reason to steal it besides making another colony tree?” He was wondering if other Raksura had taken it, though that didn’t make much sense. Why take a seed to make a colony tree when there was a perfectly good colony tree, uninhabited and ready to occupy, right here?
“No, it looks like a seed,” Stone said. “Like it’s made of wood.”
“It must be a powerful artifact, though.” Flower bit her lip as she leaned down to touch one of the cut tendrils. “There are many magics something like that might be used for.”
Moon stirred uneasily. Like the way the Golden Islanders used the rock from inside flying islands to make their boats fly. That wasn’t a pleasant thought. If someone had stolen the thing for magic, it could have been cut to pieces, destroyed, anything.
“Maybe they stole other things.” Chime turned to the others. “We saw a carving that was damaged where the inlay had been pried out. Whoever did this must have passed that way.”
Jade nodded, her expression grim. “We’ve seen other things broken, in ways that didn’t make sense. As if someone was searching.”
Moon added, “They didn’t get as far up as the Aeriat levels. The stones are still in the carvings there.” The inlay was all up and down the main stairwell; the intruders couldn’t have missed it.
Stone’s eyes narrowed. “If they left other signs they were here—”
Pearl snarled suddenly, furious, and the sound echoed off the walls. Everyone but Stone twitched, and even he barred his teeth. Her voice a growl, she said, “These thieves left a trail! Find it!”
The trail might be old, but last night the hunters had been looking for predator scat and traces of recent occupation, not signs that intruders had searched the tree within the past couple of turns. Now that they knew what they were looking for, it wasn’t hard to find.
There wasn’t enough dirt or moss on most of the floors to show tracks, but on the level below, off a main stairwell, two hunters reported finding a room with more smashed storage jars. Others found several more carvings, on passage walls and the pillars supporting a lower stairwell, where inlaid stones had been pried out. “They were in a hurry,” Moon told Jade as they climbed down the well in the Arbora levels. “They could have checked every carving in the tree for inlay, but they didn’t.”
“It’s as if they knew exactly what they wanted, and didn’t waste any time once they found it,” she agreed grimly, and swung down onto the next balcony.
The trail led to a level far below the Arbora’s workrooms and the storerooms. This part of the tree had smaller passages and wells, narrower stairs woven through and around thick folds of wood. The floors were lumpy and the walls had been left rough and undecorated. Moon and Jade followed a passage toward the tree’s outer trunk, and found Knell and a group of soldiers and hunters there.
As Stone and Pearl arrived, Knell said, “All the doors down here are sealed from the inside, so the hunters assumed no one had used them since the court left.” He ran his thumb along the seam where the door met the wall. “But the other doors have a thick crust here, hard as rock, from turns of wind and rain forcing dirt through the cracks from the outside.” He glanced up. “This one doesn’t.”
Pearl hissed. “Open it.”
“Wait.” Stone frowned at the door. “Let the Aeriat scout it from the outside first.”
Jade regarded him doubtfully. “You don’t think whatever took the seed is still out there?”
“I don’t know what I think.” Stone’s voice was dry. “I just know I’m against the idea of opening any convenient passages to the ground at the moment.”
“Very well.” Pearl sounded as if it was an effort not to growl. Her spines twitched with impatience. “Hurry.”
With Stone, Chime, Vine, Root, and a few other Aeriat, Moon went up to the knothole entrance to take flight, making a cautious spiral down the outside of the tree.
They dropped past more platforms, through the spray of the waterfall. Some of the overgrown foliage was still flattened from the rain, but Moon spotted berry bushes, yellow vines that might be whiteroot, and tall slender nut-trees. They dropped further, until the sun was dimmed to a deep green twilight. The ground was thick with fern trees, their fronds spreading like giant parasols. The mountain-tree’s roots were huge, great ridges of wood sloping down from the massive wall of