’t want to know what form Stone’s vision of the destruction of the court had taken, and he didn’t want to talk about his own. The images were still too vivid.

Stone jerked his head toward the stairwell down to the teachers’ hall. “Do the mentors know what it was?”

“They said it was a shared dream, not a vision. And no, they don’t know why it happened.” Moon still felt uneasy to the core. “You’ve never heard of anything like that?”

“No.” Stone looked away from the Arbora and the warriors who still gathered at the far end of the room, all restless and talking anxiously. “This isn’t just chance. Things like this don’t happen for no reason.”

Moon wished he could believe Stone was wrong.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

One Change of the Month Later

H
unting was normally the Arbora’s job, though in the Reaches it was necessary to have warriors present to keep watch and help transport them and their prey to and from the colony tree. Moon had wondered occasionally why they didn’t just let the warriors do the hunting themselves, and attributed it to a combination of tradition and warriors being lazy. It had turned out the answer was that the warriors were terrible at hunting.

Moon crouched on the branch, his foot claws caught in the rough bark. “If you let me go down there and be the bait, we could get this over with.” The warriors were only doing the stalking today because their prey was a creature who had been pursuing the Arbora on their hunts and scaring away the usual game. It was just too big and too fast for the Arbora to deal with on their own, and it had already injured too many of them. The Arbora who had been attacked hadn’t been able to describe the predator well, and the hunter who had seen it best was still in a healing sleep back in the colony tree.

Chime, perched on the branch collar a little further down, said, “Uh, the hunt would be over with, all right. We’d have to spend the rest of the day recovering your body.”

Annoyed, Moon settled his wings. It was raining lightly, which wasn’t helping anyone’s temper. The already muted light falling through the multiple layers of leaves in the mountain-tree canopies was dim and more gray than green. The court had been tense since the shared dream, with everyone braced for it to be repeated, or for the event that it foretold to occur. Neither had happened. Nothing had turned up in the mentors’ augury, despite their best efforts. Jade had sent messages to their two closest allies, Sunset Water and Emerald Twilight, to see if they had had any similar experiences. The answer had been no, and the messages, delivered by warriors, had been too polite to convey what the other courts were actually thinking: that Indigo Cloud had collectively lost its mind.

Below, on a lower branch, one of the warriors startled a nest of flying lizards, sending them fleeing in a small explosion of multicolored squeaking, alerting half the Reaches to his presence. Moon hissed in frustration. He had been hunting for survival since he was a fledgling, while most of these warriors had still been playing in the nurseries. It had taken them three days to follow the signs and traces from the platform where the Arbora hunters had been attacked to here, and now they weren’t even sure where the thing had gone to ground. He told Chime, “I’ve been bait before—”

Chime nodded. “I know, and I find that terrifying.”