He meant the doors out to the root levels, on the forest floor. Pearl flicked a spine in acknowledgment.
Then Heart looked up. “I can’t see anything. If it was happening somewhere now, or about to happen here, I’d know.”
Merit’s shoulders slumped in relief. Thistle said, “No one could fail to see it, let alone Heart.”
Pearl tilted her head and looked at Jade. Jade said, “Stone will be back soon. He can confirm it.”
Pearl turned to regard Heart again. Moon would have twitched uneasily under the fixed predatory intensity of her gaze, but as an Arbora, Heart didn’t have the same reflexes. Pearl said, “So what was it?”
Heart rubbed the back of her neck and glanced at Merit and Thistle. She said, “They think it was a shared dream.”
Merit was close to Heart’s age, but to Moon he had always seemed younger. In his groundling form, he had wide-set eyes, warm brown skin and fluffy light-colored hair. He was a little on the easily distracted side, but, like Heart, Moon had seen how powerful a mentor he was on a few memorable occasions. Thistle was young too, part of the copper-skinned and reddish-haired bloodline of Indigo Cloud, with a determined chin. Merit said, “That’s a dream that comes to one of us, and is so . . . powerful, it spreads through the rest of the court, everyone who’s asleep.”
“That’s what I said,” Chime muttered under his breath.
“Everyone, but not the clutches,” Moon said.
Everyone looked at him, then back to Merit.
Merit lifted his hands. “Arbora babies don’t show mentor potential until they’re at least ten turns old, sometimes older. Maybe fledglings and babies don’t develop their connection to the rest of the court until they’re older.”
“It must be rare,” Jade said, watching them with the scales of her brow furrowed, “considering we’ve never heard of it before.”
“It is rare,” Thistle said. “We’ve seen mentions of it in the mentors’ histories, but that’s all.”
“If Flower hadn’t made us read everything the court has, we wouldn’t know about it,” Merit added.
Not for the first time, Moon wished Flower were still here. She had been the court’s oldest mentor, the one who helped guide them out of the east and to the Reaches. She had been dead for nearly two turns now.
Pearl’s expression suggested shared dreams weren’t rare enough. “It has never happened to this court, not in our memories. Why now?”
Merit and Thistle turned to Heart, who said, “We just don’t know.”
Then Jade cocked her head, and a moment later Moon heard voices from the stairwell up to the greeting hall. Jade said, “Stone’s back.”
Pearl turned and took the stairs in two bounds. Jade followed and Moon went after her, everyone else trailing behind him. He noticed he was getting better at this part, at realizing what his place was and taking it. Two turns ago he would have stood there a moment, waiting to go with the warriors and Arbora, while they stared at him awkwardly.
Stone was in the greeting hall with Knell and some of the other soldiers and warriors. He was in his groundling form and a little damp from the light rain outside. Raksuran queens and consorts grew larger and stronger as they grew older, and Stone was old enough to remember when the court had first left the Reaches, generations ago, so his winged form was too big to easily get through the part of the knothole entrance where it narrowed. Tip to tip his wings were more than three times Moon’s twenty-pace span.
In his groundling form Stone was lean and tall, like all the groundling forms of Aeriat. One of his eyes was partially blind, with a white haze across the pupil, and his skin and hair had faded to gray with age. He wore battered gray pants and an old shirt, with absolutely no concession to the idea that consorts were supposed to dress to do credit to the court. But one of the benefits of being a line-grandfather was that you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. As Pearl came toward him, he said, “There’s nothing out there.”
There were murmurs of relief from the Arbora and warriors, and Jade’s and Pearl’s spines flicked, shedding tension. Pearl said, “You’re certain?”
Stone said, “There’s nothing in the air. It’s not as damp as it was last night and there’s a breeze. I can scent the redflower that just opened on the next mountain-tree, but no Fell.”
The Fell’s distinctive stench permeated their surroundings and would be carried on the wind even over long distances. It was probably one of the reasons they relied on less scent-sensitive groundling species as their main prey. If they were anywhere nearby, their odor would be hard to disguise, and Stone’s senses were far more acute than an ordinary Raksura’s.
“So,” Pearl said. She looked around at all the anxious faces. Moon knew he didn’t feel much relieved. “I’m not going to tell you to go back to sleep as if nothing happened. But there is no immediate threat, and there is no point to behaving as if there was.”
For Pearl, that was an inspirational speech. All the Arbora and warriors here had grown up with her, and they knew it was an attempt to reassure them, as well as a not so subtle hint that they should shut up and stop panicking.
Pearl turned to go, collecting a few of her warriors with a dip of her spines. She exchanged an opaque look with Jade, who turned to follow. Yes, Moon figured they were probably going to talk over what had happened.
As Jade passed him, Moon caught her wrist. “I’m going to spend the rest of the night in the nurseries.”
Jade didn’t question it. She brushed the back of her hand against his cheek. “Just try to get some sleep.”
Moon didn’t make any promises, as he was pretty certain that wasn’t going to happen.
Jade and Balm both leapt up the wall onto the first balcony level with Pearl to head up toward the queens’ hall. Chime was climbing down the steps back to the teachers’ hall with Heart and Merit and the others, still arguing about the characteristics of shared dreams. Moon found himself standing next to Stone. Keeping his voice low, he asked, “Did you have it?”
Stone eyed him. “Did you?”
“Yes.” Moon didn’t ask Stone exactly what he had seen. Stone was the one responsible for Moon being the first consort of Indigo Cloud rather than a feral solitary, and also the closest thing Moon had ever had to the relationship many groundlings had with their male sire. Moon didn’t want to know what form Stone’s vision of the destruction of the court had taken, and he didn’t want to talk about his own. The images were still too vivid.
Stone jerked his head toward the stairwell down to the teachers’ hall. “Do the mentors know what it was?”
“They said it was a shared dream, not a vision. And no, they don’t know why it happened.” Moon still felt uneasy to the core. “You’ve never heard of anything like that?”
“No.” Stone looked away from the Arbora and the warriors who still gathered at the far end of the room, all restless and talking anxiously. “This isn’t just chance. Things like this don’t happen for no reason.”
Moon wished he could believe Stone was wrong.
CHAPTER TWO
Hunting was normally the Arbora’s job, though in the Reaches it was necessary to have warriors present to keep watch and help transport them and their prey to and from the colony tree. Moon had wondered occasionally why they didn’t just let the warriors do the hunting themselves, and attributed it to a combination of tradition and warriors being lazy. It had turned out the answer was that the warriors were terrible at hunting.