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He had woken with his hand on the rock beside the first cradle and the hum of the eggs in his palm like the purr of a nest that would not cool while he breathed. He had watched Luna and Miryam sleep, then fed the little wyrmling the shining liquid, then sat and let quiet settle into the corners of him where the fight had been sharp. By midmorning the quiet had done its work. He needed to see with his own eyes the enemies that would try to co for him.
He left by a side path on the mountain’s right shoulder, one of the narrow cuts he had walked when the stone was still learning his weight. He paused in the entrance long enough to tell Shadeclaw the truth and enough of a lie to make it easier to let him go.
"I am going to the right side," he said. "I want to look at the treeline. Alone."
Shadeclaw looked as if he had expected another word to follow that sentence. He did not argue. "Yes, King."
Silvershadow’s eyes flicked once toward the sky where Alka cut circles the size of a small world and then back to Kai. "Two flares," he said. "If you see more than you like to see."
"If I see more than I like, there will not be ti for flares," Kai said, but he nodded. They had to say so things out loud to make the mountain feel comfortable, even if the things were not true.
He went down the stone in his human form, the plates of his ant body quiet under skin, the apex heat banked until the world insisted on it. The right side of the mountain sloped into scrub that had learned to hold water like a miser. Low thorn trees hunched over their own shadows.
There were bands of saltbrush with thin white rims on their leaves where night had sweated and morning had licked them dry. The ground here was not the soft slide of dunes. It was grit and old riverbed, pocked where water had once punched holes and left when it had told all the stories it had to tell.
He moved without hurry. His body knew how to look without making the world look back. Antenna Sensory Boost and predator’s instinct was not a switch he had to think to flip anymore. It rose around him whenever he wanted to hear what stone and root were saying.
The treeline ahead was a ragged seam at first, then a wall of narrow trunks and dark green that admitted the desert’s sin of heat and tried to make it sothing else. The sll changed as he walked. Hot resin. Old needles that had built themselves into carpets. A sweet note like pitch warming in a sun that did not care about plants.
He took the last twenty paces slowly. He did not step into the forest until he had chosen what he would put his feet on. The first place was a root that rose and dipped again. The second was a patch of old needles. The third was a stone that would not turn. He liked counting that way. It kept the part of his mind that wanted to run ahead busy while the rest of him remained here.
The forest on the right side of his mountain was as old as the northern choke that guarded the Scarlet Kingdom’s flank, but it had learned patience from that old wood and tried to copy its voice. The trunks were tall and straight. The lower branches had died in the kind of shade that is kind to dying.
Light moved here in lines. It drew bars across the ground and colored the dust gold where it hung. Insects and birds used those bars like roads. A small gray animal scurried across one and paused at the edge of another as if it had learned not to cross lines without permission.
Kai stopped and let everything that was not him move. He listened. Sowhere a woodpecker beast struck a tree with the regular rhythm of soone who liked their work so much they could not stop.
Sowhere else sothing with soft pads pulled through fallen needles and stopped just shy of stepping on dry twigs. He slled a fox. He slled the thin rank of a cat. He slled a faint trace of smoke that did not belong to any fire he had lit or Lirien’s forge. It was older and farther away and lifted slowly as if whatever had made it had not bothered to make a hot fla.
He went deeper. He held his arms loose and his weight low. The canopy pushed the light into narrow shafts that found his hair and turned it the color of new bone. He thought of Luna and how she had touched his plates without fear, of Miryam rather pleased with herself after licking the last bright drop from the bowl. He thought of Naaro resting like a warrior who had paid a price and gotten value for it. He thought of the cradles and their hum.
He kept his attention on the ground and used the thoughts like weights he could hang on hooks inside himself so that he would not run too far ahead inside his head.
He found a trickle of water and knelt. It made a sound like whispering tal, the way water does when it has to work its way through stones that do not quite fit together. He cupped his hand and drank. It tasted faint and honest and had the mory of minerals in it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, then placed his hand flat on the wet stones and let the cold climb his palm into his arm. It felt like it was telling him that the heat could be managed if he respected the ways this place had already learned.
Footprints told him what he needed. A heavy set of hooves had crossed the trickle on the stones without slipping.
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