Chime was silent for a long moment. “I know, but . . . You’re not a normal consort. I’ve never thought you should pretend you are, or make decisions based on that pretense.”
Moon looked up at him and Chime waved his hands and said hastily, “But I don’t mean to tell you what to do.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. Then Moon leaned forward and nipped Chime on the ear. He didn’t want to leave the clutch. But maybe what he really wanted was for this nightmare not to have happened, and for everything to go on as it had before. And that just wasn’t possible.
Chime nipped Moon on the neck in return, still an intense sensation on groundling skin, no matter how many times Moon had felt it. Moon pulled him close and Chime slid a hand around his hip.
At that point a breathless Song whipped in through the library door. She saw them wound together and skidded to a halt, her claws scraping the floor. “Sorry, sorry!”
“What?” Chime demanded. “Can it wait?”
“No, there’s been an augury,” she gasped. “You two need to come hear it.”
CHAPTER SIX
Moon and Chime followed Song to one of the workrooms in the lower levels, which the mentors used for making simples and storing materials. The scents of various herbs grew more intense the closer they got to the room, so it was almost overwhelming when Moon stepped inside.
It was a big round chamber and the bent sapling wood rack arching overhead held herbs stored in bundles and bags. Pots and jars holding more ingredients sat on the floor. The combination of scents was fascinating, but Moon didn’t know how the mentors could stand working in here for long periods without going scent-blind.
There was a large sap-sealed jar in the corner that Moon knew contained the eastern plant that was called three-leafed purple bow. It was used for Fell poison, which was prepared by boiling down the plant over and over again into an odorless simple that tasted of nothing but grass or waterweeds and could be easily concealed in food or water. It affected both Fell and Raksura, preventing you from shifting and making you unconscious or too sick to move. Some Fell it killed outright. Moon had discovered it the hard way, by having some groundlings use it on him when they thought he was a Fell ruler.
Since encountering a Fell flight moving through the west on the far side of the Reaches, the mentors had taken the precaution of trying to grow the plant here. They hadn’t been successful until two rain seasons ago. Moon had thought it was a good idea at the time; considering the shared dream, he thought it was an even better one.
Jade was already there, with Stone and Balm. They were sitting on the floor with Heart, Merit, and Thistle.
Heart’s version of the map lay nearby, with ink cakes and pens beside it. Jade looked up as Moon and Chime came in, and said, “We’re waiting for Pearl.”
Moon nodded and sat on his heels to look at the map; he couldn’t see any difference from Chime’s version, except in the handwriting. Chime knelt to examine it more closely, and asked, “Who’s going to make the copies?”
“Rill and Merry said they’d do it,” Heart said. Moon glanced up at something in her tone and saw her expression was set, her jaw a hard line. Merit seemed edgy and Thistle bristled with fury. Jade and Balm watched them worriedly. Moon found himself meeting Stone’s gaze, which was ironic and exasperated. Right, Moon thought. He was getting the impression that this augury had not gone well.
Pearl swept in with Floret behind her. She settled on the floor, curling her tail around her feet, and gestured impatiently to Heart. “Tell us.”
“It was a very strong vision,” Heart said. She glanced at Merit and Thistle. “All three of us shared it, and we agree it was clearly an augury and not a dream, like the way it happened before. We’ve asked the other mentors and they all shared it to a certain extent. Even Copper, who is too young to have gotten any serious training in augury yet.” She turned to Chime. “Did you feel anything odd, or see or hear anything?”
Chime’s expression was frustrated. “No, and I was down in the library, concentrating on the map before Moon came in. There was no way I could have missed it.”
Pearl’s tail twitched in impatience. “Well, what was it?”
Heart spread her hands. “It doesn’t make any sense . . .”
“Neither did the shared nightmare,” Jade encouraged her. “Go on.”
Heart’s expression was tight and tense. “We saw white water. Solid white water. Chunks of it floating in a cold sea. A city of stone floating almost in the clouds, surrounded by mist, but we couldn’t tell if it was groundling or skyling or something else. We saw something waiting there, something powerful. Then the cold sea again and another city of metal, moving with the waves.” She hesitated, biting her lip, and Thistle stirred uneasily. Merit now had his gaze locked on the floor. Heart said slowly, “Merit didn’t think I should tell you the rest.”
Merit winced. Pearl’s irritated attention was transferred to him, and she said, “Why not?”
Heart watched Merit, brows lifted. After a moment, Merit looked up and said, “I don’t think that part of it was a real vision.”
Thistle pressed her lips together. “He thinks I imposed it on the augury, and that it means I caused the shared dream.”
Merit glanced at her, exasperated. “Not intentionally!”
“Why me?” Thistle demanded, obviously angry and offended. Moon didn’t get it either. He had mostly seen Thistle’s skills demonstrated more in healing than visions, but he couldn’t see why Merit suddenly thought she was bad at augury.
As if it was obvious, Merit said, “Because it didn’t come from Heart and it wasn’t me—”
Chime’s expression said he was not particularly thrilled with any of them. “You should have figured this out before you called the queens in here, and not interrupted the interpretation with it. And you should be able to tell if anyone imposed it on an augury, it would be markedly different from a shared dream—”
Heart bared her teeth at him. “I know that, Chime, and I’m saying we couldn’t tell—”
“Then it must have been part of the vision—”
Stone cut through it all with the words, “Argue about it later,” spoken in a tone with an implied or else.
All the mentors and Chime subsided, glaring at each other. Pearl, whose spines had started to take on an alarming angle and tension, said grimly, “You’re going to have to explain what this means.”
Heart said, “If mentors are sharing a vision, it’s possible for one of them to accidentally add something to it. A fear, a hope, a memory. It’s not like the shared dream, but it’s not an entirely conscious act, either.”
Merit interposed, “It’s because you can tell your own thoughts when they mingle with a vision, but if someone else’s are carried in the joint seeing, then you can’t tell where they come from—”
“I can tell!” Thistle snarled, her voice roughening toward the deeper tone of her shifted form. “I can tell my own thoughts, and that wasn’t one of them!”
“Merit, why do you think this part of the vision isn’t real?” Jade asked. She was controlling her own impatience pretty well but Moon could tell it was an effort.
Merit shook his head but didn’t seem to be able to answer. Thistle said grimly, “Because he doesn’t want it to be true.”
That wasn’t reassuring, but Moon would rather just hear it. “Just tell us what it is,” he said. If he had been in scaled form, he would have been signaling just as much frustration as Pearl, but he tried to keep his voice even. “Just tell us and let us decide.”
Heart took a deep breath. “We saw Fell in the Reaches.”