Nissa forgot about what Sutina was wearing when she put her arms out and started to speak.
Friends, Speaker Sutina said. The word seemed to hang shimmering in the air above their heads. Nobody spoke. One of the Tajuru dropped his bag of wolf berries on the wood floor. With the smallest trace of a smile, the Speaker s eyes cast around the room. When they met Nissa s eyes, her smile faded. Friends, she repeated in a voice suddenly louder. I won t mix words now that I have traveled so far to visit you. We have come to Ondu to alert others to a great rot in the roots of the forest.
Sutina s eyes fluttered for a moment. When she spoke her lips were dashed with green phosphorescence, and the words that came out of her mouth were guttural, rasping, and filled with chirps. Her eyes fluttered open, and the smile flitted across her lips again.
This is the language of the infection traveling in the forest right now. Do any of you recognize this talk?
Nissa didn t bother to look at the faces around her. She knew the language belonged to nothing from their plane It sounded like flint chips knocking together. Even mountain trolls spoke more pleasantly.
Sutina s eyes fluttered and went to their whites again as she channeled something else. What is that? a concerned male Tajuru s voice echoed out of her throat.
What are those holes? Stina, Rawli, give that thing a volley.
But the wind, this time a female voice. The wind.
A silence lasting nearly thirty heartbeats followed.
Nissa watched the muscles in Sutina s cheeks and around her eyes twitch and spasm. Her chin jerked side to side and up and down, and Nissa knew she was reliving the last moments of each of the scouting party s lives. Then the whites of Sutina s eyes blinked back into place, and she smiled. All around her the Tajuru had grown quiet. All the elves had bowed their heads. Their lips had all become slightly green, she noticed with a bit of unease. The elves did that sometimes at meetings.
A Joraga would never share consciousness with her tribesmen it would be a shameful action. But the Tajuru seemed to want to do it when even the smallest thing went wrong. Nissa waited. Through the windows of the longhouse she could see patches of sky through the trees.
Stina is my sister s name, a Tajuru said from the crowd. We haven t heard from her in a week.
Another spoke up. That was Leaf Talker Gloui s voice.
He patrolled the far west, someone else said, almost in a whisper.
Wind, Nissa thought. Where was there wind in a forest? Breeze, yes, but never wind. She still didn t know the topography of the Tajuru s lands as well as she would like, but she did know that wind would be something of a rarity in a forest.
Hiba leaned over. His lips weren t green, Nissa noticed.
The Binding Circle, he whispered. It s on a plateau.
Just then, in response to his thought, someone across the room said, The Binding Circle is in the west.
The Binding Circle, other elves repeated, almost in unison.
Nissa hated when they did that, speaking together like the undead.
Nissa, Speaker Sutina s voice said, suddenly speaking in her head. The Speaker s eyes were on her, and then she spoke aloud, You will take a force of Tajuru and your own significant abilities to find and eliminate this threat.
Nissa nodded. She d been a Leaf Talker for the Tajuru ever since her arrival in the Turntimber. The Tajuru always gave her the most difficult assignments. Many at the home tree were impressed with her abilities, she could tell; and many others thought she was a threat the first step to a Joraga invasion. But for whatever reason, Nissa liked taking the dangerous assignments. What was she leaving anyway? A cold room in the home tree with a slug oil lantern and the distrustful stares of the Tajuru.
Nissa looked around the longhouse. Most of the Tajuru were filing out of the hall. She walked toward the door with Hiba following close behind.
The other Tajuru edged away from her as she passed. That was as it should be, she figured. It wouldn t do for them to get too friendly with a Joraga. Hiba was different. He appreciated her Joraga ways of disciplined magic and combat. When she d first come to the home tree, some Tajuru had refused to sit at the same dinner table with her. She couldn t blame them. The experiences they d had with the Joraga had not been pleasant. Nothing about the Joraga was particularly pleasant, unless your idea of pleasant involved training all day, leading raiding parties all night, and sleeping on the hard ground in between. Except for their distrust of scholarship, Nissa liked the Joraga lifestyle. She had the fetid jungles of Bala Ged in her blood, but she couldn t go back yet. And so she was leading a scouting party to defend the land of elves who distrusted her.
As Nissa walked out of the hall, she recounted what she d heard about Speaker Sutina. The leader lived far away in the Tumbled Palace an ancient structure crumbling to pieces on the cliffs of Sunder Bay. It sat clutched in the boughs of an ancient jurworrel tree which was slowly walking its way to the edge. Rumor had it that the Speaker partnered with the Moon Kraken once a month when that creature made its disastrous rise from the depths of sea.
Hiba s hand closed around Nissa s shoulder, stopping her mid-step. She turned. Tajuru in rustling silks and dyed leathers walked quietly around them. Her lieutenant s long ear was cocked to the sky, and his large jaw was slack, listening. That ear was his best asset in many ways, and it alone made him useful to have around. He could hear an owl preening from three tall timbers away, and that was impressive even for an elf. And from their scouting expeditions together she d come to know his facial expressions very well. She could tell what creature lurked by how his lip curled and where his eyelids sat on his eyes. But the expression he showed just then, standing on the boardwalk outside the longhouse, was new to her.
A moment later the warning horns began to moan through the undergrowth. The Tajuru on the boardwalk stopped walking and stared down at the forest floor. Nissa fell to a crouch, and her hand went to grasp the staff strapped to her back. Before she could get to it, however, Hiba grabbed her wrist and pulled her off the edge of the branch. The ground rushed up as Hiba snatched a hook off his belt and threw it away, catching the crevice of an old tree. The rope jerked hard when it caught, and Nissa felt her teeth snap shut, but then they swung in a long arc away from the tree.
As Hiba let go of the rope, Nissa caught a spinning, blurred look at the branch they were hurling toward, gauged the distance, and executed a tight flip that plunked her feet squarely into the branch s mossy duff. She grabbed Hiba s arm and pulled him in as the larger Tajuru teetered on the narrow branch. Somewhere far off an eeka bird cried. A brace of giant hedron stones floated in the tree canopy above their heads, knocking unceremoniously together. It was a sight so common she barely took notice, but today their movements seemed more patterned than normal. They listened for the sounds of battle but heard nothing; neither horn, nor the sizzle of magic coursing through the air; not even the clash of steel. For a moment Nissa thought she heard a far-off scream, but when she asked Hiba, who was listening hard, he shook his head.
A moment passed, and then another, until suddenly Hiba jerked his head. They are coming, he said. He seized the short sword clipped onto his belt, and Nissa held her staff firmly in both hands. She heard a low whistle and moved her staff at the last moment to deflect the dart, or some such thing, away into the greenery. And then, whatever it was in the trees was jetting toward them, chirping as it flew.