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the prickle along his nerves that told him his spines had hardened and lifted, spreading out across his back and up onto his head, out of his mane of frills.
    Fair fell back, his spines flicking uneasily, his attempt at intimidation having failed. He said, “I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”
    Moon hissed in amusement, and shifted to groundling just to emphasize his point. He stepped past Fair and headed for the stairs at the far end of the chamber. No one was stupid enough to try to leap on him from behind. Unfortunately. A good fight might clear the air.
    Moon took the stairs down to the teachers’ hall and the passage to the nurseries. As he stepped through the round doorway carved with baby Arbora and Aeriat, his appearance was greeted with a chorus of squeaks and trills of delight. That made up for a lot of aggravation.
    * * *
    Moon went out with the hunters again the next day, with Balm and Chime and some other warriors. Pearl had made the stipulation that the area be searched first to make sure there were no tentacle creatures.
    “As if I wasn’t planning to do that already,” Bone confided to Moon before they left. “The damn thing wasn’t even any good to eat.”
    They got back to the tree at dusk, and Moon flew on inside while the warriors were still helping ferry the Arbora and their kills to the tree. As soon as Moon reached the greeting hall, the disturbed state of the colony was obvious. All the warriors who hadn’t come on the hunting trip seemed to be in motion, flying around in the upper levels, and a group of Arbora were in a tense conversation by the fountain pool. Bell, the leader of the teachers’ caste, saw Moon arrive and hurried over to him. Moon demanded, “What is it?” He hadn’t seen anything wrong near the knothole.
    Bell was one of Chime’s clutchmates, though their groundling forms didn’t much resemble each other. Bell had dark hair and his skin was more brown than bronze. He said, “We had a visit while you were gone, a queen from Emerald Twilight.”
    That could be good or bad, Moon thought. They had traded with Emerald Twilight warriors, but hadn’t had a formal visit from an Emerald Twilight queen since what everyone insisted on referring to as “the incident” which had occurred on the way back from the forest coast. The augury, with the vision of upheaval and the odd “someone watches” message came to mind; he wondered if the court being watched was Emerald Twilight. “Which queen?”
    “Tempest, with five warriors,” Bell told him. “They didn’t stay long and we didn’t even get to see them. They met with Jade and Pearl and Heart up on the queens’ level.”
    “They didn’t want to stay the night?” That definitely wasn’t good, at least from Moon’s limited understanding of relations between Raksuran courts. The visitors should have stayed at least until morning and there should have been a special meal for them, put together by the Arbora. And it was also odd that the only Arbora included in the meeting had been Heart; for the other visits, Bell, Bone, and Knell had been there to represent the Arbora castes. Bone had been away leading the hunt, but Bell and Knell were both here. “Uh…Were they not invited to stay?”
    Bell’s expression was deeply worried. “I don’t know.”
    “Right.” Moon looked up. The warriors wheeling around up in the central well all kept their distance from the queens’ level gallery, clearly not wanting to antagonize the occupants. “I’d better get up there.”
    “Good luck,” Bell called after him, as Moon leapt up the wall.
    Moon climbed rapidly. As he swung up onto the gallery of the highest warriors’ level, Vine landed beside him and clung to a claw-scarred pillar. Keeping his voice low, he said, “Moon, do you know what happened with the visit?”
    “No, I just got back. Weren’t you there?” Vine had fallen a little out of favor with Pearl, but not with Jade, and Moon was surprised he had been left