He got dutiful murmurs of assent from the Arbora and Chime, Root, and Song, and a glance of contempt from River. They followed Stone and Delin out into the corridor, a bemused Merit trailing along last. Moon rubbed his face and wondered if any of their efforts at subterfuge would last past the first day. For a race who had supposedly originally used their shapeshifting abilities to trap and prey on groundlings, Raksura were lousy liars.
He got the map out of Chime’s pack and spread it across the bed. It didn’t show their entire route, just the coast and a portion of the sel-Selatra, then the trail of islands and sea-mounts leading toward the site of the city. It didn’t tell him much he didn’t already know, but at least he had the directions of their route in his head now.
He was folding the cloth map when someone shook the sliding door. Moon stuffed the map into the pack, pulled out a packet of writing paper Chime had brought, and pretended to be reading the first sheet. “Come in.” If the groundlings found out they had made one copy of the map, let alone three, the whole situation would be even more difficult than it already was.
The door slid open. Surprisingly, it was Captain Rorra. She said, “Am I allowed to speak to you?”
Moon kept his attention on the paper. “I don’t know; are you?”
Rorra stepped into the room. Stiff as one of the cork floorboards, she said, “It was my understanding that you are the property of the queen.”
Moon let his breath out in irritation, and looked up at her. “I understand the connotations of the word ‘property’ in Altanic and if you didn’t mean it to be an insult, I don’t think you would have used it.”
Her face worked, as if she was struggling with different emotions and didn’t want to show any of them. None of them appeared to be chagrin. “Isn’t that the case? An insult to you is an insult to her.”
It was hard to explain something that he didn’t quite understand himself, at least not well enough to articulate it. Especially when he was being provoked. “I belong to the court, just like everybody else in it.” He groped for the right words. “She protects me to show she can protect the court.”
“So you’re helpless, to be protected—”
Moon was on his feet in one smooth motion and looking down at her. “I’m really not,” he said. He didn’t shift, though the surge of pure anger at her words made it difficult.
A surge of anger. That’s odd, Moon thought.
He stepped back. Rorra’s expression went blank and her eyes hooded, a defensive response. Her voice trembled just a little as she said, “That’s good. We don’t need any dead weight in this expedition.”
Moon knew he had a temper, but she hadn’t been pushing him that hard. He had taken worse insults than that without threatening anybody. Something else had to be going on. “Hold it. Are you causing that?”
She took a step back. Now she was showing emotion. It was humiliation. Stiff, angry humiliation, but still humiliation. “I don’t mean to.”
Moon tasted the air, and caught just the faintest unfamiliar scent off her skin, almost too ephemeral to detect. He couldn’t place it. “What is it? There’s a scent. A pheromone?” He used the Raksuran word for it because he had no idea what it was in Altanic, or even if the idea existed in Altanic. “A scent that makes people react. That communicates.”
That she understood. Her expression was grim. “Yes. It isn’t intentional.”
“I’m sorry I reacted like that.” The fury had disappeared, overcome by a keen appreciation of just how awkward and embarrassing this was. At least it had happened in private. Moon fumbled for something to say. “That must be . . . hard to deal with.” Or impossible to deal with. But it must not affect every species in the same way. He doubted she would have survived very long if it had. “Not everyone can scent it?”
“No, some species can’t. Not the Kish-Jandera, like Callumkal and the others of this crew. They have little sense of smell.” Rorra swallowed hard, flustered. “I should go.”
It explained why Jade was so agitated around Rorra. As she turned to go, he said, “Tell me what it is. That might make it easier to ignore.”
She hesitated, a little of her habitual glare returning. He said, “Raksura know a lot about scents.” This was true. There were scent-markers that queens could produce and detect that no one else could, like the one that signaled to other queens that Moon was Jade’s consort. As a consort Moon experienced some scents more clearly than the warriors and Arbora did, and Arbora could follow scents that the warriors could barely detect. Stone hadn’t seemed to react to her at all, but then Stone was odd. Sitting here with her for a few moments would give Moon a chance to learn the scent so he could hopefully filter out the effect.
She grimaced, clearly reluctant, but she turned away from the door. “It’s a characteristic of my species of sealing. In saltwater, it’s a request for distance, a neutral signal. In the air . . . it is not neutral. I can’t control it. I can make other scents but this one is . . . not voluntary.”
Moon tried to imagine how difficult that would be to cope with in a tense situation. Anticipating it probably brought it on even more quickly. No wonder she radiated tension. He couldn’t think of anything to say. “I’m sorry.”
She looked away. “You’ve already apologized. I’m used to it.” She made what was obviously a determined effort to change the subject. “I actually wanted to speak to you about the underwater city you found. The creature inside it. Delin told us about it but I wanted to hear it from one of you.” She hesitated. “I wasn’t sure if I should speak to you without the queen’s permission, especially after what happened last time.”
Moon sat down on the bed. “What did you want to know?” Since the first attempt at a conversation had gone astray rapidly even from something as innocuous as can I talk to you?, it would be best to keep this one as on target as possible. Rorra seemed to be naturally reticent, and the scent that made everything she did seem like a deliberate affront had to make it worse. He wondered why she had left the sea at all, to put up with this. Plus the fact that her feet didn’t seem designed to walk on land and she needed the boots to compensate, she must have a powerful motivation. He felt asking what it was would just make the whole situation worse.
When Moon’s survival had depended on pretending to be a groundling for turns at a time, he had avoided asking questions, since they usually opened him up to being asked questions in return, often very hard-to-answer questions. Old habits died hard, and now he tended to operate on the principle that if people wanted him to know things, they would tell him.
Rorra seemed relieved to be talking about something, anything else. “Delin said you first thought it was a shapeshifter?”
“It was pretending to be one, to keep the Fell there while its prison was opening. What it was really doing was making us see things. You’ve heard of how the Fell can do that?”
“Yes. I’ve never experienced it.”
If she had, she would be dead, but there was no point in explaining that. “This was similar, but it was happening to all of us. A Fell ruler can do it to multiple groundlings, but it has to work on one person at a time. It has to get close to them and tell them what it wants them to see, or think, or remember. This thing made itself look like a forerunner. It made us all see that the city was filling up with water. It happened instantly. We could feel the water, but one of us was in groundling form and his clothes were dry. We realized it wasn’t real, but the thing was still able to hide from us under the water. The water that wasn’t really there.” It was hard to get across in words just how terrifying the experience had been.
Rorra frowned, but now he could tell she was worried and not angry. Maybe knowing about her odd scent did help. “That’s disturbing.”