Edge of Worlds (The Books of the Raksura) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    Moon crouched on the branch, his foot claws caught in the rough bark. “If you let me go down there and be the bait, we could get this over with.” The warriors were only doing the stalking today because their prey was a creature who had been pursuing the Arbora on their hunts and scaring away the usual game. It was just too big and too fast for the Arbora to deal with on their own, and it had already injured too many of them. The Arbora who had been attacked hadn’t been able to describe the predator well, and the hunter who had seen it best was still in a healing sleep back in the colony tree.
    Chime, perched on the branch collar a little further down, said, “Uh, the hunt would be over with, all right. We’d have to spend the rest of the day recovering your body.”
    Annoyed, Moon settled his wings. It was raining lightly, which wasn’t helping anyone’s temper. The already muted light falling through the multiple layers of leaves in the mountain-tree canopies was dim and more gray than green. The court had been tense since the shared dream, with everyone braced for it to be repeated, or for the event that it foretold to occur. Neither had happened. Nothing had turned up in the mentors’ augury, despite their best efforts. Jade had sent messages to their two closest allies, Sunset Water and Emerald Twilight, to see if they had had any similar experiences. The answer had been no, and the messages, delivered by warriors, had been too polite to convey what the other courts were actually thinking: that Indigo Cloud had collectively lost its mind.
    Below, on a lower branch, one of the warriors startled a nest of flying lizards, sending them fleeing in a small explosion of multicolored squeaking, alerting half the Reaches to his presence. Moon hissed in frustration. He had been hunting for survival since he was a fledgling, while most of these warriors had still been playing in the nurseries. It had taken them three days to follow the signs and traces from the platform where the Arbora hunters had been attacked to here, and now they weren’t even sure where the thing had gone to ground. He told Chime, “I’ve been bait before—”
    Chime nodded. “I know, and I find that terrifying.”
    “—and I wasn’t talking to you.” He looked up at the smaller branch arching above them.
    Jade perched up there, partially concealed from this angle by the drooping fronds of a fern tree that had taken root on the broad branch. She said, “Not every problem can be solved by you trying to get yourself killed.”
    “Not every problem,” Moon agreed. He looked down toward the platforms nestled in the branches across from their vantage point. “But this one could be.”
    The suspended forest was made up of layers and layers of these platforms, formed when dirt built up in the entwined mountain-tree branches until it had enough depth to grow grass, form ponds and swamps, and support entire forests of smaller trees. The platform their quarry might have gone to ground in was unusual in that another mountain-tree had taken root in it. Usually when this happened, the sapling mountain-tree died off or fell when its weight grew too heavy. This one was apparently intending to survive.
    It was already a few hundred paces tall, its smaller canopy mingling with that of the mountain-tree that supported the platform, and its trunk was a good hundred paces around. Its roots had grown through the dirt of the platform and twined around the branches below it, and there was plenty of room to hide in that extensive and complex structure.
    Jade said, definitively, “If anyone’s going to be bait, it’s me.”
    Moon twitched his spines at her. “That is not fair.”
    Jade snorted. “You sound like Frost.”
    Moon had been teaching Frost and some of the older fledglings how to hunt,