Chapter Text
Jade landed at the edge of the waterfall, the smell of predator blood still filling her nostrils, streaks of it marking her hands and calves. She leaned gratefully into the cool, sheeting mist.
A dozen Arbora met her at the entrance, climbing down from the platforms in their scaled forms with spears and ropes. At the front of the group, Bone called out, “All clear?”
“We didn’t find any more inside.” Jade looked the Arbora over carefully. Her heart still beat furiously at the memory of tearing through thick, spiny skin. Nobody seemed bloodier than the last time she'd seen them, but she still asked, “You?”
Bone shook his head, wiping dark purple blood off his face with the back of his hand. He’d been among the first to arrive when the predator had broken through the lower levels. He didn’t look relieved by Jade’s information. The old colony had taught him pessimism the hard way.
Gold flashed in the lower branches, and Pearl shot up to land next to them. Several of her warriors followed, finding perches around the colony entrance, gaze turned out towards the tree’s canopy of platforms planted with the colony’s crops.
“No more on the ground,” Pearl said. “Bone, what did you see?”
Bone nodded at Flint to report: “We found one trail coming in along the platforms to the east. A climber, not a ground dweller. No signs of any others with it.”
“It had the claws of a climber,” Jade said. Bone cast a glance at his own climbing claws, two inches long and polished to a deep charcoal shine with frequent use.
He grimaced. “But it went for the ground door instead of the main entrance.”
“I hate the smart ones,” Pearl snarled, pacing along the platform with her wings half-open as if she was about to jump into flight. Pearl was the biggest thing there, her gold and blue scales catching the dappled sunlight. Even Jade felt like shying away from her.
Protection was a queen’s responsibility, but Jade had barely gotten to the fight in time to land a single blow on the long, spiny monster that had boiled out of the lower levels of the tree. It left her restless, her skin crawling.
She looked out towards the distant crown of the tree. “What about the Emerald Twilight party?”
“The trading party,” Pearl said with a hiss. She managed to sound both approving and annoyed.
Bone scratched his brow ridge. “They left early yesterday. Some of the predator tracks could have been older than that. I’d say it’s been in the area a few days, watching.”
Pearl flicked a spine at Floret. “Go check on them, at least to the edge of our territory. Do it now. I don’t want time to change my mind.”
Jade shot her mother a sharp look. It was easy to think of Pearl as deliberately difficult, but then Pearl would say something that showed she knew her own limits, knew she had trouble acting as quickly or as strongly as the colony needed her to.
Jade frowned, looking around. “Where’s Moon?”
“He was in the nurseries when Ginger sounded the alarm,” Bone said. Jade nodded. Because that’s what soldiers did in an emergency; they checked the nurseries, then the consorts, and then anybody known to be outside. But Moon usually didn’t require checking. He was usually on the front line.
One of the younger soldiers laughed. She was half bent over with exhaustion, cleaning dark blood from a spear. “Of course he was. Does he even sleep in the bowers anymore?”
Bone ignored the comment, looking Jade in the eye. “I haven’t seen him since.”
The soldier froze in the middle of cleaning off her spear. Unease rippled through Jade’s spines. She hadn’t seen Moon at the fight. He couldn’t have -- there wasn’t any way that --
Jade whipped around and leapt across the entry hall.
**
Moon was in the nurseries, and he was pristine. No blood, not even a smudge of dirt.
Teachers and fledglings bustled around him. Thorn and Bitter pressed up against his legs, clutching at the soft, dark fabric of his clothes, which the Arbora had embroidered around the edges in green vines and silver flowers. Chime stood close by, hands fluttering nervously.
Jade took in Moon’s untouched appearance with confusion, her spines quivering with the urgent beat of her heart.
Chime’s spines sank with relief when she arrived. The motion caught Moon’s attention, but when he saw Jade, he looked away, his fingers curling in Thorn and Bitter’s hair. Jade missed a step in her approach, confused and suspicious.
“Are you alright?” Jade asked.
“I’m fine,” Moon said. He pulled Bitter up into his arms, a silent barrier with dark eyes slowly blinking at Jade.
“We stayed here!” Chime said brightly. The skin around his eyes looked tight. “In the nurseries. For the whole ordeal. Are you alright? It sounded awful.” He gave Jade a look of baffled panic over Moon’s shoulder. Help me with this, his face said.
“This is where I’m supposed to stay,” Moon said, glowering at the back of Bitter’s head instead of at Jade. His expression flickered through uncertainty and regret and settled on determination. Bitter stared at Jade, three fingers stuck in his mouth.
That was... true. Jade gave Chime her own baffled expression. It didn’t seem like a bad thing, Moon staying out of trouble. Except that anytime Moon went unreadable, Jade started waiting for disaster. Especially when she was still wearing the blood of a creature that had torn its way into her court.
“Yes,” she said slowly.
“The clutch is safe,” Moon added. He shot her a quick worried look asking for reassurance. Jade opened her mouth to give it and stopped, her eyes sliding over the crowd around them.
Every Arbora in the room was listening attentively. Jade spotted at least two of her mother’s favorites.
“Thank you for protecting the clutches,” Jade said instead. That’s probably why he stayed out of the fight. To protect the clutch. Everything’s fine.
Her spines started to relax, but when she tried to catch Moon’s eye, to nod her gratitude as a fighter and a queen, the only eyes pointed her way were Bitter’s, staring at her under a furrowed brow, his nose mashed into Moon’s silk-covered shoulder. Moon was looking fixedly at the floor.
Unease prickled along Jade’s spine.
She let the teachers lead her to their sleeping royal clutch, the tiny bodies still a dark matte bronze, too young to develop color patterns. The smell of them calmed her, made Moon’s behavior seem temporary, a forgotten blip in the long lives of their children. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t known he could be difficult. Sometimes he wasn’t any easier to deal with than Pearl.
“The predator never came near them,” Blossom assured her.
“Good,” Jade said weakly. But then why was Moon here?
**
“But then why was he there?” Chime asked later, jostled as Arbora and warriors pushed past him to pick up supplies for their longer patrols. The area closest to the tree had finally been cleared. Everyone wanted to know if there was another predator out there, waiting a little farther out. “You asked him?”
Jade shot him a look. “You didn’t?”
“Well, he’s not injured,” Chime said with the confidence of someone who’d made a thorough inspection. Possibly more than one, probably last night.
Jade frowned, uncertain why she wasn’t more relieved to hear that. It had been a possibility -- that Moon had pulled himself out of the action because of some concealed physical ailment. Moon would much rather let things clear up on their own than admit weakness.
Jade felt herself open her mouth and say petulantly, “He’s been sleeping with you since the attack.”
A few feet away, Vine’s head turned towards her before jerking away. Jade winced.
“No, he hasn’t,” Chime said startled.
Jade stared back at him. “He’s been sleeping alone?”
“I -- yes, I -- maybe he was with the Abora? But.” Chime swallowed, visibly calming himself. “Sometimes Moon needs to be on his own.”
“I know that,” Jade said, lip lifting almost into a snarl. Of course she knew that. She didn’t know the first thing about courting or claiming or keeping a normal consort, but she at least had to know something about Moon. Didn’t she?
“Jade,” Balm said. “We’re ready to leave.”
Jade consciously pulled her expression back to neutral.
Chime’s hand touched her forearm softly. “You’ll talk to him?”
All her spines went stiff with a full body No that took her by surprise. No, she didn’t want to talk to Moon. She’d been avoiding it since the attack. She hadn't pushed when he hadn't come to her at night. What are you afraid of? she thought.
No, she did know. She was afraid of another Opal Night. She was afraid that Moon would tell her, again, that no matter what she did or said, he didn’t believe she wanted him or that he belonged here. That he'd tell her he was thinking about leaving.
Jade hadn’t realized how much that trip to Opal Night had exhausted her, knowing that for Moon ‘not looking back’ wasn’t about a lack of caring for those he left behind; it was about survival. For most of his life, lingering connections to communities that had repudiated him had been the kind of thing that could get him killed. It meant she knew that if Moon ever decided to leave the Reaches, he would not turn back for her. Not for Chime. Not even for Frost, Thorn, and Bitter. He would just be gone.
They had a clutch now. If Moon still didn’t believe, if the doubt was a sickness in him Jade couldn’t fix, then Jade… didn’t want to hear about it today. Later, things would be more stable, more safe, it would be easier to face. Later, she could face it like a queen. Later, please.
And after all, maybe it was nothing.
She turned away from Chime, leading Balm and a group of warriors towards the knothole entrance. The would head east to the last trail the hunters had found. As Balm came up beside her, Jade let herself ask casually, “Which patrol is Moon on?”
“He’s not going out,” Balm said. “He’s guarding the Arbora repairing the ground entrance.”
Jade clenched her teeth. “Good,” she said with difficulty. “He’ll keep them safe.”
**
Moon looked more like Moon when Jade caught him on the way to dinner, her spines stiff, trying to hide dread and uncertainty. He wore vibrantly dyed but simple clothing, body bare of jewellery except the bracelet that had been her courting gift. Normally she found that reassuring, but today she glared at it like it wasn't doing its job.
He'd spent the last few days in unusually fine clothing for the diplomatic visit, adorned with gold along his arms and throat, small jeweled cuffs on the shell of his ear. He'd done well for the first day, which had been largely a delivery of gifts for the occasion of the first clutch of a ranking consort, but after that, he'd retreated, let Ember handle nearly every decision regarding etiquette.
As soon as she pulled him side, Moon said immediately, “I'm not doing that again.”
He sounded sick, guilty, his mouth turned down like he felt unwell. Jade had no idea what he was talking about. She let her eyebrows go up and waited. She was, after all, a queen, and explanations were owed to her.
“The attack,” Moon said. “I tried to -- I thought I could convince myself to stay out of it because I needed to protect the clutch.” He looked into the hall where the Arbora were laying out the evening meal, his eyes tight with worry. Jade could spot several Arbora with bandages from here. “Nobody died, but I should have been out there.”
“Yes,” Jade said eventually. She was trying to process how Moon had come back at the question of proper consort behavior months after she thought it had been resolved. Was that it? Something so fixable? “That’s -- good; you’re a good fighter. You’ve done a lot to protect the colony.”
Moon didn't look like that made him feel better. He was also dirty, a smudge across his cheek and on his tunic.
“You went out with the patrols?” Jade said.
“Watching the entrance repairs.”
Jade had known that, but she nodded anyway. “We didn’t find any other predator signs in the area, but some of the game had cleared out.”
“So it was in the area a few days.”
“I don’t like that something that could get in here was just out there watching us.”
Moon didn't say anything, like he wasn't paying attention.
“You're alright then?” Jade pressed.
Moon picked at a streak of dirt on his arm. “Yeah,” he said, listless.
Jade didn't know why she wasn't reassured. Or more importantly, why Moon wasn't back to normal now that Jade had reminded him he wasn't a normal consort and no one in this tree expected him to be.
**
“Chime,” Jade said.
She found boxes and bundles spread across Moon’s bower. Moon wasn’t there, but Chime was, holding up some slinky fabric to the light suspiciously before adding it to a pile.
“I talked to him,” Chime said.
A lead brick dropped into Jade’s stomach. She tried not to flare her spines. Everybody already knew a queen could throw them through a wall. It was rude to remind them. Evenly, she said, “I didn’t ask you to talk to him. I asked you to --”
Cheer him up. Bribe him.
“He’s fine,” Chime sighed. He straightened a pile of exquisitely decorated manuscripts Moon couldn’t read. “He didn’t know why I was asking, except of course, that he’s willing to pick up any fledgling close enough to avoid a conversation.”
“He was in the nurseries, you mean.” Jade forced her claws to uncurl. Instead of being annoyed that Chime had talked to Moon, now she was annoyed that Chime hadn’t gotten a real answer either. The worst part would have been over. No more imagining terrible revelations (that he'd never loved any of them like a home, that he was leaving tomorrow).
“He's always in the nurseries,” Chime said.
Jade took a breath and looked carefully at the wall, “What do you think, then?”
Chime cast a baffled look at the gifts. They’d both been there when the Emerald Twilight delegation had delivered it all, along with their formal congratulations. “I don't know that any of this will cheer him up much, except maybe the sweets.”
“I tried those. He said he didn't like sweets.”
Chime have her a horrified look. “He loves sweets.”
“I know,” Jade snapped, all the muscles in her neck knotting up. “I meant. What’s wrong. With Moon.”
Chime shook his head. “Nothing. He just gets sad sometimes, and I don’t think he knows how to use the colony to make himself less sad.” He added anxiously, “He's been sleeping alone.”
“Yes.” Jade remembered Chime’s panicked face in the nurseries the day the climber-digger had come out of the lower levels.
“Maybe,” Chime said, “maybe we just think this is a -- a ‘feral consort raised by the wilds’ thing, and it’s not. It’s totally normal first clutch consort moodiness. We haven’t had any consorts with first clutches in a while. Maybe we just don’t know.”
“So, we should treat him like a normal consort? Giving him… things. Jewelry and sweets -- ”
Jade would never tell Moon, but she’d gotten a lot farther treating him like a gently-bred consort of high rank than she had treating him like a dangerous, feral wanderer.
Chime's face fell. “We're already doing that.”
“-- and, uh, petting him.” Jade regretted that choice of words immediately. It was accurate, but she didn’t mean sex. She meant My feral consort is touch-starved. But that took them straight back around to how Moon was not normal by any Raksuran measure, and right now they were trying to pretend otherwise. Everything is totally normal.
Queens were supposed to know what they were doing, and someday someone was going to notice that Jade never knew.
Chime looked hopefully at his open palms, fingers curling like he was preparing himself for a good bout of Moon petting. “We could do that. I could do that. It might work?”
Jade grimaced. It wouldn't if they didn't know where he was sleeping.
Maybe the answer was the nurseries, again. Every moment he wasn’t required to to help with the social and political health of the colony, Moon was in the nurseries. Sometimes he acted like they were dragging him out against this will. As if there was anyone in the colony who wouldn’t have let Moon stay there all day if he wanted to. It was his clutch.
Our clutch. Why doesn’t he act like we’re in this together?
“I don’t know,” Jade admitted. “I’m just -- worried. What if this is a Moon thing, and he works himself up into leaving? When he gets like this, the first thing that goes wrong is that he decides he can’t say anything to anyone.”
Chime jerked his head, startled. “He wouldn’t leave. He has a clutch. He can’t convince himself he’s unwanted anymore, not when we are raising his clutch?” His voice lifted with a hysterical note. He stared at Jade, pleading for reassurance.
Jade put her hands over her face and dug her claws into her frills. They were thicker than they’d been even a few turns ago. Soon no one would call her young during diplomatic visits or wonder how she could handle a consort like Moon. They thought Moon was a powerful handful and not an idiot.
She made a frustrated sound into her forearms. She would rather be angry than be worried that Moon could still pull the conviction out of thin air that he wasn’t a part of their colony, that they were all the enemy and had been lying to him for -- Jade’s spines straightened, a frisson moving over her scales -- for years now. She had successfully tricked Moon out of abandoning them for years.
Chime made a little sad sound that she ignored. Jade was thinking, full of heated annoyance: maybe one day Moon will stop trying to leave.
Moon’s doubt in his place at Indigo Cloud was like lung sickness; it had the terrifying ability to flare up in someone who’d already survived it once. You had to get someone with a lung flare to the mentors as quickly as possible. Jade’s father had died of not getting to the mentors fast enough.
Getting angry about Moon's doubt was easier then getting worried. If Jade didn’t get angry, she’d just get scared. Scared of Moon whipping himself up into an anxious frenzy too quickly for anyone to notice before he did something to hurt himself -- and them -- when he left them behind.
“Should we -- ” Chime made a gesture in the air that could have been comforting or obscene.
“No,” Jade said, “if he wants to be in the nurseries, let’s go to the nurseries.”
Maybe Moon would change his mind and want to be outside where Jade could tear something apart for him.
**
Moon wasn't in the nurseries.
He was hanging upside down from the bottom of a platform with three Arbora soldiers, watching a rustle in the leaves down below, trying to decide if it was dangerous.
“Any signs of the predator?” Jade knew they’d found no evidence of another one, but she would be happy for any sign of Moon putting himself back into the colony defenses. He was outside, and maybe she could tear something apart for him. Remind him he was valued the old fashioned way.
“What? Oh, no,” said Anchor, her arm hooked through a hanging root as Jade and Chime swung down into their vantage point. “We’re hunting branch spiders.”
“Flit got bitten last week,” Moon said, eyes focused on the shifting grasses of the platform beneath them. They were out near the crown of the tree where the protective branches gave way to the open forest. He didn’t look at them.
“But they’re all over the place aren’t they?” Chime said. “I mean, I don’t like them, they’re poisonous -- ”
“We think they’ve started nesting in the garden platforms out here,” Anchor said. “They like the tubers we planted.”
Moon finally turned to face them. He looked normal, wearing his usual productive-colony-member face, that one that said, I am here to protect you, Warriors annoy me, and Will you still sleep with me if I move in with the Arbora because I like them better. Jade wanted nothing more than to get back to that world where just being in the colony made Moon interested and open and involved. Where Jade didn’t spend most of her day plotting with Chime to trick Moon into acting like himself.
“If we find the nests,” Moon said, “we can get them out of the whole tree. Heart won’t have to keep sending the Arbora out here with a bundle of pre-made simples.” When Chime blinked at him, he added mulishly, “It’s worth the time.”
Chime put a hand to his chest, his whole body slumping with released tension. To Jade: “Oh, thank goodness, he’s invested.” The move shifted his balance, and he flung a wing out, nearly wobbling off his perch in the hanging roots. He didn’t seem to notice. “Well! I’m going back inside.”
He lurched awkwardly along the tree root to give Moon a enthusiastic nip on the ear before he leapt, wings catching the air with more grace than people gave him credit for.
Moon stared after Chime, his brow ridge pulled down.
Jade didn’t feel relieved. She’d seen the way Moon went stiff when Chime nipped him, and the way he turned back to watching for branch spiders without looking at Jade. The same way he’d been avoiding her eyes for a week. The spines at the back of his neck lifted uneasily and then jerked flat like he was forcing his body language to behave.
Jade frowned suspiciously, something queasy turning over in her stomach. Her claws left a deep furrow in the root underneath her.
**
“Are you going to help the soldiers again tomorrow?” Jade asked.
Jade lay with her leg thrown over both of Moon’s and her wing spread over him like a canopy. When they’d first started sleeping together, she’d been wary of making him feel trapped, but Moon seemed to enjoy being crowded when they were alone. There were a lot of ways in which Moon was exactly what Jade had been led to expect from a consort. One of the biggest was exactly how happy he was to feel physically protected -- well, during sex anyway.
He had been interested in sex earlier, but in a guarded way. More than once Jade had needed to wait for Moon to say out loud what he liked, that it was good, instead of letting his body language speak for him. It was another throwback to his first few months at the colony.
“Yes,” Moon said, rubbing his cheek against the ridged scales next to her ear. “I want the branch spiders taken care of and finished.”
And then he went stiff like he’d said something he shouldn’t.
“It’s good to do once a season probably,” Jade agreed. After a beat, she added carefully, “You can help them next season too.”
Moon started shivering and nodded stiffly against her neck.
“And the season after that,” she added, “and the -- ”
“Stop,” Moon said.
It hit Jade like a blow. Her teeth clenched, and her face flushed. She packed those feelings down and wrapped him up tightly in her arms instead, feeling him shake through his shoulders and his chest. “Moon. You aren’t going anywhere.”
“I know. Yes. I know that.” He sounded like he was appeasing her. Repeating something he’d memorized.
“...Good,” Jade said.
“If I left now the clutch wouldn’t even remember me,” Moon said quietly and stopped Jade cold. The ice in her veins was the same urgent fear she’d felt trying to get to Opal Night, knowing that no force in the Three Worlds would make Moon believe she was coming for him. Knowing that if she didn’t make it in time, he’d leave the Reaches, and it would be another thirty years of wandering before she found him again.
Jade made an angry sound, all her spines going up in a threat posture she couldn't control. Her wings spread out, the canopy over them growing, letting shadows from the shell lights pass over Moon’s face, eyes screwed shut and his expression resigned. Inside she was cold and terrified. She tightened her grip, nipping his neck.
“You aren’t going anywhere, you’re part of our court and we love you -- ”
“Stop,” Moon said, “stop, stop.”
Jade dropped him, but Moon reached out in an aborted gesture, his expression going miserable, then resigned then blank. Jade found herself caught in an aborted gesture of her own, half reaching out, half pulling back. She didn’t want to be told stop so desperately ever again.
“Stop… talking?” She put a hand experimentally on his shoulder.
Moon was looking fixedly at some point on the ceiling. He nodded jerkily.
“But -- you -- ” Jade blew air out her nose in frustration because it was a better reaction than wailing that she just wanted to know what he wanted. Jade pulled him slowly into her chest, fitting his cheek in the curve of her shoulder. Moon started to shake as though he was having an attack of something -- of unbearable unhappiness probably, and Jade clutched him helplessly. Uselessly.
She fell asleep eventually without really noticing whether he’d stopped.
She woke up to see Moon sitting up in the bed watching her. He looked better. His expression was wry with a little of the humor she’d gotten used to seeing from him, but the skin around his eyes looked bruised. He had sleep impressions from her scales on his cheek.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said quickly, though it probably wasn’t.
Moon nodded mechanically and slipped out of the bower.
It was awful to not have any idea what she was doing -- which made her feel like she wasn’t doing anything at all -- but to still feel responsible for everything anyway. Jade had a sudden nightmare vision of this stretching out for years, of things going badly forever, Jade never understanding how she was supposed to fix it and forever making it worse always. She imagined being a queen whose consort, whose clutches, whose entire court wasted away in despair no matter what she did, and how hopelessly paralyzing that would be.
She wouldn’t be able to take it -- she simply wouldn’t survive.
Her eyes widened as realization washed over her. She had just described the slow, devastating decline of the Indigo Cloud court at the river temple colony.
Jade had one of those terrible moments that children have -- when they realize that no matter how much work they’ve put into being completely different, they are exactly like their parents after all.
She stared hollowly at the ceiling. She was going to have to talk to her mother.