“Sorrow. Her scales were dark copper. Her groundling form…She looked like me, same skin and hair. Except her eyes were brown.” He knew he wasn’t being very coherent, but it was the best he could manage.
“She must have changed her name.” Feather frowned and bit her lip in thought. “It sounds like she was from Malachite’s dominant bloodline, though. That should narrow it down a little. I’ll ask and see what the others who are my age remember. I suppose…” Her voice went thick. “She just grabbed as many children as she could?”
“Two in each arm. I was hanging on to her neck,” Moon told her. Then he went still, realizing what he had said. I don’t remember that. Except he did, the rush of air in his spines, clinging to a warm scaly body, Arbora babies too terrified to cry, and somewhere close by voices screaming in rage, agony…He squeezed his eyes shut, banishing the image. “What happened?”
“It was the Fell. Back then, they weren’t as bad in the east. There were a few small flights that we knew of, preying on isolated groundling towns or camps. They never hit big cities, like I’ve heard they’ve done now.” Feather’s gaze was on the gardens, and the Arbora moving along the plantings. “We never could figure out how they got so close.” She shrugged a little, her expression turning bitter. “None of us had ever seen or scented Fell before, so the rulers must have been able to confuse the soldiers who were guarding the ground entrances just long enough to get inside. The next thing we knew, there were dakti swarming the passages and major kethel digging in through the top.”
Moon hesitated, watching her. “You didn’t look for survivors, afterward?” He braced himself not to react to her answer, whatever it was.
He still wasn’t prepared for it when she said, “We looked, but we didn’t think there were other survivors. The queen and the warriors went after the prisoners the Fell took.”
“Prisoners?”
“They took Malachite’s consort, Dusk. Your father. Some Arbora and Arbora children.” Feather turned to him and squeezed his wrist. “Malachite thought you were with them. I thought that’s where my clutch was. The Kethel brought down one of the bluffs, and it collapsed into the colony. We didn’t know who was a prisoner and who was buried under the rubble. The only one we were sure of was Dusk, because some of us saw the Fell take him.” She made a helpless gesture. “But the hunters and some of the warriors searched the forest around the colony, looking for anyone who might be separated, hurt. They should have found you.”
Moon pulled away, shaking his head, confused down to the core. “But when I wasn’t with the prisoners, and there were others missing—”
“It took Malachite well over a turn to find them and free them,” Feather said.
Moon stared. “They were trapped with the Fell for a turn?” It was too horrifying to take in.
“I was with the Arbora survivors. There were maybe a hundred of us, and the wounded warriors, what was left of the children and fledglings. We were hidden in the forest near the colony. Malachite, the warriors who were still able to fight, and a couple of young mentors went after the Fell. Three nights later, Malachite came back alone and told us to follow the coast back to the west, back here to the mother colony, that she and the others would catch up with us when they could.”
The enormity of that was hard to imagine. “That’s a long way to walk.”
“We thought so,” Feather admitted. “But we started out. Slowly at first, with all the wounded, but we made better progress once the warriors recovered and could carry us for short distances. We got messages from Malachite along the way. She would send warriors to check on us, make sure we were still well and that she could find us when she needed to. She wouldn’t let the warriors who had healed up join her, made them stay with us. Then in the rainy season, months and months later, she came with the others. She brought all the prisoners back, except your father. He was dead, along with twelve of the warriors.” Her expression held remembered anguish. “We didn’t know how many prisoners the Fell had. We’d convinced ourselves that most of the court had survived. Seeing how few there were…” She shook herself, shaking off the memory, the beads in her hair clicking. She looked up at him, bewildered. “I don’t understand how we missed you. You were alone all that time?”
“Until this turn. Stone, the line-grandfather from Indigo Cloud, found me.”
Feather hissed, a combination of frustration and regret. “I wonder…Do you remember how long the warrior fled with you? If the Fell were chasing her—She must have gone some distance from the colony, or we would have stumbled on her.”
“I don’t remember. The Fell could have followed her because she was carrying us, because they wanted children.” After Indigo Cloud’s experience with the Fell flight who had been determined to crossbreed Raksura, it was a real possibility. “What did the Fell do to the prisoners? Did they try to make them breed with the progenitor and the rulers?”
Feather sat back, eyes widening in astonishment and consternation. He thought he had shocked her, until she said, “How did you know about that?”
So that’s a ‘yes,’ Moon thought. “It almost happened to Indigo Cloud, before the colony moved to the Reaches. It was a Fell flight that had bred with Raksura before, and wanted more of us. They had a few dakti with mentor powers, and a female ruler who was part Raksuran queen.” Even as he said it, a horrible realization struck, that Ranea and the mentor-dakti might have been born from the Opal Night prisoners. “It wasn’t—That couldn’t have been the same flight that attacked—”
“What? Oh no, no.” Feather shook her head emphatically. “Malachite killed their progenitor, and— There were none of our people left with them. The warriors told me there wasn’t much left of the flight at all.”
Moon subsided, relieved. Now that he thought about it, the timing didn’t match what Ranea had told him about her flight’s multiple attempts to crossbreed Raksura. And she was part queen. She would have recognized my bloodline. She surely wouldn’t have missed the chance to gloat over it. He said, “Opal Night should already know what happened to Indigo Cloud. The word’s been spreading through Emerald Twilight to the other courts.”
“If Malachite and Onyx know, they didn’t tell us.” Feather still seemed distracted. “Not yet, anyway.”
Watching her, Moon felt like he had the end of a tangled mass of threads, and if he pulled in the right spot, the whole thing would come apart. If he just knew what the right spot was. “Does that have something to do with why Malachite had me brought here?”
“No, how could it?” Feather looked up, frowning. “Wait, Moon, didn’t you want to come?”
Moon didn’t want to go through the story again, but he had to give her an answer. “I was taken by the sister queen of Indigo Cloud. I wanted to stay.”
Feather, at least, didn’t try to argue with him. Her brow furrowed in sympathy. “I suppose they had no choice but to let you go.”
“She said she’d come after me, but she should have been here by now. I think …” Moon stopped, realizing he had come within a hair’s breadth of confessing the fear that he was infertile. Don’t be stupid. Feather might be sympathetic, but she wouldn’t keep that information from the Opal Night royals. “I’m not counting on it.”
Feather watched him worriedly. “Why not?”
Moon shook his head, wishing he hadn’t spoken. Then he sensed motion in the air above them and looked up.