Moon shifted to follow Jade and used his wings to drop straight down through the central well.
The dream was still too close for Moon to be able to look at the stairs curving up the spiral well and the carved balconies without wincing. He kept expecting to see dead bodies lying in the round doorways.
It wasn’t as if the dream had been of some far-fetched, impossible circumstance. The Fell existed by feeding on groundling settlements and cities and had destroyed Raksuran colonies and killed entire courts. Moon was a survivor of one of those attacks; it had been the reason he had spent most of his first forty or so turns of life alone. A Fell flight had nearly destroyed Indigo Cloud’s old colony to the east before the court had fled here to the Reaches.
Moon landed on the floor of the greeting hall a heartbeat after Jade. This was the first chamber visitors to the colony tree would see when they entered through the twisting passage that led in from the knothole, and it was designed to be impressive, as well as easily defended. Directly across from the entrance a pool of water was fed by a small fall from a higher channel, and the shell-lights glinted off all the warm colors of the carved wood.
Warriors and Arbora, some in their scaled forms and some in groundling, were out on the balconies that looked down on the hall, their voices rising in worry as more of them woke from the dream. Arbora soldiers were on watch in the hall all day and night, gathered around the hearth bowl near the pool. Usually they traded off turns sleeping but now they were all awake, on their feet, and watching Jade’s arrival with relief. She said, “Ginger, you all had the dream too?”
Ginger flicked her spines in an affirmative. “Four of us were sleeping, and we all saw—” She stopped and her throat worked as she swallowed uneasily.
“We thought it was just us, but Balm said it’s everyone,” Sharp added.
Jade made her voice reassuring. “Send someone to find Knell.” He was the leader of the soldiers’ caste, and one of Chime’s clutchmates. “Tell him to have the other soldiers check through all the bowers, make sure everyone’s all right.” She glanced up at the warriors gathered on one of the upper balconies. “Sand, Aura, Serene, the rest of you. Get down here and help the soldiers guard the entrance.”
As the warriors dropped down to the greeting hall floor, Sharp said, uneasily, “You don’t think the dream is going to become real . . .”
“No,” Jade said, absently enough for it to be convincing. “But if it’s a warning of some danger, we want to be prepared.”
There was something Moon had to check on first, before worrying about the rest of the court. “I’m going to the nurseries.”
Jade flicked a spine in acknowledgment and Moon dove down the stairwell into the teachers’ hall. The round hall was crowded with uneasy Arbora, all talking nervously. They barely noticed as Moon flashed past and flung himself down the passage that led to the nurseries.
He slid to a stop in front of a round doorway with a lintel carved with the figures of baby Arbora and Aeriat, took a deep breath, and shifted back to his groundling form. He couldn’t hear any crying or screaming inside, which was a good sign.
Moon stepped through into the first big low-ceilinged chamber and almost ran into Blossom. She lifted her hands and said, low-voiced, “It’s all right. It didn’t affect any of the clutches, whatever it is.”
Moon let out his breath, the tension in his chest easing. He hadn’t realized how afraid he was until this moment.
Everything was quiet, though some sleepy Arbora toddlers played near one of the several shallow fountain pools. Doorways led off into a maze of smaller rooms, and teachers were moving in and out of them, checking on their charges, a few being trailed by querulous Aeriat fledglings. The inhabitants of the nurseries had changed over the past two turns in the colony tree. Several Arbora had clutched, producing new Arbora babies and warrior fledglings, and the court’s population balance was finally on its way to becoming more stable. Moon asked, “Did it happen to you?” From what the others had said, everyone’s version of the dream was a little different. The one thing in common had been the overwhelming violence of the attack, the helplessness, the sense that the court had been caught with no warning at all.
Blossom’s nod was grim. She was an older Arbora, though the only sign of age yet was the threads of gray in her dark hair. Raksura lost all their coloring as they got older, and Blossom’s skin was still a warm bronze. She was the teacher Jade and Moon had chosen to be in charge of the care of their first clutch. “The Fell attacking the Reaches.” She lifted her shoulders, not quite shuddering, and turned to lead the way across the room. “It was like the old colony all over again, but worse.”
At the far end of the main room was another small chamber with a pile of furs and cushions. Moon and Jade’s clutch was in the center of the pile, three female and two male, sleepily climbing on each other and tugging on one another’s frills. It was more and more likely that they were queens and consorts. Mixed gender clutches were unlikely to produce warriors. They were with the other royal clutch, the last three survivors of the Sky Copper court. The two fledgling consorts Bitter and Thorn were half-awake, leaning on each other, and Frost, the little queen, sat in front of the babies to guard them. “What’s going on?” Frost demanded. “Blossom said everyone’s having the same dream.”
Blossom shushed her. “Keep your voice down, some of the others are still sleeping.”
In a piercing whisper, Frost repeated, “Is everyone really having the same dream?”
Moon sat down beside the nest and untangled Cloud’s still soft claws from Fern’s frills. At a little over a turn old, the clutch couldn’t talk much and were mostly concerned with playing, along with eating and sleeping and other bodily functions. “It looks like it, but we don’t know why yet. You didn’t have the dream?”
Frost shrugged her spines. She was in her Arbora form, small and deceptively soft. Her scales were green, and as she had grown over the past turn, the yellow tracery was becoming more pronounced. All queens had a second contrasting web of color across their scales, and it was a sign that Frost was finally maturing. She was still a long time from officially leaving the nurseries, whatever she thought. She said, “We dream about Fell all the time.” Thorn and Bitter sleepily nodded.
The Sky Copper clutch had survived the Fell attack on their colony to the east, only to be captured by a Fell flight. It would have been a horrific event for anyone to go through, let alone fledglings, and they still bore the effects of it, though it wasn’t as obvious now. “But you weren’t dreaming about them tonight?” Moon asked, just to make sure, as Sapphire lunged into his lap and started to chew on the cuff of his pants. Queens shared mental connections to their courts; it was how they brought the court together, how they could hold other Raksura in their groundling forms and keep them from shifting, and other abilities Moon still wasn’t so certain about. But Frost wasn’t in the Indigo Cloud bloodline, so even if it was possible for a queen to give a nightmare to the whole court, he didn’t think it could have come from Frost.
“Blossom already asked that,” Frost informed him. “We weren’t dreaming.”
“If any of the clutches did have the dream,” Blossom said as she lifted Solace and Rain out of the nest and deposited Rain in Moon’s lap, “they don’t remember it. When we started to wake them, they all wanted to play or eat or go back to sleep. They weren’t shifting, either.”
When fledglings and baby Arbora were frightened, they shifted at random, even in their sleep. As proof he hadn’t been upset, Rain curled up in Moon’s lap and hissed out a contented breath as he fell asleep. Bitter crawled into the nest, pulled Cloud and Fern against his chest, and followed suit. Frost gave Thorn a push and he joined them, curling up in a ball. Moon arranged Solace, Sapphire, and Rain next to Thorn. It calmed abraded nerves just to come down here and touch their little soft-scaled bodies. He felt better able to think about this logically now. “I need to get back to Jade.” She was going to want to know the nurseries weren’t in chaos, for one thing. “Frost, keep an eye on everyone, all right?”