“Yes, but…” Jade rubbed her forehead, then shook her spines out, as if shaking off pointless recriminations. She started to take off her jewelry, armbands, pectorals, and belt, dropping it into a glittering pile on the fur mat. “Pearl said the royal clutch saw Plum and the others fall. Were they upset?”
“Not really.” Moon had taken a few moments during the afternoon to check on them. “I think they liked seeing me and the warriors catch them.”
Jade snorted. “They would.” The bathing pool was full and the warming stones in it had kept the water hot and steaming. She stepped in and sank down completely under the surface. Moon stripped off his shirt and pants and stepped in after her.
The water had been heating all day and would have been painfully hot for most soft-skinned groundlings, but Raksura loved heat, even in their most vulnerable form. Moon settled into it, leaning back against the smooth stone side of the basin, feeling the knots in his back relax.
Jade surfaced and shifted to her other form, the disturbance from the change making the water bubble up away from her. She leaned back, her frills floating around her.
Moon rested his head against the rim and breathed in the steam. “What did you and Pearl decide about letting the Arbora start clutching again?”
“We were going to let them start after the first root harvest came in, the red tubers, and talk to them to make sure they all didn’t clutch at once. But now, I don’t know if we should go ahead with it.” She added wearily, “But we still need warriors. I just hope they produce some this time.”
“Maybe we’ll have a clutch of warriors,” Moon said, to see how she would respond.
“Maybe.” She sounded matter-of-fact, which didn’t exactly help. She pushed through the water, steam swirling around her, and leaned on the rim next to him. “Any luck with Bitter?”
Moon ran his fingers through her frills as they floated on the surface, and tried not to notice how quickly she had changed the subject. “Not yet.”
“You should talk to Stone about it when he gets back.”
Moon had been trying to avoid that, mostly because he wanted to solve this problem himself. And he was afraid Stone’s methods might be more direct. “He’ll want to throw Bitter off a branch and force him to fly.”
Jade laughed. “No, he won’t.”
“If I wouldn’t fly, he’d throw me off a branch.”
“Yes, but that’s you.” Jade sunk down in the water, eyes closed, her nose just above the steaming surface.
Moon asked, “Do you want to sleep?”
She sat up with a splash, water streaming down her scales. “Not yet.”
Moon smiled up at her, and suddenly found that all the worries were easy to put aside, at least for now. “What do you want to do?”
Jade took his wrist and pulled him up out of the water with her. “Guess.”
* * *
When Moon woke the next morning in the hanging bed in Jade’s bower, she was already awake, sitting up, and staring down at him.
He stretched, yawning. The air tasted of a fresh cool dawn, the sweet green scent of the tree, and Jade. Looking up at her, still bleary with sleep, he realized her expression was pensive and not a little worried. “What’s wrong?”
She blinked, as if she had been so lost in thought she hadn’t noticed he was awake. “Nothing.” She leaned against the curving side of the bed, shaking her frills back. She was in Arbora form, softened by sleep, not wearing her jewelry and seeming vulnerable without that armor. “I couldn’t sleep.”
The bowers were quiet, except for the water trickling down from the channel above the pool. Before he could change his mind, he asked, “Do you still want a clutch?”
“Yes.” The answer came with gratifying emphasis, though Jade still looked as if she was thinking of something else. Then she focused on him, her gaze suddenly sharp. “Why do you ask? Because we might have to put off letting the Arbora clutch again?”
“Right, that.” Moon rolled over to her, wrapping an arm around her waist and hiding his face against the warm scales of her stomach. Jade hadn’t changed her mind, so the problem was in him somewhere. He needed to talk to someone, find out what the chances were, if it might be something temporary. But whoever he spoke to might tell Jade, or worse, Pearl. “I thought you might want us to wait, too.”
Her hand moved through his hair, then kneaded his shoulder, her claws grazing his skin possessively. “No. No, I don’t want to wait.”
* * *
The Arbora spent the next several days diverting the drainage channels from the more vulnerable outer platforms, and weaving more living branches into the root mats to support them. Moon stayed out with them, being a reassuring presence in case anyone fell, and occasionally helping with the work in the more difficult spots where wings and longer arms were needed. He took breaks only to visit the nurseries and to occasionally bring the royal clutch out to watch. Frost expressed disappointment that none of the Arbora fell, since she liked watching Moon fly so fast to catch them.
Plenty of the warriors helped with the task as well, and Jade and Pearl came out for the most difficult sections, but for some reason the Arbora still wanted Moon there. And they made their appreciation clear. The varieties of spiced roots he liked best appeared every night for the last meal. Rill made him a new sash, of a blue silky cloth brought from the old colony, worked over with vine patterns in black thread. Other gifts—flowers, polished stones, and braided leather and copper bead bracelets—showed up in his bower. Maybe consorts were considered lucky. Whatever the cause, after months of being alert for signs that the court’s opinion was turning against him, it was a relief, at least for a while.
A few days into the work, Moon was hanging by his foot-claws from the supports of a platform, guiding the Arbora above to a dead branch woven through the living roots. It was partially rotted and might damage the platform’s stability in the future, though it seemed sturdy enough now. The Arbora’s footsteps crunched across the grass of the platform toward the broken spot Moon had marked, when River swooped up beside him.
River caught a root with one clawed hand, making the platform shiver. “What was that?” someone called from above, muffled by the layers of dirt and branches.
“Nothing,” Moon assured them. It was more a comment on River’s personality than his physical presence. “Absolutely nothing. Keep coming this way.” Rustling and thumps sounded overhead as the Arbora resumed probing for the broken support.
River slung himself closer and folded his wings in. As a warrior his scales were blue with a green undersheen, and in his groundling form he was a dark-haired man with copper skin. He said, “You’re letting them take advantage of you. Working you like a common warrior.”
Moon had to laugh. “Thanks. You’ve always been so concerned on my behalf.”
River flared his spines, contemptuous and amused. “You have no idea how other courts would look at this.”
Moon was fairly certain he knew exactly how other courts would look at this, but he had no intention of stopping. Knowing River, he was probably repeating things that Pearl had said in private. Whether Pearl intended this or not was hard to tell; River only appointed himself to speak for Pearl when Pearl was nowhere around. “If you don’t want other courts to know, then don’t tell them.”
“You think no one will talk about this on the next trading visit?” River’s amusement was turning into real irritation. “The courts in the Reaches have to see us as something besides struggling refugees coming back to our old mountain-tree to die off in peace. It’s bad enough that they know we have a feral consort with no bloodline; when you act like one you’re shaming all of us, making us look weak.”
The biting suspicion that River might be right made Moon snap, “If the gardens keep collapsing, nobody’s going to care what kind of consort you’ve been stuck with.” Above them, on top of the platform, the Arbora were digging down through the loam, getting closer, and he didn’t want them to hear this.
“Exactly.” River bared his teeth in real frustration. “If the queens could convince another court to give us a consort, don’t you think they would?”
A crunch overhead told Moon that the Arbora had broken through the crust above the supports. Bramble’s voice said, “Oh, it’s River. That’s why there’s an argument.”
Spice’s voice seconded her. “Well, he couldn’t be here to help!”
River hissed at them and dropped from the branch, snapped his wings out, and angled to catch the updraft.
Moon stayed where he was, flexing his claws into the wood, while Bramble and Spice and the others dug and chatted and sawed at the rotted support. He didn’t think the Arbora were taking advantage of him, not intentionally. But it had been turns since they had had a real first consort, since Pearl’s consort Rain had died. After that there had just been a few young consorts sent away to queens in other courts, and Stone. Maybe they hadn’t thought about Indigo Cloud’s place with the other courts. Most of them had only seen foreign queens and warriors when they came to visit, and that had been rare for Indigo Cloud even before the court moved here.
It doesn’t matter,
he reminded himself, if the Arbora or the warriors or even Jade led him astray, let him get away with more than he should. No one was going to ask for or accept excuses for his behavior.
You’re on your own, as usual
.
* * *
Later that day, a storm came up, the high wind and heavy rain making only indoor work possible. Jade was busy with Balm somewhere in the colony, so Moon ended up sleeping with Chime in his bower.
Queens and consorts usually had warrior lovers, and no one seemed to mind that Moon slept with Chime occasionally. Which was good, because Chime had really wanted to.
Stubbornly, Chime had never moved out of the teachers’ level up to the warriors’, though he did have a bower with a balcony looking out into the lower central well below the greeting hall. Moon hated storms but the tree’s heavy trunk made the thunder a distant grumble, and the air from the balcony held the fresh scent of rain that had drifted in through the knothole. Chime’s bower-bed was warm and comfortable, but Moon couldn’t relax into sleep.
He finally said, “I need to ask you something.”
“Um.” Still half-asleep, Chime nuzzled his shoulder. Chime claimed to have gotten used to every aspect of being an Aeriat rather than an Arbora, except for the need for more rest. Once he was asleep he was hard to wake.
“Can consorts and male Arbora turn their fertility off like queens and female Arbora?” Moon was hoping the reason Jade hadn’t clutched yet was something that he needed to do, or needed to stop doing. One of those things that everyone assumed he knew all about that he had no idea existed.
In the past months, Moon had found out everything he could about clutches, and why stillbirths seemed so common. The mentors said that the babies in a clutch might be conceived at different times, so that when the first was ready for birth, some of the others might not be as developed. It also didn’t help that queens developed in the womb faster than consorts, and consorts faster than warriors. This wasn’t as big a factor for the Arbora clutches, because Arbora and warrior babies developed at about the same rate. Moon thought he had asked about everything he needed to know, but it hadn’t occurred to him that the conception process might entail more than the obvious.
Chime pushed up on one elbow and stared blearily at him. “No. Why would we need to suppress our fertility—I mean, why would they? They don’t need to. It’s the females who decide when to clutch.” He shook his head, baffled. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason.” Moon let his breath out in disappointment. There went that, unless it was a secret consort thing that not even a former mentor would know about, which he doubted. That left the other, far more disturbing possibility: that Moon wasn’t as fertile as a consort was supposed to be.
Chime settled back down, grumbling, “You do ask the oddest questions.”
* * *
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.