Edge of Worlds (The Books of the Raksura) (2 page)

Balm should have been looking at them as if they had all lost their minds. Moon knew he was still twitchy from his turns of living like a feral solitary, but waking him usually didn’t cause this much of an outburst. Especially considering it was Balm, Jade’s warrior clutchmate and one of Moon’s oldest friends in the court. But Balm looked worried, the gold scales of her brow furrowed. She said, “Were you all having nightmares? About the Fell attacking the colony?”

Startled, Moon said, “Yes.”

Jade flicked her spines in an affirmative, then glanced at Moon. “What, you were too?”

Rolling the book back up into its cover, Chime looked up. “Uh, so was I.”

They didn’t have a moment for the strangeness of that to settle in, because Balm said, grimly, “So did almost everyone down in the teachers’ bowers, and maybe everyone in the court. Some of the younger mentors woke up screaming. Heart wants to talk to you and Pearl right away.”

“I know it’s odd,” Chime was saying as they went out into the queens’ hall, “but it’s theoretically possible for a mentor or a queen to share a dream with the rest of their bloodline and related bloodlines.”

“Theoretically possible doesn’t mean any mentors or queens know how to do it, or if they have, they never mentioned it to me.” Jade’s spines and expression were somewhere between appalled and angry.

As sister queen of the court, she should know. Of course, Moon was her consort, and technically he should know too, but he hadn’t been raised as a Raksura, and most of the time it seemed everything he learned about his own people had to be acquired the hard way. “I think if Pearl could do it, we’d know by now,” he said. It might be theoretically possible, but the idea made his skin creep.

The queens’ hall, meant to impress visiting queens and consorts, was still quiet except for the water falling into a fountain pool against the far wall. The huge sculpture of a queen, her scales set with bright sunstones and her outspread wings stretched out to circle the hall and meet tip to tip, was suddenly an uncomfortable metaphor, at least for Moon. The open gallery of the consorts’ quarters was above the sculpture; Moon, Stone, and Ember, the only adult consorts currently in the court, had bowers up there, but they seldom slept in them. From the well that led down through the center of the tree came the faint sounds of movement and voices. Raksura, especially Arbora, didn’t always sleep through the night, but this was the noise of disturbance, uneasy voices and people calling out to each other.

Jade stepped to the edge of the well and unfurled the deep blue expanse of her wings. “Balm, you wake Pearl. Chime, find Stone.” She jumped off the ledge and cupped her wings to control her fall.

Chime looked uneasy at the prospect of disturbing Stone. “If he’s having the same nightmare we were . . .”

“Just make sure he’s awake before you get close,” Moon told him. Stone was the court’s line-grandfather and could be cranky at the best of times, let alone when he was caught in a vivid dream about the Fell eating all his descendants.

Balm went toward the reigning queen’s bower to wake Pearl, saying, “I think I’d better stand in the doorway and call to her.”

Moon shifted to follow Jade and used his wings to drop straight down through the central well.

The dream was still too close for Moon to be able to look at the stairs curving up the spiral well and the carved balconies without wincing. He kept expecting to see dead bodies lying in the round doorways.

It wasn’t as if the dream had been of some far-fetched, impossible circumstance. The Fell existed by feeding on groundling settlements and cities and had destroyed Raksuran colonies and killed entire courts. Moon was a survivor of one of those attacks; it had been the reason he had spent most of his first forty or so turns of life alone. A Fell flight had nearly destroyed Indigo Cloud’s old colony to the east before the court had fled here to the Reaches.

Moon landed on the floor of the greeting hall a heartbeat after Jade. This was the first chamber visitors to the colony tree would see when they entered through the twisting passage that led in from the knothole, and it was designed to be impressive, as well as easily defended. Directly across from the entrance a pool of water was fed by a small fall from a higher channel, and the shell-lights glinted off all the warm colors of the carved wood.

Warriors and Arbora, some in their scaled forms and some in groundling, were out on the balconies that looked down on the hall, their voices rising in worry as more of them woke from the dream. Arbora soldiers were on watch in the hall all day and night, gathered around the hearth bowl near the pool. Usually they traded off turns sleeping but now they were all awake, on their feet, and watching Jade’s arrival with relief. She said, “Ginger, you all had the dream too?”

Ginger flicked her spines in an affirmative. “Four of us were sleeping, and we all saw—” She stopped and her throat worked as she swallowed uneasily.

“We thought it was just us, but Balm said it’s everyone,” Sharp added.

Jade made her voice reassuring. “Send someone to find Knell.” He was the leader of the soldiers’ caste, and one of Chime’s clutchmates. “Tell him to have the other soldiers check through all the bowers, make sure everyone’s all right.” She glanced up at the warriors gathered on one of the upper balconies. “Sand, Aura, Serene, the rest of you. Get down here and help the soldiers guard the entrance.”

As the warriors dropped down to the greeting hall floor, Sharp said, uneasily, “You don’t think the dream is going to become real . . .”

“No,” Jade said, absently enough for it to be convincing. “But if it’s a warning of some danger, we want to be prepared.”

There was something Moon had to check on first, before worrying about the rest of the court. “I’m going to the nurseries.”

Jade flicked a spine in acknowledgment and Moon dove down the stairwell into the teachers’ hall. The round hall was crowded with uneasy Arbora, all talking nervously. They barely noticed as Moon flashed past and flung himself down the passage that led to the nurseries.

He slid to a stop in front of a round doorway with a lintel carved with the figures of baby Arbora and Aeriat, took a deep breath, and shifted back to his groundling form. He couldn’t hear any crying or screaming inside, which was a good sign.

Moon stepped through into the first big low-ceilinged chamber and almost ran into Blossom. She lifted her hands and said, low-voiced, “It’s all right. It didn’t affect any of the clutches, whatever it is.”

Moon let out his breath, the tension in his chest easing. He hadn’t realized how afraid he was until this moment.

Everything was quiet, though some sleepy Arbora toddlers played near one of the several shallow fountain pools. Doorways led off into a maze of smaller rooms, and teachers were moving in and out of them, checking on their charges, a few being trailed by querulous Aeriat fledglings. The inhabitants of the nurseries had changed over the past two turns in the colony tree. Several Arbora had clutched, producing new Arbora babies and warrior fledglings, and the court’s population balance was finally on its way to becoming more stable. Moon asked, “Did it happen to you?” From what the others had said, everyone’s version of the dream was a little different. The one thing in common had been the overwhelming violence of the attack, the helplessness, the sense that the court had been caught with no warning at all.

Blossom’s nod was grim. She was an older Arbora, though the only sign of age yet was the threads of gray in her dark hair. Raksura lost all their coloring as they got older, and Blossom’s skin was still a warm bronze. She was the teacher Jade and Moon had chosen to be in charge of the care of their first clutch. “The Fell attacking the Reaches.” She lifted her shoulders, not quite shuddering, and turned to lead the way across the room. “It was like the old colony all over again, but worse.”

At the far end of the main room was another small chamber with a pile of furs and cushions. Moon and Jade’s clutch was in the center of the pile, three female and two male, sleepily climbing on each other and tugging on one another’s frills. It was more and more likely that they were queens and consorts. Mixed gender clutches were unlikely to produce warriors. They were with the other royal clutch, the last three survivors of the Sky Copper court. The two fledgling consorts Bitter and Thorn were half-awake, leaning on each other, and Frost, the little queen, sat in front of the babies to guard them. “What’s going on?” Frost demanded. “Blossom said everyone’s having the same dream.”

Blossom shushed her. “Keep your voice down, some of the others are still sleeping.”

In a piercing whisper, Frost repeated, “Is everyone really having the same dream?”

Moon sat down beside the nest and untangled Cloud’s still soft claws from Fern’s frills. At a little over a turn old, the clutch couldn’t talk much and were mostly concerned with playing, along with eating and sleeping and other bodily functions. “It looks like it, but we don’t know why yet. You didn’t have the dream?”

Frost shrugged her spines. She was in her Arbora form, small and deceptively soft. Her scales were green, and as she had grown over the past turn, the yellow tracery was becoming more pronounced. All queens had a second contrasting web of color across their scales, and it was a sign that Frost was finally maturing. She was still a long time from officially leaving the nurseries, whatever she thought. She said, “We dream about Fell all the time.” Thorn and Bitter sleepily nodded.

The Sky Copper clutch had survived the Fell attack on their colony to the east, only to be captured by a Fell flight. It would have been a horrific event for anyone to go through, let alone fledglings, and they still bore the effects of it, though it wasn’t as obvious now. “But you weren’t dreaming about them tonight?” Moon asked, just to make sure, as Sapphire lunged into his lap and started to chew on the cuff of his pants. Queens shared mental connections to their courts; it was how they brought the court together, how they could hold other Raksura in their groundling forms and keep them from shifting, and other abilities Moon still wasn’t so certain about. But Frost wasn’t in the Indigo Cloud bloodline, so even if it was possible for a queen to give a nightmare to the whole court, he didn’t think it could have come from Frost.

“Blossom already asked that,” Frost informed him. “We weren’t dreaming.”

“If any of the clutches did have the dream,” Blossom said as she lifted Solace and Rain out of the nest and deposited Rain in Moon’s lap, “they don’t remember it. When we started to wake them, they all wanted to play or eat or go back to sleep. They weren’t shifting, either.”

When fledglings and baby Arbora were frightened, they shifted at random, even in their sleep. As proof he hadn’t been upset, Rain curled up in Moon’s lap and hissed out a contented breath as he fell asleep. Bitter crawled into the nest, pulled Cloud and Fern against his chest, and followed suit. Frost gave Thorn a push and he joined them, curling up in a ball. Moon arranged Solace, Sapphire, and Rain next to Thorn. It calmed abraded nerves just to come down here and touch their little soft-scaled bodies. He felt better able to think about this logically now. “I need to get back to Jade.” She was going to want to know the nurseries weren’t in chaos, for one thing. “Frost, keep an eye on everyone, all right?”

When the Sky Copper clutch had first come to the court, Frost had been, off and on, an incorrigible terror. Over the past couple of turns, Frost had gradually been getting better, either from growing more secure at Indigo Cloud or just getting a little older.

Moon had expected her, and maybe the two fledgling consorts, to be jealous of his new clutch, but it had just seemed to make all three of them happier and easier to deal with. Bitter, who had refused to speak to anyone but his clutchmates, had even started to talk to the new babies. Maybe a new royal Aeriat clutch, along with the clutches that the Arbora had produced, had been another sign of security in their new court and colony.

Frost hesitated, clearly torn between wanting to watch over the other clutches and wanting to be a part of whatever was going on. She said, grudgingly, “Someday I’ll be big, and I can fight the monsters.”

“It’s not a monster.” Moon pushed to his feet, and thought,
Probably not a monster
. In the Reaches, anything was possible.

Blossom followed him out to the doorway. Keeping his voice low, Moon said, “So whoever did it, didn’t want to upset the clutches.”

“Which means it was one of us. Unintentionally, I mean.” Blossom eyed him a moment. “Could it be Chime?”

Moon hesitated. Before Moon had come to Indigo Cloud, Chime had been an Arbora and a mentor. The Fell influence at the old colony had caused disease and a drop in warrior births, and one day, Chime had shifted and found himself a warrior. This was apparently a natural process that happened in courts on the decline, but that hadn’t made it any easier for Chime to cope with. Warriors never had mentor powers, and so Chime had also lost his ability to heal, to augur, and to manipulate rocks and flora to produce heat and light. But the change had affected him in odd ways, and he had gained the ability to hear things he shouldn’t be able to, and to get odd insights about groundling magic.

Those insights had warned them of traps, but had also lured Chime into dangerous situations. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that something had made Chime do this. But while Chime could hear strange things, he had never shown any ability to make anyone, including other Raksura, hear him. Moon said, “Maybe, but I doubt it. I think he’d know if he did.”

Blossom nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true. He always does seem to know.”

Another consort whipped through the passage down from the teachers’ hall, not quite with the speed Moon had. Ember jolted to a halt and shifted to his groundling form. He said, “They said you were already here. Is everything all right?”

“They didn’t have the dream,” Moon told him. “Did you?” Ember was Pearl’s consort, given to Indigo Cloud by the court of Emerald Twilight. His skin was a lighter bronze than usual for the Aeriat of Indigo Cloud or Emerald Twilight, and his hair was a light gold-brown. He was young and had been gently raised, but had a comprehensive knowledge of court politics in the Reaches, which made him nearly the opposite of Moon in every respect. Moon liked him, but Ember made him feel large, awkward, and like the feral disaster that most of Indigo Cloud had considered him when he had first arrived.