Free The Siren Depths by Martha Wells Page A

permanent mate?” Except for queens and consorts, Raksura usually didn’t.
    “If they want babies. If you have a baby with anybody but a permanent mate, it’s bad. For you and the baby.” The idea that offspring might be unwanted was hard for Raksura to understand as well. Queens and Arbora only clutched when they wanted to, and there were always teachers to take care of the babies or fledglings.
    “But how do the others know if someone’s had sex?” Chime protested. “How can they tell? If they have sex without the ceremony, shouldn’t they just keep quiet about it?”
    “Do they change color when they have sex?” Balm asked thoughtfully.
    “No. They just seemed to know.” Moon admitted, “I never figured that part out.”
    Bone snorted, stretching to pick up the kettle. “Strange creatures. Though I’m sure they’d say the same of us.”
    If confronted by a Raksura, the Deshar would probably have been too busy having hysterics to say anything. In the east where Raksuran courts were rare, groundlings confused them with Fell. Before Moon could point this out, one of the soldiers, Grain, dropped down the stairwell from the greeting hall, calling out, “Where’s— Moon, visitors just arrived from another court! Two queens, and some warriors, and they’ve got a consort with them!”
    Everyone gasped and exclaimed. Moon exchanged an alarmed look with Chime and Balm. That meant this was the most formal form of visit. It would have to be today, Moon thought. Everyone would have been tracking mud and water through the greeting hall all morning. Knowing Raksura, the visitors had probably planned it this way to put them at a disadvantage. He said, “Is someone telling the queens?”
    “Yes, Sage went up there,” Grain told him, bouncing up and down with excitement.
    Rill stood hastily, shaking crumbs out of her skirt. To Balm, she said, “We should give them tea in the greeting hall first, give them a chance to dry off before we send them up to the queens’ hall.”
    Balm got to her feet, looking down at herself helplessly. “I have to get up there.” The senior female warriors were the ones who were supposed to initially greet visitors, and as Jade’s clutchmate, Balm was the most senior one available. She was wearing an old pair of brown pants and a shirt stained with the juice from the berries they had all been eating, and her only jewelry was a copper armband. She was still beautiful, but it was definitely not the way to be dressed while formally greeting two foreign queens and a consort. Moon looked worse, but he wouldn’t have to appear until the first round of formal greetings were done, and that might take quite a while, depending on how difficult the queens all decided to be.
    “Wait, wait,” Rill said, and whipped off her dress, holding it out toward Balm. “Put this on!”
    “Oh, good idea.” Balm took her shirt off and pulled on the sleeveless dress. She was much taller than Rill, so on her it was more of a tunic, but the dye on the soft fabric was a blue that faded to violet toward the hem, and it looked good against Balm’s dark groundling skin. Someone else contributed a necklace of flat polished amethyst and everyone judged Balm ready to go.
    Balm took a deep breath and started up the stairs with Grain, as everyone else scattered to get cushions and one of the better tea sets. Moon headed off to take the back passages up to the consorts’ level.
    As Moon traveled upward through the colony, he warned everyone he met about the visitors. When he reached the Aeriat levels, he skipped the queens’ level and went right to the consorts’, tracing a path through the maze of empty rooms and antechambers and bathing rooms to his bower, just above Jade’s.
    He hadn’t spent a lot of time here. During the evenings, he was either down in Jade’s bower, or Chime’s, or sitting with the others in the teachers’ hall. But this was the first time he had had a room in a permanent structure