“Can’t you find another place to live in this forest?” Niran asked. It was something Moon had been wondering himself. “Are there other deserted colonies?”
Blossom’s expression was bleak. “There must be, but all of them would be claimed by their original courts. Just like this tree still belonged to us, even though we hadn’t been back here in generations. If we take someone else’s colony and territory, even if it’s unused, it leaves us vulnerable to challenges by other courts. We’d have to leave the Reaches completely. That’s a long trip, when we don’t know where we’re going.”
Moon had no answers. There were more than enough Arbora working and he didn’t want to just stand here and watch. He jumped over the side, flew back up to the knothole entrance, and took the winding passage into the greeting hall. Several soldiers were still there on guard, a considerably more glum group than they had been that morning. One looked up, a dark green Arbora with a heavy build, and Moon recognized him. It was Grain, one of the soldiers who had ordered Moon out of the old colony on his first day there.
If Grain remembered the incident, Moon couldn’t tell; he looked just as depressed as Blossom. He told Moon, “They’re all down in the big room below the teachers’ level, reading.”
Moon twitched his tail in acknowledgement and headed for the stairs. “Big room below the teachers’ level” actually took in a lot of territory, but he found them in the room they had been using to sort the unloaded supplies from the ships. It was round, with several passages leading away or up into the bowers, and the domed ceiling was a carving of the sky, with the sun’s rays stretching out to give way to stars, then the half-moon. Light-shells ringed the room, set just below the rim of the carving.
All the mentors and several teachers sat around on the floor, reading from loosely bound books or piles of loose parchment. Jade sat near Flower and Merit and Chime, paging through a thick book.
Moon shifted to groundling, because everybody else was, and Jade was in her Arbora form. He went to sit next to her, and she put an arm around his waist to tug him against her side. He leaned against her, and rubbed his cheek against hers. She said, “Was it a good hunt?”
“It was great,” he said absently, distracted by the book. The paper was a thick, soft parchment, the binding a silvery cord as thin as wire, the covers a soft blue reptile hide. The writing was absolutely incomprehensible. It looked like a solid block of serpentine scrawl, ornamented in places with colored inks. He hoped he was looking at some sort of decorative embellishment, until Jade turned the page and hope sank. He snuck a look at the books and papers that Flower and Chime and the others were examining. No, this was actually the writing.
He could read Altanic and Kedaic well, and pick out words in several other common groundling languages, but this was a complete mystery. He assumed this was written Raksuran, but he couldn’t even tell where one character ended and another began. He had had the vague idea that there might be a book about consorts, something that would give him some idea of how to behave, what was expected of him, or at least a better frame of reference. That was out; there probably was something like that, but it wasn’t going to be written in Altanic.
He hesitated, but asked, “Did you find anything yet?” If they asked him to help, he wasn’t sure what he was going to say. He would have to admit it eventually and ask someone to teach him, but he would rather not do it just yet. He didn’t want to give River and his cronies anymore ammunition to use against him just now, not with the court so unsettled.
“I think we finally found where we need to be looking,” Jade said, her voice dry. “That’s an improvement.”
Chime stirred, rubbing the back of his neck. “We started with the oldest records first, but those all seemed to be from the time Indigo and Cloud led the court away.”
Flower nodded, not looking up from her book. “It looks like the paper they used started to fall apart, and they had to re-copy most of the old volumes. They were in too much of a hurry to bind most of it. So we can’t go by age of the cover to tell the date. We just have to read until something indicates it.”
From what Moon could tell, she had continued to read the entire time she was speaking. Being a mentor was apparently even more complicated than it had seemed at first glance.
Merit turned a page, yawning. “At least we found out that when the court originally left, there was no mention of anything being wrong with the tree.”
“Stone already said that,” Heart pointed out.
Merit shrugged. “I know, but at least if he hadn’t been here to tell us we would have found it out anyway.”
Heart frowned at him. “Could you make less sense? I almost understood that.”
“Argue later, read now,” Flower said, a growl in her voice.
Moon waited until they were all deeply engrossed in the books again, then slipped away.
He stopped at the nurseries to visit the kids, trying to forget the court’s troubles while the Sky Copper royals played mock-fight with some of the young fledgling warriors, and the baby Arbora climbed on him.
Spring came to sit next to Moon, and said, without preamble, “Copper says we can’t stay here.” She was a gawky, half-sized warrior; she and her clutchmate Snow were the oldest warrior fledglings, the only survivors of the old sister-queen Amber’s last clutch.
Moon eyed her over the head of the Arbora toddler who had clamped herself to his chest. It was either Pebble or Speckle, he couldn’t tell them apart yet; even their scent was identical. “Who’s Copper?”
Snow, who was shy, edged up behind Spring and supplied, “He thinks he’s smart, because Flower says he’ll be a mentor when he grows up.”
Moon ruffled Pebble or Speckle’s head frills, trying to think how much to say. The little queen Frost had switched sides at some point in the mock-battle and had pinned Thorn to the floor; she stopped to listen, and so did the rest of the combatants. Bitter, perched on Frost’s back, watched Moon with wide eyes. Three teachers, busy feeding baby Arbora, also looked over this way, worried and curious.
Moon let out his breath, resigned to being the bearer of this news. “We don’t know yet. But we might.”
He was braced to have to explain the theft of the seed, and just hoped he could do it in a way that wouldn’t make them all feel that the tree might be invaded at any moment. But Frost just said, “On the flying boats?”
Moon admitted this would probably be the case. Then Thorn flung the distracted Frost off him, Bitter pounced, and the game resumed.
Snow bounded off to join the other fledglings, but Spring said, “They don’t understand.”
Moon thought Frost, Bitter, and Thorn probably did understand, but compared to what they had been through, moving again just wasn’t a daunting prospect. The others were still unsettled by the Fell attack, and most seemed to be just pretending it hadn’t happened. Spring was old enough to realize all the implications of their situation, and maybe starting to feel the weight of the responsibility she would have soon, as a female warrior from a queen’s clutch. He tried, “We survived the Fell, we’ll survive this.”
It worked better on Spring than it had on Bone. She sat up a little straighter and said, “We will.”
Later Moon went back to the teachers’ hall, but found that in a frenzy of organization, the Arbora had moved everyone into newly-cleaned bowers. He found the one Jade had been moved into, a good-sized room on the far side of the nurseries, with a balcony looking out onto the stairwell and an intricately carved ceiling. Furs and cushions had been arranged on the floor for seating areas, there were warming stones in the hearth basin, and the blankets were piled into the big hanging bed. Moon found his fur blanket on top and took that as a good sign that he was living here too. He slung himself up into the bed for a nap.