Moon wished he could find an objection to it, but it just didn’t seem that much to ask. Staying here for a short time, even if he was threatened, stared at, and talked about, wouldn’t hurt him. Not much. But there was the other problem. “What about the Fell?”
“The place of the Raksura in the Three Worlds is to kill Fell.”
Moon looked at Stone, not certain he was serious.
Stone shrugged, as if he wasn’t saying anything particularly odd. “They’re predators, just like Tath, Ghobin, a hundred others. We should be hunting them, not the other way around.” He shook his head. “After Pearl’s reign, we don’t have a lot of allies except for Sky Copper. I’d been talking to their reigning queen about combining with us.”
Moon thought Stone wasn’t the only one in the Indigo Cloud Court who had been talking. “Then someone warned the Fell you wanted to join with Sky Copper. Someone here.”
“I thought of that, too.” Stone’s voice held an edge now. “You staying?”
Moon looked at the colony; all those people, so vulnerable in the dark. “I’ll stay, and I’ll let you use me for this. But I won’t promise anything afterward.”
“We’ll see,” Stone said, amused rather than grateful. “Maybe you’ll make another quick decision.”
Moon hissed at him, shifted, and leapt into the air.
Flying back across the river to the colony, he avoided the teachers’ court and the other lighted areas. The voices still rose and fell, but the effect wasn’t as loud or as penetrating, as if many of the singers had lapsed into silence.
Moon landed on a ledge and went to one of the air shafts he had found earlier, climbing down, taking the back way into the living quarters. He hoped that if anyone detected his presence, they would take the hint and leave him alone. The hall was empty, and he went back to the bower Petal had shown him. He had a warm place to sleep, at least, and he should take advantage of it while he could.
But as he climbed the steps to the little room, he paused. Someone else had been up here, and it hadn’t been Petal or Bell, or even River or Drift; the unfamiliar scent still hung in the air.
Moon had left his old clothes on a basket next to the robe Petal had loaned him. There was now something on top of them, a roll of blue fabric. He poked it warily, and when nothing leapt out at him, unwrapped it. Inside was a belt, of dark butter-soft leather, tooled with red in a serpentine pattern, the round buckles of red gold. Attached to it was a sheathed knife. He drew it, finding the hilt was carved horn, and the blade was something’s tooth, sharp as glass with a tensile strength like fine metal.
He thought of the bracelet he had found in Stone’s pack, made of the same rich red gold as these buckles, and how Flower had said something about a token Jade had sent, to be given to the consort Stone might bring back from the Star Aster court. And he recalled Stone’s comment: I’m bringing a present back for my great-great-granddaughter. Moon let his breath out in a bitter hiss. Very funny.
Moon sheathed the knife and re-wrapped it and the belt, and left the bundle halfway down the steps of the bower. Hopefully that made it clear that he wasn’t accepting the gift, bribe, wage for selling himself into servitude, or whatever it was. Hopefully Stone would tell Jade or whoever had left it that Moon had said he would cooperate, that this wasn’t necessary.
He climbed into the bed, listening to the court’s song as it gradually diminished and finally faded away.
When Moon woke the next morning, he lay still for a while, watching dust drift in a ray of light from an air shaft. He wasn’t looking forward to the day, mostly because he had no place here and no idea what to do.
He had slept badly; even if he hadn’t been half-expecting River to return for another try at him, the noise had kept him awake. The openings between the thick walls and the ceiling allowed sound to travel from the other bowers, making him even more hyper-aware of quiet voices, deep breathing, and the soft sounds of sex. It hadn’t been any different at the Cordans’ camp, and he knew his nerves were only on edge because these were strangers, some of them actively hostile.
The noise hadn’t seemed to bother anyone else. Though if there had been two or three friendly bodies in this bed like there obviously were in some of the other bowers, Moon wouldn’t have noticed it either.
He decided to do what he would usually do anywhere else and go hunting. It would give him some space to think and also make it clear he wasn’t depending on the court’s generosity for food.
When he climbed out of the bed, he saw the wrapped knife and belt still lay where he had left them, undisturbed. But on the step below it was another bundle, a bigger one. Unrolling it, he saw it was a fur blanket, the long soft hair dyed a shade of purple close to the haze of twilight.
With an annoyed grimace, Moon rolled it back up and left it on the step. If this went on, he was going to have to climb over a pile just to get out the door.
He went through the hall and down to the common room. As he stepped out of the stairwell, there was a sudden flurry of movement and a flash of blue and silver-gray disappeared through the outer door. The people left in the room, including Chime, Bell, and a few he didn’t know, all tried to pretend that nothing had happened, with varying degrees of flustered confusion.
Moon had the feeling he knew who that blue and gray figure was: the woman he had seen on the ledge of the pyramid yesterday with a slim build and a mane shape and scale color different from anyone else. If that was Jade, then the best thing he could do was follow her example and make himself scarce. At least the atrium was bright with sunlight, promising a good flying day. He cleared his throat and said, “I’m going hunting. Is there any place I should stay away from?”
They stared blankly at him. Puzzled, Bell asked, “What do you mean?”
“Territories? Preserves? Places that are reserved for other people, or where you’re letting the game increase?” He wished they would stop looking at him like that. This was a perfectly rational question.
One of the women he hadn’t met yet said, “Aeriat don’t... don’t usually hunt, not when they’re in the colony.” She must be a warrior herself. She had a slim but strong build, with dark skin and curly honey-colored hair tied back from a sharp-featured face. “That’s what the hunters do.”
Moon set his jaw, trying to control his annoyance. Yes, even I figured that one out. “Where I come from, if Aeriat don’t hunt, they don’t eat.”
Chime stood hastily. “I’ll go with you.”
Flustered, the woman followed him a moment later. There was something just a little awkward about her that made Moon think she was young, maybe not that far from girlhood. She said, “I’m Balm. I’ll go, too.”
Moon kept his expression noncommittal. He had meant to go alone for a chance to explore the area and to think, but if he was going to be saddled with guards, he wasn’t going to let his irritation show. He just turned and walked out to the atrium, leaving them to follow or not. The sky was a clear blue vault, no clouds in sight.
They did follow, Balm saying, “The hunters have the forest portioned off so they don’t over-hunt any one area, as you said. But they don’t go much more than four or five ells from the valley.”
Ells? Moon thought. They must have a system of measures that he had no idea how to translate. That was all he needed. I’m getting tired of feeling like an idiot. A feral idiot.