Someone handed Moon one of the pieces of scrap cloth being passed around, and he used it to scrape the mud off his feet and claws. As he finished, he glanced up in time to see Balm slip unobtrusively down a passage. He tossed the cloth back onto the pile and followed her.
He caught up with her just past the foyer, where the passage divided into three directions, all heading up into different parts of the teacher’s level. “Balm, where are you going?”
She stopped, her spines twitching uneasily. “To find somewhere to sleep.” Three young warriors slid past, carefully not looking at her, and Balm hissed. “I’m tired of feeling like I did something wrong.”
Balm hadn’t done anything wrong, except be unlucky enough to be used by the Fell to spy on the colony. Fell could influence groundlings, cause them to believe anything the Fell told them, and to do things they would never do in their right minds. They could use this power to a lesser extent on Raksura, but it didn’t work as well. The Fell had been able to make Balm tell them about the court’s plans, but she had had no memory of it, no awareness of what she was doing. Moon had seen enough groundlings in this same state to know it wasn’t her fault. But it had put Balm at a severe disadvantage in the maneuvering for dominance between Pearl’s faction of warriors and Jade’s. He said, “Then stop acting like it. Don’t let them treat you like this.” Jade’s influence could only protect Balm so far. River and his cronies couldn’t attack Balm outright; now that Pearl was taking more interest in the court, the last thing River wanted was to make her angry enough to intervene. But they could make Balm’s life a misery, and know that they were hurting Jade by proxy. And Balm just didn’t deserve it. “You belong with Jade.”
Balm hesitated, obviously torn. But she said, “I’ll… think about it,” and turned away.
Moon hesitated, half-tempted to follow, but he didn’t know what else to say to persuade her. He turned to the passage to the teachers’ hall.
As he walked through the bowers this time, they were anything but haunted and silent. Flower and the other mentors had been renewing the spells on every light-shell they could find. The warm light caught red and yellow highlights in the wood, chased the shadows away, threw the wall carvings into high relief. Arbora and Aeriat were everywhere, cleaning dirt and debris out of the bower beds, hanging wet clothes off the stairwell balconies, pulling bedding out of baskets. Their voices echoed through the rooms. They were excited to finally be here, relieved to be free of the cramped quarters on the boats.
Moon wanted to check on Bitter, Frost, and Thorn, and see the other clutches, so he followed the sound of squeaking and chattering. He had been the one to find the three Sky Copper fledglings in the Dwei hive, where the Fell had been keeping them as part of their plan to make more Raksuran crossbreeds. He wasn’t sure if the clutch had gotten so attached to him because of the rescue or because he was the first Raksura they had seen after their colony had been destroyed. Whatever the reason, Frost persisted in telling everyone that they were Moon’s clutch now.
There had been no question that Indigo Cloud would adopt them; at the moment the court had no other royal fledglings. If Moon and Jade didn’t produce any fledgling queens of their own, Frost could end up as reigning queen of the court. Moon knew that wasn’t anyone’s preference, but it was a relief to have the option available. And it would be twenty or thirty turns at least before Frost would be old enough to even be considered a sister queen, which gave him and Jade plenty of time to have their own clutches.
He found a round doorway with the lintel carved with baby Arbora and Aeriat tumbling in play, and stepped through into a big, low-ceilinged chamber.
At the moment, it was a chaotic mess, with Arbora children and a few warrior fledglings, all overexcited and shifting at random, as the teachers tried to calm them and put them to bed in nests of blankets and cushions. It was even more obvious here that there had been far more Arbora births than Aeriat. Hopefully things would even out, now that the