Moon’s sense of the sun’s passage told him it was setting now, somewhere outside the sac. They were still moving at what felt like the same speed, still toward the north. Moon hated feeling useless, so he went to the foodstores and took out some flatbread, fruit, and strips of dried cooked meat and fish. He divided it up, setting aside a share for Lithe, and made the others eat whether they liked it or not. They didn’t like it, but everyone seemed less edgy afterward.
Shade regarded his portion with a sickly expression. He said, “I don’t know if I can. Ever again.”
Moon took the dried meat and put it back in the basket. “Just the fruit and bread.”
Shade managed to choke it down with difficulty. Watching sympathetically, Chime said, “It’s the Fell stench. It’s making me sick too.”
Moon didn’t comment.
Saffron and Floret and Chime managed to settle who would take turns standing watch in the passage and who would sleep and when. Then Chime told Moon that Moon needed to sleep, that he was starting to say things that didn’t make sense. Rather than have the fight that had just been averted by the food, Moon stomped over to the far end of the cabin, flung himself down on a blanket and pretended to sleep.
After a short time, Shade came over with another blanket and settled down a few paces away, with a studied casualness that didn’t fool Moon for a moment. Moon patted the blanket next to him.
Shade didn’t hesitate, scooting over to curl up next to Moon. Moon put an arm around him and pulled him close. But he didn’t sleep for a long time, listening to Shade weep quietly against his chest.
Moon woke when he heard Lithe and Chime talking quietly. Shade was still curled up against his chest, breathing deeply. Moon eased away from him. When he stirred, Moon whispered, “Go back to sleep,” and Shade subsided.
He got to his feet and stepped quietly across the cabin. Floret had shifted to groundling, and slept sitting up against the wall near the doorway. Moon stopped to check the passage and saw Saffron perched midway up the steps, her attention on the deck above and the rhythmic breathing of their kethel guard.
Chime and Lithe sat near the wounded, with a piece of Delin’s pounded reed paper and one of his drawing sticks between them. Chime glanced up at Moon and said quietly, “Lithe saw something.”
Moon knew he meant the scrying. He sat down beside them, looking at the paper. Sketched on it was a flower, like a lily or a sea-flower, with a door in the center. Lithe said, “I saw trees clinging to cliffs, smelled saltwater and rock, heard waves crash. It makes sense; we’re still heading north, and there’s a salt sea several hundred ells to the north of the Aventerans’ plateau—or at least that’s what the court’s old histories say. There’s been no reason to go in this direction for turns.”
“What’s an ell?” Moon asked, still too half-asleep to care about exposing his lack of knowledge.
“It’s an Arbora walking measurement,” Chime said. “That would be… What, about fourteen days of warrior’s flight?”
“Something like that,” Lithe said. She rubbed her temple as if trying to coax more information out of it. “It’s been so long since I looked at the court’s maps. I suspect kethel fly much faster.”
“About three or four times as fast as a warrior. And they haven’t stopped to rest,” Moon said. They must be switching out, the shifted kethel carrying kethel in groundling form to take their places.
“So this door is somewhere on the coast.” Chime tugged the paper around so he could study it. “It all must mean something. That image they showed you, crossbreeds, a salt sea…”
Moon stared at the sketch of the flower with the door inside it, feeling his brain shake off the sleep and slowly grind into motion. “They said Shade was the key. Maybe they meant that literally.”
Chime frowned at the paper, and Lithe said slowly, “The key to this door. Only someone who is part Fell and part Raksura can open it?”
“Or someone who looked like the image they showed us.” Moon wished he had had a longer look at it. “A forerunner, one of our ancestors.”
“All right, so say that’s true,” Chime said. “What’s behind the door? If Shade is right, the Fell have been capturing consorts and Arbora and forcing them to breed for the past forty turns. What would they want so badly…” He trailed off.
Lithe hugged herself. “And it wasn’t just the flight that attacked our colony in the east, it was the one that attacked Indigo Cloud, too. They both failed and were destroyed, and this flight took up the task?”
Moon felt cold creep down his spine and settle in his stomach. Malachite had ruined the plan forty turns ago by finding the flight that had attacked Opal Night, killing the progenitor and all the rulers, and taking the crossbreeds. But the flight that had attacked Indigo Cloud must have begun their breeding experiment sometime before that. Destroying some small eastern court, taking the consorts and the Arbora and breeding them until they died, attacking Sky Copper and then Indigo Cloud to capture more Raksura. The Fell queen Ranea had implied that it was all meant to make the Fell more powerful. Maybe she was a mistake. They never wanted a queen, they wanted a consort like Shade. And then Ranea came along, took over the flight and ruined the plan.
But who—or what—had come up with the plan? Who had gotten three—at least three, if there had been more failures in the east—different Fell flights to follow this scheme, and how had it known that the crossbreeds were still alive in Opal Night’s mother colony? That one of them was Shade, the crossbreed consort they had been hoping for, all this time.
Chime grimaced in distress. “I don’t want Shade to be right.”
“I don’t want a lot of things.” Moon picked up the drawing. “If the voice you heard, that thing Shade thought came into the nest, is their guide, why are they listening to it?”
“What did it offer them?” Lithe added quietly.
There was no answer for that, either.
Chapter Eighteen
The night wore on, and nothing changed. The kethel didn’t move from the deck, and the sac didn’t stop its rapid progress north. None of them slept well and the air seemed to get even worse; thick with Fell stench, stale, and damp, it was making everyone ill. Keeping their voices carefully low so the kethel wouldn’t hear, they talked about using the fire weapon and the oil to escape, and made and discarded a number of plans.
It all came down to the simple fact that even if they could get out of the sac, there was no way any of them could outrun the kethel, whether they tried to carry Lithe and the wounded or not. Moon thought the only way it might work was if some of them stayed behind to try to distract the Fell, while one or two tried to escape. And this would mean abandoning the wounded to die terribly.
As they sat on the floor of the cabin wearing their groundlings forms, weary, sick, and filthy, it was Saffron who finally brought up the inevitable. She said, simply, “I won’t leave Ivory.”
“No,” Floret agreed with a sigh. “I won’t leave Song and Root. I’m not keen on leaving anyone.”
Moon looked around. No one seemed hopeful. He said, “Is anyone willing to run, if we can get you out?” To make it sound less like an admission of weakness, he added, “To tell Opal Night what happened.”
They exchanged a few glances, but no one volunteered. Shade drew his fingers across the wooden deck. He had been quiet through the morning, and Moon had been keeping a worried eye on him. Shade said, “I can’t leave Lithe, or Ivory, or the warriors. Or you.” He lifted his head to meet Moon’s gaze. “I can’t.”