before, and she’s close to Pearl.” Jade stirred uneasily. “But I’ve tried to talk to Balm, and it didn’t go well. It was hard on the boats. There was nowhere private, and she wouldn’t fly off anywhere with me.”
It might be that Balm just didn’t want to talk about what the Fell had done to her, not yet. Moon could understand that at a bone-deep level. “Tell her you need her help. Tell her it’s her duty.”
“It’ll make her feel guilty.”
“She already feels guilty.” It might as well be used for a good purpose.
Jade thought about it a moment more, then nodded. “It can’t hurt to ask. I’ll go find her.”
Jade went inside, and Moon sat there a while longer, watching the light fail. He was about to go in when a green warrior swooped down from above, cupping his wings to land on a narrow ledge just below the lip of the knothole. It was River.
Moon leaned back and propped himself on his arms, deliberately casual. “Here for that beating?” He really hoped so.
Sounding amused, River said, “You should be afraid of this trip, solitary. This will be a big court, with lots of consorts to spare.”
Moon didn’t show his sudden sense of unease. “So.”
River climbed a little closer, gripping the bark with his claws. “Jade’s never been near an adult consort she wasn’t related to. All the ones at the courts near us were taken already, or too young. Why do you think she settled for you?”
Moon shoved forward and shifted in a blur of movement. But River fell backward off the ledge and twisted into a dive through the spray of the waterfall.
Moon stopped, trying to settle his spines. Chasing River was no good. It wasn’t as if he could kill him when he caught him. It would upset the others too much.
The words stung because they were true. By the time Jade had grown to adulthood, Pearl had driven off the consorts who had been born to Amber, her sister queen, sending them to other courts. The other consorts had died of illness, or been killed in fighting off attacks on the colony.
Stone had said Azure had chosen him out of the lot, but Jade hadn’t had a choice. It had been Moon or nobody, and the court had been reluctant to move without a consort for her.
He knew Jade wanted him now, but his position in Indigo Cloud had been far more secure when he was the only available consort in flying distance. He knew queens could take more than one consort, and have warrior and Arbora lovers, but that wouldn’t affect his place in the court. And he had thought that as long as he was with Jade, he could handle it. He hadn’t counted on the members of the court who weren’t happy with an ex-feral solitary as first consort having the opportunity to pressure Jade to replace him.
Moon turned and went back to the passage, taking it through to the greeting hall, snarling under his breath. Now he had yet another reason to be uneasy about this trip.
Chapter Five
They left at dawn the next morning, flying under the canopy through the suspended forest. Traveling as fast as they could, Moon and Jade could have made the trip in three days rather than
five. Stone could fly much faster than that, even carrying Flower, but all three kept to the warriors’ pace. Everyone agreed that showing up at a strange court, especially one that had no reason to be friendly, without the warriors necessary for the formal greeting would waste more time than it would save. It would give Emerald Twilight’s queens an excuse to delay speaking to them, or to refuse to see them at all. Moon had already gotten the idea that Raksuran courts saw no inherent reason to be nice to each other; this was just more proof that alliances between courts, let alone friendly relationships, had to be carefully managed.
The warriors they brought were Chime, Balm, Vine, Floret, and Song. Chime had spent little time outside the colony compared to the others, but after flying to the Golden Isles and chasing kethel across desert plains to a Dwei Hive, he wasn’t much daunted by a trip to visit another court. Vine and Floret were Pearl’s choices. Vine had visited other courts before, and he was easier to deal with than many of the warriors she might have picked. Moon didn’t know Floret well. In groundling form, she had the copper