The Serpent Sea

by Martha Wells

  Jade shook her spines and grimaced with contempt. “We’ll never get her there without killing her, so I might as well do it now.”

  Moon countered, “They have simples that make you sleep. It worked on me. It’ll probably work on a queen.”

  Jade’s shout of thwarted rage was so loud it hurt Moon’s ears. He winced, and Chime and Root both flattened themselves down in the grass and covered their heads. She stalked back and forth, then stopped and flung her hands in the air. “You’re right! I’ll go get a damn warrior. If that piece of excrement moves—” She growled again and flung herself into the air.

  “Get the green female!” Moon yelled after her. She had seemed like the leader of the warriors, and was probably the one most attached to Halcyon.

  Root sat up to watch Jade speed away. “She carried me here, so I could show her the way,” he confided to Moon. “I’ve never flown so fast!”

  Chime pushed to his feet. Shaking a little, he wiped the sweat off his forehead. “I’ll go look for the simple. It’s probably in one of these shelters.” He went to the first one and ducked down to look through the entrance.

  “Hurry.” Moon sat down the grass, keeping a wary eye on Halcyon. The simple had given him a headache and a dry throat. His neck was bleeding a little from Halcyon’s claws, but not enough to worry about. It felt like the end of a very long day, though so far he had only been conscious for a small part of it. “Where are the others?” he asked Root.

  “On their way here, following Jade’s markers. We were going to wait until they caught up, and attack in the middle of the night, but—” Root waved a hand, indicating the disturbed camp. “Jade changed her mind.”

  “This is it.” Chime came out of the shelter, holding a lizardskin bag, intricately tooled and dyed. He sat down to rummage in it and pulled out various cloth packets and a couple of stoppered bottles. “I’ll have to mix another batch, but it won’t take long. You don’t have to be a mentor to make it work, which is probably why they picked this one.”

  Moon reached over to ruffle Root’s hair. “So you just pretended to run away?”

  Root nodded, fairly pleased with himself. “Right, until they stopped chasing me. Then I followed them from a distance, until they got to this camp. Then I flew back to find Jade. We left the others, so we could get back here by dark.”

  Chime glanced up from the herb packets. “That was smart.”

  “I know.” Then Root popped up and cuffed Chime in the head. “Ow!” Chime protested in outrage, reeling back.

  “I heard what you said earlier. I’m not stupid,” Root said, coming back to sit next to Moon. “I have a big mouth, but I’m not stupid. There’s a difference. A big difference.”

  “Hey, no hitting,” Moon said belatedly. Though he figured Root probably did owe Chime that one.

  “I’m sorry.” Chime subsided, looking abashed.

  “Jade’s back,” Moon said, and got to his feet.

  Jade dropped down to the platform and flung the dazed warrior to the ground. She was in groundling form, a tall woman with light bronze skin and reddish hair. Her shirtsleeves were torn, and there were scratch marks on her arms, and a few rapidly darkening marks on her face about the size of Jade’s fist. “Are you happy?” Jade shouted at Moon.

  “Yes,” he told her. “But I’m easy to please right now.”

  Oddly enough, Jade didn’t appreciate the joke.

  While she paced, fumed, and made certain that any of Halcyon’s warriors still lurking in the area knew that a rescue attempt would end in a bloodbath, Root tied up the female warrior and Chime made the simple. Halcyon was groaning and starting to wake by the time he finished, but once it was administered she settled into a deep sleep. While searching the packs left behind for rope, Moon found a cake of very good tea, so he built up the fire again, filled the dented kettle from a waterskin, and made some. Chime and Root went to scout for injured warriors, and found three dead, victims of the first clash with Jade. They found a few blood trails, but the survivors must have retrieved all their wounded.

  Darkness had fallen and it was well into the night before the Indigo Cloud warriors arrived. It was good timing, because it had taken about that long for Jade to calm down.

  While Chime and Root greeted them and answered questions and traded various congratulations and recriminations, Moon stood up and stretched his back. His headache had gone, but he had spent most of the time sitting by the fire, watching Jade stare grimly at Halcyon’s unconscious body, braced to intervene if she suddenly changed her mind about leaving the other queen alive.

  Moon circled around the fire to the shadows where Jade stood. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you wanted to rescue me, again.”

  “I did rescue you,” she pointed out, though she sounded more huffy than angry. Her sigh was too weary to be a hiss. “Did you have to hit her with the kettle?”

  “It had a handle. It was easier than a rock.” Moon felt some of the tension melt out of his spine. As impressive as she was while enraged and defending her consort, he still liked her normal self better.

  “It’s not going to make a very good story, in the annals of my time as sister queen.” She quoted dryly, “‘Then her consort jumped up and knocked the foreign queen unconscious with a kettle.’”

  “If Cloud had been fast with a kettle, then you wouldn’t be here,” Moon admitted.

  “That is hardly fair to Indigo. Indigo was nothing like—” She waved a hand back toward the camp. “That.”

  Before she could get worked up again, he took her wrist. “Come on, the others can keep watch. Let’s go to bed.”

  “Sometimes you have good ideas,” she said grudgingly, and let him tow her over to the shelter.

  

  The trip to Emerald Twilight took a day and a half, with Jade and Balm taking turns carrying the unconscious Halcyon, and Vine carrying the woman warrior, whose name turned out to be Torrent. During the awkward and desultory conversation around the camp at night, she admitted that she was from a queen’s clutch, sister to Tempest and Halcyon. She seemed to feel bad enough, so Moon managed not to ask her if there were any sisters besides Tempest from that clutch who weren’t crazy.

  They knew Halcyon’s surviving warriors followed them at a distance, but none of them ventured any closer, or tried to talk to them. Balm said, “I bet they would have tried to stop us if we were heading toward Indigo Cloud. But they know we must be taking her back to Emerald Twilight. They’re probably going to quietly slip back into the colony, and hope Ice is too distracted by dealing with Halcyon to worry about who was with her.”

  Once they arrived at the court, Jade didn’t waste any time. She dropped the still limp Halcyon on the landing platform outside the greeting hall, and Vine set the woman warrior down. At first the warriors and Arbora who hurried out seemed to think that they had found Halcyon and Torrent injured in the forest, and brought them back here for help. It was reassuring evidence that only Halcyon’s group of warriors had been involved in the plot, and that most of the court had known nothing about it. But it made Moon feel even worse for those about to hear the truth. Then Jade demanded a mentor be called as witness, and the whole colony had seemed to go still.

  One of the older mentors who had helped Flower came out, and Tempest, Ash, and three of the other sister queens, and every warrior and Arbora who could get outside in time. They all listened in shocked silence to Torrent’s guilty recital. Tempest kept her expression under control, though her spines trembled with the effort. Ash kept alternately flaring hers and flattening them, looking from Jade to Tempest to the other queens, incredulous and horrified.

  Afterward, Tempest stiffly offered Jade hospitality, seemed relieved when Jade refused it, and they left. Ice and Shadow hadn’t appeared, and Moon was glad for it, because the whole thing had been deeply embarrassing. He made a resolution to ask Stone if he had ever fathered any clutches who tried to kill each other and what to do if they did.

  It was a re
lief to be shed of Halcyon and Torrent, and they made good time back to Indigo Cloud, reaching it during the late afternoon five days later.

  As they approached the colony tree, Moon could see already that the Arbora had made progress while they were gone.

  Several of the garden platforms had neat planting beds built, others had plots that had been stripped of grass and were now covered with turned earth. The weeds and moss that had choked the main runoff pools were gone, the deadfall cleared away from some of the old orchards. There were Arbora out on the platforms too, digging in the gardens, weeding, moving baskets of dirt. The two flying boats were still anchored in place, with a few Arbora climbing over them, sanding claw-damaged wood and making other repairs.

  Warrior lookouts had already spotted them and carried the word to the tree. More warriors flew out to meet them, and swooped around and called out greetings. Moon and Jade and the others landed in the knothole and were almost swept through the passage into the greeting hall by a happy swarm of Arbora.

  The well rapidly filled up with Raksura, coming up the stairs from the level below or dropping down from above. All the shell-lights were lit, and caught reflections off the polished wood and the rich carving, the slim pillars along the criss-crossed stairs, the overhanging balconies. The waterfall across from the entrance ran clear and fresh, streaming down the wall to the pool in the floor, which now boasted floating flowers.

  Heart pushed her way through the growing crowd to hug Jade impulsively, and tell her, “We were so worried! We expected you days ago!”

  “We were delayed unexpectedly. I have to tell Pearl about it first.” Jade released Heart and asked anxiously, “What about the seed? Is it all right?”

  Heart admitted, “We’re not sure yet. The instructions the Emerald Twilight mentors sent said it had to be coated in mud from below the roots and then soaked in heartwater.” Before Moon could ask, she said, “That’s the water drawn up through the roots. We had to get it just as it came out of the wood, through the spring in the top of the tree. But first we had to find the spring. That took most of a day. Stone thought he knew where it was, but apparently it moves around when the tree grows. Or that’s what Stone said, anyway. Now we’re just waiting to see if it will show the signs that it’s ready to be placed in the tree.”

  “I see.” Jade exchanged a worried look with Moon. It had been a big unspoken fear that all Ardan’s meddling with the seed might have damaged it somehow. Moon had been hoping that fear would be banished by the time they arrived. It wasn’t good to hear that they would still have to wait and see.

  Heart turned to Chime, and they looked at each other a long moment. They had been Flower’s last students, and Chime couldn’t act on her teaching anymore. Heart stepped forward and Chime caught her in his arms, burying his face against her shoulder.

  Stone wandered up out of the crowd, stopped and eyed Moon for a moment, then nudged his shoulder. “You all right?”

  “Yes.” Suddenly that was all Moon could trust himself to say. He felt like he had never really come home before, not to a permanent home, not to a place where everyone knew the real him. He couldn’t even trust himself to shift to his groundling form, even though it was technically rude to stay like this while Stone was a groundling. What he really wanted to do was run away and hide in a corner, and enjoy this intense, unaccustomed feeling privately.

  Then Pearl dropped down from the levels above. Arbora and warriors scattered to make way for her. River impulsively started toward her, and remembered just in time to stop and wait with the others, while she greeted Jade. Moon was so emotional at the moment he even felt a spark of pity. River might sleep in Pearl’s bower, but he would never be her consort, anymore than Chime could ever be an Arbora again.

  “You’re late,” Pearl said, and frowned at Jade. “Stone was ready to go out looking for you.” Then her gaze hardened. She had obviously spotted the recent scratches on Jade’s scales, though they had faded over the past few days. Knowing Pearl, she might even be able to tell they had been made by another queen. Her spines started to lift in agitation. “What happened?”

  Jade set her jaw and braced herself. “Halcyon, a sister queen from Emerald Twilight, tried to steal Moon.”

  Moon had half-expected Pearl to express disappointment that Halcyon hadn’t succeeded. But Pearl’s eyes went black with fury. Her spines stiffened, until they flared out around her head.

  Stone lifted his brows and gave Moon an incredulous look. Moon shrugged helplessly. Pearl ignored them. Her voice flat, she said to Jade, “Did you kill her?”

  Jade’s spines lifted in response, but she kept her temper. She said, “No.” Her voice heavy with irony, she said, “I was persuaded not to.”

  Moon belatedly shifted to groundling. The last thing he wanted at the moment was Pearl’s attention. But Pearl stayed focused on Jade. She tilted her head, her gaze hardened to ice. “Why not?” The words dropped into a near perfect silence. No one in the hall breathed. Moon could hear the breeze rustling leaves outside.

  Jade flicked her spines. “I didn’t want to start a war. We took her back to Emerald Twilight with one of her warriors, and made the warrior speak before a mentor.” She paused, and added deliberately, “They owe us a great debt now.”

  Pearl was silent for so long there were probably warriors in the hall starting to suffer from lack of air. Then she said, “I’m surprised you thought of that, in the heat of the moment.”

  Moon tried not to react in any way. He wondered if he had made things worse by talking Jade out of immediate vengeance. But Jade was calm and didn’t take Pearl’s bait. She said, “It seemed the best course.”

  Pearl held her gaze a moment more, then said, “We’ll see.”

  She turned away, and the whole hall took a collective breath of relief. Out of the corner of his eye, Moon saw Chime’s knees buckle, and Heart and Balm reach hastily to steady him.

  As the crowd parted for Pearl, she lifted one hand in a signal to River. He hurried after her. Moon regretted the sympathetic impulse. Keeping his voice low, he said, “He’ll tell her everything that happened.”

  “So he will.” Jade wasn’t worried. The long flight here from Emerald Twilight had evidently given her a much more sanguine perspective on the situation. “She’ll see the advantages.”

  “Somebody needs to tell me everything that happened,” Stone pointed out. “But you need to do it on the way to the nurseries, because Frost accused me of leaving you somewhere for dead, and she’s managed to convince the rest of the clutches that she’s right.”

  Moon winced. When he had left, he had been afraid of something like that happening, but there hadn’t been any real choice.

  Jade took his wrist and pulled him with her as she followed Stone. She said, wryly, “We’ll both go. I think I need to spend more time with Frost.”

  Moon thought that was probably the best thing they could do.

  

  They held the farewell for Flower later that evening, after Jade and Moon and the warriors had had a chance to sleep and rest. The Arbora had found a niche in one of the walls up in the unused Aeriat levels, which Stone said was one of the old grave niches for royal urns. Heart and the other mentors didn’t know how to make the wood grow to seal the niche yet, but it would still make a good resting place.

  The whole court sang for Flower. Moon didn’t contribute, but he made himself sit still for the whole uncomfortable performance. It wasn’t as eerie this time, though it still felt alien to him.

  Afterward, Moon ended up sitting outside with Chime on a ledge above the waterfall. They watched the tiny flying lizards chase lightbugs in the spray, while the sun set somewhere past the mountain-trees and the green twilight deepened toward darkness. The whole court felt tense and uneasy. From what Moon understood, either the seed would show that it was ready to be reattached to the tree within the next day or so, or it wouldn’t. There was nothing to do now but wait.

  Chime said suddenly, “They�
�re choosing a new chief mentor tonight.”

  That was an uncomfortable thought. The balance of power in the court was already delicate. Moon asked, “Who is it going to be?”

  “Probably Heart.”

  That was an uncomfortable thought for a different reason. After the fight to escape the Dwei hive, Heart hadn’t been able to put Moon into a healing trance. “But she’s so young.”

  “That’s not actually a problem,” Chime said, though he still sounded depressed. “You want someone young, to grow into it. And she still has all the other mentors to help her. Heart is reasonable, and good at settling differences, and Pearl and Jade both trust her. She was Flower’s second… first choice as a successor.”

  “The first choice after you,” Moon said, then realized a moment later that he should have withheld that thought.

  “But I’m not a choice anymore,” Chime said, sounding less depressed but more exasperated.

  “Sorry.”

  Chime shook his head. “It’s all right. It’s just… I wish I could help with the seed.”

  Moon wished Chime could help, too. He tried to imagine packing the two flying boats again and heading off for some new destination, and it felt like a little stab in the heart. He wanted to stay here.

  Stone had been right from the beginning. The court belonged here. And Moon meant to belong here, too.

  

  Late that night, when Moon and Jade were asleep in their bower on the teachers’ level, someone banged loudly on the hanging bed. Moon, closest to the bottom, started awake and Jade rolled off him with a growl. They both leaned over the edge to see Blossom looking up at them expectantly. She said, “It’s the seed! It’s ready!”

  Moon realized he could hear a lot of movement and voices out in the passage. Jade gasped, vaulted out of the bed, and bolted out of the room with Blossom. Still half-asleep, Moon climbed out, got his clothes on, and joined the trickle of Arbora moving toward the nearest stairs. Moon passed Niran, half-dressed and bleary with sleep, his long hair wrapped up in a scarf for the night. “What is it?” Niran asked.