it hurt Moon’s ears. He winced, and Chime and Root both flattened themselves down in the grass and covered their heads. She stalked back and forth, then stopped and flung her hands in the air. “You’re right! I’ll go get a damn warrior. If that piece of excrement moves—” She growled again and flung herself into the air.
“Get the green female!” Moon yelled after her. She had seemed like the leader of the warriors, and was probably the one most attached to Halcyon.
Root sat up to watch Jade speed away. “She carried me here, so I could show her the way,” he confided to Moon. “I’ve never flown so fast!”
Chime pushed to his feet. Shaking a little, he wiped the sweat off his forehead. “I’ll go look for the simple. It’s probably in one of these shelters.” He went to the first one and ducked down to look through the entrance.
“Hurry.” Moon sat down the grass, keeping a wary eye on Halcyon. The simple had given him a headache and a dry throat. His neck was bleeding a little from Halcyon’s claws, but not enough to worry about. It felt like the end of a very long day, though so far he had only been conscious for a small part of it. “Where are the others?” he asked Root.
“On their way here, following Jade’s markers. We were going to wait until they caught up, and attack in the middle of the night, but—” Root waved a hand, indicating the disturbed camp. “Jade changed her mind.”
“This is it.” Chime came out of the shelter, holding a lizardskin bag, intricately tooled and dyed. He sat down to rummage in it and pulled out various cloth packets and a couple of stoppered bottles. “I’ll have to mix another batch, but it won’t take long. You don’t have to be a mentor to make it work, which is probably why they picked this one.”
Moon reached over to ruffle Root’s hair. “So you just pretended to run away?”
Root nodded, fairly pleased with himself. “Right, until they stopped chasing me. Then I followed them from a distance, until they got to this camp. Then I flew back to find Jade. We left the others, so we could get back here by dark.”
Chime glanced up from the herb packets. “That was smart.”
“I know.” Then Root popped up and cuffed Chime in the head. “Ow!” Chime protested in outrage, reeling back.
“I heard what you said earlier. I’m not stupid,” Root said, coming back to sit next to Moon. “I have a big mouth, but I’m not stupid. There’s a difference. A big difference.”
“Hey, no hitting,” Moon said belatedly. Though he figured Root probably did owe Chime that one.
“I’m sorry.” Chime subsided, looking abashed.
“Jade’s back,” Moon said, and got to his feet.
Jade dropped down to the platform and flung the dazed warrior to the ground. She was in groundling form, a tall woman with light bronze skin and reddish hair. Her shirtsleeves were torn, and there were scratch marks on her arms, and a few rapidly darkening marks on her face about the size of Jade’s fist. “Are you happy?” Jade shouted at Moon.
“Yes,” he told her. “But I’m easy to please right now.”
Oddly enough, Jade didn’t appreciate the joke.
While she paced, fumed, and made certain that any of Halcyon’s warriors still lurking in the area knew that a rescue attempt would end in a bloodbath, Root tied up the female warrior and Chime made the simple. Halcyon was groaning and starting to wake by the time he finished, but once it was administered she settled into a deep sleep. While searching the packs left behind for rope, Moon found a cake of very good tea, so he built up the fire again, filled the dented kettle from a waterskin, and made some. Chime and Root went to scout for injured warriors, and found three dead, victims of the first clash with Jade. They found a few blood trails, but the survivors must have retrieved all their wounded.
Darkness had fallen and it was well into the night before the Indigo Cloud warriors arrived. It was good timing, because it had taken about that long for Jade to calm down.
While Chime and Root greeted them and answered questions and traded various congratulations and recriminations, Moon stood up and stretched his back. His headache had gone, but he had spent most of the time sitting by the fire, watching Jade stare grimly at Halcyon’s unconscious body, braced to intervene if she