for so long, and yet it still feels like it happened so quickly. I guess I was too good at putting it out of my mind, pretending she was going to be fine if she just got more rest.”
Moon nudged the carcass over, and sat back on his heels, hooking his disemboweling claws into the wood to steady himself. “Did you have a chance to talk to her about what happened inside the leviathan? How you kept getting—” He waved a hand beside his head. “Visions from it?”
“No. I wish I had.” Chime looked up at Moon, the scales on his brow furrowed with worry. “Esom kept wanting to talk about it. He seemed to think I’m going to be able to sense things like he can. I told him I wasn’t like a groundling sorcerer, and I wasn’t going to be like one, no matter what.”
“Would it be so bad if you were?”
Chime glared at him. “Yes.” He glanced back around, toward the west. “The others are coming this way.”
Moon stood and leaned over the steaming carcass to see if it was ready to move. Then Chime said, “Wait. Who’s that with—” His voice sharpened. “That’s not them.”
“What?” Moon looked, straightening up. Four warriors… no, five warriors came toward them through the trees. The colors and sizes were all wrong; these were strangers. “We’re about a day’s flight from Emerald Twilight.” He looked down at the carcass, belatedly wondering if they were trespassing. “Are we hunting in their territory?”
“Yes, but we’re just passing through. Nobody cares about that.” Chime pushed to his feet, watching the warriors approach.
There were two big males with copper-red scales, a smaller blue male, and two females, one green and one dull yellow. It was obvious they were heading this way. Maybe nobody cared about poaching back in the territory the old Indigo Cloud colony had occupied, but things might be different here in the Reaches. Moon said, “Root, come down here.”
Root dropped from the branch above to land next to Moon. “What do they want?” he asked, sounding a little nervous.
“We don’t know.” Moon wondered what the penalty for poaching was, if they would have to fight, and how many warriors he could take out on his own. Chime wasn’t the best fighter, and Root was still on the small side. Chime’s spines flicked uneasily and he whispered, “This isn’t good. I don’t know everything about being a warrior, but I don’t think they should be approaching a strange consort like this.”
Moon flicked his spines back. “If they’re from Emerald Twilight, they know who we are. We’re not strangers.”
“Still…” Chime muttered.
The warriors banked in, then split up at the last moment so that three landed on the branch above and two came down on this branch, about ten paces from Moon, Chime, and Root. There was something about them that made Moon’s spines itch. He didn’t recognize any of them from Emerald Twilight, but there had been a lot of warriors and he hadn’t been paying much attention to the ones clustered around the younger queens.
The green female had landed on their branch, and now she said, “What court are you from?”
She didn’t sound angry or aggressive, and Root and Chime both lowered their ruffled spines. Chime said, “We’re on our way back to Indigo Cloud. Are you from—”
Something hit Moon in the face, a wet membrane filled with liquid, thrown by one of the warriors above them. He staggered back a step, startled more than hurt, and snarled in surprised fury. Root growled, astonished, and crouched to leap upward. But Chime grabbed for Moon, shouting, “No, don’t breathe, don’t breathe!”
But the heavy sweet fumes of the splattered liquid filled his lungs, his head. Another membrane hit Chime in the side of the head and he jerked away. Moon stumbled sideways, darkness closing in around him rapidly, falling…
Moon drifted awake slowly, weighed down by a heavy lassitude. He felt oddly reluctant to move. He made himself turn his head, and felt leaves and branches creak and rustle beneath him, smelled the pungent scent of crushed foliage. Leaves? he thought, and remembered falling. He opened his eyes.
He was lying on a woven surface of leafy branches, more branches arching over him, latticed with big broad fern fronds. Chime lay beside him, sprawled on his back with one arm over his eyes. They were both in their groundling forms. The reason for the shelter was obvious; rain pattered gently on it. The light coming through the