Chime glanced up from the herb packets. “That was smart.”
“I know.” Then Root popped up and cuffed Chime in the head. “Ow!” Chime protested in outrage, reeling back.
“I heard what you said earlier. I’m not stupid,” Root said, coming back to sit next to Moon. “I have a big mouth, but I’m not stupid. There’s a difference. A big difference.”
“Hey, no hitting,” Moon said belatedly. Though he figured Root probably did owe Chime that one.
“I’m sorry.” Chime subsided, looking abashed.
“Jade’s back,” Moon said, and got to his feet.
Jade dropped down to the platform and flung the dazed warrior to the ground. She was in groundling form, a tall woman with light bronze skin and reddish hair. Her shirtsleeves were torn, and there were scratch marks on her arms, and a few rapidly darkening marks on her face about the size of Jade’s fist. “Are you happy?” Jade shouted at Moon.
“Yes,” he told her. “But I’m easy to please right now.”
Oddly enough, Jade didn’t appreciate the joke.
While she paced, fumed, and made certain that any of Halcyon’s warriors still lurking in the area knew that a rescue attempt would end in a bloodbath, Root tied up the female warrior and Chime made the simple. Halcyon was groaning and starting to wake by the time he finished, but once it was administered she settled into a deep sleep. While searching the packs left behind for rope, Moon found a cake of very good tea, so he built up the fire again, filled the dented kettle from a waterskin, and made some. Chime and Root went to scout for injured warriors, and found three dead, victims of the first clash with Jade. They found a few blood trails, but the survivors must have retrieved all their wounded.
Darkness had fallen and it was well into the night before the Indigo Cloud warriors arrived. It was good timing, because it had taken about that long for Jade to calm down.
While Chime and Root greeted them and answered questions and traded various congratulations and recriminations, Moon stood up and stretched his back. His headache had gone, but he had spent most of the time sitting by the fire, watching Jade stare grimly at Halcyon’s unconscious body, braced to intervene if she suddenly changed her mind about leaving the other queen alive.
Moon circled around the fire to the shadows where Jade stood. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you wanted to rescue me, again.”
“I did rescue you,” she pointed out, though she sounded more huffy than angry. Her sigh was too weary to be a hiss. “Did you have to hit her with the kettle?”
“It had a handle. It was easier than a rock.” Moon felt some of the tension melt out of his spine. As impressive as she was while enraged and defending her consort, he still liked her normal self better.
“It’s not going to make a very good story, in the annals of my time as sister queen.” She quoted dryly, “‘Then her consort jumped up and knocked the foreign queen unconscious with a kettle.’”
“If Cloud had been fast with a kettle, then you wouldn’t be here,” Moon admitted.
“That is hardly fair to Indigo. Indigo was nothing like—” She waved a hand back toward the camp. “That.”
Before she could get worked up again, he took her wrist. “Come on, the others can keep watch. Let’s go to bed.”
“Sometimes you have good ideas,” she said grudgingly, and let him tow her over to the shelter.
The trip to Emerald Twilight took a day and a half, with Jade and Balm taking turns carrying the unconscious Halcyon, and Vine carrying the woman warrior, whose name turned out to be Torrent. During the awkward and desultory conversation around the camp at night, she admitted that she was from a queen’s clutch, sister to Tempest and Halcyon. She seemed to feel bad enough, so Moon managed not to ask her if there were any sisters besides Tempest from that clutch who weren’t crazy.
They knew Halcyon’s surviving warriors followed them at a distance, but none of them ventured any closer, or tried to talk to them. Balm said, “I bet they would have tried to stop us if we were heading toward Indigo Cloud. But they know we must be taking her back to Emerald Twilight. They’re probably going to quietly slip back into the colony, and hope Ice is too distracted by dealing with Halcyon to worry about who was with her.”
Once they arrived at the court, Jade didn’t waste any time. She dropped the still limp Halcyon on the landing platform outside the greeting hall, and Vine set the woman warrior down. At first the warriors and Arbora who hurried out seemed to think that they had found Halcyon and Torrent injured in the forest, and brought them back here for help. It was reassuring evidence that only Halcyon’s group of warriors had been involved in the plot, and that most of the court had known nothing about it. But it made Moon feel even worse for those about to hear the truth. Then Jade demanded a mentor be called as witness, and the whole colony had seemed to go still.
One of the older mentors who had helped Flower came out, and Tempest, Ash, and three of the other sister queens, and every warrior and Arbora who could get outside in time. They all listened in shocked silence to Torrent’s guilty recital. Tempest kept her expression under control, though her spines trembled with the effort. Ash kept alternately flaring hers and flattening them, looking from Jade to Tempest to the other queens, incredulous and horrified.
Afterward, Tempest stiffly offered Jade hospitality, seemed relieved when Jade refused it, and they left. Ice and Shadow hadn’t appeared, and Moon was glad for it, because the whole thing had been deeply embarrassing. He made a resolution to ask Stone if he had ever fathered any clutches who tried to kill each other and what to do if they did.
It was a relief to be shed of Halcyon and Torrent, and they made good time back to Indigo Cloud, reaching it during the late afternoon five days later.
As they approached the colony tree, Moon could see already that the Arbora had made progress while they were gone.
Several of the garden platforms had neat planting beds built, others had plots that had been stripped of grass and were now covered with turned earth. The weeds and moss that had choked the main runoff pools were gone, the deadfall cleared away from some of the old orchards. There were Arbora out on the platforms too, digging in the gardens, weeding, moving baskets of dirt. The two flying boats were still anchored in place, with a few Arbora climbing over them, sanding claw-damaged wood and making other repairs.
Warrior lookouts had already spotted them and carried the word to the tree. More warriors flew out to meet them, and swooped around and called out greetings. Moon and Jade and the others landed in the knothole and were almost swept through the passage into the greeting hall by a happy swarm of Arbora.
The well rapidly filled up with Raksura, coming up the stairs from the level below or dropping down from above. All the shell-lights were lit, and caught reflections off the polished wood and the rich carving, the slim pillars along the criss-crossed stairs, the overhanging balconies. The waterfall across from the entrance ran clear and fresh, streaming down the wall to the pool in the floor, which now boasted floating flowers.
Heart pushed her way through the growing crowd to hug Jade impulsively, and tell her, “We were so worried! We expected you days ago!”
“We were delayed unexpectedly. I have to tell Pearl about it first.” Jade released Heart and asked anxiously, “What about the seed? Is it all right?”
Heart admitted, “We’re not sure yet. The instructions the Emerald Twilight mentors sent said it had to be coated in mud from below the roots and then soaked in heartwater.” Before Moon could ask, she said, “That’s the water drawn up through the roots. We had to get it just as it came out of the wood, through the spring in the top of the tree. But first we had to find the spring. That took most of a day. Stone thought he knew where it was, but apparently it moves around when the tree grows. Or that’s what Stone said, anyway. Now we’re just waiting to see if it will show the signs that it’s ready to be placed in the tree.”