“Sure.” She seemed anxious, and Moon tried not to find that ominous. She might want to tell him something to pass on to Jade. They moved off through a short passage into one of the unused smaller chambers off the greeting hall. “What is it?”
Heart looked up at him. She still smelled of fresh Raksuran blood; when she had shifted to groundling the blood staining her claws had transferred to her fingernails. “The augury…There was something about you. Oh, nothing terrible. It was just that your blood was woven all through the part of the design that indicated an upheaval.”
That…doesn’t sound good. Moon extended his senses, making sure no one was in earshot. He could hear movement and voices in the balcony passages above, but no one seemed to be paying attention to them. He lowered his voice anyway. “What does that mean?”
Heart hesitated. “I think it means that your interest will part from the interest of the court. For a time, anyway. I’m not certain.” Her gaze was worried. “You weren’t…planning to leave, were you?”
That took Moon by surprise. “No. Why would I?”
“Sorry, it’s just—That’s what it looked like.” She shook her head in frustration. “It’s very hard to interpret individual strands in general auguries; Flower always thought it was a mistake to try. And this was an unusual augury anyway, with that intrusion about the watcher.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about it to the others?” Then it occurred to Moon that she might be about to, that she might have wanted to warn him first.
“It was a personal augury, not one for the court. And…I thought it would just make trouble for you. There was nothing in the augury that indicated danger for the court.” Heart smiled a little wryly. “I don’t want to upset anyone over a minor issue, like a disagreement over something the court will do.”
That was a relief. “Thank you for…telling me.” He had almost said warning me.
“As I said, it’s probably nothing,” Heart told him and slipped away. Moon wished she didn’t sound quite so much as though she was trying to convince herself.
Lost in thought, he started across the chamber. Then a warrior came off a balcony somewhere above in an uncontrolled tumble and landed in front of him. Moon stopped abruptly and shifted by instinct. “Sorry,” the warrior gasped in contrition, sprawled on the floor and looking up at Moon. It was Coil, who was one of Pearl’s younger warriors, though Moon didn’t know him well. “They threw me off the—”
Two more warriors landed nearby, and one pounced forward to pin Coil down. From Coil’s expression of mingled embarrassment and fear, this wasn’t play, at least for him. Annoyed, Moon said, “Get off him.”
The warrior looked up, baring his teeth. It was Band, another member of Pearl’s faction. The one who was looking on with a grin was Fair, his clutchmate. Band said, “Why? We’re just having fun.”
A disproportionate amount of the trouble Moon had had in the court came from the younger male warriors. The female warriors and the older males always seemed able to find unobjectionable ways to spend their free time; the younger males couldn’t manage to.
It also didn’t help that Moon had discovered early on that his patience for being argued with by young male warriors was close to nonexistent. Band’s mocking grin was too much to bear. Moon grabbed Band by the throat and threw him.
Band landed about twenty paces away, sliding across the smooth polished wood of the floor. Coil seized his chance, skittering out of reach. But Fair surged forward and stopped a bare pace away. He had been one of those trapped and wounded during the Fell attack on the old colony, so he would have missed the battle to free the court and other events that might have convinced him that Moon was not exactly a safe or easy target. He snarled, “I wonder how tough you are without a queen to defend you, solitary.”
Moon stepped forward, closing the distance between them. He said, deceptively calm, “My queen’s not here. Stop wondering.” He had gotten used to having the solitary accusation thrown in his face during almost every disagreement, but he still felt the prickle along his nerves that told him his spines had hardened and lifted, spreading out across his back and up onto his head, out of his mane of frills.
Fair fell back, his spines flicking uneasily, his attempt at intimidation having failed. He said, “I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”
Moon hissed in amusement, and shifted to groundling just to emphasize his point. He stepped past Fair and headed for the stairs at the far end of the chamber. No one was stupid enough to try to leap on him from behind. Unfortunately. A good fight might clear the air.
Moon took the stairs down to the teachers’ hall and the passage to the nurseries. As he stepped through the round doorway carved with baby Arbora and Aeriat, his appearance was greeted with a chorus of squeaks and trills of delight. That made up for a lot of aggravation.
Moon went out with the hunters again the next day, with Balm and Chime and some other warriors. Pearl had made the stipulation that the area be searched first to make sure there were no tentacle creatures.
“As if I wasn’t planning to do that already,” Bone confided to Moon before they left. “The damn thing wasn’t even any good to eat.”
They got back to the tree at dusk, and Moon flew on inside while the warriors were still helping ferry the Arbora and their kills to the tree. As soon as Moon reached the greeting hall, the disturbed state of the colony was obvious. All the warriors who hadn’t come on the hunting trip seemed to be in motion, flying around in the upper levels, and a group of Arbora were in a tense conversation by the fountain pool. Bell, the leader of the teachers’ caste, saw Moon arrive and hurried over to him. Moon demanded, “What is it?” He hadn’t seen anything wrong near the knothole.
Bell was one of Chime’s clutchmates, though their groundling forms didn’t much resemble each other. Bell had dark hair and his skin was more brown than bronze. He said, “We had a visit while you were gone, a queen from Emerald Twilight.”
That could be good or bad, Moon thought. They had traded with Emerald Twilight warriors, but hadn’t had a formal visit from an Emerald Twilight queen since what everyone insisted on referring to as “the incident” which had occurred on the way back from the forest coast. The augury, with the vision of upheaval and the odd “someone watches” message came to mind; he wondered if the court being watched was Emerald Twilight. “Which queen?”
“Tempest, with five warriors,” Bell told him. “They didn’t stay long and we didn’t even get to see them. They met with Jade and Pearl and Heart up on the queens’ level.”
“They didn’t want to stay the night?” That definitely wasn’t good, at least from Moon’s limited understanding of relations between Raksuran courts. The visitors should have stayed at least until morning and there should have been a special meal for them, put together by the Arbora. And it was also odd that the only Arbora included in the meeting had been Heart; for the other visits, Bell, Bone, and Knell had been there to represent the Arbora castes. Bone had been away leading the hunt, but Bell and Knell were both here. “Uh…Were they not invited to stay?”
Bell’s expression was deeply worried. “I don’t know.”
“Right.” Moon looked up. The warriors wheeling around up in the central well all kept their distance from the queens’ level gallery, clearly not wanting to antagonize the occupants. “I’d better get up there.”
“Good luck,” Bell called after him, as Moon leapt up the wall.
Moon climbed rapidly. As he swung up onto the gallery of the highest warriors’ level, Vine landed beside him and clung to a claw-scarred pillar. Keeping his voice low, he said, “Moon, do you know what happened with the visit?”