Free The Siren Depths by Martha Wells

the court was staying inside today. Moon sat with the others in the teachers’ hall, which had become a common gathering place for Arbora and Aeriat alike.
    It was a large central chamber below the greeting hall, its walls and domed ceiling covered with a detailed carving of a forest, with plume trees, spirals, fern trees, and many others, their branches reaching up to entwine overhead, their roots framing the round doorways that led off to different passages. With the shells set into the walls glowing with soft white light and the hearth basins filled with warming stones, it was a comfortable welcoming space. There was always someone there, and it was a good place to go if you wanted to talk, or just listen to others talk. Someone was always making tea, baked spiced roots, or flatbread, and the older Arbora gathered there to tell stories, or read aloud from one of the books in the mentors’ library.
    Moon liked the readings best, since that was his only chance to hear what was in the books. He had taught himself to read the other languages he could speak, but Altanic and Kedaic had much simpler writing systems. The written Raksuran language was proving just as twisty and complicated as the Raksura themselves.
    He had been trying to remedy this, timing many of his visits to the nurseries to coincide with reading lessons. He sat with Frost, Bitter, and Thorn while Rill or Bark or one of the other teachers drew the letters and words on clay tablets and the fledglings copied her. When they read from the simpler books, Moon looked over their shoulders. It wasn’t a particularly effective way to learn, since he couldn’t be there for every lesson and he couldn’t ask questions without giving himself away. But he had made some progress, memorizing all the characters for the various sounds, and he was starting to recognize a number of words. He didn’t think anyone had caught on, except, oddly enough, for Thorn.
    At the third lesson Moon had attended, Thorn had eyed Moon thoughtfully, and moved his tablet so Moon had a better view of it. Moon had eyed him back, but they had never spoken of it, and Moon was fairly sure Thorn hadn’t shared his suspicion with anyone else, even Frost or Bitter. He thought Thorn might like having a secret to share with Moon, something that was his alone. That suited Moon.
    But that rainy afternoon in the teachers’ hall, no one brought out a book. Instead, Rill said, “Moon, tell us a story about groundlings.”
    The Arbora and older warriors settled in to listen, and even the young warriors lounging on the fringes of the group were hard put to conceal their interest. The entire court knew Moon’s life had been substantially different from theirs, but most of them had little idea of what that really meant. They knew he had traveled widely and seen strange places, but so had Stone. Moon had never seen much point in trying to convey what it had really been like, so he avoided stories like the time he had had to flee a Morain cliff-town in the middle of the night, got trapped in a tunnel and had to hide in a crack in the rock barely wider than his body while his former comrades hunted him.
    So he told them about the Deshar in the hanging city of Zenna, and their elaborate social customs that made passing through the place so difficult for visitors. Predictably, everyone wanted to hear more about the Deshar’s attitudes about sex, which were as baffling to the other Raksura as they had been to Moon at the time.
    “So if they have sex without this ceremony first, they can’t have it again?” Bone said, scratching the scar around his neck thoughtfully. He was clearly having trouble following this strange brand of logic.
    Moon tried to explain. “Sort of. You can only have sex with your permanent mate, and you can’t have a permanent mate without the ceremony, and if you have sex before the ceremony, nobody wants to be your permanent mate.”
    Bark frowned. “But do they have to have a