If worse didn’t come to worst and Jade had left when she said she would, she would be two days ahead of them by now.
The one thing he hadn’t expected to do was to miss Indigo Cloud so much. He had been leaving people all his life, to the point where all the turns seemed like an uninterrupted progression of departures, and there had been people he had missed terribly. But this was a never-ending ache in his chest, and every thought of Jade, Stone, Chime, Balm, the fledglings, Heart, Bell, Merit, Rill, Bark, Bone, Blossom, the other Arbora, was an active pain. You’ll get over it, he told himself. You always get over it.
But somehow, this time was different.
Finally, on the morning of the fourth day at Viridian Sea, Moon reluctantly left the consorts to join Tempest and her warriors. Tempest acknowledged his existence with a nod and an opaque expression; the warriors looked grumpy. He suspected their accommodations hadn’t been nearly as comfortable as his. Before Moon had left the consorts’ hall, Flint had told him not to worry, that everything would surely be all right. He had said it with the unconvinced air of someone who knew it wasn’t true but had no intention of saying what he really thought, but Moon appreciated it anyway.
They set out again, flying to the west.
It rained every day, lightly enough to fly through but still making for miserable nights. As they traveled, the forest gradually changed, the mountain-trees growing further apart and the ground between becoming increasingly studded with rocky outcrops. The outcrops grew gradually taller, until they formed pillars reaching up to the height of the taller platforms of the suspended forest. The pillars were sculpted by the wind and rain into slim spirals, the rock dark gray but shot through with veins of silver that caught the light and threw back rainbow reflections.
Tempest had grudgingly admitted that she had never been this far west before, and was now navigating solely by a map that Ice had shown her. The warriors, having never seen country like this, grew uneasy. Moon, with nothing better to do and his own nerves eating away at him, took to dropping hints about various horrible Raksura-eating creatures he had encountered under similar circumstances. Some of the stories were actually true.
Everywhere they stopped, Moon searched unobtrusively for signs that Jade was ahead of them somewhere, but found none, and the rain obscured any scent that might have been left behind. They did find signs of a camp on one of the platforms where they landed to rest, but it was months old. Gust nudged the remains of the fire pit with his foot claws, asking hopefully, “We must be close? One or two more days?”
They had to be close to the edge of the Reaches. For the past day or so, the mountain-trees had been further apart and the platforms mostly bare of anything but grass. The forest floor seemed to have more rock pillars than greenery, as if the mountain-trees had been slowly encroaching on some stony expanse, and hadn’t had time yet to finish the job. “We’ve made good time,” Tempest admitted. “We might get there late tomorrow.”
Moon didn’t look for opportunities to terrorize the warriors that night; he was dreading their arrival while being so impatient for it he couldn’t think straight.
But on the next day, thunder rumbled all through the morning, threatening to slow their progress. Heavy rain started in the late afternoon.
After they had fought it for a while, Tempest landed on a branch, sheltered only by the mountain-tree’s canopy high above. She raised her voice to be heard over the rush of rain, saying, “I think we’re almost there. We can either spend time searching for shelter, or try to make the colony.”
Beacon glanced around at the warriors, gauging their stamina rather than taking their opinion. Moon, a much stronger flyer, was tired from fighting the wind, so they had to be feeling the strain. They stood with their spines drooping, dripping, and probably miserable, but none of them looked ready to drop from exhaustion. Beacon said, “I think we’d rather sleep dry tonight.”
Dart and one or two of the others nodded agreement. Tempest cocked her head at Moon. He shrugged. On his own, he would have stopped and found a place to hide and wait out the thunder, but he wasn’t going to show that weakness in front of them.
So they flew on through the rain. Moon had hoped that they could out-fly the storm, but it seemed to cover half the Reaches, pounding down as the afternoon stretched toward evening and the gray light grew more dim.
Moon was beginning to doubt the accuracy of Tempest’s ability to estimate distance. Then thunder crashed and lightning washed the sky in white. Moon flinched so hard he lost control of his wings, and the wind spun him down and sideways. Copper scales flashed in his peripheral vision, right before one of the warriors slammed into him.
Instinct took over and Moon pulled his wings up to prevent a collision that could have broken bones. He grabbed wildly, caught the flailing warrior by the collar flange and yelled, “Stop flapping, idiot!”
The warrior snapped in his wings in reflex and clung to Moon’s arms. It was Gust, dazed and frightened but sensible enough to go limp and let Moon help him.
With a couple of hard flaps Moon righted them, his head pounding from the crash of thunder that still reverberated in his bones. Shaking the rain out of his eyes, he looked for the others and saw they were flapping hard to catch the wind again, with Tempest banking back toward them. She saw Moon had Gust and motioned him toward the branches of the nearest mountain-tree.
Carrying Gust, Moon followed her in and landed on the broad branch a few paces down from the other shaken warriors. He set Gust on his feet and shouted over the dying rumble of thunder, “We have to stop!”
Tempest stepped close, taking Gust’s arm and peering into his face to make sure he was all right. Satisfied, she pointed to the south with one wing tip. The rain nearly drowning her voice, she said, “The colony is just down there!”
Startled, Moon turned to look. At the mouth of the valley, dark against the gray sky, huge stone pillars stretched up from a rocky ridge that formed a giant ring, much of it overgrown with vines and smaller trees. It enclosed a huge mountain-tree, but it was a hideously deformed one. Some past cataclysm had split the enormous structure in two, so half of the trunk leaned into the ridge, the malformed canopy reaching for the sky but at a steep angle, creating twisted branches and huge gaps. The other half of the trunk still stood, but the bare branches jutting from it showed it was long dead.
With all that to take in, it took Moon a moment to realize what else was wrong: there were no lights visible in either of the two trees. No steady white-gold glow from enspelled shells or stones or flowers, no warm glints of firelight. He said, “Are you sure they’re alive?”
He hadn’t meant it to sound facetious, but Tempest apparently took it that way. She snapped her spines at him and leapt off the branch. The warriors, caught by surprise and still recovering, followed in a belated rush. Moon took a deep breath and dove after them.
As they drew closer, Moon still saw no signs of life, though the heavy rain made it hard to make out details. The dying gray light threw the surrounding ridges of rock into deep shadow, but as they flew over the stony barrier, all the vegetation he could see was wild and untended, the same heavy green tangle of vines and moss and saplings that covered the forest floor. Inside the bowl of rock, the wind formed tricky currents and the ground was covered by a mass of giant mountain-tree roots, groves of small trees, and tumbled piles of rock. The slanting trunk of the living half of the tree still showed no hint of occupation. No lights, no movement. The platforms cradled in the branches were overgrown and slumping under the weight of wild vegetation. Moon hoped Tempest knew where she was going; the bowl was the size of a small valley and there was no sign of sentries, no indication of where the landing platform for visitors might be. It didn’t look like a place that wanted visitors.