She let the Hians drop a rope ladder for her to climb up, because she wanted to look weak. Even in her groundling form, she could have made the leap from the floor to the opening, but that was the last thing she wanted the Hians to realize.
She climbed out into a room with walls and floor of tightly woven moss, just like their cage. Beams like stems arched overhead. The lights were dim, smaller versions of the globes that had been used on Callumkal’s flying boat. Those had been filled with luminescent fluids that had supposedly come from sea creatures.
Five Hians confronted her, three standing down the wide corridor with fire weapons. Bramble tried to look downcast and sick, and suspected her effort wouldn’t have convinced a Raksura for a moment. She knew she didn’t look very good. Her shirt and pants had been clean when she had taken them out of her pack days ago on the sunsailer, but now they were stained and smelled like sickness. There had been barely enough water for her and Merit to wash their hands and faces, let alone clean their clothes.
One Hian pointed down the corridor, indicating that Bramble should come with her. She obeyed, walking with the Hian as the other three followed. They looked much the same as those who had arrived on the sunsailer with Bemadin, though Bramble found it difficult to tell them apart. Arbora were short compared to Aeriat, often wide or round, and always sturdy. The Hians were muscular in a different way, with long arms and legs, and their silver gray skin marked with patches of a rough armored rock-like hide, with one large patch on their heads. Their eyes were wide but their noses were barely visible, and their clothes were short skirts and tunics of a light material, as if their bare skin didn’t need as much protection as soft groundling skin usually did. Bramble had never much noticed Vendoin’s personal scent, which had tended to disappear under the stronger scents of the Raksura, the Kish-Jandera, and Rorra’s sealing scent. In the confines of the corridor it was easier to smell them, but there was still not much that was distinctive, and even the cool moss scent of the flying boat tended to drown them out.
They took her up a set of steep stairs, down a winding corridor of closed doors, then up another set of stairs. This brought them into a wide foyer, and they led her through an open door into a large common room.
It had the bones of a Kishan craft, with padded benches back against the walls. There was no pedestal stove in the center for holding heated material, but there was a bare spot in the deck where it looked as if one had been removed. Large windows in the far wall looked out into an evening sky in shades of purple and blue. There were distant unfamiliar mountains, and she could just catch a glimpse of green treetops.
The Hians had added more furniture, some padded chair-couch things that Vendoin, Bemadin, and another Hian half-lay on. Bemadin had led the Hians in the flying boat that had found the sunsailer; it was her gifts of food that had poisoned everyone aboard. Bramble didn’t recognize the third Hian sitting with her and Vendoin. Others stood around the room, like warriors in attendance on queens. Except in a court everyone would get to sit down eventually but that didn’t look like it was going to happen here.
A little table stood in front of Vendoin’s seat, and it had something on it that looked like a gray, striated rock. Maybe it was some sort of food? A careful taste of the air told Bramble nothing, but she caught a familiar scent. Then one of the Hians stepped aside so she could see Delin, seated on a stool among the attendants. He quirked a brow at her; Bramble sucked her cheeks in to try to look ill and hunched her shoulders to seem smaller.
In Altanic, Vendoin said, “It’s all right, Bramble. We won’t harm you. I just want to ask you some questions.”
Bramble had been calm up till now, but something about the sound of Vendoin’s voice, the confidence, the self-satisfaction, made her skin want to crawl off her body and her fingers ache. For once the Fell poison worked for her, keeping her from shifting, making it easier to control her temper. She stilled the growl in her throat and nodded. “I understand.”
“Bramble is an Arbora,” Vendoin said to Bemadin and the other Hian sitting with them, in Kedaic. “The Raksura servant class.”
Bramble didn’t react. It was a relief that her speculation was right. It would have been highly embarrassing to have explained it all so passionately to Merit only to find she was completely wrong.
Also in Kedaic, Bemadin said, “You should have gotten one of the others, the winged ones.”
“I took what I could get.” Vendoin had always been hard for Bramble to read, far more so than Delin or Niran or any of the Jandera, but Bramble got the impression she was not happy with Bemadin.
The strange Hian seated beside them said, “There is no reason to enjoy this so much. Your power over these people has changed you.”
Bramble kept her gaze on the deck and forced herself not to react, but it was difficult. She let herself look up and saw Bemadin turn partially away from Vendoin and the other Hian, something stiff in her posture. Bramble wasn’t sure what it meant. Then Bemadin said in Kedaic, “I apologize.”
Vendoin said hurriedly, “We will speak of this later.”
Delin had taken the whole exchange in with polite attention. “We have not been introduced,” he said to the strange Hian. “I am Delin-Evran-lindel, of the Golden Isles. This is Bramble of the Court of Indigo Cloud. She does not speak Kedaic, only Altanic. We have two other friends here, Merit of the Court of Indigo Cloud and Callumkal, Master Scholar of the Conclave of the Janderan.”
The new Hian said in Altanic, “I am Lavinat, and I am afraid I cannot be your ally.”
Delin gave her a nod. “It is a pleasant change to have that out in the open at the first meeting.”
Bramble had to bite the inside of her cheek.
Obviously trying to ignore Delin, Vendoin explained to Lavinat, “The winged ones would be too difficult to control. The two I selected are more malleable, though the little male has some arcane powers and must be more carefully guarded.”
Bramble slid a look at Delin, and saw by the set of his mouth an expression that in a Raksura she would have described as an attempt to conceal contemptuous amusement. He said in Kedaic, “You fear they will still find you, even though you have changed to a different flying craft so that the Jandera can’t track the moss in the motivator.”
That’s not good, Bramble thought, not letting her expression change. She hadn’t noticed the difference, since the only thing she had seen of the flying boat that had come to the sunsailer was the bottom of its hull.
Vendoin ignored Delin again, turning back to Bramble and switching to Altanic to say, “My friends are very curious about your people, Bramble.”
Bramble didn’t have any idea how to respond to that and keep up her guise as cowed and subdued. She knit her brows, trying to look hesitant, and asked, “Why did you take us prisoner?”
“I wonder this as well,” Delin said.
Bemadin and Lavinat looked at Vendoin. Instead of answering the question, Vendoin said, “We are told that the Fell are the natural enemies of the Raksura. But we are also told that the Raksura and the Fell are the same species.”
Bramble let her expression show confusion. It was easy, because she couldn’t tell where this was going. “We come from the same species. But we aren’t the same.” You idiots, she added mentally.
“Is it possible that a handful of Raksura could drive off a whole flight of Fell?”
Bramble lifted her chin. It depended on the number of rulers and kethel, and how badly they wanted to eat the groundlings aboard the sunsailer, and if any of the Kish-Jandera had been conscious enough to use their weapons. But Bramble said, “Yes. You saw the Aeriat fight them at the foundation builder city.” She could see from Delin’s expression he didn’t understand the purpose of the questions, either.