by Martha Wells
Root was quiet for a long moment, the wind playing with his frills. Hesitantly, as if he had to choke the words out, he said, “It’s like no one thinks about Song but me.”
Moon turned all the way to face him, startled. “That’s not true.”
Root’s spines flicked. “I know it’s because you’re busy. But no one talks about her but Briar and that’s just because she feels guilty.”
Moon felt that needed to be unraveled. “So we don’t think about her because we don’t talk about her and Briar talks about her but that means she doesn’t care?”
Root glared at him. “I’m not stupid.”
“I know you aren’t.” Moon let out his breath, trying to think how best to handle this. Jade had said Root’s behavior was uncertain at best. But he hadn’t had to come over here and loiter around Moon, hoping Moon would start a conversation. Which meant Root wanted to talk, if Moon could just think of the right things to say. “Not talking about her doesn’t mean we don’t think about her. Jade and Balm . . . You know how they felt about Song. They trusted her like . . .” Jade had other favorites, but Song had been with her on her most harrowing trips away from the colony. Queens were always closer to female warriors than to the males, and Jade had trusted Song, been sure of her, in a way she wasn’t with most of the others. And Balm had felt the same.
It was why Jade and Balm had gotten so angry when Song had challenged Jade back on the foundation builder city’s island. And Moon knew how responsible Jade felt for Song’s death, how Pearl might react when they got back to the court and Jade had to tell her how Song had died. Not in battle with Fell, but in a trap set by groundlings. “But Jade can’t show things like that, and neither can Balm. Not while we’re still out here.”
Root twisted away, as if he couldn’t bear to hear it. He stepped back from the rail. “I have to go. It’s my turn on watch next.”
“Root—” Moon called after him, but Root pretended not to hear, and leapt up to the cabin roof and disappeared.
Shade stepped out of the cabin doorway and moved to stand at the railing beside Moon. “Is he all right?” Shade asked.
“No.” Moon let out his breath in exasperation, mostly at himself. He had made a bad job of that, but he had no idea what to say to make anything better for Root or anyone else. Shade was in groundling form, so Moon shifted to lose his scales and wings. The damp cool air settled on his skin and clothes. “He thinks we don’t care about Song.”
Shade winced in sympathy. “It’s not as if you can have a ceremony for her until you get back to your court. Your Arbora would be furious.” He shook his head a little, looking out over the view. “I don’t think warriors that young really understand how queens feel about their warriors and Arbora. There’s a connection that they just haven’t lived long enough to feel and understand, yet. And Song was in Jade’s bloodline, wasn’t she? She looks—looked like Balm. Jade and Balm can’t afford to show weakness now, no matter how upset they are. They have to be strong to show the rest of us that everything is all right, or at least under control. Even if it isn’t. Especially if it isn’t.”
Moon wished he had been able to say all that to Root. Though he wasn’t sure it would have helped. He said, “Are you all right?” He jerked his head toward the stern, where the kethel lurked under Stone’s watchful eye. “After the thing with the . . . Last night.”
Shade lifted his shoulders, uncomfortable. “Not really.” He glanced down the deck. “I guess we can’t just tell it to leave, since Malachite’s made an alliance with the Fellborn queen.”
“Telling it to leave doesn’t really work,” Moon admitted. “And it’s hard to kill it when it’s just standing there looking at you. And it keeps talking.” He hesitated, then asked, “What did you think about that alliance, about what Malachite’s doing?” He wanted to ask what Shade thought of Consolation, if he and Lithe had seen her for themselves. There were other half-Fell at Opal Night, the rescued children of the Arbora who had been captured by the Fell at the same time as Moon and Shade’s father Dusk. But Moon was wondering if Shade would have felt any special connection to Consolation. Thinking about it, it felt like a completely stupid thing to ask. Shade was more of a Raksuran consort than Moon was.
From Shade’s expression he was contemplating a much more complicated question. “I don’t know. It’s not like I want the other half-Fell to be . . . If they’re really going to ally with us and help us . . .” He leaned heavily on the railing. “Lithe thinks it could work out for the best.”
“But you don’t want to be near Fell,” Moon guessed. Considering what had happened to Shade when they had been captured by the Fell flight northwest of the Reaches, it was only rational.
“No, I don’t.” He looked at Moon hopelessly. “Is that weak?”
Consorts were supposed to be weak and delicate and to need everything done for them, but Moon and Shade were different, and nothing was going to change that. And “weak” wasn’t really the right word for what Shade meant. What he was trying to say was harder to express. It was giving in to feelings other people thought you were supposed to have about things that shouldn’t have happened to you in the first place, but were not like the actual feelings you did have. There wasn’t a word for that in Raksuran or Altanic or Kedaic or any other language Moon knew. Moon said, “It’s not weak.”
The wind-ship moved out over the plain of gorges and the rushing sound of waterfalls became audible over the wind. The cliffs were thick with deep green foliage, and there was no sign of any other ruins. Shade twitched a little, and said, “I’m glad we have Dranam. At least we know where we’re going.”
Moon nodded. But they didn’t, though. They only knew the direction.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In the Eastern Reaches
Heart waited in the greeting hall, trying not to pace. She was going with Pearl and Malachite to talk to their new half-Fell allies, and she was trying to pretend as if this didn’t frighten her. Though it wasn’t the idea of the half-Fell that was the problem. Malachite had made it clear most of the flight were Fell, subordinate to the half-Fell queen.
The shared dream and visions of Fell attack had been bad enough. Heart took a deep breath to calm herself. This was different.
“Are you all right, mentor?” Celadon asked her. The Opal Night daughter queen waited a few paces away with three of her warriors. Floret had just arrived with Vine and Sage and Malachite’s warriors. Celadon herself would remain behind, since leaving a court without a queen present just wasn’t a good idea, especially under these circumstances.
No one smelled as nervous as Heart, which didn’t help. She said, “I’m fine, thank you. It was just . . . I was held prisoner by the Fell once, when they attacked our court to the east. Moon saved us.”
Celadon’s spines flicked in sympathy. “I haven’t heard that story. Will you tell me when we get back?”
For some reason it was easier to remember that Malachite was Moon’s birthqueen than it was that this sober, capable daughter queen was his clutchmate. Distracted, Heart dipped her spines in assent. “I will.”
Heart sensed movement overheard and looked up in time to see Pearl and Malachite launch themselves off the queens’ hall terrace. Apparently they had solved the question of precedence by simply going at the same time, though Heart somehow doubted if Malachite cared. Heart said, tentatively, “They’re getting along very well.” She wasn’t sure Celadon and the Opal Night contingent understood what a revelation that was for Indigo Cloud.
Celadon lowered her voice. “No one speaks to Malachite like that, especially not another reigning queen. She’s enjoying it.”
The two queens landed on the greeting hall floor before Heart had a chance to take that statement in. Then Pearl said, “Come on, let’s get this travesty started.”
Heart clung to Vine as they flew through the cool damp air. It was a long trip but it had been a while since she had been flown through the Reaches, so she didn’t mind. The sunlight
that streamed through all the thick layers of the canopy was soft and green. Platforms made by the wild mountain-trees’ branches were covered with lush grass, vines, and flowers. Many supported glades of smaller trees or the swampy overflow of water drawn up through the mountain-trees’ roots. Heart caught glimpses of a dozen different grasseaters and predators that lived on the platforms, including the mottled gray-green tree-frogs bigger than she was, too shy to come near the colony tree.
Some of the mountain-trees were in strange shapes, bending down or curving around other trees, some were hung with curtains of moss big enough to drape over Indigo Cloud’s main garden platforms. It was all a much-needed distraction, until Vine said in her ear, “We’re nearly there. Can you scent them?”
With her next breath Heart caught the Fell stench laced through the air. It was like a thread of bitter rot creeping through all the intense green and flower scents. She tried not to react, but she must have tensed, because Vine tightened his hold on her.
Pearl abruptly signaled a landing and they banked down to a platform heavily overgrown with vines and small, purple-fern trees. Vine said, “This is one of our outposts. Well, one of Opal Night’s outposts, but we helped.”
Heart’s eye caught movement, and she realized there were warriors and a few Arbora under the cover of the ferny leaves, waiting for the queens to land. Huge branches that had fallen down onto the platform had been hollowed out and made into shelters. Heart studied it avidly, trying to spot and memorize all the details. It was an excellent concealed camp, and Blossom and Rill and the other teachers would want to hear about every trick and technique.
Pearl and Malachite lit on the broken remnants of a fallen branch and the warriors followed them down. By the time they landed, a female Opal Night warrior was reporting to the queens. Heart only caught the last bit as Vine set her on her feet. “—more of them, maybe another flight.”
Malachite said, “I need to see for myself.” She tilted her head at Pearl.
Pearl twitched her spines in annoyed assent.
Heart steeled herself, set her jaw, and said, “I should see them. In case it sparks a vision.”
Malachite tilted her head at Pearl. Pearl considered it, her spines flicking. She said, “Come here, then. The rest of you wait here.”
It wasn’t long before Heart began to glimpse brighter sunlight between the branches and platforms ahead. “They won’t be close,” Pearl had told her, “but we need to be careful of dakti scouts.” As they drew nearer to the edge, Heart found herself taking a firmer grip on Pearl’s collar flanges. It was a different experience being carried by a queen of Pearl’s size. It was like being carried by Moon, whose easy, unexpected strength in flight was always surprising, and so different from the warriors. Pearl was like that, except her larger body was more reassuringly solid.
Finally Malachite lit on a large branch on a mountain-tree sapling just at the edge of the wetlands. Pearl cupped her wings to land beside her. She didn’t set Heart down immediately, and Heart found herself clinging like a baby. You’re a grown mentor, you can handle this, she told herself, trying to settle her nerves.
“There they are,” Pearl whispered.
Heart stretched to look. She was afraid of what she would see, but it was just the bright sunlight on the tall grass of the wetlands. Light played on stretches of open water between stands of reeds and the occasional copse of broadleaf trees. She had seen this fringe of the Reaches when they had first arrived here, when they had left the destruction of the old eastern colony and so many of their dead behind.
Floret had described the western fringe of the Reaches as a gradual change from mountain-tree forest to rocky plains. But here on the eastern fringe the change was abrupt; the wetlands turned into lush fields of short green grass, dotted with tiny white flowers and alive with glasslizards and insects, then it stopped abruptly at the line of mountain-trees. Standing on the grass and facing the forest was like looking at the impenetrable wall of a giant cliff face.
Heart had been afraid the Fell would be as thick on the wetlands as the myriad colors of the waterbirds. It was a relief to see the landscape empty. Then a dark shape moved in the distance. And then another, and another. Kethel, Heart thought, and felt a chill travel through the skin under her spines.
She counted at least twelve. They were mostly clustered over a group of low hills, some distance across the wetlands. “Is that an old ruin?” Heart asked softly. The ripple in the terrain of the marshes looked unnatural.
“Probably.” Pearl hissed and said, “There’s more kethel than there were before.”
Malachite didn’t acknowledge that, but after a moment said, “We should go.”
Pearl turned and dove off the branch, snapping her wings out. Heart shivered against the heat of her scales.
They rejoined the warriors and Pearl handed Heart over to Vine again. As they flew toward the camp of the Fellborn queen’s flight, Vine asked her, “Was it worse? Pearl looks like it was worse.”
“We saw more kethel,” Heart told him. She had been hoping it would spark a vision, but nothing had happened yet. She could still sense the potential for one in the awareness of uncertain movement just outside her conscious thoughts.
The Fellborn queen’s flight was camped on a platform high in a mountain-tree. The tree’s canopy bent toward it, the huge branches curved over, giving the feeling of a cavern or a vast green chamber.
The platform had been efficiently cleared to its grassy surface and the Fell had actually built shelters of woven leaves and stripped saplings. There were hearths, too, dug out of the moss and dirt. The big bones of several grasseaters, probably the furry hoppers from what Heart could see, were piled near the edge. Dakti peered out from under the shelters, watching their approach. Heart scanned the canopy and picked out two kethel, coiled on the upper branches, keeping watch. A growl built in her chest and she forced it down.
Vine landed with the others on a branch overlooking the platform. He said to Floret, “That’s weird. It looks like a real camp.”
“It does,” she said, settling her wings. She eyed the camp critically. “I didn’t think they knew how to do that.”
Rise leaned over and told Floret and Vine, “We had to show the dakti how to build the shelters, and what grasseaters to hunt, but I was surprised they actually listened to us.”
“Better you than us,” Vine muttered in Heart’s ear.
Malachite and Pearl waited further down the branch, Malachite as still as if she was a wall carving and Pearl flicking her spines impatiently. A figure ducked out of the biggest shelter and at first Heart thought it was a ruler. As it came further into the open she realized this was the half-Fell queen.
Malachite and Pearl launched off the branch and dropped to the platform, Pearl flicking a spine to tell the warriors to follow. Vine landed with the others and set Heart on her feet. He gave her wrist an encouraging squeeze. Heart took a deep breath, reminded herself she was a mentor, and stepped forward. The wet grass brushed her scales as she moved to stand just behind and to the right of Pearl.
The Fell queen, Consolation, picked her way toward them, a dakti in her wake. She said without preamble, “There are more today. You saw them already?” She spoke Raksuran but not as fluently as the other Fell. She spoke it like Delin did, just a little hesitantly, as if trying to remember words. Heart wondered if it was because the flight had no progenitor. The Fell’s facility for their prey’s languages might come from their connection to the progenitor or the rulers. It was something to talk to Merit about. If Merit’s alive, Heart thought bleakly. If Jade can find him and Bramble.
Malachite said, “We saw them.”
Pearl’s gaze moved over the dakti, the two rulers who remained back near the bigger shelter. The way her spines angled told Heart she was acutely aware of the kethel in the branches above. Pearl said to Malachite, “We need to talk about this strategy of yours.”
The dakti nudged Consolation. She said, “We know how
to make the progenitor come to us. But we want something else from you before we do it.”
Pearl’s spines took on a flare that would have caused the warriors to bolt out of reach if it had been directed at them. Malachite tilted her head and said, “And what is that?”
The dakti ducked its head in a gesture Heart would have sworn was nervous. Consolation hesitated, watching them both warily. She dragged one set of foot claws through the grass and moss and said, “We had a consort.”
Heart’s lips peeled back to bare her teeth without any conscious volition on her part. Pearl’s hiss was near soundless and the tip of Malachite’s tail flicked almost imperceptibly. The cold, sardonic amusement was heavy in Malachite’s voice as she said, “You say this to us.”
Consolation’s brow furrowed. “He was my sire. He named me. I can speak of him.”
Heart made herself take a breath. Pearl’s tail lashed. Malachite said, “Speak.”
Consolation said, “Before he died, he said we were going to go someplace, just us and a few others, the nice ones. A big tree, maybe.” She added defensively, “I didn’t know what he meant until we got here.”
Heart had to lock her jaw to keep her expression neutral. It was painful to think about, this long dead consort making plans for escape with his fledgling queen. She wondered if Malachite could identify the court. But she didn’t see how a consort could be taken from a court within the vastness of the Reaches. It must have been an eastern court, one that told stories of their old mothercourt and its colony tree in the west.
Consolation continued, “But we had to learn to hunt grasseaters and grow things, like groundlings.” The dakti risked a glance at the queens, then scratched the side of its head, somehow conveying mild doubt. Consolation eyed Malachite. “If you show us that, I’ll help you with the plan. I can get the most powerful progenitor to come to me.”
