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* * *

A few days went past, mostly uneventful. There were no more platform collapses, and no serious sickness and only a few hunting injuries. The work on the gardens was going so well, the hunters decided to go ahead with the plan to take the warrior fledglings and the younger Arbora on a teaching hunt. Moon took advantage of the opportunity to ask to bring Frost, Thorn, and Bitter along, too.

There was a Raksuran prejudice that queens and consorts didn’t hunt; they were taught to, but only later, when they were past fledglinghood. But Moon would have died as a boy if his foster mother hadn’t taught him to hunt when he was barely able to leap from branch to branch. He thought he would have trouble convincing Pearl that the royal fledglings needed to learn along with the others, but she gave in with only minor grumbling.

That actually made Moon more worried than anything else. The concession had been granted with suspicious ease, almost as if Pearl felt sorry for him for some reason. He made the mistake of mentioning it to Chime, who said, “You really are crazy, aren’t you?”

“No.” Moon hissed in annoyance. “It’s just strange. I know she’s humoring me, but why would she bother?”

Chime sighed. “She probably thinks she owes you a favor after you saved Plum and have been helping so much with the work on the gardens.”

Moon grudgingly admitted that might be it.

Despite Moon’s suspicions, it was a very good day. Moon didn’t let Frost and Thorn try to take any game, but had them watch the others and then get their claws dirty helping the Arbora bleed and gut the carcasses of their prey. Bitter didn’t make any attempt to fly, but he did obviously enjoy the outing. He was carted around by Moon, Balm, Chime, and the female warrior Floret, as well as Bone and some other Arbora hunters, mostly Bramble and Salt. He helped with the gutting and got as covered with mud, loam, and blood as Frost and Thorn.

After they returned to the tree, Moon took the royal clutch down to the nurseries for baths and sleep. On his way back, he passed one of the small workrooms and saw two Arbora sitting on the floor, bent over a glittering pile on a stone slab, deep in a discussion about whether to use amethysts or polished onyx. It was Merry and Gold, the two best artisans in the court. Curious, Moon stepped into the room to look at what they were making.

It was a fingerwidth-wide band, in pieces now so it was hard to tell if it was meant for a bracelet, necklace, or ankle or arm band. It was figured with the coiled shapes of Aeriat, all with wings half-spread and outstretched arms, intended to hold polished stones that hadn’t been set into place yet. Moon was startled again by how intricate the Arbora’s creations were, how much hard work they were willing to do just for the sake of art. “That’s beautiful.”

Merry and Gold both flinched, staring up at him. “Moon!” Gold, an older female with masses of curly auburn hair, managed to say, “Uh, we didn’t hear you come in.”

“Sorry.” Moon sat on his heels for a closer look at the piece. “Is it for Jade or Pearl?” Now that they were getting visits from other courts, the Arbora might be feeling a need to make sure their queens had more impressive finery.

Moon looked up in time to catch a fleeting expression of relief on Gold’s face, but it was gone too fast to be sure he hadn’t imagined it. “It’s for Pearl,” Merry said. Lifting his brows, he added, “You think she’ll like it?”

Gold nudged Merry’s shoulder, giving him a quick glare, as if she hadn’t liked the question. That Moon definitely hadn’t imagined. “Of course she will,” he said, and stood, leaving before it got more awkward. They must have thought he would be annoyed that it was meant for Pearl and not Jade.

It was two days later when Moon figured out who the piece was actually for.

* * *

It had rained all night and much of the morning, very bad conditions for work on the outer platforms, so most of the court was staying inside today. Moon sat with the others in the teachers’ hall, which had become a common gathering place for Arbora and Aeriat alike.

It was a large central chamber below the greeting hall, its walls and domed ceiling covered with a detailed carving of a forest, with plume trees, spirals, fern trees, and many others, their branches reaching up to entwine overhead, their roots framing the round doorways that led off to different passages. With the shells set into the walls glowing with soft white light and the hearth basins filled with warming stones, it was a comfortable welcoming space. There was always someone there, and it was a good place to go if you wanted to talk, or just listen to others talk. Someone was always making tea, baked spiced roots, or flatbread, and the older Arbora gathered there to tell stories, or read aloud from one of the books in the mentors’ library.

Moon liked the readings best, since that was his only chance to hear what was in the books. He had taught himself to read the other languages he could speak, but Altanic and Kedaic had much simpler writing systems. The written Raksuran language was proving just as twisty and complicated as the Raksura themselves.

He had been trying to remedy this, timing many of his visits to the nurseries to coincide with reading lessons. He sat with Frost, Bitter, and Thorn while Rill or Bark or one of the other teachers drew the letters and words on clay tablets and the fledglings copied her. When they read from the simpler books, Moon looked over their shoulders. It wasn’t a particularly effective way to learn, since he couldn’t be there for every lesson and he couldn’t ask questions without giving himself away. But he had made some progress, memorizing all the characters for the various sounds, and he was starting to recognize a number of words. He didn’t think anyone had caught on, except, oddly enough, for Thorn.

At the third lesson Moon had attended, Thorn had eyed Moon thoughtfully, and moved his tablet so Moon had a better view of it. Moon had eyed him back, but they had never spoken of it, and Moon was fairly sure Thorn hadn’t shared his suspicion with anyone else, even Frost or Bitter. He thought Thorn might like having a secret to share with Moon, something that was his alone. That suited Moon.

But that rainy afternoon in the teachers’ hall, no one brought out a book. Instead, Rill said, “Moon, tell us a story about groundlings.”

The Arbora and older warriors settled in to listen, and even the young warriors lounging on the fringes of the group were hard put to conceal their interest. The entire court knew Moon’s life had been substantially different from theirs, but most of them had little idea of what that really meant. They knew he had traveled widely and seen strange places, but so had Stone. Moon had never seen much point in trying to convey what it had really been like, so he avoided stories like the time he had had to flee a Morain cliff-town in the middle of the night, got trapped in a tunnel and had to hide in a crack in the rock barely wider than his body while his former comrades hunted him.

So he told them about the Deshar in the hanging city of Zenna, and their elaborate social customs that made passing through the place so difficult for visitors. Predictably, everyone wanted to hear more about the Deshar’s attitudes about sex, which were as baffling to the other Raksura as they had been to Moon at the time.

“So if they have sex without this ceremony first, they can’t have it again?” Bone said, scratching the scar around his neck thoughtfully. He was clearly having trouble following this strange brand of logic.

Moon tried to explain. “Sort of. You can only have sex with your permanent mate, and you can’t have a permanent mate without the ceremony, and if you have sex before the ceremony, nobody wants to be your permanent mate.”

Bark frowned. “But do they have to have a permanent mate?” Except for queens and consorts, Raksura usually didn’t.