Moon felt he had to say, “She has a point.”
Chime didn’t respond for a moment, lifting and flexing his bad wing with a cautious wince. He finally said, “You’ve been alone all this time. How did you teach yourself to fly?” He waved a hand at the plain, the breeze bending the tall grass, the now-distant herds of grasseaters. “How to hunt? How did you know—”
It was Moon’s turn to hiss in annoyance, and he paced away from them, lashing his tail. It was turns too late for him to want sympathy from these people. “If you stop asking me about it, I’ll show you how to take down a grasseater without breaking your neck.”
He had only said it to make Chime angry and to shut him up. He didn’t expect him to perk up and say, “All right.”
Even as Moon explained the basics—grip the creature with your feet to leave your hands free, rip its throat out quickly before it has a chance to roll over on you, don’t attack anything too much bigger than you are—he didn’t expect Chime to listen. But Chime did, asking careful questions and prompting Moon to provide more detailed examples and advice, things he had learned for himself the hard way, and other knowledge picked up from the various groundling tribes he had hunted with.
Balm, tactfully, didn’t stay to watch or to enjoy being vindicated. She flew off to take a kill from the edge of one of the smaller herds, and then carried it away downwind to bleed it. Chime, after three false starts, managed to follow Moon’s example and take down a young loper bull. Moon wondered if Chime’s aversion to learning had more to do with being taught by people he had grown up with, who had known him only as a shaman, with abilities they didn’t have.
To eat, they took their kills back to the flat-topped head of the statue Moon had first landed on, high above any predators that might stalk the plain. The wind up there was strong enough to keep away the more persistent insects, and the view was still impressive.
When he finished eating, Moon, who had been looking forward to this since he had first seen the valley, leapt high into the air to circle around and dive into the deep part of the lake. Chime and Balm didn’t follow his example, but did venture into the shallows, swimming around the tall water grass near the bank. After a while, Chime actually relaxed enough to get into a mock-fight with Balm, both of them splashing and snarling loud enough to drive all the game to the far end of the valley.
When Moon swam back to see if they were really trying to kill each other, Chime tackled him. Since Chime’s claws were sheathed, Moon just grabbed him and went under, taking him out of the shallows and all the way down to the weedy bottom, some thirty paces down. He then shot back up. By the time they surfaced, Chime was wrapped around him, wings tightly tucked in, clinging with arms, legs, and tail. “I didn’t know we could do that!” he gasped.
“You learn something new every day,” Moon told him, grinning. Chime tried unsuccessfully to dunk him, and Balm stood in the shallows, pointing and laughing.
If Moon had been alone, he would have spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping on the warm stone of the statue’s head, but he was supposed to be a functioning member of the court and that meant each of them bringing another kill back. After this day, it didn’t seem like such an insupportable burden.
They flew back to the herd, and Moon and Balm took their kills with no difficulty. They waited upwind while Chime tried to bleed his without ripping up the meat too much and losing all the organs.
Moon caught a scent on the wind that wasn’t blood or viscera. He pivoted, studying the empty sky. “Did you smell that?”
“What?” Balm lifted her head, tasting the air. “No. What was it?”
It had just been a trace, there and gone almost too quickly to mark it. “Fell.”
“There’s been Fell taint in the air off and on since that ruler came to see Pearl.” Balm showed her fangs in a grimace of disgust. “They must still be in the area, watching the court.”
The wind came from the south, away from the colony. The Fell must be lurking out there somewhere; maybe this valley wasn’t such a good place to nap in the sun after all. Moon asked, “Were you there? When the ruler came?”
Balm shook her head, her spines flaring. “No, I’m not in favor with Pearl. I’m Jade’s...” She trailed off, looking up at Moon, suddenly uneasy.
It was the hesitation that did it. Spy, Moon thought. Spy is the word you’re looking for. He had known that Chime and Balm had only come out here to keep an eye on him; that Balm was here specifically on Jade’s behalf somehow made it... personal.
Chime landed next to them, dropping a carcass on the dry grass. He panted with exertion, proud and flustered with his success. “There, is that right? Can we go now?”
Moon turned away, picked up his own kill, and leapt into the air. Behind him, he heard Chime asking Balm, “Hey, what’s wrong? What did you do?” Moon didn’t listen for the answer.
Chapter Six
Moon reached the colony well ahead of Chime and Balm, finding and following the river back up the valley. As he circled the main structure, he identified the pillared terrace that belonged to the hunters by the hides drying on wooden racks. A dozen or so Arbora worked there, skinning something large and furry that had a double set of spiral horns. The place stunk of butchered meat and the acidic tang of whatever they used for tanning.
Moon landed and dumped the carcass on the paving, folded his wings, and shifted. He managed not to twitch when all the Arbora working in the court shifted too. He was going to have to get used to that.
They were all dressed roughly for the messy work, most wearing just ragged cloth smocks or leather kilts. All stopped their work to watch Moon with open curiosity. The one who stepped forward, eyeing the carcass as if he grudged its existence, said, “Well, you killed it. Did you bother to bleed—Oh, you did.” He had the heavyset build of most Arbora, and he was old, showing the signs of age that Moon was learning to recognize in Raksura. His hair was white and his bronze-brown skin had an ashy cast. Other than that he looked as tough as a boulder, with heavily muscled shoulders and a ridge of scar tissue circling his neck, as if something had tried to bite his head off. “I’m Bone,” he added, and kicked the carcass thoughtfully. “Do you want the hide? You’ve got first claim on it.”
“No. Give it to someone else.” It would have come in handy, but Moon hoped to be long gone before they could finish tanning it.
“Huh.” Bone looked as if he might argue, then subsided with a scowl.
That seemed to be it. Moon turned away, wanting to get out of there before Chime and Balm arrived. “Hey,” one of the hunters called out. Warily, he turned back. A woman, silver-gray threaded through her light-colored hair, sat on the steps and sharpened a skinning knife. She said, “Why are you staying down here in the Arboras’ bowers, instead of up there with the Aeriat?”
Moon suppressed an annoyed growl. He had had enough of this from the warriors; he didn’t need to hear it here, too. He said, “Do you have a problem with it?”
She snorted with amusement. “Not me.”
But Bone, still watching him, said, “That’s going to make trouble for you. You should move up there with them. It’d go easier on you.”
Moon shook his head, frustrated with all of it. All his turns trying to fit in had come to nothing, over and over again, and he was too weary to start the whole process again here. The Raksura could take him as he was. He said, “No, it wouldn’t.”
He caught movement overhead, and looked up to see Chime and Balm circling in. Moon shifted and jumped to the terrace roof, then up to the first ledge. He followed it around the outside of the building, to the passage that led to the back entrance into the teachers’ hall.