by Martha Wells
That was great advice, and of course, impossible to take.
When Moon returned, Jade commented, “Good. You smelled terrible.”
Thistle slipped in next, also dripping from a recent wash and carrying a couple of bags of mentors’ supplies. “Grain was the only one who needed a healing sleep,” she reported. “We’ve got their wounds bandaged up and Merit and the others are making simples in case those darts were poisoned too. And Balm is on her way.”
Balm appeared next in her groundling form, her hair wet and her shirt on backwards. Her face was tight with tension, her jaw set, and Moon hadn’t seen her look this nervous since the last time something had tried to eat them. She sat beside Stone and leaned against his arm. Stone was the only one who looked calm and as if he was actually enjoying the whole thing. He patted her knee reassuringly.
Watching Jade with intense concentration, Heart gently touched her belly again. Jade said, “Tell me about the battle, Balm.”
Balm tried to smile. “It wasn’t as much fun as it sounds.”
Then Heart said, “It should start any moment. Everyone who isn’t a mentor or in the direct line, out.” Bell squeezed Moon’s shoulder and made for the door. Chime leaned in to nip the back of his neck and whispered, “It’s fine, it’s going very well, I can tell,” and followed Bell. Everyone but Stone, Balm, and Thistle scattered for a doorway. Moon could tell they were all still nearby, in the other rooms, but no one was peering through the doorways. Then Pearl stepped inside and settled onto a cushion.
Heart told Jade, “You need to crouch down. It’ll be easier.”
Jade grimaced and gripped Moon’s forearm. He helped her down and knelt beside her. Sitting on her heels in front of them, Heart gave Moon a glance that was all nerves. A bead of sweat was already making its way down her brow. This was the first time Heart had supervised a royal birth, though she had done all three recent Arbora births here. Moon recalled his job was technically to keep everyone calm, and told her, “It’s fine. You’re doing great.”
Heart nodded, and said, “This should be it.”
Hissing between her teeth, Jade said, “Finally.”
Moon actually saw the scales on Jade’s stomach ripple and move as the babies changed position.
Heart scooted closer, up between Jade’s knees, and muttered, “Here we are.” Then she added, “The first one is a little turned. That’s normal, but I’ll have to turn it back a bit so it can come out right.”
Heart leaned down and Jade’s other arm snapped up. Moon intercepted it in mid-reach, catching her wrist. He said, “Don’t.”
Jade relaxed and hissed in dismay at her own lack of control. It was a good thing she didn’t really want to hurt Heart, because there was no way Moon could stop her if she hadn’t wanted to be stopped. Heart, her face tense with concentration, hadn’t even noticed. Jade said, “I hate this.”
“Me, too,” Moon agreed, evenly. His pulse was pounding in his temples and he hoped he didn’t black out.
Heart did something that made Jade snarl.
Balm crept a little closer, craned her neck to see, and winced in sympathy. Pearl just flicked a spine.
Then Moon caught a glimpse of a little dark bundle, streaked with blood, as Heart handed it off to Thistle’s waiting towel. The blood gave him a moment of heart-stopping terror, but the bundle was squirming in Thistle’s gentle hands. She wiped the blood and fluid away, then passed it to Stone, who said, “Hah, female,” in a pleased tone, and showed it to Balm.
Moon felt so dizzy with relief, he almost swayed and fell over. Then the next one started to come, Jade reached for Heart again, and Moon caught her wrist again.
The next two babies were slightly twisted, but Heart, gaining confidence with each successful birth, freed them without trouble. The fourth came out smoothly, but the fifth had to be turned completely around. Listening to Jade’s growls, watching Balm’s expressions of horror and Heart’s teeth-gritted efforts, it was all Moon could do not to die of anxiety. He remembered the stories of difficult clutches, all the turns of troubled births in the old colony. Then Heart sat back with a tiny wriggling shape in her hands and an exhalation of exhausted relief.
Jade let go of Moon and stood up immediately. Moon tried to but his legs failed to work and he just slumped in a heap instead.
Jade demanded, “How did we do?”
“A mixed clutch,” Stone reported, taking the fifth one from Thistle. “Three female and two male.”
Pearl said, “Very good.” Taking that as a signal, the warriors and Arbora in the surrounding rooms burst into happy talk. There was no way to tell yet if the babies were queens and consorts, but the chances were good. Everyone had told Moon that single gender clutches were the ones most likely to have warriors.
“Good,” Jade said. She leaned down and grabbed Moon by the back of the neck and bit him in the shoulder, almost but not quite hard enough to draw blood. He said, “Ow,” but it was more of a comment than a protest.
Then Jade stepped over to crouch beside the nest and examine the new babies. Standing up again, she told Balm, “I really need a bath. And I’m starving.”
Balm was grinning with joy and relief. “Come on, they’ve been warming a pool in the next room, and they were going to bring some food up.” They went out together.
Moon, who found he had gone almost numb from the waist down from kneeling in the same position too long, crawled over to Stone to look.
They were all curled in the soft blankets, tiny shapes, their scales a very dark bronze, their eyes black, blinking sleepily. He knew they would change color as they developed, and take on more individual characteristics. Pearl came to look over his shoulder and said, approvingly, “And they’re all the same size, too.”
“What does that mean?” Moon asked.
“It means they were conceived at the same time,” Stone told him, and ruffled his hair.
“So it turns out you are good for something,” Pearl said, almost fondly, and left.
Moon was too overwhelmed to care. He touched one little belly cautiously, reverently, and got a wriggle in response. The baby wrapped a little hand around his finger. Despite its claws still being soft, the fledgling’s grip was solid. He stroked another little back, feeling the soft spines. The scent, a strange combination of groundling baby and Raksura, he had expected from the other new babies he had held. But these babies also smelled like Jade, and it made his chest go tight. “Who’s going to feed them?” Queens didn’t feed babies from their breasts, like most mammalian groundlings, though mentors’ lore said they had at some point in the distant past, before the Aeriat joined with the Arbora. Female Arbora did, but only for the first few days. Raksura were born with teeth and like their claws, they hardened over time.
Washing her hands in the basin Thistle had brought her, Heart said, “Bead and Needle will take turns. Then we switch them to meat broth for a while, then solid food.”
Jade wandered back in, still dripping from a quick bath. She was in her winged form, as if she had missed it and hadn’t been able to wait to shift. After the past month of fast growth, it was odd to see her belly back to its normal size, as if nothing had happened. And she clearly had all her energy back. She sat on her heels beside Moon, and said, “Ready to name them?”
Surprisingly, Moon was. A large part of his terror for the future seemed to have inexplicably receded. He stretched out on his side with his head propped on his hand so he could see the babies at eye level. “Go ahead.” Jade touched each baby in turn, starting with the girls. “Solace, Sapphire—”
“Fern,” Moon interposed. It had been the name of the Arbora who he had thought of as his sister, who had been killed by the Tath with Swift and the others, all those turns ago.
“Fern,” Jade agreed. She touched the first boy. “Cloud.”
Moon nodded. Indigo Cloud should have a Cloud. As Jade touched the last boy, to tease her, he said, “Puffblossom.”
“Not Puffblossom.” Jade was
firm on that point. She hesitated. “Dusk? Or do you think Malachite would mind?”
It was the name of Moon’s father, who had been killed by the Fell. Moon considered that. “She might not be able to look at him.” Malachite had had trouble looking at Moon, who apparently closely resembled his dead father. If this little one turned out to be a consort and closely resembled Moon, it might be even more difficult for Malachite.
“Hmm. What about Rain?”
Rain was the name of Pearl’s previous consort, the one who had fathered Jade and Balm. He had died several turns before Moon had come to the court. He asked, “You don’t think Pearl would mind?”
“I think she’d like it,” Stone said.
“Rain,” Moon agreed. Then he laid his head down and fell asleep.
Moon woke abruptly, already sitting up. He would have thought he dreamed it, except he was looking down at five sleeping babies cuddled in a carefully arranged pile of blankets. He blinked and rubbed his bleary eyes. No, he hadn’t imagined it.
“Are you all right?” Chime asked, handing him a cup of tea. “Do you need something to eat?”
Chime, Bell, Rill, and Bark all sat nearby, watching him expectantly. The room was empty except for them, though there were hunters and some other teachers sitting in the doorways. Moon drank the tea, which stung his dry throat. He coughed, and heard the distant rumble of thunder, cushioned by the thick wood of the trunk. The air smelled of heavy rain now, carried on the drafts coming down from the greeting hall. Someone had stuffed a cushion under his head without waking him. He must have been sleeping like the dead. He could tell it was night, that was all. “How long?”
“It’s past the middle part of the night,” Rill told him. “Jade said we should let you sleep.”
“She said she’d kill anyone who woke you, actually,” Chime said, taking the cup back and refilling it from the pot.
Sleeping for the rest of the night was a nice idea, but Moon was pretty certain he still had things to do. He had left a dead predator in the teachers’ hall that could turn invisible by sewing another species’ skin to itself, for one thing. “Where is Jade?”
“Jade’s with Pearl and Stone and the others, trying to figure out how to help the Onde.” Bell winced in sympathy. “It’s been getting worse, and the simples aren’t working on it. They brought in one of the other groundlings to try to talk to it and get it to tell the mentors what to do.”
“That wasn’t going well, the last we heard,” Chime said. “That thing you fought—the Onde calls it a skin-hunter—has been preying on the Onde in this area for turns, and there aren’t many of them left. The skin-hunter wouldn’t let the Onde have any contact with other species. As if the skin-hunter wasn’t just hunting them, but herding them, the way some groundlings do with grasseaters.” He grimaced in distaste.
Moon shook his head. If it was true, it was a horrible situation. All this had been happening just a few days’ walk from the colony tree, but it might as well have been all the way across the Three Worlds. The Onde hadn’t even asked the Kek for help. It would never have occurred to them that the local Raksuran court might have been perfectly willing to kill the creature that was tormenting them. Well, Pearl might not have been willing, but could probably have been talked into it, just to remove a potential threat.
Moon downed the second cup of tea and felt more coherent. He wanted to go to Jade, and he might be able to help with the Onde, though he wasn’t sure how. He looked around again. Apparently he was in charge of the babies for now. Or until they grew up. It was still a daunting thought. He looked at Chime and the three teachers and said, “I have absolutely no idea what to do now with …” He nodded toward the babies.
“Oh.” Bell glanced at Bark and Rill. “We don’t want to move them to the nurseries just yet.”
Bark said, “For one thing, it would wake them up, and wake up all the babies and fledglings, and it would be chaos for the rest of the night.” Rill added, “Usually we just keep them where they were born for a few days, so everyone can come through and see them. We were planning to do that in Jade’s bower, but since they’re down here, it’s actually more convenient to be near the teachers’ hall. And we can make it comfortable for you and Jade to sleep here until it’s time to take them to the nurseries.”
Bell finished, “But it’s your decision.”
Moon’s decision. He wished Bell hadn’t put it like that.
Chime leaned forward, eyeing him sharply. “When I asked if you were all right, you didn’t answer. Are you all right?”
“Uh.” Moon rubbed his eyes again. He was confused and overwhelmed, but he didn’t want to admit it out loud.
Bark said carefully, “Why don’t you go see Jade and then come right back? We’ll be here.” Rill nodded and patted Moon’s knee.
That Moon could handle. “I’ll do that.”
Chime had to steady Moon when he stood up.
As they went to the passage that led to the lower stairwell, Chime said, “You should get something to eat soon. And you have bruises all around your neck.”
Moon had almost forgotten about that. The muscles of his shoulders and chest ached and he had a scatter of painful spots all over. Whatever it was, the thing with the Onde skins had been brutally strong. “Thanks for staying with me, when …” He couldn’t think of a way to end that sentence that didn’t sound wrong. Something more interesting had been going on, and it had involved a little groundling dying, and maybe Chime would have preferred to be there to try to help save it. “Watching me sleep is not all that exciting,” he finished, feeling inadequate.
Chime shook his head a little. “I got to hold the royal clutch before most of the court has even had a chance to see them. But I do wish …” He hissed in frustration. “I should just stop talking about not being a mentor anymore. Even I’m tired of it, you all must be exhausted by now.”
“We used to be, but now we just ignore it,” Moon said, and got a shove to the shoulder.
They shifted to their winged forms to drop down the stairwell to the lower levels, and Moon saw some of the warriors and Arbora standing just outside the doorway of the workroom where the Onde had been taken. They were all watching something inside. He swung down onto the walkway and shifted back to groundling, Chime following him.
Blossom saw them, slipped away from the doorway, and came to meet them. “Are you all right?” she whispered to Moon. “You look terrible.”
“I’m fine. Is Jade in there?”
Blossom’s spines signaled dismay and frustration. “Yes, she’s in there with Stone and Pearl and Balm. The Onde’s dying. We brought one of the Amifata in to talk to it, but it still won’t tell us where the others are so we can get help. It’s too afraid.”
If the story about the skin-hunter and what it had done was even partly true, then Moon could understand why the Onde wouldn’t reveal its people’s location. But that didn’t leave a lot of options for helping it. “Did it tell you what happened at the leaf boat?”
“Yes, it was willing to talk about that. It said it caught the scent from that trade-beacon the Amifata had and went to warn them. But it didn’t realize the skin-hunter could detect the beacon too. The Onde was hit with a dart but pulled it out, and ran into the leaf boat with the others. The amphibians all collapsed once they got inside but it was awake and managed to hide. The skin-hunter searched for it, but it couldn’t see past the camouflage like a real Onde; the skins didn’t give it that ability. So the skin-hunter just sat outside, talking to the Onde, telling it to give up.” Blossom rolled her shoulders, releasing tension so her spines would drop. “It was entertaining itself, I suppose, waiting for them all to die in there.”
Chime leaned in to ask, “Were we right? The skin-hunter killed the Kek plant hunters because they could see it?”
Blossom gave him a grim nod. “The Onde said it didn’t see the Kek arrive, but it heard some disturbance and then looked out and saw the Kek fighting the skin-hunter, and saw it kill
them.”
“But what was the skin-hunter?” Chime asked, “What species?”
“The Onde didn’t seem to know. The Amifata said it had never heard of anything like it. Since the skin-hunter spoke Raksuran to Moon, the hunters are trying to find out if it had any …” Blossom bared her fangs briefly in disgust. “… Raksuran parts on it.”
Chime hissed, appalled. Moon’s skin twitched with the urge to shift. It was a sickening thought, but all too possible. Chime said, “The hunters are trying to find this out?”
“The mentors are all busy, so they have the skin-hunter down in their tanning room taking it apart to try to figure out how it works.”
“If they miss something …” Chime twitched, apparently at the idea that the hunters would bungle the job. “Maybe I should go down there.”
“They could probably use the help,” Blossom agreed.
Moon nudged Chime. “Go. They need you.”
Chime squeezed his wrist gratefully, shifted, and bounded down the walkway.
Moon followed Blossom to the workroom, where she elbowed a couple of warriors aside to make room for him to slip up to the doorway. Jade, Balm, and Pearl stood a few paces inside the room, but Moon didn’t want to go in any further and risk interrupting. Jade didn’t even look tired. It was as if she had stored up a great deal of energy while being unable to shift, and now it was time to expend it.
From here he could see the Onde. It had dropped its camouflage, or was too weak to maintain it, and lay propped up against a pile of cushions. Its long metallic fur was a blue-tinged white. The fur made its features harder to distinguish, but it had a long nose and a pointed jawline. Its eyes were large and luminous, taking up much of the space on the upper part of its face. Each ear wasn’t a single piece, but were multiple folds and fans, like feathery fur-covered spines. It was blinking at the lights in the chamber, even though a few had been removed. It might be nocturnal, or just unused to any light that wasn’t filtered through the forest.
