“I think we finally found where we need to be looking,” Jade said, her voice dry. “That’s an improvement.”
Chime stirred, rubbing the back of his neck. “We started with the oldest records first, but those all seemed to be from the time Indigo and Cloud led the court away.”
Flower nodded, not looking up from her book. “It looks like the paper they used started to fall apart, and they had to re-copy most of the old volumes. They were in too much of a hurry to bind most of it. So we can’t go by age of the cover to tell the date. We just have to read until something indicates it.”
From what Moon could tell, she had continued to read the entire time she was speaking. Being a mentor was apparently even more complicated than it had seemed at first glance.
Merit turned a page, yawning. “At least we found out that when the court originally left, there was no mention of anything being wrong with the tree.”
“Stone already said that,” Heart pointed out.
Merit shrugged. “I know, but at least if he hadn’t been here to tell us we would have found it out anyway.”
Heart frowned at him. “Could you make less sense? I almost understood that.”
“Argue later, read now,” Flower said, a growl in her voice.
Moon waited until they were all deeply engrossed in the books again, then slipped away.
He stopped at the nurseries to visit the kids, trying to forget the court’s troubles while the Sky Copper royals played mock-fight with some of the young fledgling warriors, and the baby Arbora climbed on him.
Spring came to sit next to Moon, and said, without preamble, “Copper says we can’t stay here.” She was a gawky, half-sized warrior; she and her clutchmate Snow were the oldest warrior fledglings, the only survivors of the old sister-queen Amber’s last clutch.
Moon eyed her over the head of the Arbora toddler who had clamped herself to his chest. It was either Pebble or Speckle, he couldn’t tell them apart yet; even their scent was identical. “Who’s Copper?”
Snow, who was shy, edged up behind Spring and supplied, “He thinks he’s smart, because Flower says he’ll be a mentor when he grows up.”
Moon ruffled Pebble or Speckle’s head frills, trying to think how much to say. The little queen Frost had switched sides at some point in the mock-battle and had pinned Thorn to the floor; she stopped to listen, and so did the rest of the combatants. Bitter, perched on Frost’s back, watched Moon with wide eyes. Three teachers, busy feeding baby Arbora, also looked over this way, worried and curious.
Moon let out his breath, resigned to being the bearer of this news. “We don’t know yet. But we might.”
He was braced to have to explain the theft of the seed, and just hoped he could do it in a way that wouldn’t make them all feel that the tree might be invaded at any moment. But Frost just said, “On the flying boats?”
Moon admitted this would probably be the case. Then Thorn flung the distracted Frost off him, Bitter pounced, and the game resumed.
Snow bounded off to join the other fledglings, but Spring said, “They don’t understand.”
Moon thought Frost, Bitter, and Thorn probably did understand, but compared to what they had been through, moving again just wasn’t a daunting prospect. The others were still unsettled by the Fell attack, and most seemed to be just pretending it hadn’t happened. Spring was old enough to realize all the implications of their situation, and maybe starting to feel the weight of the responsibility she would have soon, as a female warrior from a queen’s clutch. He tried, “We survived the Fell, we’ll survive this.”
It worked better on Spring than it had on Bone. She sat up a little straighter and said, “We will.”
Later Moon went back to the teachers’ hall, but found that in a frenzy of organization, the Arbora had moved everyone into newly-cleaned bowers. He found the one Jade had been moved into, a good-sized room on the far side of the nurseries, with a balcony looking out onto the stairwell and an intricately carved ceiling. Furs and cushions had been arranged on the floor for seating areas, there were warming stones in the hearth basin, and the blankets were piled into the big hanging bed. Moon found his fur blanket on top and took that as a good sign that he was living here too. He slung himself up into the