As if in idle speculation, Halcyon said, “I could say I took you from Ash. Your queen wouldn’t want you after that. You could stay with me.”
Moon hoped she couldn’t hear how hard his heart was pounding. “I think you’re underestimating my queen.”
She laughed. “They said you knew very little of our ways. I see they were right.”
“What about your consort?” Presumably he was back at Emerald Twilight, enjoying the respite from his queen.
Her lip curled. “He does what I tell him to do.” Her hand dropped and she ran sheathed claws down Moon’s throat. “A change would be interesting.”
“No,” Moon said, reacting before his brain caught up to him. Keep stalling, he thought. Keeping himself and Chime alive was all that mattered. “It wouldn’t—”
A sound high above them made everyone look up. It was a warrior, flying down from the upper branches. Not flying, Moon realized. He was falling. One of the others leapt up to catch him, breaking his fall. But the others stared at what hurtled down after him.
A flash of vivid blue and silver-gray resolved into Jade, wings spread and spines furled, as she dropped down on them like vengeance itself.
With a startled growl, Halcyon jerked Moon around, his back to her, her claws pressed against his throat. She yelled at the warriors and they sprang into the air to attack.
Jade flared her wings to meet them. She slapped three Emerald Twilight warriors out of the air without a pause for breath, then closed with a big male and tossed him aside in a spray of blood.
Root appeared out of nowhere, leapt on a smaller warrior, and wrestled him off a branch, but Moon didn’t see any of the others. Not that Jade needed them, apparently. Moon couldn’t do anything but stare, Halcyon’s claws pricking his skin. He had seen Jade fight Fell, but never seen her take on other Raksura, not when she was really angry. The fight with Ash had been nothing; these warriors had no chance against her.
Halcyon must have realized it too. She shrieked, “Stop! I’ll rip his throat out!”
The remaining warriors broke off and veered away from Jade. Three were gone, either fallen to the forest floor or caught on the branches and platforms somewhere below them. Some of the others flapped unsteadily to nearby branches, badly wounded. Root dropped to land on the platform near Chime, who crouched uneasily.
Jade snapped her wings in and landed ten paces away from Moon and Halcyon. Flexing her bloody claws, she bared her fangs. She radiated fury like a furnace. Her scales were slick with rain but unmarked. None of the warriors had been able to land a claw on her. She took in Halcyon’s position, how she was using Moon as a shield, and sneered. “Coward.”
Halcyon snarled, her voice rising in rage. “Bitch.”
Jade hissed an unpleasant laugh. “Dead woman.”
Halcyon tossed Moon aside and leapt for her. Moon hit the wet grass with a thump and rolled, then scrambled up. Jade and Halcyon slammed into each other, tumbled across the platform, and broke apart. Their scales were already streaked with scratches and blood. They circled each other, moving fast, then Halcyon darted in and nearly caught a slash across the face.
Moon tried to shift to his winged form and hissed with relief when the change flowed over him. Halcyon was obviously too distracted to maintain control over him. But unlike Ash, Halcyon was closer to an even match for Jade. And after that brief conversation, Moon doubted either of them were in any state to think about consequences or negotiate. He stepped over to the firepit and grabbed the kettle. It was a heavy one, with an iron bottom meant to hold warming stones. As Halcyon ducked away from a slash, Moon lunged in and slammed her in the head with it, putting all his weight behind the blow.
Halcyon jolted forward, right into a blow from Jade that rocked her head back. Between that and the kettle, she dropped like a rock.
Jade stood over her, breathing hard. She stared at Moon, incredulous, offended, and still wild-eyed. “What was that?” she demanded, her voice gravelly with rage.
“You can’t kill her,” Moon said deliberately. He dropped the kettle beside the firepit and shifted back to groundling, hoping that would calm Jade down. Halcyon’s head was cut and bleeding, some of her spines broken and crushed, but he saw her furled wings tremble, showing she was still breathing. “We have to take her back to Emerald Twilight and make her tell what she tried to do.” If Jade killed her, the warriors could lie about what had happened, claim they were attacked. Emerald Twilight might choose to believe them just to avoid the disgrace.
Jade didn’t think much of that idea. A growl thickening her voice, she said, “She won’t tell them. She’ll lie.”
“Her warriors won’t, if you threaten them. Tell them you’ll kill her unless they tell the truth.” The survivors had all fled the tree, but Jade could still catch one if she hurried.
Jade shook her spines and hissed in pure fury. Root shifted to groundling and dropped to a crouch, prudently not taking sides. But in a small voice, Chime contributed, “You can ask for a mentor as witness when you get to Emerald Twilight. That will involve the Arbora, and the other queens can’t pretend it didn’t happen. They’ll be forced to deal with her.”
Jade shook her spines and grimaced with contempt. “We’ll never get her there without killing her, so I might as well do it now.”
Moon countered, “They have simples that make you sleep. It worked on me. It’ll probably work on a queen.”
Jade’s shout of thwarted rage was so loud it hurt Moon’s ears. He winced, and Chime and Root both flattened themselves down in the grass and covered their heads. She stalked back and forth, then stopped and flung her hands in the air. “You’re right! I’ll go get a damn warrior. If that piece of excrement moves—” She growled again and flung herself into the air.
“Get the green female!” Moon yelled after her. She had seemed like the leader of the warriors, and was probably the one most attached to Halcyon.
Root sat up to watch Jade speed away. “She carried me here, so I could show her the way,” he confided to Moon. “I’ve never flown so fast!”
Chime pushed to his feet. Shaking a little, he wiped the sweat off his forehead. “I’ll go look for the simple. It’s probably in one of these shelters.” He went to the first one and ducked down to look through the entrance.
“Hurry.” Moon sat down the grass, keeping a wary eye on Halcyon. The simple had given him a headache and a dry throat. His neck was bleeding a little from Halcyon’s claws, but not enough to worry about. It felt like the end of a very long day, though so far he had only been conscious for a small part of it. “Where are the others?” he asked Root.
“On their way here, following Jade’s markers. We were going to wait until they caught up, and attack in the middle of the night, but—” Root waved a hand, indicating the disturbed camp. “Jade changed her mind.”
“This is it.” Chime came out of the shelter, holding a lizardskin bag, intricately tooled and dyed. He sat down to rummage in it and pulled out various cloth packets and a couple of stoppered bottles. “I’ll have to mix another batch, but it won’t take long. You don’t have to be a mentor to make it work, which is probably why they picked this one.”
Moon reached over to ruffle Root’s hair. “So you just pretended to run away?”
Root nodded, fairly pleased with himself. “Right, until they stopped chasing me. Then I followed them from a distance, until they got to this camp. Then I flew back to find Jade. We left the others, so we could get back here by dark.”