in down here.”
“One of us?” Song wondered. “A Raksura?”
“Or something else that could fly or climb.” Moon put the skull back on the pile of bones and stood. “It doesn’t have to be a Raksura.”
“Or they got some solitary to do it for them—” Root began, then twitched his spines in confusion. “Oh, sorry, Moon.”
Moon controlled his annoyance. Even during a crisis this serious, nobody forgot who had been a feral solitary.
Chime flicked his tail at Root. “The question is, how do we track them?”
Knell edged past Stone to examine at the groundling bones. “It’s been too long. We can’t track them.”
“We should search anyway,” Jade said, and looked up to where Pearl sat crouched in the doorway. “If they left their dead behind, they might have left other traces, some sign of where they came from.”
From Pearl’s expression and the angle of her spines, she had already gone from righteously angry to depressed. Moon didn’t think that was a particularly good sign. One of the problems at the old colony had been Pearl’s growing apathy; necessity, and being away from the Fell’s influence, had shaken her out of it. Now would be a terrible time for her to slip backward.
The moment stretched to an uncomfortable point. Then Pearl settled her spines, and said, “Go and search. Maybe they were careless.”
Moon felt the others’ relief. Their chances of finding something didn’t matter; the important thing was that their reigning queen wasn’t giving up. Or at least if she was, she was managing to hide it.
Jade acted as if she hadn’t noticed the lapse, and told Knell, “Send someone for Bone. We need all the hunters.”
Chapter Four
They started the search through the strange twilight world of the mountain-tree’s roots, finding their way through the hanging moss and vines, the forests of fern trees, and the marshes. The teachers
and the rest of the Aeriat had been told to keep searching the inside of the tree and up into the branches, on the chance that some trace of the thieves had been left inside.
Moon searched the ground with the hunters, but he didn’t hold out much hope. Unless the groundlings had camped for a long period while trying to find a way into the tree, the damp and time would have wiped out any sign of them. And if they did find old evidence of a camp, it wasn’t as though there would still be tracks to follow.
But there just wasn’t anything else they could do at the moment. Casting over the ground in a stand of reeds, he passed a clearing where Jade, Stone, and Flower were talking. He heard Jade ask Stone, “Does it have to be that seed? Can we get another?”
Stone didn’t sound hopeful. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Flower wasn’t as discouraged. “I told Heart and Merit and the others to unpack the court’s library. The answer should be somewhere there. I’m going to join them now.”
Moon continued through the reeds, working his way further out. If we could get another seed… It was a hope to hold onto, at least.
As the roots spread further away from the mountain-tree, they grew smaller, only as big around as the trunks of the big fern trees. Some roots arched up off the ground, forming fantastic shapes, supporting curtains of moss and vines.
Then Bramble, one of the hunters, slipped out of the brush and made a faint clicking noise, beckoning Moon. Startled, Moon ducked under the foliage to follow her. He had been so convinced they wouldn’t find anything.
They came to a tall thatch of big green flowers with brilliantly red centers. Bramble crouched in its cover and pointed.
Not far past the flowers was a shallow pond, barely more than a widened section of stream. It was home to a collection of snails with dark brown shells. And there was something crouched over the pool, watching the snails.
It was a groundling, but of a kind Moon had never seen before. Its legs and arms were skinny as sticks, lightly furred, and its torso was narrow and flat, and seemed to be all ribs; its stomach and bowels must be tiny, and he couldn’t tell where it kept its sex organs. The head was squarish, eyes and mouth round, the nose just a slit. It had vines draped around its body, or maybe they were growing on its skin; it seemed to wear them like clothes.
Moon would have been half-inclined to think it was just a big treeling, but it had a bag slung