Watching her walk away, Moon thought, I can try.
Chapter Seven
They were to start for the Yellow Sea at dawn the next morning. Moon didn’t have much in the way of preparations to make. He borrowed a small cloth pack from Petal, just large enough to carry his old clothes and some dried meat and fruit she insisted he take. He didn’t have anything else to carry, though he was starting to covet the knife and belt, still in the pile of refused gifts outside his bower. It wasn’t as if he needed a knife in his shifted form, but he was used to having one as a groundling, and you never knew when it would come in handy. But he didn’t weaken enough to take it.
Before first light, Moon flew far enough away to be out of the hunters’ range and took a kill, a small grasseater. He purposefully overate, knowing he would need it for two long days of flight. It was still dark when he got back to the colony, so he stretched out on a ledge, pillowed his head on his pack, and napped.
The gray dawn light roused him, and he woke to see a group gathering on one of the terraced platforms below the pyramid. Stone and Flower were there in groundling form, plus Chime, Balm, and Jade, and three of the warriors who had come to the teachers’ common room with her yesterday.
Moon jumped off the ledge and glided down toward the platform. He landed just in time to hear one of the warriors say, “He’s probably run off. How long are we supposed to...” The words trailed off as Moon touched down on the paving and folded his wings.
“Wait?” Stone finished mercilessly. Chime gave the offender a derisive smile, Flower winced, Jade kept her expression blank, and everyone else looked uncomfortable. Impervious, Stone asked Moon, “You ready?”
Moon shifted to groundling, since everyone else was, and shrugged. Flower gave Stone a repressive look and introduced the three other warriors. “Moon, this is Branch, Root, and Song.”
Song was female, younger and a little smaller than Balm, but she had the same warm, dark skin and curling honey hair, as if they might be related. Root was the one who had speculated that Moon had run off, and also the one who had asked yesterday about stealing the flying boats from their groundling owners. He and Branch looked enough alike to be clutch-mates. Both had reddish-brown hair and copper skin, not unlike the young warrior who had attacked Moon yesterday, but in more subdued shades. If they were from a related clutch, that was just Moon’s luck. Root was typically slender but Branch had a bigger, broader build, which might mean his shifted form was larger. That could be a problem, Moon thought, resigned to trouble.
Moon had no idea what his chances were in a fight against a larger male warrior, or a group of warriors. What worried him the most was that he had never had a real fight in his shifted form that wasn’t to the death. Play-wrestling his Arbora siblings with claws carefully sheathed had been his last experience with it, and he had never fought just for dominance or to make a point.
But he had no intention of letting anyone else use him to make a point.
Jade told Stone and Flower, “We’ll be back as soon as possible. If we’re delayed more than a few days, I’ll send someone as messenger.”
“Take care,” Flower said, with a worried smile.
Everyone shifted, Moon following a beat behind the others. Stone didn’t say anything, but Moon was aware that he watched them, long after they leapt into the air and flew toward the west.
They flew all day, passing the point where the hilly jungle gradually gave way to flat coastal plain. As the afternoon became evening, Moon saw the plain had turned to marshland, with bright green grass and tall elegant birds undisturbed by their passage high overhead. In the distance the sea was a yellow haze.
When they reached it, the setting sun made the yellow of the water even more brilliant. The waves rolled up a wide beach bordered by low dunes and a band of yellow vegetation. The sand glinted with metallic and crystalline reflections. Jade had followed Stone’s directions well, and they reached the coast only a short distance away from the first landmark: a ruin rising up from the water, about a hundred paces out from the land.
Moon landed on the beach, shifted, and stretched. He wasn’t that tired; he had grown used to keeping up with Stone, and this hadn’t been very strenuous flying. It was also warmer here, despite the strong wind off the sea, and the sand was hot under his feet. He walked toward the waves as the others landed a short distance away.
From the look of this ruin, the groundlings who had built the blocky pyramid and the statues in the valley hadn’t made it as far as this coast. The structure was a series of big platforms, placed as if forming a circular stairway up to the sky, each roofless but ringed by tall thin columns linked by delicate arches. It was all made of metal and covered with verdigris, and the supporting posts in the water were heavily encrusted with little yellow barnacles. Moon reached the waterline and stepped onto the wet sand, letting the frothy edge of the waves run over his feet. The sky was tossed with clouds; a haze of rain fell far off to the south.
A little way up the beach, the others had gathered into a group to talk. Moon kept part of his attention on them, while he watched the waves suck sand from around his toes.
Chime came over to Moon, slogging through the loose sand. He stopped a few paces away and said abruptly, “Are you speaking to me?”
“What?” Moon stared at him, startled out of his mood. “Yes.”
“You’ve barely spoken to anyone except Stone since what happened with Pearl.”
Moon scratched his head, watching the last of the light glitter on the water. That wasn’t quite true, but he could see how it would look that way to Chime. “I didn’t have anything to say.”
“Somehow I find that hard to believe.” Chime folded his arms, rolling his shoulders uncomfortably. “What Pearl did was unacceptable, even if you’re a...”
“Groundling-eating solitary,” Moon supplied.
“Groundling-eating solitary, she shouldn’t have behaved that way. Since you were brought to the court by Stone... The groundling-eating part was sarcasm, yes?”
Moon gave in. Chime seemed to be offering friendship, in his own way, and he wasn’t going to turn that down. They were both outsiders among the Aeriat, and Chime seemed more out of place at times than Moon did. He just said, “Speaking of eating, let’s go look for dinner.”
They found tidal pools farther up the beach, in the rocky flats at the edge of the yellow scrub. The shallow pools had trapped fish, crabs, and other shelled creatures, and some water lizards, coming in to feed. The fish were too small to be more than a snack, but the lizards would make a more substantial meal. Moon shifted and slipped from pool to pool, catching surprised lizards, breaking their necks, and tossing them out for Chime to collect. They also found small patches of metal-mud, which Chime had heard about but never seen before. It was good for making colors for pottery, and Moon’s favorite groundlings, the Hassi, had also used it when they hunted on the forest floor. Once it dried on skin or scales, the metallic odor disguised your own scent. It also burned easily, something that Chime seemed to find fascinating.
The others all explored the ruin or the beach. They were divided into two camps, with Moon on one side, and everybody else on the other. Or two and a half camps, since Chime hovered in the middle.
When Root and Song wandered over to try their luck in the pools, Moon and Chime carried their catch over to the ruin, landing on a platform about halfway up the structure. As a place to camp it wasn’t ideal. There was no real shelter; the slender pillars didn’t provide any windbreak. But the metal was hot from the day’s sun and felt pleasant on Moon’s scales, and the elevation made it difficult for anything to come at them from the shore. For one night, it wouldn’t be a problem.