Jade started to hiss but lost the will for it midway through drawing breath. If Stone wanted to fly ahead, let him. Her gaze fell on Balm, who was in her groundling form. The sleeves of her borrowed Kishan jacket were ripped and her arms were scratched and bruised. Her cheeks were hollow and a bruise darkened on her temple. Jade said, “Balm needs some tea.”
Balm’s nod was serious. “So do you.”
Delin lifted a hand and one of the young Islanders hurried forward with two cups. Delin took them and handed them to Jade and Balm. Jade drank hers, barely noticing that it was an Islander tea and already cool. It had been a mistake to speak, since once Jade had started, she couldn’t just stop again. She handed Delin back the cup and said, “Who’s that below?”
Delin probably couldn’t hear it but he seemed to know what she meant. “Chime is badly off. So is Shade. The others . . . are not so well, either.”
Jade twitched her spines in acknowledgement, then winced at what that did to her wing muscles. She made herself say, “I’ll go down there.” Shade might not appreciate her presence, but Chime would, for now. Until someone told him what had happened in the ruin.
She pushed away from the rail and followed Delin, Balm trailing behind her.
Jade hadn’t intended to sleep, but at some point she must have. She lay on the floor in one of the belowdecks cabins, and flinched awake when Balm leaned over her. The mentor’s lights in the cabin were starting to fade and the air tasted of early dawn. The bruises on Balm’s face had had time to discolor but her eyes were alight and her expression made Jade’s heart seize up. Balm dragged at her arm. “Stone’s back! Come on!”
Jade shoved upright and followed her. Her back still ached and the little food she had been able to eat sloshed unpleasantly in her stomach. But the wind-ship stirred around her, more movement and voices than she had been conscious of in hours.
She stepped out onto the deck and saw Diar holding up a lamp, its light falling on the circle of Raksura, Golden Islanders, Rorra, and Kalam. In the center stood Stone, with the kethel beside him, crumpled on the deck. Jade caught Chime’s expression of painful hope and her mind went blank.
The kethel’s pale skin was mottled with dark bruises, raw burns, and bloody cuts and scrapes. As Jade stepped forward, it looked up at her. “Groundlings took the consort,” it said, its voice a harsh rasp.
Jade forced the words out, “Was he alive?” “It doesn’t know,” Stone said. His clothes were torn and covered with dust, smeared with blood where he must have been carrying the kethel. “When it woke, it saw Moon on the ground next to a pile of debris, but a Kishan flying boat was coming. It crawled away through the grass and hid under a piece of wall, and pretended to be dead. It saw groundlings in flying packs come down from the boat and carry Moon and at least three Hians away. I searched, and there were some dead Hians left near that spot. They must have taken anyone they found still alive.”
A flutter of anxious spines went through the warriors, and Bramble shook Chime’s arm. Shade turned and buried his face on Flicker’s shoulder. Jade couldn’t trust herself to speak. Balm said, “It saw which way the flying boat went?”
“Northeast,” Stone said.
Diar nodded sharply. “If my calculation of our position is correct, we’re at the edge of Kish-Jandera. North is the territory of Kish-Majora, and the city directly to the northeast is Kish-Karad.”
Kalam took a sharp breath. “The Imperial seat.”
Jade found her voice. “Get the kethel some water. Stone, Rorra, Kalam, we need to make plans.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Moon woke struggling to breathe, the stink of smoke overwhelming light and sound, nothing but dry grass and acrid metal and burning flesh. He had the bad feeling the flesh might be him; his skin felt like fire. He heard hushed voices, speaking some variation on Kedaic. Then footsteps, coming closer.
That penetrated the haze enough for him to realize the dirt and the scratch of grass was on his bare skin, that he was lying here in his groundling form, probably surrounded by dead Hians. Lavinat used a fire weapon on me, he remembered. He would have blood on his teeth, his hands. He knew what he had to do, pretend he was a groundling, come up with a story. He got his arms under him and tried to heave himself upright, but pain ran out of his chest like blood and water, and he slid down into burning darkness again.
The next time he woke slowly, drifting back up to an awareness of an unfamiliar place. He knew he had been almost awake before, that several dramatic things had happened while he was semi-conscious. He remembered flashes of intense searing pain between times of cool relief. Someone giving him water, and broth with just enough of a taste of meat to make him alternately sick and ravenous. He remembered trying to flex his hands and realizing his fingers were broken, held immobile by splints.
Now the skin of his chest felt tender and tight, but it didn’t hurt nearly as much as he remembered. He heard movement from another room, the sound bouncing off stone walls, and voices, none familiar. He took a deep breath, keeping his eyes closed, and tasted the scent.
Sun-warmed air, incense caught in the folds of fabric, Kishan moss, though not nearby, strange groundling bodies, a trace of sweet oil, water running over stone and metal. And somewhere, the confusion of dust and sour/sweet scents that suggested a groundling city.
No Raksura. There was no scent of Fell, either. Kethel might have survived the fire weapons and the crash into the plain, but it wouldn’t have survived being found by groundlings. It was either dead in the ruin somewhere or escaped.
Now Moon just had to figure out where he was.
He managed to get his gummy eyes open to see a high domed ceiling of gray-white stone, embossed with half circles, all set with chips of glittering blue and green glass. Morning sunlight fell through stone-latticed windows just under the dome. Figured bronze lamps hung from the ceiling, and the walls had more embossed images, repeating square designs. The bed he lay on was a stone platform built against the wall, but it was made comfortable with cushions and drapes in soft fabrics.
Moon started to lever himself up and subsided with a gasp at the stab of pain in his chest. He squinted down at himself and saw a lot of patchy new bronze skin in between bandages and red healing burns; the muscles underneath ached with every movement. All the fingers on his right hand and three on the left had been broken and mostly healed straight. He moved his feet and added several toes to the total. He had a dim memory of digging his way out from under smothering debris, breaking his claws in the process. Nothing was broken or strained in his back; it didn’t hurt except for a dull ache. It meant his wing joins weren’t damaged, which was a relief.
Someone had taken care of him, obviously. Someone not a mentor. There was no scent of the simples that Merit or Lithe would have used, and he could tell he hadn’t been put in a healing sleep.
The door in the far wall was an open arch to another room. The groundlings he could hear were somewhere past it. He shifted to his scaled form.
Tried to shift. Nothing happened.
Moon tightened his throat against a snarl. They know what you are. He knew what being caught felt like. But it wasn’t Fell poison; there was no scale pattern on his skin. He tried again but it was like there was a wall between himself and whatever power he needed to shift, a wall he couldn’t break through. Kishan shamen, he thought. This had to be why the Fell were so wary of them.
He tried to sit up again and his arms trembled with the effort of pushing himself upright. There was no sign of whatever might have been left of his own clothes, or anything else he had been carrying with him.